Kerry (avatiakh) and her books in 2014 #2

Miravet is the site of a Templar castle on the River Ebro in southern Catalonia and we visited briefly back in February. The Ebro also saw one of the last battles in the Spanish Civil War.

Currently Reading:

Phoenix by SF Said
Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
Dreams of Gods & Monsters by Liani Taylor
The Ringed Castle by Dorothy Dunnett
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years by Bernard Lewis
- iPod audio

We also visited the old Templar castle in Tortosa on the River Ebro, it's now a parador de turismo (state-owned hotel).

The link to my 2014 Category Challenge:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/159815

My categories
1) A made-up place - children's literature
2) Right Book Right Time - YA literature
3) The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years - nonfiction on the Middle East (& North Africa)
4) Running through Corridors - books to film or tv
5) Reading on Location - travel books and books set in exotic locations
6) 1000 books to change your life - books on lists, group reads, themed reads, challenges
7) Fantasy freaks and gaming geeks - scifi and fantasy fiction
8) The old man mad about drawing - books with illustrations, photos or art
9) The Exercise Book - modern literary fiction (1950-)
10) Only Connect - series
+
11) Notes of a bag lady - my overflow

47) The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis (2003)
nonfiction

My edition has a 2004 updated afterword. Lewis wrote a lengthy New Yorker article in response to 9/11 that was published in November 2001. He was then asked to flesh it out into a short book. For me the size appealed, especially as the other Middle Eastern reading I'm doing at present is quite ambitious.
I found it interesting to read, Lewis backgrounds the story of Islam, the Arabs, and the rise of Al Quaeda and global terrorism. I read it keeping in mind that Lewis has a lot of critics, especially those who are in the 'Edward Said' camp. He does draw conclusions and quite strong ones about Islam and the trials and tribulations of modernisation.
I haven't read anything by Edward Said but understand that he rejected Orientalist scholars and their writings especially that by his contemporary Bernard Lewis.

I'm currently doing a Coursera paper on The Emergence of the Modern Middle East and so will hopefully be completing more topical reads in the next few weeks. I feel that I might be reading on the Middle East all year, there is so much that sounds interesting. I'll mention a few fiction books that have been enthused about by course participants:
The Gendarme by Mark Mustian - historical fiction about the Armenian genocide
Birds without Wings by Louis de Berniers - set in Turkey just before and during WWI and during the population exchange with Greece
Jason Goodwin's books featuring Yashim the eunoch (1930s Istanbul): Janissary Tree, An Evil Eye, and The Snake Stone.
Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua
The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Rees
The Egyptian (Sinuhe the Egyptian), a historical novel by Mika Waltari, first published 1945
Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan
Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
The Abyssinian by Jean-Christophe Rufin (founder of Medecins San Frontieres)
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi

I was excited then disappointed today. My request for the audiobook of Simon Montifiore's Jerusalem: a biography had finally come in. Unfortunately it is an 11 hour abridged version, only 9 cds. So sent in a suggestion to the library that they should fix the catalog info as most people aren't interested in abridged. Look up on Amazon to see if there is a nonabridged edition, there is one coming out in a week or so on audible, it's 76 hours! That feels like too much commitment for me, so I'll probably just read the book.

I'm enjoying listening to The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492) by Simon Schama, it's narrated by Andrew Sachs. I watched the documentary series last year.

Library books:
In the courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman
Falling out of Time by David Grossman
A room at Guardian Angel Inn by Countess de Segur - fresh translation of children's book originally published 1863

In the mailbox:
Manhatten Transfer by John Dos Passos -
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Room at the top by John Braine
A sense of purpose: recollections by Suzy Eban (wife to Abba Eban, Israeli diplomat)

YA books:
The One Dollar Horse by Lauren St John - horses
The Disgrace of Kitty Grey by Mary Hooper - historical
Tank Boys by Stephen Dando Collins - WW1 child soldiers
The Sultan's Eyes by Kelly Gardiner - historical

Happy New Thread Kerry! I must say I'm glad you started a new one because the former thread took a very long time to load and kept skipping all over the place. I noticed that started happening on LT with content-heavy threads (including mind of course), that they seem to skip up and down for quite a while before settling down. I wonder why that is?

I'm glad to see the first three books participants to your course have enthused about are already on my tbr: The Gendarme by Mark Mustian, Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernières (which I started listening to on audio, only to find the tracks were all mixed up AND I had the abridged version, so now have the book), and Jason Goodwin's first book in the Janissary Tree series. Will keep my eye out for the others.

I think it's the image-heavy threads that are most problematic, Ilana, simply because it takes any system more time to digest all the instructions being sent about all the pixels and where they have to go.

That's a lot of books, Kerry!

Yes, the Said/Bernard Lewis rift is famous/infamous in contemporary Middle East/international affairs circles. The latter, because Said hones in on what I think is an important broader issue, although he does so in the context of the Middle East: it's the way that one (dominant) culture attempts to make another large cultural grouping that is different, or "other", readily understandable by forcing it into a series of simplistic analyses that are ill-founded and reflect more the preconceptions of those doing the studying than they do reality. Hence, the "Orient" as passionate, mystical, mysterious -- and that then informs policy at an elevated level and assumptions at a basic level. It's a thoughtful and sobering critique, demanding that we re-evaluate certain first principles before we forge ahead, willy nilly. I think one indication of how seminal it is, is the sheer level of the response it has generated, both among admirers and detractors.

It's unfortunate that some of the most avid relativists have co-opted Said's critique. I've not read enough of his work to know what he thought about that, but having read Orientalism and some of his other major works, I don't see him suggesting that pure cultural relativism is a perfect alternative to what he condemns. He seems rather to be advocating for an awareness of inherent bias and for allowing peoples to speak to their own identity, political traditions, etc., rather than having definitions imposed upon them from the outside.

In contrast, I see Lewis as speaking more more within a received tradition. His intellectual/analytical "heft" is without question enormous, but he hasn't really restated any of the fundamental questions in the same way. I think he's been most useful when, as in the book you read, he has taken some key constructs in contemporary political Islam and distilled them in a way that the average reader can follow the debate. Least helpful, when he's turned that into polemical argument...

I loved both The Gendarme and Season of Migration to the North, and I have The Abyssinian sitting on my shelf. Your thread is too full of ideas and books for me to distill onto my TBR list, so I'll just keep the thread starred and your list as well. Good luck on your paper. So much great reading-I'm envious!

Kerry, I love both your pictures at the top. Very interesting.

>5 Smiler69: Ilana, I do tend to overload on images and that skipping thing bugs me too. I'm keen to read The Gendarme as well. I have most of Louis de Bernières books on Mt tbr but have still only read his Captain Corelli.

>6 Chatterbox: Suzanne - so much to comment on. From what I understand the basic idea of Said's thesis is reasonable but it has been extrapolated by others. I don't really know enough to discuss Said's work, I'd like to read Orientalism.
The course I'm taking through Coursera has recommended about 3 of Lewis' books in their suggested reading which has met with criticism by participants who favour Said's work. We have a 'what's on your bookshelves' thread and some state 'nothing by Bernard Lewis'. Personally I like to keep an open mind and read across the range.

Lisa - I'm personally swamped by my own suggestions and I'm hardly reading anything these past few weeks. Because I couldn't find one here on LT I started a Middle East Fiction list last night and have already had feedback on it. You are welcome to add your favourites.
http://www.librarything.com/list/9482/all/Middle-East-Fiction

Stephanie - thanks. My photos weren't that great so I pulled them from the internet. I'd love to go back and spend even more time in that part of Catalonia, but now I'm home I will be able to read about it which is almost as good.

Kerry congratulations on your new thread and the Catalonian photos are stunning.

You list some very interesting books with a middle eastern theme. I have read Birds Without Wings and was enthused by it - just as good as Captain Corelli IMO. I have the Mustian and Cities of Salt on the shelves too and look forward to bumping them up a little in my reading priorities.

>9 avatiakh: I think your approach is very sound! Whenever I see anyone say "nothing by X", my immediate reaction is to discount everything they have listed that they consider to be acceptable... Personally, I don't think it's easy to understand either Lewis or Said in isolation from each other, since they represent polar opposite views and in some cases, react to each other. It's like Marxism vs capitalism. I wouldn't remove either Adam Smith or Marx in a course devoted to economic thought... whatever you end up concluding about their views. The mere fact that others consider them to be foundational texts requires that they be treated seriously, IMHO. If only to be able to hold a serious discussion.

Kerry, I brought home What Makes This Book So Great from the library yesterday and started the first couple of entries last night. I loved her piece on re-reading!

Hi Roni - I think you'll get a lot more out of Walton's book than I will as I'm not familiar with a lot of the books she is talking about. I'm still very much enjoying it, though not sure if I'll get through it all before it's due back to the library. I feel this for me would be a great keeper book to grab ideas from and go back to after actually reading the books. Though at this stage I'm resisting adding more scifi and fantasy to Mt Tbr as I have so much already there.

Suzanne - so true, thanks for clarifying.

Paul - oh, I loved Captain Corelli when I read it. The movie was really poor though, I don't think I watched it right through.

Speaking of movies:
My son and I took in 'Noah' earlier this week, mainly to see it on the big screen. We both enjoyed it to a point, and both came home and googled the bible story so we could talk about it a little more. For those living in countries that are banning the movie or whose religious affiliations won't allow them to view it, you could read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters instead.

Tonight I watched an Israeli film, A Matter of Size, about a group of overweight men who take up sumo wrestling. Not bad.
We also have been rewatching a few episodes of an old tv series, 'Sliders'.

Another documentary series I watched last week was 'Planet Egypt' which was about the early pharoahs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAe4GHoX_zo

Happy new thread Kerry!

*Hi Heather*

My brother posted this on FB this morning and it made me laugh enough to share

48) Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz (2007)
fiction

An interesting read that I didn't particularly take to, more because of me than the writer I would think, as I'm having trouble enjoying most of my reading at present. I should just grab a thriller or two.
Anyway we follow a successful writer as he gives a talk and then wanders in the streets through the night unable to sleep. As we follow him, we also engage with the characters in his head as he grapples with their particular problems until one does not know what is real and what is not. I liked the idea of this and will note it for a reread when my own frame of mind is more settled.


Africa is my home: A Child of the Amistad by Monica Endinger (2013)
children's nonfiction
This is Edinger's first book for children and it tells the story of the four children who were aboard the ship Amistad. The illustrations by Robert Byrd are gentle which works to counter some of the harsh actions that happen in the story. Edinger keeps the entire story on a positive note emphasising hope and longing for home. In the author's note she writes of all the research she did and how the project was close to her heart having spent several years teaching in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. This is probably suiting 7-10 yr olds.
I've followed Edinger's children's literature blog educating Alice for many years. She also writes about children's books for Huffington Post.




