(from usatoday.com
by Jocelyn McClurg)
What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include Anna Quindlen's new novel and a memoir for George Eliot fans.
Still Life With Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen; Random House, 252 pp.; fiction
Rebecca Winter is a photographer who moves to a cabin in the country so she can rent out her Manhattan apartment to save money. Rebecca was married to an undermining, narcissistic professor when she snapped a photo of the detritus of a party he refused to help clean up.
The photo she called Still Life With Bread Crumbs made Rebecca a feminist icon and catapulted her to wealth and acclaim. She divorced her philandering husband, but at 60, her Still Life money is running out.
Rebecca's ramshackle cottage has raccoon issues, and she calls on Jim Bates, the town's roofer, for help. Fortysomething Jim is a classic good guy who cares for his fragile sister and anyone else who needs a hand.
USA TODAY says: * * * ½ out of four. "Still Life is a charming read … smooth and comforting about the vulnerabilities of growing older."
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart; Random House, 368 pp.; non-fiction
Novelist Shteyngart writes a memoir about his life, a story that begins when he comes to the USA with his Russian Jewish parents.
USA TODAY says: * * *. "Alternately moving, irritating and laugh-out-loud funny."
The Kept by James Scott; Harper, 357 pp.; fiction
This novel set around 1900 in western New York is about a woman seeking revenge along with her surviving son after her husband and four of her children are murdered.
USA TODAY says: * * *. An "unsettling but gracefully written debut novel."
My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead; Crown, 278 pp.; non- fiction
Journalist Mead celebrates George Eliot's most famous novel, which she has loved since reading it as a teenager.
USA TODAY says: * * * *. "Delightful … her passion proves infectious."
The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch; St. Martin's Press, 336 pp.; fiction
The novel is set in 2005 and narrated by a 25-year-old American studying literature at England's class-conscious Oxford University. (It's written by a frequent contributor of book reviews to USA TODAY.)
USA TODAY says: * * *. "Gracefully written and atmospheric."
Contributing reviewers: Patty Rhule, Elysa Gardner, Bob Minzesheimer, Carmela Ciuraru
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Rebecca Mead’s ‘My Life in Middlemarch’: What Does It Mean to Want to Live in a Book?
(from flavorwire.com
by Michelle Dean)
I have often said that I’d like to live in a book, but I’m sort of lying. Much as I love books, I confess that it sounds rather boring, the idea of living in and through just one. The confines of one plot strike me as too predictable and too confined.
Yet in My Life in Middlemarch, the New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead reports, however, that she has done just that. Joyce Carol Oates classifies Mead’s book as a “biblio-memoir” in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, but really it’s more biblio than memoir; the book does extra lifting as a serious critical study of George Eliot’s novel, as well as an exploration in the author’s biography (though there is not much new material here). We are given fleeting glimpses of Mead’s life as a writer and reporter for several magazines, and, yes, of her personal life too. But anyone hoping for the naked emotionalism of memoir as we usually see it done nowadays will be disappointed. Moreover: while theoretically I suppose you could read this book without reading Middlemarch, it’s hard to see that you could get the full benefit of its small moments of Eliot-inspired wisdom.
There is something fitting to the subject in Mead’s demureness, though. The last paragraph of Middlemarch, and in particular its last line, speak to the fact that even the quietest lives have some value. For those of you not well-versed in Middlemarch, the speaker here is talking about Dorothea Casaubon, the main character:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Remarks Mead, when she gets to this: “I cannot imagine reading these words and not sighing at the end of them.” I think she’s right: if this is a ringing endorsement of a life quietly lived, it’s one laced with a great many caveats. Mead goes on to point out that in the manuscript Eliot had this phrased much more strongly. “Half owing” becomes full “owing,” and that sort of thing. Eliot, I think, was just suffering from something most writers feel, which is the sense that they are no longer quite as convinced by a thought once they set it down on paper.
The fact is, as you learn from Mead’s book, Eliot herself was not really one for a quiet life, per se. She was not a Brontë or even a Jane Austen. Well known to other writers and intellectuals in her lifetime (Henry James even called her a “horse-faced bluestocking”), she lived a relatively public life for a 19th-century writer. When she began living in effective sin with her married lover, George Henry Lewes, it was a scandal because she did it openly. Most of Eliot’s life was lived in open defiance of the narrow channels a woman like her was expected to follow. She wasn’t, to put it in our terms, living according to any book that came before her.