The way to the zoo by John Burningham (2014)
picturebook
I love Burningham's work and so jumped to see his latest. Probably not his best work, it is still an imaginative story and the art is great, I just felt that some of the sentences were a little clunky. One of my favourites is Hushabye where the language is a real treat.

Oh, I'll have to keep an eye out for The Way to the Zoo - I love Burningham!

Happy New Thread, Kerry! It looks like you are deeply immersed in some very interesting books. Hope you had a terrific weekend.

Even though I gave Rhyming Life and Death four stars it was probably my least favorite work by Amos Oz. I enjoyed Scenes from Village Life, Between Friends and his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness much better.

I look forward to your comments about The Story of the Jews.

49) The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492) by Simon Schama (2013)
nonfiction
I listened to this history on my iPod, the narrators were very good and I actually did not pick up when Saul Reichlin took over from Andrew Sachs. Last year I watched Schama's documentary series 'The Story of the Jews' and this is the first volume of two written to accompany the tv programmes. The book goes into much more detail and I found it quite fascinating, Schama makes use of individual stories to bring the past to life, this means that while you don't always get an overall picture of history, the parts he does cover remain vividly drawn on your memory. The parts that stood out were the descriptions of early synagogues in Antioch, medieval Jewish intellectuals and their poetry, cartography and literature.
And then there is the terrible long line of Christian persecution of their Jewish populations starting with England's expulsion of Jews in 1290, the killing and destruction of entire Jewish communities in Europe during the Crusades along with the forced conversions. Ending with the 1492 expulsion order from Spain after years of inquisition and the questioned status of the 'conversos', had they embraced their new religion?
The book also covers life under Muslim rule and the dhimmi status of the Jews. Schama dips into some of the stories from the Cairo Geniza, a collection of some 300,000 Jewish manuscript fragments. 'These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum (870 CE to 19th century) of Jewish Middle-Eastern and North African history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.'

What comes across is the undeniable contribution Jewish people have made to the communities they lived in, the culture and way of life that flourished when they were living through peaceful times and then the terrible persecution when antisemites gained positions of power. Ironic that as Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492 & then Vasco de Gamas to India, they were both relying on the astronomical tables & astrolabe of Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer mathematician who, refusing to become a 'converso', was expelled from Spain & then Portugal.

The actual book contains an extensive bibliography, excellent footnotes and a range of maps.

50) The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller (1941)
nonfiction

I was looking forward to reading this memoir of a year that Miller spent in Greece at the start of WW2, however I found it quite a difficult book to take in. Miller spends much of the book philosophising on Greece, Greeks, Americans and how he dislikes spending time in the company of people with money. He was also quite disdainful of the US and had been living in Paris before arriving in Crete to stay a few weeks with Lawrence Durrell. So I found it a slow read and probably would have appreciated it more if I had just returned from Greece myself. Parts were quite fascinating.
At the end as Miller boards an American ship to return to the US he is immediately aware of a different world, one he doesn't want to return to and says ' I was among the go-getters again, among the restless souls who, not knowing how to live their own life, wish to change the world for everyone.'

51) Falling out of Time by David Grossman (2014)
prose

This is Grossman's second book dealing with a parent's grief. He lost his son who was killed in fighting in Lebanon in 2006. To sum the book up in one word, I'd have to say 'wail', it felt to me like one long screaming 'wail', beautifully written with fantastical elements but full of mourning, grief and sadness. I thought the first few pages were absolutely brilliant but didn't enjoy much from the rest of the book, though it is also a quick enough read being in prose form.
I'll go back and read more of his earlier work, he is a great writer and I've enjoyed reading his work but if he continues to riff on grief I just can't take it.

'At night people came
bearing news
They walked a long way,
quietly grave,
and perhaps, as they did so,
they stole a taste, a lick.
With a child's wonder
they learned they could hold
death in their mouths
like candy made of poison
to which they are miraculously
immune.
We opened the door,
this one. We stood here,
you and I,
shoulder to shoulder,
they
on the threshold
and we
facing them
and they,
mercifully,
quietly,
stood there and
gave us
the breath
of death.'

>19 scaifea: Amber - I also love his work

>20 msf59: Mark thanks, I'm finding it hard keeping up with everything at present

>21 kidzdoc: Darryl - I prefer other Oz books too. I just did my thoughts on The Story of the Jews which I really enjoyed and of course it opens up a myriad of possible reading. I was especially interested in the stories of the cartographers and other intellectuals. I have an audio of Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds by Joel L. Kraemer which I'll probably listen to when I finish my next audiobook.

Enjoyed reading your comments on The Story of the Jews. It was a superb TV series and I'm glad you found the book even more rewarding. I have it on my wishlist, and your review has really whetted my appetite for more. Glad to hear that there is a proper bibliography and good maps as well, as I'm sure that I'll want to turn to many other books as well when I finally get to it.

Is it illustrated apart from the maps?

Paul - there are a few photos. The maps aren't that great but are all you need to place where he is talking about. I enjoyed the book on audio, and really I'd never have got round to reading it otherwise. I was able to picture the various parts of the tv series as I listened to the book and this definitely enhanced my enjoyment, especially at the start with the bit on Elephantine.
I'd suggest looking for a good historical atlas, I have Atlas of the Islamic World: since 1500 and will be on the lookout for something similar on Jewish history. Another atlas I've found useful is the more modern The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

>22 avatiakh: Kerry, I was just looking at that and wondering if I should add it to my wishlist. I swiped Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama from Don. Of course, who know when I will get to it.

Fatima and the Dream Thief by Rafik Sehami (1996) ill: els cools & oliver streich
illustrated tale

I came across Sehami's children's books when researching his adult fiction and finding that his Damascus Nights draws heavily on fairy tales, Arabian Nights, storytellers and such like. Anyway this Fatima book is quite lovely, the story is different, quite exotic though feels familiar in some ways. The illustrations are great, very friendly and again exotic enough and great palette of colours.
Fatima's brother goes to work for a rich lord of the castle and if he doesn't get angry he'll earn a whole gold coin for the week's work. Of course, he's goaded into being angry on the last day. His resourceful younger sister then has a go. Fun.
Rafik Sehami is from Syria though has lived many years in Germany.
Albert & Lila is another collaboration between the writer and illustrators, looks like they've done 1 or 2 more as well.

>28 AuntieClio: Stephanie - Schama has done another great tv series The Power of Art which I can highly recommend. I have his book Landscape and Memory which sounds like a fascinating read, just have to crack it open.

The twelve Dancing Princesses by Mary Hoffman ill: Miss Clara (2013)
illustrated story

This is part of a chapterbook series for confident readers, written by well-established children's writers. At first I was interested to see how Mary Hoffman would tell the tale as this is one of my daughter's favourite fairy tales, but I was also very drawn to the cover illustration. Once I had the book I found the story to be a good straightforward retelling but the artwork quite sensational. Miss Clara who hails from France has also illustrated the Princess and the Pea & The Snow Queen. Barefoot Books, is a well established publisher of folktales. Unfortunately my library only has this one book.

Barefoot Books: 'Miss Clara's illustrations are unlike anything I have ever seen before! She creates her illustrations by making three-dimensional dolls and figurines that she photographs and then manipulates digitally. The final effect is mesmerizing -- the eye can't quite tell what is real and what is illusion.'

52) A room at the Guardian Angel Inn by Comtesse de Ségur (1863) (2012)
children's fiction

Australian Stephanie Smee has tackled the job of translating the 19thC work of the Comtesse de Ségur who wrote numerous children's books including the Fleurville trilogy which featured the irrepressible Sophie.
A soldier returning to his home during the Crimean War comes across two homeless but well-behaved young boys. He ends up taking them to an inn in a nearby village where a home is found for them. A couple of years later he returns accompanied by an aristocratic Russian prisoner of war, both recovering from injuries. This Russian, General Dourakine, proceeds to bring order and disorder to all their lives. A very fun read, would appeal as a read aloud I'd think. There is one event in the book that shows the book's age but apart from that the story and characters sparkle from the every page.
The sequel, General Dourakine, is already sitting on my tbr pile.

Hi Kerry- Excellent review of The Story of the Jews. I might have to try that one on audio, one of these days. Hope the week is going well.

Find Momo by Andrew Knapp (2014)
photography

Aimed at children, this photography book started out as a web project. Lots and lots of interesting photos of New England and somewhere in each of them is Knapp's border collie, Momo. Some are easy and others a bit harder to find that dog. Lots of fun and appealing, have a try on his website: http://gofindmomo.com/
I was alerted to the book by @fuzzi who shared it with all her family as I have also done. We all enjoyed it.

53) Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (2013)
children's fiction

This just won the 2014 Waterstones Children's Book Prize and is the second time I took it from the library. I ended up liking it quite a bit though not loving it as I first thought I would. Sophie was discovered as a baby floating in a cello case after a shipwreck in the English Channel. She's taken in by a survivor who becomes her guardian when no family is found. She's convinced her mother is still alive and eventually they go to Paris to try their luck. Here Sophie meets the rooftoppers, the children who live on the rooftops of Paris.

Nice review of The Story of the Jews, Kerry. I'll plan to get it next month. I'm sorry that you didn't like Falling Out of Time; I bought a copy in London last month.

>30 avatiakh: Seconding the Power of Art suggestion. Great series.

Kerry, I just listened to Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan very recently (still working on my review), which I found fascinating, and one of the things I really enjoyed about it is it gave me some background on Judaism, or the state of it during that particular period, that wasn't all that familiar to me (I know very little, considering I spent 4 years as a student in Israel). Anyway, all this to say that I'm really wanting to listen to The Story of the Jews too. I haven't seen the TV series, though it sounds fascinating, and I'm hoping the library gets it soon, though I may help them along and request it. I see it's available on Amazon, but then it might be a great resource for them to get at the library. The audiobook doesn't seem to be available in these parts yet, though I've just requested it from Audible, so hoping they'll be releasing it soon.

eta: oh yes, also wanted to comment about The Colossus of Maroussi. From what I've (re)read of it so far, I have to agree with you that I think my original enthusiasm about it was very much due to the fact I was just returning from a five-month stay in Greece. Because this time around, 15 years later, I found myself putting it down some 40% of the way in and none too enthused about picking it up again...

>37 Oberon: Hi Erik. it's good isn't it. I got the book, The Power of Art, out of the library but that was a step too far.

Hi Ilana - I've read a few reviews of Zealot that put me off, though I might just have to find out for myself, especially after reading so many positive reviews here on LT. I watched the Schama series on youtube as it was shown on UK tv and was lucky in that my library had recently got the book on audio. I'd bought the book when it first came out.

Regarding The Colossus of Maroussi, I had to set myself a target of 10pgs every day or so in order to get through it. There were only a couple of passages in the book where I wanted to read more in one sitting. Pleased I finished it, one of those on my 'must read' lists and now I can go on and read Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons. My library has The Alexandris Quartet on audio and having struggled to get through Justine last year, I've downloaded the audios of the other three books and will be listening to them.

>22 avatiakh: I picked it up During my Xmas book buying season, on my list to read very soon, somehow I missed there TV series or maybe it hasn't been on down here ????

Happy Easter!

>40 roundballnz: Hi Alex - I watched the series on youtube, someone was putting each episode up as it was shown on UK tv, but now that I check the link it has been taken down.

>41 wilkiec: Hi Diana - thanks for the greeting


54) Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (2013)
YA fiction
Enjoyable YA that I simply flew through in a couple of sittings. Cath comes to college feeling abandoned by her twin sister who wants 'independence' from twinhood. For the quieter Cath this equals loneliness and an inability to adapt well to college life. Her one consolation is writing class and her fanfiction.
I really liked Eleanor and Park and this is almost as good.

55) Agent of Change by Sharon Lee & Steven Miller (1988)
scifi / audiobook
(Liaden Universe #1)

Not sure about whether it's #1 in the series or not as I've seen it listed under #7 and #9 elsewhere, but looks to have been the first book published in the series. I think the one to read next is Carpe Diem or to go back and read the books in chronological order rather than published order.
That all aside this was a fun entry into the Liaden Universe, a richly diverse universe of aliens and Terrans co-existing across the Universe in relative peace but not always harmony. This is a great little space adventure without the epic length of some of the scifi I have read in recent times. Will gladly dip into this universe from time to time.
Worked well as an audiobook.

56) The Red Shoe by Ursual Dubosarsky (2006)
children's fiction

This wonderful book has sat on my tbr pile for several years, I was given an uncorrected proof copy around the time it first came out. This is an excellent novel, and while it's for older children it is one that rewards even the adult reader. I loved how you can just read the narrative and be left slightly mystified on a few points, but then extra information can be gleaned from reading the newspaper extracts at the end of each chapter. The story is set over Easter, 1954 and is about three sisters and their parents who live in a remote beach suburb north of Sydney. We have a polio epidemic, a nervous breakdown, pet day, a father with PTSD, imaginary friends and Russian defectors on the loose.

I loved her The Game of the Goose and also have The Word Spy: come and discover the secrets of the English language on Mt Tbr.

57) General Dourakine by Comtesse de Ségur (1893) (2013)
children's fiction
This is the sequel to A room at the Guardian Inn and finds the French boys, Jacques & Paul accompanying their father, his new wife and General Dourakine back to the General's estates in Russia. They've barely settled in when the General's unpleasant niece arrives with her eight obnoxious children for a lengthy uninvited stay. The General takes it all in his stride, and manages to outwit the niece who is clearly just after his money & estate. I really enjoyed this, managed to read it in one sitting when I should have been doing other things.
Stephanie Smee has managed to add considerable English sparkle to the Comtesse's work with her translations. I'm now moving Monsieur Cadichon : memoirs of a donkey up Mt tbr and will be looking out for the last 2 Sophie books as well.

eta: The Comtesse was born in Russia and spent her childhood there. Her father was Governor of Moscow during the invasion by Napoleon. After the family were exiled and eventually ended up in France.

Kerry, you'll want to read Conflict of Honors before Carpe Diem. I hope you fell in love with Edger!

>4 avatiakh: 76 hours of audio book!? Wow, that takes some commitment.

>34 avatiakh: Find Momo sounds like a great book. Wilbur (5) is all over the Where's Wally books at the moment, he loves finding that guy :)

Lots of wonderful books and movies here, Kerry. Thanks for sharing the list of Middle East fiction and the review of Noah. I had no idea it was similar to Many Waters. I loved the first three in that series (I wanted a mom that cooked dinner over a Bunsen burner), but Many Waters came out later, and I've never read it. I've added myself to the queues for The Story of the Jews (no. 63 in line) and The Power of Art (no. 2).

I'm slow on the uptake...I just wondered if you'd decided to go silent. Duh, silly me, new thread of course.

Happy weekend-in-progress.

>46 ronincats: Roni - I'll have to make note of that.

>47 LovingLit: Megan - I've listened to some really lengthy works of fiction, but committing to 76 hours seems too much. I also noticed that the Lawrence Durrell books, the three volumes of his Alexandra Quartet that I have yet to read and downloaded the audios turned out to be abridged.

>48 labfs39: Lisa - I'm not saying the Many Waters is like the movie but it is an interesting slant on the Noah story.
The second volume of The Story of the Jews: When Words Fail 1492 - present day comes out in September (UK).

>49 richardderus: Hi Richard. Great to see you visiting here, I've been lying low lately and not reading as much as I could do.

58) Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination by Otto Dov Kulka (2013)
nonfiction
This slim little book is historian Kulka's memoir or rather fragments of his recollections of his time in Auschwitz. I can't even begin to describe the writing except to say that I'm glad that the book exists as it is so different from other Holocaust writing. Kulka was only about 9 or so years old and for a time was with his mother in a special family camp that was set up for Czech Jews as a front for possible visits by the Red Cross. The visits never eventuated as the Red Cross was appeased by what they saw on a visit to Theresienstadt. These Czech Jews were all killed (without selection to begin with) every six months and a new group would arrive to take their place. Kulka survived as he was in hospital through two of these eliminations. The book was awarded the 2014 JQ Wingate Prize.

While I was reading this I was also making my way slowly through the 9 hour documentary Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann. This is quite an amazing film, a series of 'testimonies by selected survivors, witnesses, and German perpetrators, often secretly recorded using hidden cameras.' Again, I can't really comment on this film, my emotions have been left fairly raw, just that some of the testimony matched up with the book I was reading, so I got a double hit.

From wikipedia: Lanzmann was commissioned by the Israeli officials to make what they thought would be a two-hour film, delivered in 18 months, about the Holocaust from "the viewpoint of the Jews".Although none of his family were killed in the Holocaust, Lanzmann became obsessed by the project.Over 350 hours of raw footage were recorded, including the verbatim questions, answers and interpreters translations.Shoah took eleven years to make. It was plagued with financial problems, difficulties in tracking down interviewees and threats to Lanzmann's life. The film was unusual in that it did not include any historical footage, relying instead on interviewing witnesses and visiting the crime scenes. Four feature length films have since been released from the outtakes.
Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has preserved all the film for archival purposes and I believe you can see it if you visit.
Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive
http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/docs/shoahstatus.pdf

One of the many testimonies that is riveting to watch is that of Jan Karski, he was the person who told the Allies about the Final Solution and then had to watch them do nothing to stop it. Apparently there are hours of extra footage of Karski talking that have been preserved but not available as yet. The Polish government have made 2014 the year of Jan Karski 'to honor, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the legacy of Poland’s wartime emissary'.
You can see the footage of his Lanzmann interview here: http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4739

His book Story of a secret state is about his war experiences and Lisa @labfs39 was just talking about it on her thread. Definitely a book I need to read asap.

Hi Kerry- Just checking in. Glad you liked Fangirl. I'll have to check that one out. I heard she has a new book coming out. It's nice to see how popular she has become on LT. Hope you had a good week.

Maori photographs by Ans Westra (1967)
photography

The text is by psychologist James Ritchie and I have to confess I have only read the first couple of pages. I have read some of Ritchie's work on parenting in earlier years but really I was just interested in looking at Westra's photographs. These were taken just as Maori were beginning to revive their culture and their language after years of assimilation policy by the NZ government. Westra, a Dutch immigrant who was fascinated by the Maori people, was at first welcomed to photograph such as this book shows, but within a few years met hostility and was no longer welcome - 'we have our own photographers'.
_

I watched a documentary, more like a prolonged interview, Ans Westra, Private Journeys/Public Signposts about Westra and her photography a few weeks ago and of course needed to see some of her work from the different periods. She was basically self taught and took photographs, many for her own interest and has photographed New Zealand since the 1960s. She was also a solo mother and it was interesting to hear that some weeks she had to choose between putting food on the table or buying film for the camera.
She has donated her work, over 200,000 negatives to our National Archives and it is already considered a wonderful resource and taonga (treasure) for New Zealand.



I think her first published book was for the Department of Education, anyway Washday at the Pa (1964) turned out to be quite controversial and all 50,000 copies were trashed. The book was republished privately. The criticism came from Maori groups who didn't like the poverty that was depicted in the rural lifestyle of the Maori family she had photographed. I had the original out from the library and really, it is to be admired, she captured engaging, happy, candid shots of a young rural Maori family.
A new edition of the book was republished a couple of years ago, including a couple of essays about the changing attitudes as well as some extra photos, but the original narrative is missing.
_



One of her more recent books is The Crescent Moon: the Asian face of Islam in New Zealand. These photographs are accompanied by text about each person depicted. Many are Indian Muslims from Fiji.

Can't help but notice that even the Maori women were apparently influenced by Jackie-O!

>51 avatiakh: I've put Shoah on hold at the library. I think they dole it out in 1-2 hour chunks. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is on my wishlist.

>53 avatiakh: I've enjoyed your reviews of photographers over the years. I think you first introduced me to Robert Capa. Did you see the WWI book of photos from the Imperial War Museum? It's called The Great War : a photographic narrative and was published last year. I thought it was fantastic and showed the war from many different perspectives.

>54 Smiler69: I liked that photo, my Mum used to get those hairdos.

> Lisa - I think you'll find Shoah well worth watching, it's an important document.
I've requested The Great War: a photographic narrative from the library.


59) Line of Fire: diary of an unknown soldier August - September 1914 by Barroux (2014)
graphic novel
So this was a little disappointing especially after getting quite excited by the story of how Barroux came to create this. Barroux came across the diary when out for a walk in Paris, it was on a pile of rubbish being thrown out of an apartment. This story is actually more interesting than the book itself. I was also drawn to the GN as the translator is Sarah Ardizzone who has worked on some great books and it has an introduction by Michael Morpurgo which is how the book initially caught my eye in the bookshop a couple of weeks ago. Luckily I went on to request this one from the library.
First I did not like the illustration style especially how Barroux draws weird birdlike noses on his people, that just jarred on every page for me. Also the story was rather bland. Barroux has illustrated the diary entries of a French soldier from the first few months of World War 1. The problem is, is that the soldier saw little action before being wounded in the arm, so there isn't a lot to take from the GN.
There's a website with teaching resources for the book: http://www.lineoffirebook.com/
Barroux has also adapted it into a musical event.