When people say they wish they lived in books, I often think that what they must mean — because it is what I mean — is that they would like to live lives that seem freighted with meaning. Book characters have this advantage over us. In real life we spend a lot of time in unmoving lines, being annoyed at the people who shove us on the bus, eating things that seemed delicious in theory but in practice are sugary cardboard. And if even those tedious things happen in books, they do not happen in the flat, uninflatable way we experience them in our everyday lives. The mechanics of plot mean that every action provokes some kind of necessary reaction. And since we live in a world where things often feel meaningless, we envy that in book characters, their assurance that all those “channels which have no great name on earth” are actually headed towards something worthwhile.
I don’t know that there is really a bridgeable gap there. A lesser novelist (and lesser biblio-memoirist) probably would have wanted to be more reassuring to readers that the meaning is there regardless. Instead, they seem to both be telling you that even if they don’t know the answer, even if the world-historical-import of your own small little life is at best a work-in-progress, the only way to cope is to keep on reading. It’s salve enough for the uncertainty while you’re waiting to find out.
by Michelle Dean)
I have often said that I’d like to live in a book, but I’m sort of lying. Much as I love books, I confess that it sounds rather boring, the idea of living in and through just one. The confines of one plot strike me as too predictable and too confined.
Yet in My Life in Middlemarch, the New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead reports, however, that she has done just that. Joyce Carol Oates classifies Mead’s book as a “biblio-memoir” in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, but really it’s more biblio than memoir; the book does extra lifting as a serious critical study of George Eliot’s novel, as well as an exploration in the author’s biography (though there is not much new material here). We are given fleeting glimpses of Mead’s life as a writer and reporter for several magazines, and, yes, of her personal life too. But anyone hoping for the naked emotionalism of memoir as we usually see it done nowadays will be disappointed. Moreover: while theoretically I suppose you could read this book without reading Middlemarch, it’s hard to see that you could get the full benefit of its small moments of Eliot-inspired wisdom.
There is something fitting to the subject in Mead’s demureness, though. The last paragraph of Middlemarch, and in particular its last line, speak to the fact that even the quietest lives have some value. For those of you not well-versed in Middlemarch, the speaker here is talking about Dorothea Casaubon, the main character:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Remarks Mead, when she gets to this: “I cannot imagine reading these words and not sighing at the end of them.” I think she’s right: if this is a ringing endorsement of a life quietly lived, it’s one laced with a great many caveats. Mead goes on to point out that in the manuscript Eliot had this phrased much more strongly. “Half owing” becomes full “owing,” and that sort of thing. Eliot, I think, was just suffering from something most writers feel, which is the sense that they are no longer quite as convinced by a thought once they set it down on paper.
The fact is, as you learn from Mead’s book, Eliot herself was not really one for a quiet life, per se. She was not a Brontë or even a Jane Austen. Well known to other writers and intellectuals in her lifetime (Henry James even called her a “horse-faced bluestocking”), she lived a relatively public life for a 19th-century writer. When she began living in effective sin with her married lover, George Henry Lewes, it was a scandal because she did it openly. Most of Eliot’s life was lived in open defiance of the narrow channels a woman like her was expected to follow. She wasn’t, to put it in our terms, living according to any book that came before her.
When people say they wish they lived in books, I often think that what they must mean — because it is what I mean — is that they would like to live lives that seem freighted with meaning. Book characters have this advantage over us. In real life we spend a lot of time in unmoving lines, being annoyed at the people who shove us on the bus, eating things that seemed delicious in theory but in practice are sugary cardboard. And if even those tedious things happen in books, they do not happen in the flat, uninflatable way we experience them in our everyday lives. The mechanics of plot mean that every action provokes some kind of necessary reaction. And since we live in a world where things often feel meaningless, we envy that in book characters, their assurance that all those “channels which have no great name on earth” are actually headed towards something worthwhile.
I don’t know that there is really a bridgeable gap there. A lesser novelist (and lesser biblio-memoirist) probably would have wanted to be more reassuring to readers that the meaning is there regardless. Instead, they seem to both be telling you that even if they don’t know the answer, even if the world-historical-import of your own small little life is at best a work-in-progress, the only way to cope is to keep on reading. It’s salve enough for the uncertainty while you’re waiting to find out.
THE QUOTE, THE REVIEW, THE LIST for February 1, 2014
A BOOKISH QUOTE
Books are the most quietest and constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and most patient of teachers.
-Charles W. Eliot
THE REVIEW
THAT TOUCH OF MAGIC
by Lucy March
KIRKUS REVIEW
Despite the potential dangers of magic, recently laid-off librarian Stacy Easter starts mixing potions for income, and when her ex Leo North comes back to town, she takes a potion herself—opening her town and herself to an evil and destructive dark magic.