I have a copy of Chris Slane's GN Nice day for a war: adventures of a kiwi soldier in World War 1 which is also based on a diary but includes photos as well as illustrations and it is a much more interesting project. I still have to read it, but have attended a talk about the book so know a little about its background. There's a website for this book as well: http://www.slane.co.nz/nicedayforawar.html

Cezanne and the apple boy by Laurence Anholt (2009)
children's picturebook
I'm always interested in picturebooks about the great artists as it is a sort of doubleact to see how the illustrator depicts the style of the artist in question. Apparently Anholt has a series 'Anholt's Artists' so this is just one of several books he's done.
The story is told from the POV of Cezanne's young son who holidays with his father in a remote area just at the time that Cezanne was introducing cubism in his work. In the notes at the back we learn that Cezanne is the father of Cubism and his son became his biggest fan and grew up to be his agent. That Cezanne had a phobia about being touched and that he lived separately from his wife and child as she preferred Paris, while he loved remote, rural areas for his art.

A delightful story with lovely robust illustrations. I'm quite impressed that this story is just right for younger children and yet gives them a glimpse of a great, eccentric artist along with his love for his son.


Anholt has a colourful website with a special 'book' on his research for the Artists series: http://www.anholt.co.uk/anholts-artists/

I've been having terrible problems with my internet connection this past ten days or so. I have a new laptop and it could be Windows 8 is dissing me as I'm the only one in the house experiencing this problem. Anyway it takes forever to load and display some pages, I have lost several posts, can't download the app to do Overdrive for library audiobooks on this new laptop and have almost had to give up on watching the videos for my Cousera.

Anyway I'm spending far too long at the laptop waiting for things to load, all too slowly, so will probably have to take a break from it all till I get this issue resolved.

Ugh! Sorry to hear about all your laptop troubles. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be. Hope it all gets resolved for you soon!

Little worse than not being able to communicate when you want to get online. Had my own strict limitations recently in the UK and it has placed me in a position of playing catch-up.

Have a lovely weekend and I do hope your laptop travails are a thing of the past.

Thanks Paul & Ilana - I seem to have fixed it a little, though will still be on a go slow as I have a lot of RL work to get on with currently.

Just wanted to post the link to Laurence & Catherine Anholt's website again as he has posted about their Sunflower House renovation in Devon. Quite inspiring, they used to have a children's bookshop in Lyme Regis as well as their work as writers/ illustrators. This property's previous owners were a couple of eccentric sisters who let their animals wander inside so was a total mess but the house & garden felt perfect....
http://www.anholt.co.uk/renovation-of-sunflower-house-by-laurence-and-catherine-...

Oh, I want that library!

I tried to reserve Nice Day for a War at the library, but they don't have it. :-(

Just catching up Kerry. Thanks for the post on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. I saw it some years ago when I lived in Israel and found it to be a most powerful experience. It is though of course quite overwhelming. Glad you mentioned The Story of a Secret State as that looks fascinating.

Love that library as well - is the full bay window why it's called the Sunflower House - always facing the sun? In any case I love it!

Lisa - that's a New Zealand book that I doubt would get much of a look at outside NZ. I only drew attention to it as it is a really great example of using a soldier's diary, his grandfather or great uncle wrote it, and mixing in large doses of research, photos, storytelling and illustration in a style that teenagers especially will respond to.
Here's a link to the slideshow he showed us at the comics panel: http://www.slideshare.net/chrisslane1/slane-school-lecture

Paul - have to thank Lisa for reading Story of a Secret State, I had downloaded the kindle e-book where it had joined a vast backlog of reading. Now I have it lined up to read fairly smartly. Just need to finish the books I'm slowly making my way through. I'm spending too much time reading about politics and history in online articles at present so am not making headway on any of my current reads.

Not sure on why the house is called Sunflower House, but he says that it's on Love Lane! I just loved the whole story about the previous owners and how they almost didn't get the property as a developer had his sights on it and would have demolished the house.


60) A game for swallows: to die, to leave, to return by Zeina Abirached (2012)
graphic novel
This is a story set during the Lebanon Civil War in the early 1980s. It focuses on a group of people from one apartment building during a shelling. Based on a true story I believe, Abirached who now lives in France was motivated to this project by seeing her grandmother appear in a documentary about the civil war.
I just love the illustration style, the heavy use of black with little action from scene to scene which depicts civilians sheltering for hours on end in the safest room in an apartment building.

The slideshow was interesting; I wish I could have heard the accompanying presentation.

I spent several minutes comparing the two pages looking for all the minute changes. Have you read the Conference of Birds by Peter Sís?

Yes, I've read the Sis book.
I remember Slane saying how useful google maps were for recreating the landscape of the WW1 battlefields.


61) Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds by Joel L. Kraemer
biography / audiobook
I've visited Cordoba in Spain several times and wandered past the statue there of Maimonides, on my last trip I even bought a souvenir of his statue but have known little about him except that he is considered one of Judaism's great sages and lived most of his life in North Africa, particularly in Egypt and wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides was born in Cordoba and spent his early life in Andalusia before his family moved to Fez in Morocco.
An interesting book that not only covers Maimonides himself but also looks at life of the Jewish people living in Muslim countries during the 12th century. The last part focuses on the works and philosophy of Maimonides and while parts are fascinating other parts less so.
Interesting to listen to the various rights of women especially the 'killer wife' as Maimonides is asked to judge on a woman's rights to a third marriage when her second husband died after agreeing to a divorce but not signing the contract, as if she wasn't considered divorced then she had rights to her second husband's property which had already been divided up by his relatives - 'if a woman was married to one husband who died and to a second one who also died, she is not permitted to marry a third husband for fear of his life.'
Kraemer makes great use of the documents found in 1896 in the Cairo Genizah from the Ezra Synagogue in Fostat (Old Cairo, Egypt), built in 882 - a genizah is a depository for sacred Hebrew books that are no longer usable, and this particular one was a treasure trove of documents of the medieval Middle East including many documents written in the hand of Maimonides himself.

statue in Cordoba's old Jewish quarter.

Because I was listening to an audiobook, I couldn't always separate a lot of the medieval names of the various Muslim patrons but overall I found this a minor quibble as I would never have picked up the actual book.

More about the Cairo Genizah: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Genizah.html
and there is also a book Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

So today I took a drive to a nearby neighbourhood, Papatoetoe, to visit a used furniture shop that I quite like and haven't been to for a couple of years. I was looking for a desk chair for my son but instead came away with a few old books, pretty dusty but I love the old Penguin covers and also a couple of interesting hardbacks.
I also called in at Otara which is home to much of the Pacific Island population of Auckland, hoping to get some plantains. Lots of taro and bananas but no plantains.
Anyway thought I'd upload a few book stacks:

My May Reading Pile + on the go audio and kindle books
Ironhand by Charlie Fletcher - YA Stoneheart trilogy#2
Murder at Mykenai by Catherine Mayo - YA based on Greek Mythology
The Ringed Castle by Dorothy Dunnett - Lymond #5
The Middle East by Bernard Lewis - nonfiction
This way for the gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Taudeusz Borowski
Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly - fantasy
Hotel Florida: : Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill
Barcelona the great enchantress by Robert Hughes
Thirty-Three Candles by David Horowitz - memoir, (he married my husband's great aunt)
Wake by Elizabeth Knox - 'horror' with zombies literary fiction
The Gollantz Saga by Naomi Jacob - omnibus 3in1
The book of Rachael by Leslie Cannold - 'Jesus had a sister and this is her story' fiction

Current library books that link up with my May to read pile - most will be returned unread
Aya: Love in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet - 3in1 vol. graphic novel - definitely read this final 3 of 6 GNs about Aya.
An act of love by Alan Gibbon - should be interesting, YA set in Afghanistan
Wunderkind by Nikolai Grozni - @gingerbreadman gave this a glowing review
A Love like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick - his first adult novel
Metro: a Cairo story by Magdy El Shafee - Graphic novel
The gigantic beard that was evil by Stephen Collins - graphic novel
Monsieur Proust's Library by Anka Muhlstein - nonfiction - I own this but got it out from the library anyway.
The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City by Dore Gold - nonfiction
Two Wolves by Tristan Bancks - interesting YA
The interrupted tale by Maryrose Wood - The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place #4 - Ilana made me get this
The Bosnia List: a memoir of war, exile, and return by Kenan Trebincevic - nonfiction
Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom by William Sutcliffe - children's, I should be reading his YA The Wall.
Cress by Marissa Meyer - YA, last in the trilogy though I still have to locate and read #2.
The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East by Caroline Glick - nonfiction
Where the moon isn't by Nathan Filer, most commonly known as The Shock of the Fall
Echo Boy by Matt Haig - YA scifi

10 x Georges Simenon

more books to add to the stacks:
Troubles & The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell - cheap reading copies
A house for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
White Eagles over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell
Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler
Figures in Light by Maurice Shadbolt - short stories
I've read Reach for the Sky when I was in high school, but this is in much better condition than my Dad's old copy.

Nice review of Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds, Kerry. Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon at Yale who died earlier this year, also wrote a short book about him, titled Maimonides, that I've been meaning to get to for several years.

Excellent stacks of books you have there! I need to review Robert Hughes' Barcelona, which I greatly enjoyed, although I may wait until after I've returned from my holiday there, since I have the Kindle version and will likely refer to it while I'm there. I'll try to review The Shock of the Fall later this week.

Ilana made me get this

LOL! I hope you enjoy it.

Love all the book stacks.

Wow! Where to start?

Dragonsbane is one of the great dragon stories of all time. I refuse to read the sequels, though.

I've had some books about Maimonides on request at PaperBackSwap forever--he seems a fascinating character.

I see books! *happy sigh*

61) Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee (2012)
graphic novel, Egypt
'When published in 2008 it was banned for “offending public morals” and remains banned despite the change in government.'
This was written to expose Egyptian political corruption, injustice and poverty. The story centres around a young IT guy whose software company is on the brink of bankruptcy as a foreign IT company has bribed its way to taking a project that he has been working on. The bank refuses a loan, he has thugs coming at him for some investment money, and no way to repay. What can he do but use his IT skills to get a bit of revenge and expose some of these 'villians'.
The story is quite noir and has a good ending. It also gives you an idea of what Egyptian society was like leading up to the Arab Spring.

>70 kidzdoc: Darryl - I sort of rushed those Maimonides comments. I found some of his ideas about living a happy and healthy life quite refreshing. Other ideas were a response to living under Islamic rule. I'm interested in reading more historical nonfiction about the Middle East.

I have Hughes' Barcelona but haven't tried to read it for many years. I thought this shorter book would offer me another glimpse of the city. I really fell in love with the whole state of Catalonia on this last visit.

>71 Smiler69: Ilana - your enthusiasm for the 'Incorrigible Children' books had me racing to request the latest.
I've been enjoying how Amber shows us the new arrivals to her house and as my newly acquired green Penguins were so photogenic...and then the library books were there as well,,,and it only took a few minutes to add my tbr pile!
I've had some pleasure from looking at all your book piles that you posted today as well.

>72 labfs39: Hi Lisa, where indeed. I'm in the middle of a reading funk so all those library books are just not happening. Annoying as there are some really good reads in there that I'll have to reqiest again.