One year ago, Stacy Easter was embroiled in a violent magical power struggle when her best friend, Liv, discovered she had latent powers that certain people would love to get their hands on. In the process, Stacy learned she had some talent herself in mixing potions. After losing her librarian job to budget cuts, she began mixing love potions for clients. All is well until her ex-boyfriend comes back to town. Ten years ago, Leo betrayed her and left, but now he’s back for her brother’s wedding, and while he’s in town, he wants to make amends and convince her that they belong together. Leo tore Stacy’s heart out when he left, and she decides it would be much better to numb her emotions. Procuring a potion to use for the duration of the wedding turns into a dark choice when, suddenly, her clients begin experiencing dangerous side effects and Stacy realizes she’s inadvertently opened herself up to a magical psychopath. It will take the support and talents of her friends to counteract the spells and save the town, and as they try to come up with a rescue plan, Stacy finds herself admitting to her long-buried feelings for Leo. March spins a magical tale with an authentic, damaged heroine who must overcome some serious self-worth issues in order to rescue herself, her clients and her heart. Great writing and characterization flesh out a unique, compelling plot that keeps readers intrigued and emotionally engaged.
Touching, sexy and enchanting.
Pub Date:Jan. 28th, 2014
ISBN:978-0-312-38938-3
Page count:352pp
Publisher:St. Martin's
Review Posted Online:Dec. 17th, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue:Jan. 1st, 2014
THE LIST
Amazon Romance Best Sellers
Books are the most quietest and constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and most patient of teachers.
-Charles W. Eliot
THE REVIEW
THAT TOUCH OF MAGIC
by Lucy March
KIRKUS REVIEW
Despite the potential dangers of magic, recently laid-off librarian Stacy Easter starts mixing potions for income, and when her ex Leo North comes back to town, she takes a potion herself—opening her town and herself to an evil and destructive dark magic.
One year ago, Stacy Easter was embroiled in a violent magical power struggle when her best friend, Liv, discovered she had latent powers that certain people would love to get their hands on. In the process, Stacy learned she had some talent herself in mixing potions. After losing her librarian job to budget cuts, she began mixing love potions for clients. All is well until her ex-boyfriend comes back to town. Ten years ago, Leo betrayed her and left, but now he’s back for her brother’s wedding, and while he’s in town, he wants to make amends and convince her that they belong together. Leo tore Stacy’s heart out when he left, and she decides it would be much better to numb her emotions. Procuring a potion to use for the duration of the wedding turns into a dark choice when, suddenly, her clients begin experiencing dangerous side effects and Stacy realizes she’s inadvertently opened herself up to a magical psychopath. It will take the support and talents of her friends to counteract the spells and save the town, and as they try to come up with a rescue plan, Stacy finds herself admitting to her long-buried feelings for Leo. March spins a magical tale with an authentic, damaged heroine who must overcome some serious self-worth issues in order to rescue herself, her clients and her heart. Great writing and characterization flesh out a unique, compelling plot that keeps readers intrigued and emotionally engaged.
Touching, sexy and enchanting.
Pub Date:Jan. 28th, 2014
ISBN:978-0-312-38938-3
Page count:352pp
Publisher:St. Martin's
Review Posted Online:Dec. 17th, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue:Jan. 1st, 2014
THE LIST
Amazon Romance Best Sellers
Now THIS is Book Trailer!
I won this book yesterday and was looking at the links I was sent and found this little gem. If it does not make you want to read the book, I would be surprised. The name of the book is The Angelic Gene Elijah Hael. Click here for the trailer.
It Is Officially February - The Month Of Love (For Some of Us!)
January sure went fast. It seems like I was just wrapping presents.
I blogged the other day about my husband and I not celebrating Valentine's Day. Something we both agreed to. However, because I am doing so much reading and blogging, and my tour companies have no shortage of romance books, so I decided to read as many romance books as I can for the month. I have other reading to do but even if I get to even one, that would be my triumph for the month. Also I know I am going to get batted over the head with romance book reviews and giveaways so I may as well saddle up.
So I am starting of with The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion which not only has received fabulous reviews but it has been mentioned on all the top romance lists.
I will be starting today and keep you posted. I think I read it is a little humorous too which would be awesome. I love the title and the book cover.
If anyone has a favorite romance book they want to tell me about, please comment so I can check it out.
I will try to give you all the romance you could wish for this month.
And for the haters, let me know I will find a great horror book for you!
I blogged the other day about my husband and I not celebrating Valentine's Day. Something we both agreed to. However, because I am doing so much reading and blogging, and my tour companies have no shortage of romance books, so I decided to read as many romance books as I can for the month. I have other reading to do but even if I get to even one, that would be my triumph for the month. Also I know I am going to get batted over the head with romance book reviews and giveaways so I may as well saddle up.
So I am starting of with The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion which not only has received fabulous reviews but it has been mentioned on all the top romance lists.
I will be starting today and keep you posted. I think I read it is a little humorous too which would be awesome. I love the title and the book cover.
If anyone has a favorite romance book they want to tell me about, please comment so I can check it out.
I will try to give you all the romance you could wish for this month.
And for the haters, let me know I will find a great horror book for you!
Review of "Bound" by K.A. Last
I did a book blitz for Imagica, the book by K.A. Last. When I went to one of the author's pages, this was a bonus you can click on and get for free.
It was short, but it was captivating enough to peak my interest and want to read Imagica.
Imagica is a fantasy, but from reading this, there is a romance involved. The fallen angel Seth just wants to be with his beloved Grace, also an angel. He cannot get near her because of something he did in the past. Seth waits around all the time for her to reincarnate so they can fall in love over and over again. And he is tired of it. So he calls on Michael (yes that angel Michael) to help him out.
This left me with a lot of questions which I am sure will be answered if I read Imagica. But this seems to be the thing now along with the book trailers, the series and even a .5 book that is short tells us extra information. I like it it is a good idea.
It was short, but it was captivating enough to peak my interest and want to read Imagica.
Imagica is a fantasy, but from reading this, there is a romance involved. The fallen angel Seth just wants to be with his beloved Grace, also an angel. He cannot get near her because of something he did in the past. Seth waits around all the time for her to reincarnate so they can fall in love over and over again. And he is tired of it. So he calls on Michael (yes that angel Michael) to help him out.
This left me with a lot of questions which I am sure will be answered if I read Imagica. But this seems to be the thing now along with the book trailers, the series and even a .5 book that is short tells us extra information. I like it it is a good idea.
BOOK BLITZ FOR "IMAGICA" by K.A. Last
Title: Immagica
Author: K. A. Last
Genre: YA Fantasy/Adventure
Date of Publication: January 26, 2014
Word Count: approximately 68,000
Cover Illustration: Lawrence Mann - http://www.lawrencemann.co.uk/
Cover Designer: KILA Designs - https://www.facebook.com/KILAdesigns
Map Illustration: Lawrence Mann - http://www.lawrencemann.co.uk/
Book Trailer: click here
Immagica…
Where anything is possible.
Enter at your own risk.
The night before her fifteenth birthday, Rosaline Clayton uncovers a
deep family secret. She receives an amulet from her deranged father,
and he tells her she must find the book in order to save him. Rosaline
is used to her dad not making any sense, so she dismisses their
conversation as another of his crazy rants.
When Rosaline’s brother, Elliot, drags her to their nana’s attic to
explore, they find the old leather-bound book tucked away in a chest.
It sucks them into its pages, transporting them to a magical world.
Along the way, Rosaline and Elliot are separated, and the only thing
she wants is to find her brother and go home.
The creatures of Immagica have other ideas. After years of war, their
land lies in ruin. Using the amulet’s power, they want Rosaline to
defeat the dragon and restore Immagica to its former glory. But
Rosaline is bound to Immagica in ways she doesn’t understand, and when
she discovers the truth about her family, she must follow her heart to
save them all.
K. A. Last was born in Subiaco, Western Australia, and moved to Sydney with her parents and older brother when she was eight. Artistic and creative by nature, she studied Graphic Design and graduated with an Advanced Diploma. After marrying her high school sweetheart, she concentrated on her career before settling into family life. Blessed with a vivid imagination, she began writing to let off creative steam, and fell in love with it. K. A. Last is currently studying her Bachelor of Arts at Charles Sturt University, with a major in English, and minors in Children’s Literature, Art History, and Visual Culture. She resides in a peaceful, leafy suburb north of Sydney with her husband, their two children, a rabbit named Twitch, and a guinea pig called Squeak.
Website: http://www.kalastbooks.com.au/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KALastBooks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KALastBooks
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6895878.K_A_Last
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/K.-A.-Last/e/B00B2IK8OM
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon eBook - click here
Amazon Paperback - click bere
Smashwords - click here
iBooks - click here
Barnes & Noble - click here
There is a tour wide giveaway and you can follow this link to enter: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/05ebcc22/
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