>73 ronincats: Roni - Looking forward to reading Dragonsbane, just need to finish Ironhand first. I was trying to convince my son to read the Pern novels last night, but it's hard without saying too much as I think it's great to discover all the secrets of Pern on your own. He's expressed interest in Dune so I'll have to look out my copy of it.

>74 lkernagh: Lori, welcome to my thread. Yes, I love looking at pics of book stacks too.

Another pickup from the library:
Imperial War Museum's The Great War - photographic record of WW1 - very heavy, thanks to Lisa for recommending this.
The Reckoning: : How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land by Patrick Bishop - nonfiction set during the British Mandate in Palestine
The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman - on my list of 'must reads' for a few months
The Parrots by Filippo Bologna - sounds like fun, a book about a book prize
Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougal - YA scifi
Lamplighter by Kerry Donovan Brown - New Zealand fantasy

Seeing your book piles is one of the things that inspired me to post my stacks too. Too many there to list all the titles obviously!

very heavy, thanks to Lisa for recommending this

Because it's heavy? LOL! Hope you enjoy the photos. I especially appreciated how the editors tried to include photos from different armies, different countries, different photographers. It gave the book a very comprehensive feel, that and its heft.

Hi Kerry!

I haven't read Fangirl, but I was a huge fan of Roswell's Eleanor and Park when I read it last year...

>77 Smiler69: I have too many stacks of books around my house

>78 labfs39: I'm looking forward to opening it up. My criticism about one of the previous photography books was the small size, so big and heavy works for me.

>79 TinaV95: Hi Tina. I was a big fan of E&P as well. I'm definitely looking out for her other work.

62) Israel: a history by Anita Shapira (2012)
nonfiction
I've been reading this on my kindle which I don't use that much but this was the only way to source this book at a reasonable price. It was one of the main texts for the Cousera paper I've been doing on modern Middle Eastern history. I've fallen behind on the course because my new laptop which runs Windows 8 has problems loading internet pages and viewing videos becomes almost impossible most of the time.
I've read quite a few histories of Israel and biographies of the founders of the state but I still found this book to cover the material in new and interesting ways. Shapiro not only looks at the politics and the conflict but also the changing society and how the emerging Israeli culture adapted through the years. I very much appreciated the last chapter which covered the more recent aliyah (immigration) of Russian Jews and how Israel has reinvented itself from a nation of socialist agricultural workers to an urban hitech society. Shapira also looks at the changes in literature, focusing on particular Israeli writers and how their work reflects the society of the time.

On controversial issues in Israel's history Shapira discusses the variety of narratives that have emerged over time and why this has happened. One of the issues for Israeli society has been the constant need to absorb large numbers of immigrants, first the Holocaust survivors, then the Jews from Muslim countries and finally the Russian and Ethiopian Jews of the last couple of decades. Each aliyah could have been done better in retrospect but then each one,apart from the most recent 1990s Post-Soviet Russian one, came at an enormous economic cost to the state. I didn't realise how important the 1961 Eichmann Trial was to Israeli society and I want to read more about this. The British Mandate had severely limited Jewish immigration since the 1930s, and Holocaust survivors were finally able to enter Israel just as the surrounding Arab nations declared war on the new state in 1948 and many went straight to fight in the War of Independence. 'During the trial, the Israeli public was exposed to the details of the Holocaust nightmare for the first time, as well as to the heroism and ingenuity of those who survived.'
http://www.aish.com/ho/i/The_Eichmann_Trial_50_Years_Later.html

Shapira also covers the Arab-Israel conflict and the adoption of the liberal left in recent times of the Palestinian narrative at the expense of that of the Jewish one. With the second intifada the leftist activists have lost much of their support, evidenced by voting patterns towards a more conservative government that makes the country's security a priority.

As expected for an academic book the bibliography is quite extensive, excellent footnotes and an index. I wish I owned a hard copy of this book as I'm not a skilled user of digital books and prefer to use bookmarks rather than highlight text, flick through the real book rather than the 'go to' feature which only works if you know where you want to 'go to'. For me the only advantage of a digital textbook is the price.

From wikipedia: Anita Shapira (Hebrew: אניטה שפירא‎, born 1940) is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, a Ruben Merenfeld Professor of the Study of Zionism and head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She received the Israel Prize in 2008.

The book is part of the Schusterman Series in Israel Studies: http://www.brandeis.edu/israelcenter/pdfs/SeriesFlyer2013.pdf

Great review of Israel: A History, Kerry!

Thanks Darryl, it was a good read and one that I'm pleased I took my time over. Some books needn't be read in a few days.

I've just started Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski and after only a few pages I'm hooked.

And given up on after about 5 minutes was the audio version of Arik: the life of Ariel Sharon by David Landau, the narrator gave me the impression he was trying to break all land speed records and it was not a pleasant listening experience. Now I'm getting into Darren Shan's horror fiction, Lady of the Shades, and I'm enjoying the laid back style of the narrator.

My local bookstore has been remaindering some excellent stock of late and today I picked up a few books from the nonfiction section:
Orientalism by Edward Said - been on my to buy list for a while
The Old Ways: a journey on foot by Robert McFarlane - ditto
Kublai Khan: the Mongol King who remade China by John Man - for my son
Between Parentheses: essays, articles and speeches by Roberto Bolaño
Maori: a photographic and social history by Michael King - this won the Book of the Year Award back in 1983 and has been in print ever since.
Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński

Excellent review of Israel: A History. You should post your review as it's excellent and there aren't any posted for that work yet.

I am so glad you are enjoying Jan Karski's book. I'll look forward to your impressions.

You are finding lots of great books lately. Happy reading days ahead!

Thanks Lisa, I've posted the review.

I've added my thumb to your review of Israel: A History.

Orientalism has been on my TBR pile for years. I probably won't get to it this year, but I do plan to read Said's memoir Out of Place soon.

63) The Gigantic Beard that was Evil by Stephen Collins (2013)
graphic novel
In the land of Here where everything is perfect and has its place, people fear There, the unknown place across the sea. Dave who loves to draw and observe in his spare time is suddenly afflicted with a giant beard that can't be trimmed or stopped from growing - people slowly adapt to small changes over time and an acceptance of a little chaos in their lives. Dave's fate remains unknown, last seen floating towards There.
Fun with great illustrations.

Love all the piles of books that you have been treating us to recently, Kerry. I am also still salivating at that picture of the Anholt library - Devon is a truly wonderful place to be at the best of times.

Sorry to be a few hours late in wishing you a lovely Mother's Day. xx

64) Ironhand by Charlie Fletcher (2007)
children's fiction
This is bk 2 in the Stoneheart trilogy. I read the first book a few years ago and the completist in me wants to tidy up a few of the unread series on my bookshelves. I really like the characters and the plot is interesting. I'm definitely continuing to the last book and will withhold judgement till I see how it all wraps up.
Anyway this book picks up the action straight off book one and plunges us back into an alternate London where statues and gargoyles all come alive. Schoolboy, George, must face three challenges and in the process try to save both Gunner, a statue of a WW1 soldier, and Edie the strange girl he's befriended, from the evil Walker.
I think that this would be a great series for a 9-14 yr old to read before a trip to London as you would be keen to track down quite a few of the statues in the book, from the Gunner in the Royal Artillary Memorial in Hyde Park to Blackfriars Monk in the City.
The Stones of London: Public Art in Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2011/wood.html
Stoneheart's real statues: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/capitals-magical-statues-6917072.html

I also very much enjoyed his later stand alone, Far Rockaway and look forward to reading his first adult fantasy The Oversight which has just come out. Fletcher is from Scotland, a screenwriter as well as a writer, he has credits for Taggart and Wire on the Blood.

>86 kidzdoc: Darryl - As Suzanne has said, Orientalism is a foundational text for anyone interested in understanding the Middle East. The booklist that I started for the Emergence of the Middle East is hitting at 300 books, so plenty of future reading material.

>88 PaulCranswick: Hi Paul - I had to share the Anholt pics as the house looks to be just perfect for most of us bibliophiles.

Ugh, not enjoying my current audiobook, though will finish it. Darren Shan's Lady of the Shades is so far not very horror and not very exciting, I expected more.

A few new additions:
Book Depository - The Machine by James Smythe - scifi
Local Bookshop stock clearance:
I love these sales where books I've long coveted are suddenly offered up for next to nothing.
Here & There: collected travel writing by AA Gill
Tolstoy by A N Wilson
The Cook by Wayne Macauley - Australian fiction that got good reviews when it was first published
The cleansing of Mahommed by Chris McCourt - Australian fiction based on true story, loved this so birthday gift for my Mum along with a couple of Georgette Heyer paperbacks for her collection including The unknown Ajax which I'll be borrowing back from her.
Stéphane Reynaud's 365 Good Reasons To Sit Down To Eat - cookbook for my Mum

The Writers and Readers Festival is on this week and I'm usually a volunteer, but have pulled out as we have a family reunion in Matamata tomorrow and I've been otherwise occupied.

Started reading 3 books today:
The Parrots by Filippo Bologna - infighting over a literary award
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy - a Persephone Book
Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar - Israeli novella from 1949, a classic about the War of Independence but only recently available in English.

Lots of interesting books finding their way into your house. Have fun at your family reunion.

64) Lady of the Shades by Darren Shan (2012)
fiction / audiobook
This is my first adult fiction by Shan who is more well known for his YA horror books. I didn't really enjoy it that much, a sort of crime noir but with a little too much romance in it for me. An American assassin turned crime novelist comes to London and falls for a mysterious and beautiful woman. The only barrier to their love affair is her Turkish gangster husband. Our 'hero' is plagued by his shades, the ghosts of his victims, who accompany him everywhere, revel in his misfortunes and look for opportunities to maim or finish him off. I'll leave it there, still pleased to have listened to it so I'm aware of Shan's adult work.

Now to choose my next audiobook - just downloaded My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit so I might go with that or another crime novel.

>92 labfs39: Thanks Lisa, it was a good day. I met up with lots of distant cousins that I hadn't seen for a long while and finally met two relatives I've always wanted to catch up with. One is my mother's cousin who became a hippy back in the 1960s and the other cousin has been living in Australia since forever but spent several years in Kabul recently helping to rebuild the libraries there.

I have to confess to bringing even more books into the home. I took a large box of unwanted books to the Salvation Army this morning and while there browsed the shelves and brought a few home:
Robbers on the Road by Melvin Burgess - slim YA, I read all his books
Digby Law's Soup Cookbook - my copy is falling apart and this was fairly pristine
Exodus by Leon Uris - good to have a spare copy in the house
Plainsong by Kent Hanif - seen this mentioned on a few threads lately
The Pageant of England: The Conquering Family 1135-1216 by Thomas Costain
The Macmillan Dictionary of Archaeology ed. Ruth Whitehouse - for my son
then the library:
The Bloomsbury Cookbook: recipes for life, love and art by Jans Ondaatje Rolls - cooking for the Bloomsbury Group
The French Intifada: the long war between France and its Arabs by Andrew Hussey - good reviews
The Duck and the Darklings by Glenda Millard - picturebook
Incomplete Works by Dylan Horrocks - graphic novel
The storied life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin - book about books and gets good reviews
Under the shade of Olive Trees: Recipes from Jerusalem to Marrakech and Beyond by Merijn Tol - cookbook
and a last look through my bookstore's stock clearance which is still producing gems if you look hard enough:
seen this century: 100 New Zealand artists by Warwick Brown
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by V. S. Naipul
Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin's Writers by Frank Westerman
By light alone by Adam Roberts - scifi
& 4 random manga for my daughter


Can't resist this book cover

Yay! Good work on the book haul Kerry!

Just catching in up -- and in awe of those book towers!!

Engineers Of The Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin's Writers caught my eye.

I culled one book from my shelves yesterday. Unfortunately I added two. That seems to be about my ratio. How are your books arranged, Kerry? Are they all on shelves? Mine are, finally. Except for one box of board books that I couldn't part with yet. Then there is my TBR soon table with a little shelf that has long since given way to several stacks in front of and on top of it. If only I had more time for reading!

>97 labfs39: Lisa - my books aren't all on shelves, I'm waiting to get our 5th bedroom back, it's really an extra living area that I had thought would make an excellent reading room but has for the past 15 years been used as a bedroom. So I have lots of books in boxes stored under our stairs while they await my attention. Every now and then I do go through them and find it hard to discard more than one or two books though I have lots of children's books that I could donate as I'm ready to move on from this part of my collection. I have most of my fantasy and scifi stored in a cupboard in a son's bedroom as he also reads in this genre, mostly well-read used paperbacks that I've collected over the years. I have specific shelving: 1) in the lounge, my Israel & Jewish collection and another area for my Tolkein and Gaiman books 2) in the hall I have a small bookcase for my collection of children's literature reference books 3) in the dining room where I also have my desk is a large bookcase for folklore, illustrator biographies, graphic novels and a selection from favoured writers. Let's not talk about my bedroom, I have stacked storage cubes into what looks like a bookcase but holds books 3 deep, hiding a plethora of tbrs. Around the house I have a couple of 'TBR soon' piles which don't seem to diminsh ever. I generally have only one book on my bedside table but several piles of 'should be reading' on the floor beside it. I took a few photos this afternoon and will post them when I get a chance. I do love my books.

65) Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar (1949 Hebrew) (2011 Eng)
fiction

This Israeli novella has long been a classic in Israel, on many high school reading lists, has been widely translated though only recently into English. The translation is very good and showcases Yizhar's beautiful poetic writing.
The book comes with an afterword by David Shulman who draws the reader's attention to how Yizhar has blended biblical texts into his writing. He also states that the Hebrew of the 1940s is different from the more modern Hebrew and that this novel is a very good example of the beauty of the earlier Hebrew. He also draws parallels in the story with the stories of modern day leftist activists as he himself is a pro-Palestinian Israeli activist. I personally feel that it should be left up to the reader themselves to draw conclusions on their own so was pleased that his was an afterword rather than an introduction as these political ideas don't suit every reader.

The book is about one day during the 1948 War of Independence, a group of soldiers have to move through an Arab village, Khirbet Khizeh, and clear it of Arab snipers and other fighters who've been firing on them. As they advance through the village they find the houses all empty, the inhabitants all missing apart from a couple disabled elderly women left outside in the heat of the day amid an eerie silence. The narrator begins to wonder about the people who've been living here, where they've gone, what will happen in the future. As they reach the far side of the village they come across a large group of women, children and elderly. They are instructed to direct these people onto trucks which have arrived and the soldier questions this order.

What makes this novella important, apart from its literary values, is that it was one of very few writings at the time to raise awareness of the Arab refugees.

66) Murder at Mykenai by Catherine Mayo (2013)
children's fiction, new zealand

This debut novel is a great read. Set in ancient Greece, Mayo writes about a young Odysseus and his friend, Menelaos, the teenage son of the High King of Greece. The story is well paced, exciting and begins with the assassination of the King and father of Menelaos and Agamemnon. Mayo gives a list of her references in the author notes and also writes of the experts she consulted with in order to be as authentic to the Bronze Age as was possible.
On finishing I was happy to see that a sequel is coming out next month, The Bow.

some of my scifi/fantasy - sourced from son's book cupboard

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bedroom storage cubes - books crammed, each cube is sorted to a particualr genre, or at least it was to start with

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My bedside 'should be reading' pile, lately I've been reading Matt Haig's Echo Boy before turning in to sleep.

from my Israel shelves, I collect biographies of politicians since finding Ben Gurion's big one in a used bookstore many years ago.

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children's literature & reference books, ignore the dust:
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from other shelves in living areas

Wow. Like being in a bookstore! Great photos of your books :)

67) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)
fiction / audiobook
When I watched the documentary, In their own words : British novelists, this was one of the books I took note of. I've previously only read one book by Amis, Take a Girl Like You whch was rather fun though also fairly sexist when judged by more modern standards. LJ is even more fun in that it focuses on rather hapless academic, Jim Dixon, who isn't that enthused for his career, his girlfriend and despises his upper class superior, Walsh. He has an important lecture to prepare, he's fallen for Walsh's son's girlfriend and his academic standing is increasingly at risk. To counter he begins to take rather meek rebellious stands, defacing his roomate's mail, impersonating journalists on the phone etc etc. Great writing, and I think I'd enjoy the movie as well.
One of the other books I noted was Room at the Top by John Braine which I hope to get to before the year's end and I'm also keen to try something by Martin Amis, I have his The Rachel Papers.

>91 avatiakh: I see you had to pull out of the readers and writers festival! I asked my dad, who was speaking there about his family history book (which he didn't write, btw, it was written by Ron Crosby), if anyone came up to talk to him after and said they were called Kerry :) He didn't think so, and now I know why.
He managed to get a seat at the presentation to Keri Hulme of the inaugural NZ classic novel award, for the Bone People. He was very proud of/for her to see her with such an accolade and even got up to speak!

I love all your book photos. I absolutely love seeing the contents up close :)

Hi Kerry! Just checking in. I love all those packed bookshelves. That is a true bibliophile! I have not read Kingsley Amis. That one sounds good.

>107 brenpike: Thanks Brenda

>109 LovingLit: Megan - I decided to throw the whole festival this year as I needed to scan lots of photos and look out stuff my mother gave me years ago to store. I finally found all the tablecloths that my grandmother embroidered, crocheted and tatted - absolute works of art that I'd stored safely but at the back of all other stored household items. I also had a dress and crepe coat that belonged to my great grandmother that I used to wear when in my teens and thankfully never threw away, that was quite a hit on the day as she was wearing the coat in one of the photographs on display.

I did feel a bit of a twinge when some of the publicity for the festival kicked in, would have loved to attend the talk with Keri Hulme.

>110 msf59: Hi Mark. I had fun taking the photos, but realise now that I need to resort some of my shelves (and do a touch of dusting).
Lucky Jim was quite good on audio and if you do tackle it, you'll love his lecture, a little bit too much of the dutch courage.

I've just started listening to Michael Oren's Power, faith and fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present and found the first chapter quite fascinating, all about the US dealings with the Barbary Kingdoms over tributes and ransoms as once they declared their independence the US trading ships no longer had the protection of the British navy.

69) Echo Boy by Matt Haig (2014)
YA scifi
I found this to be a slightly above average read for me. I think the 'villian' was perhaps too obvious or the plot a little too familiar, or the YA just was more 'young' than 'adult'. Anyway this is still quite the racy thriller set 100 years into a dystopian future where humans have developed a robotic servant to do all the graft jobs.
Called ECHOs or Enhanced Computerized Humanoid Organism these machines look like humans but are obediant and compliant. Of course there is ongoing research to develop even more humanistic elements into these ECHOs and several prototypes are under trial, one of these is Daniel.
On the human side we have Audrey, who loses her parents to an unprecedented attack by an ECHO, she survives only by the slimmest margin of chance. Her father was an activist journalist who was against the continued development of these ECHOs, and now Audrey must live with her uncle who runs one of the largest ECHO producing businesses.
Who was behind the killing of her parents? Her uncle's biggest rival supplied the ECHO...
I really liked a lot of aspects about the world that Haig has created, the mag rail that transports you to your destination in just a few minutes, the leviboards that raise you up to the transport platforms, the simulation pods, the everglow anti-aging drug etc etc.

Well, maybe I'm just too far into the world of Battlestar Galactica and scifi in general to be able to fully appreciate some of these one off novels that will draw new fans to the genre. Just lately I watched the Caprica tv series which is set 50 years earlier to the Battlestar Galactica tv series and covers the birth of the cylon.

Thoroughly enjoyed the book photos! Like family pictures for the bookish.

Hi Richard - I hope you noticed The Severed Wing amongst my scifi/fantasy books, it's one you recommended and is on the pile of scifi reading priority.

Have been watching a few movies so will list them here:
Just finished 'Hackers' which is looking a bit dated now. Two of my sons have been rewatching Battlestar Galactica over a few weeks and I looked in on a few of my favourite episodes, then I watched Caprica with them and Blood and Chrome so am fairly scified out.

Lawrence after Arabia (1992) - Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence at the Versailles Peace Conference, his first film role - interesting. Great opening quote by Fiennes from Lawrence's Seven Pillars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFAzzEYmnm4
Remembrance - Holocaust movie, fairly riveting and based on a true story
'The Visitors' - French movie that was adapted by Hollywood into 'Just Visiting' - there are some hilarious scenes in both movies. A Knight and his vassal time travel from the 11th century to the 20th by mistake. Comic slapstick and both movies star Jean Reno and Christian Clavier. Nothing serious here but lots of silly laughs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYZmx4HIhCw

Sallah Shabati (1963) - Israeli movie starring Topol - satire about new immigrants
Hercules Returns (1993) - Australian dub parody movie, possibly a bit of a cult one by now. At the reopening of a classic movie theatre the film 'Samson and His Mighty Challenge' has been swapped for an unsubtitled Italian language version in an act of sabotage. The new owner, his girlfriend and the projectionist end up providing ablib dialogue and sound effects for the whole movie. Hilarious and all with extreme Aussie accents and slang. I saw it when it first came out and always wanted to see it again.
There's quite a good writeup on the background to the film on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Returns
There's another Australian movie I'd like to see again with a great cast, 'Cosi', which is about patients in a mental hospital putting on an opera performance.

More books from the library:
The strange and beautiful sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton - YA with a gorgeous cover art
Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale - read a good review of this one
http://bobsbooksnz.wordpress.com/?s=gingerbread
Alexander Altmann A10567 by Suzy Zail - Holocaust YA
The game of sunken places by MT Anderson - was wondering what he wrote after the Octavian Nothing books
Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal - I think this was a LT recommendation
Toast & Marmalade and other stories by Emma Bridgewater - the cover art caught my eye, seems to be a bit of a pot pourri of a book, the writer has a pottery business so lots of photographs of making ceramics, gardening and baking, I think the Dewey number places it in crafts.
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Giving up on the children's book Mars Evacuees, it's written in a gushing jolly schoolgirl first person that doesn't appeal at the moment.

Have started Monsieur Proust's Library but looks more like a chapter a week type of read for methan something I want to rush through, so will be taking it off the May TIOLI list. Also Reuben Sachs is a go slow so another TIOLI shared read that probably won't happen.

Feel immensely privileged to have had a quick tour of your shelves, Kerry. A lot of gems there I must say.

Have a lovely weekend. xx

Love all the book shelf pictures, and those are some substantial book acquisitions, Kerry!

Love the book cube/book shelf pictures Kerry! That pile on your bedside table looks a little dangerous though... :-)

Heather, I usually only have one book on my bedside table, that pile has been lifted from the untidy mess of books on the floor by my bed. I generally start reading from the floor pile and if it feels right goes to place of honour on the table.

I'm reading much less at present, can't settle to a decent read at present. My longest stint currently is my kindle reading which I only do when I'm out. Story of a Secret State is proving to be a compelling read.

My daughter has been reading manga and has fallen for Bakuman which I'll mention here as it is a complete series of 20 volumes and is about the trials and tribulations of writing manga for a publisher - following a group of writers from the ages of 14 as they grow up to adulthood.
The other series she likes apart from her favourite Kimi ni todoke, she says it's more action oriented, Library Wars about librarians and their defenders battling censorship.

Love the shelves ...... may have to pinch that cube idea as am running out of room on mine, seems the perfect idea for the bedroom .....

Love all of the book photo's Kerry! If I stack a pile of books too high my cat loves to smooch them until it tips over. I think she liked the sense of power it gives her lol.

Alex - I got the cubes from The Warehouse. The good - you can buy as many as need or can afford every few weeks. The bad - they come in a flat pack, so if you buy a few it takes a while to set up. I really like them though after taking the photos realise they need a bit of a tidy up.

Lisa - I love your cat. One of our cats jumps onto the book piles and sits pecariously on the top as the pile sways a little till we race to secure both books and cat.

Did you enjoy Caprica? We all loved Battlestar Galactica but couldn't get into Caprica at all!

It's not anywhere as good as Battlestar Galactica, but for all that it was fairly compelling as it filled in the story behind the world of BG. We also watched Blood and Chrome which is set during the Cylon War. I could have watched Caprica straight through, though we made it last a week, I was ready for watching some scifi.

Now we have the dvds of War and Remembrance to get through, we watched The Winds of War a few years back and I just realised that the second book was also made into a miniseries. I read these books back in the 1980s.

>122 avatiakh: I have dreams of winning lotto & having floor to feeling bookshelves, until then this will definitely work - Flatpacks are my brothers speciality ....

70) Aya: love in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet
graphic novel
This ties up the final 3 of 6 volumes in the Aya series. Set in 1970s Ivory Coast and following the trials and tribulations of a bunch of teens both male and female as they grow into adulthood. It also covers a little about immigration to France. I've loved this series and recommend it to all. The illustrations are by Clément Oubrerie (http://www.oubrerie.net/) who really adds the character to Abouet's stories. I wish my library had more of his work. He is also co-founder of the 3-D animation studio, Station OMD and produced the animated films for both Aya and The Rabbi's Cat, only available in French I would think.
An interview with Marguerite Abouet: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_05_011047.php

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poster by Oubrerie

Film (French only) Aya de Yopougon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoOIfxbX9WY
Rabbi's Cat trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk6IB_Kgl4E

I thought I'd check out that Aya series when you first mentioned them Kerry... I have my wishlist entry dated April 2012. Maybe time I do something about it, especially since I haven't picked up a single GN so far this year. Actually, maybe that's not true, I just have trouble differentiating between GNs and illustrated books.

eta: Just reserved Aya, book 1 from the library. No more putting it off! They have the whole series in the original French, which is nice.

You've mentioned you thought your book stacks looked messy, but I think any kind of book arrangement (or lack thereof) is beautiful! :-)

You've intrigued me, too, Kerry, and I've requested the first Aya at our library. It'll be the English translation for me, as my French is way too rusty.

Hooray for the Aya! I read the first three installments last year (I think) and am eager to continue the saga :)
Hope my library has a copy . . .

>127 Smiler69: Yes, feels like a couple of years since I discovered Aya.

>128 jnwelch: One you should like I hope. my French is probably on par with yours!

>129 brenpike: Ha, another fan. I did have a little trouble catching up on the plot but once settled in I enjoyed myself once again. Comes together very nicely in the last few pages.

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71) The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin (2014)
fiction

I read her YA Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac a year or so ago and quite liked it and so this was my first foray into her adult work. I think I saw it mentioned in a book list somewhere and liked the idea of a novel set mainly in a bookshop. So this was a pleasant read with lots of mentions of literature both classic and contemporary, both real and also imagined. The story winds around the recently widowed owner of a bookstore, Island Books, in a New England resort town that is accessible only by ferry. His friends, an unexpected foster child and the book agent.
To be honest I almost put it down about 40 pages in, but persevered through another 20 and got hooked enough to finish it almost in one sitting. I saw it described as whimsical and yes, that fits, it is a book for a booklover for sure.
Some quotes from the book I found on a blog:
"A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three. That is to say, what A.J. believes in is narrative."

"Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again. He selects one and holds it out to his friend. “Maybe this?”

OK, I'd love one of the promotional t-shirts:

and the posters for bookshops to promote her book

>130 avatiakh: I noticed that one in the Bookstore yesterday and remember thinking to myself "who the heck is A.J. Fikry?!".
There is a good chanceof it findin it's way onto my floorboards somewhere soon (no shelving space left unfortunately).

Have a lovely Sunday, Kerry.

I liked Aya, Kerry, and I'm going to track down the ones that come after.

I quite liked Zevin's Elsewhere, and I've been curious about this "adult" one by her. A book for book lovers - can't resist. Onto the WL it goes.

I like that promotional saying, too.

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again. He selects one and holds it out to his friend. “Maybe this?”

I'll read the book just for that quote alone. Thanks. (I think.)

>131 PaulCranswick: >132 jnwelch: >133 richardderus: Well, I can't say that The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry was a great read, just a satisying one.

Joe - Oh good, you liked Aya.


72) Cotillion by Georgette Heyer (1953)
fiction
I read this for this month's Heyer group read.
Pleasant Regency romance that I found enjoyable though I have to say I'm not as enamoured with the Heyers this year, so I'll leave them alone for a while until this cynical feeling goes away.
Kitty's guardian will leave his fortune to her, but only on condition that she wed one of his grand nephews, most of whom aren't marriage material. So she does a deal with Freddy, they pretend to be engaged so she can have a month in London and have some fun. Everything is far more complicated than this simple scheme would suggest.


73) Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski (1944)
nonfiction / memoir
A book that everyone should read.
Karski was active in the Polish Underground during World War II. While acting as a courier he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured before managing to escape with local resistance help. He was taken to the Warsaw Ghetto and also an extermination camp at Izbica in order to bear witness before he travelled to England and the USA in 1942. He was the first diplomat to give eye witness accounts to Allied leaders about the atrocities of the Nazis including the extermination of the Jews. This memoir gives a quite thorough overview of the Polish Underground.
I had not heard directly of Karski until I recently watched Claude Lanzmann's 9 hr documentary Shoah. Karski was one of many interviewed, and his painful testimony was memorable. There are many more hours of footage available at the Holocaust Museum.
2014 has been declared by the Polish government as the Year of Jan Karski.

'Captured by the Nazis, he was tortured, freed by the Underground, and recruited to clandestinely visit the Warsaw Ghetto and other Jewish population centers to report to Western leaders about the Final Solution — the leaders, including Roosevelt and Churchill, dismissed his accurate, firsthand accounts of Nazi atrocities and inhuman living conditions as exaggerated.
Persona non grata in communist Poland and close-lipped about his WWII exploits, Karski was little-known in his homeland or abroad until Communism fell a quarter-century ago and he went back to Poland for the first time. He spent his post-Polish life as a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington
“I faithfully and honestly reported what I remembered,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1944 memoirs, “Story of a Secret State.”'


Lots of interesting images here: http://culture.pl/en/article/photographic-memory-snapshots-of-the-emissary

I Murdered My Library by Linda Grant (2014)
(Kindle single)
Linda Grant's short essay about downsizing her library in her recent move to a smaller home. In fact she ends up ridding her shelves of too many books. We learn about some of the books she's read, her local bookstore that is no longer and her reliance on the kindle. Not as profound as I was hoping for.
Her latest novel Upstairs at the Party is due for release next month.

Sorry you didn't enjoy that Heyer more--it's one of my favorites for the way she plays with the expectations that conventional romances have.

Roni - I did like the characters, but I'm just not totally into romance at the moment and that is reflected in my lack of enthusiasm. ANother time and I'd probably have relished the book much more.


74) I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman by Joumana Haddad (2011)
essays
Haddad is a provocative writer, and in these essays she is stirring up the role and place of Arab women in Arab society and railing against religious bigotry at the same time. It's well worth a read as it is so different from what one normally reads about Arab society, and one can consider Haddad to be a brave woman to be publishing material like this in Lebanese society. Two points need to be clear - she's an Arab Christian not Muslim and as a multi linguist has published this in French and English, it wasn't first published in Arabic.
I did find parts more of a rant than covering new ground, but it was overall interesting as she goes back to her childhood reading and we see the controversial books hidden on the top shelf of her father's bookshelves that informed her ideas. Lucky for her that she was able to read in French as most of these books weren't easily available in Arabic. This reading and her ideas on sexual politics led her to establish in 2008 a journal about the body in literature, art and science - JASAD (Body) which was considered very daring, controversial and led her to be declared 'the most hated woman in Beirut'. For all that she has a stellar career in literature circles as a poet, translator and adminstrator of the 'Arab Booker' Prize.
You can read more about Haddad here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/joumana-haddad-arab-women-ha...
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Tiny: the invisible world of microbes by Nicola Davies (2014)
picturebook nonfiction
Surprisingly pleasant foray into the world of microbes for young budding scientists. I found it informative, interesting and very down to earth with practical details on the microbes in the world around us.
For the tiny matter under discussion the book comes in rather a large size and has retro style illustration.

And because I found it while looking for images, here is a booklist for budding young scientists: http://playfullearning.net/booklist-young-scientist/

My latest trip to the library to pick up Diana Wynne Jones' The Islands of Chaldea which was an unfinished manuscript on her death and completed by her sister, Ursula Jones also yielded:
An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler - I've read a few of her blog posts and so grabbed this when I was inthe biography section looking for a book about Napoleon for my son.
The Campaigns of Alexander - the Landmark Arrian - l'll just dip into this, but what a great edition full of side notes and images.
The disinherited: Exile and the making of Spanish Culture 1492-1975 - looks interesting, another that I'll probably just dip into
Up in the old hotel by Joseph Mitchell - collection of his New Yorker articles and other works

>127 Smiler69: Just reserved Aya, book 1 from the library. No more putting it off! They have the whole series in the original French, which is nice.
Yay, Kerry scored a direct hit with that BB :)

>138 avatiakh: ...booklist for budding young scientists
I suspect Wilbur (5) could be interested in that in a few months/years. He has developed an interest in doing experiments, using an old bulb-ended test tube (I am sure there's a name for it) that I use as a vase. He puts salt and water and food colouring in and swirls it around. :)


And, one of your recent reads, Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski sounds very interesting indeed. Darn it ;)

Hi Megan - Aya is pretty good for a GN. You'll probably be impressed by the Karski book, he had a phenomenal memory which is why he was selected to be the courier of such important information and this book was written before the end of the war so really resonates.

Science books for children are to be encouraged. New Zealand writers I'll mention are Andrew Crowe and Simon Pollard. Pollard is a world renown expert on spiders and his I am a spider is excellent. Crowe does the lIfe-size guide books such as The Life size guide to the New Zealand Beach. His first book is sort of a survival manual A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand from when he was once lost in the bush. NZ photographer Nic Bishop has also worked on interesting books for children.

>137 avatiakh: and Scherezade just went on my Wishlist.

75) The Interrupted Tale The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place #4 by Maryrose Wood (2013)
children's fiction
The next installment in the life of Penelope Lumley, intrepid young governess to the three children who have been raised by wolves. This time Penelope and her young charges travel to her beloved Swansburne Academy for Poor Bright Young Girls as Penelope has been chosen to give an important speech at the annual CAKE (Celebrate Alumnae Knowledge Exposition) Day. A little more of the mystery unravels...

>142 AuntieClio: You might get a bit annoyed with Haddad's swagger and self-importance but still interesting to read someone who stands up for liberal thought and gender equality in a society that does not celebrate these ideals.

Hi Kerry, traipsing through, you hit me with enough book bullets on Pinterest so I'm not lookin' at the reviews!

Hi Richard - looks like I have to do some more pinning then!

Oh nononono! No need to rush! No no indeed, you're a prolific pinner, no cause to concern yourself! *wallet-sweat*

I was just reading a news article about the opening of Denmark's first 'real' mosque, a complex which includes a tv station and community centre and was financed mostly by Qatar and realised that I had forgotten to post about my last audiobook.


76) Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis (2013 Eng) (2010 Danish)
Nina Borg #2

This is the second in the Nina Borg series. Borg is a nurse who sympathises with the work of the Network which helps refugees and illegal immigrant communities in Copenhagen. She puts her own marriage at risk when she agrees to visit Roma familes living in an abandoned garage even though she's promised not to do Network jobs after the events of the first book. There are several threads to follow, one is a Hungarian Roma youth, a student, whose younger halfbrother seems to have found something dangerous and lethal but worth a lot of money. Central to the story is the building of a mosque in a residential neighbourhood, it is meant to be just an Islamic community centre but it is clear from the renovations that a mosque complete with tower is part of the complex.
I really enjoyed this one, just took a bit of effort to follow the various threads at first, which is a little harder with an audio version.

I should really go back to the Ashton Place books; read #1 and found it entertaining, but I suppose not quite enough to continue -- perhaps too much of a children's book or YA for me? Or too fantastical? Or some combination? I liked it, but there was no urge to keep reading.

>148 avatiakh: I've also kind of fallen off the wagon on this series, too. I'm up to date with it, but Nina Borg is becoming wearying. It's like listening to a symphony that is all in three notes. There's too little of an emotional range to be satisfying, even when one agrees with the POV of the author(s).

Heavens, am I sounding like a curmudgeon?

I can't see that you would get that much out of the Ashton Place books. I'm reading and enjoying but not being completely wowed by them, I think Lemony Snicket was the master of this type of story. I had dropped the series but Ilana's enthusiasm saw me pick up this one. I find the little wolf-children quite adorable.

I had Invisible Murder on my iPod for months and fell back to it when my 27hrs of Michael Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East fizzled out after only 6 hours (fixed and now back listening to it). I liked this one but yes, Nina isn't that great a character.
I'm really enjoying the Michael Oren though, quite fascinating and informative about all sorts of characters from America's history. I've just finished with the Civil War veterans in Ismail's Egyptian Army.

77) Half Bad by Sally Green (2014)
YA urban fantasy
I really enjoyed this and raced through reading it, staying up late last night and then not getting up this morning till I'd read the last page. It starts in the middle of the story, a boy locked outside in a cage and only allowed out to perform gruelling physical tasks and chores. Then the story backtracks to tell 'how it came to this' and we are introduced to a world where witches, white and black both exist and live amongst us. Nathan's problem is that his mother was a white witch but his father was a notorious black witch and so the white witch community where he is living with his grandmother and half-siblings don't trust him, can't trust who he'll grow to be. The magic is interesting, mostly potions for healing, shapeshifting, shielding etc.
I can see lots of influences to the plot, like the writing and its breathless pace - all good.
Good news is that Green has just wrapped up writing book #2 which will come out next year, can't wait.

I read a few pages of The Bosnia List: a memoir of war, exile, and return and it looks to be interesting. I have to take it back to the library unread though as I've not allowed enough time. Just mentioning it here in case someone else is interested. I picked up Goodbye Sarajevo in a sale this week, about two sisters separated by the war until they reunite later in New Zealand.

Drat! BB for Half Bad!

I am reading The Story of a Secret State right now. I had to :)
I was at the library for Wilbur to have a go at playing the Playstation games they have there, and I was at a loss for something to read. So I looked up the library catalogue and found they had this book you and recommended....and there I was reading it within 5 minutes! *sorted*
Oh boy, is it good too!

>153 ronincats: Roni - a good read though. I'm halfway through Dragonsbane, taking my time probably because it has a small font which I always find a challenge. Reading a chapter of Dreams of Gods & Monsters on my kindle each day as well.

>154 LovingLit: Megan - I was deeply affected when watching Karski interviewed on Shoah. He had closed off the memories and reopened to tell the world once again - once he started to testify, it was very compelling. The book is excellent.

I've been watching a few dvds. I read Fortunes of War many years ago and have the audiobooks downloaded from the library but it was great to watch it on the screen as well.
I read How I live now when it first came out so had forgotten a lot of the storyline but thought the film was really good.
A touch of Spice was a great political film about a Greek family deported from Istanbul during the Istanbul Pogrom which lasted from 1955 to 1978. The film follows the childhood memories of Fanis, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, who must leave his grandfather and friends, never really adapts to Greek life and escapes his frustrations through cooking. Eventually he revisits Istanbul when his grandfather is dying.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioZyZQUDTY&feature=kp
Last night I rewatched My family and other animals, has to be one of my favourite family films to watch. Gerald Durrell is of course very cute, and Matthew Goode plays the insufferable but engaging Larry Durrell really well, which makes me laugh now that I've read one of Durrell's books, Justine, and know I have 3 left in the quartet to suffer through.
Start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KPwCD8IObY
I also watched Sleepers, an older miniseries about 2 sleeper Russian agents in the UK that the Soviets forgot about.
Start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YUqWe1z5Iw

^ I love pairing up my reading with dvd documentaries, or film versions, or complementary watching. It feels to good to round things off.

PS what is Shoah?

Israel commissioned French film maker Claude Lanzmann to make a documentary about the Holocaust and Shoah (1983) was the result. It's 9 hrs though he shot over 350 hours of footage. He doesn't use any archival footage, just goes to where the camps were and interviews locals about what happened, what they saw. He also interviews survivors and a few German guards (using concealed camera). It's very powerful, for several survivors it is the first time they have talked about their experience. I had it out from the library this year and slowly made my way through it.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)
The extra footage is held by one of the Holocaust museums in the US -
Karski: http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4739
Shoah interviews: http://www.ushmm.org/online/film/search/result.php?titles=Claude+Lanzmann+Shoah+...

Your boys would love My family and other animals, well the animal bits at least.

78) Dragonsbane by BArbara Hambly (1986)
fantasy
Highly enjoyable fantasy outing featuring mages and dragons, gnomes and a dragonslayer. It's part of a series though I saw Roni post somewhere that it is better just to read this one and leave the others. I'm always hesitant when reading about dragons that need slaying, I'd rather have the human friendly versions like we do in the Pern novels. This novel gives us a really deadly dragon that just has to be slain - any more info and I'm into spoiler territory.
This has sat on my tbr pile for a few years, one of the earliest LTer recommendations that I've never got round to reading. I only have a few more hundred of these LTer recommended books to get through....

Fantasy-wise I'm also reading Laini Taylor's Dreams of Gods and Monsters which is the concluding volume in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.
Current reading includes:
___
___
Quite a few library books that I've made a start on, a 27 hour audiobook and a couple of kindle reads.

Oh, I read Power, Faith and Fantasy last year or so - fascinating stuff.

Yes, fascinating. I'm not up on a lot of US history and this gives a really good background into US involvement in the ME and also the changing attitudes of American society towards this region. I'm at the halfway point so just entering the 20th century.

>157 avatiakh: thanks for that.
I was up til 11.20pm (again) last night reading Jan Karski's book. And then I was awake another hour on account the chapter entitled "To Die in Agony...". It is safe to say, I think, that I was very affected by the content of that chapter. Sometimes I wonder how people can live a normal life knowing that stuff like that has ever happened. It is overwhelming.

Megan - that is one awful chapter, what gets me is that the Allies still did nothing after his testimony.
You might like to read Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination by historian Otto Dov Kulka. He was a child interned at Auschwitz and has never learnt to deal with it. This is quite a short book which I was reading around the time I watched Shoah.

79) Run by Gregg Olsen (2014)
YA thriller
This is part of Olsen's Vengeance series or the first book of it, not sure. Anyway it is quite a good racy read, though one for the teen reader as adults are already well catered for in this genre of serial killers, abductions and mystery.
When 15 yr old Rylee finds her stepdad lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen with the word RUN written in blood beside his body and her mother missing, she grabs her 6 yr old brother and runs. She has been told that this day might come and there is a procedure set up to keep them safe.

At the back of the book is an advt for a Finnish thriller by Salla Simukka which I'll be checking out, As red as blood, first in her Snow White trilogy, August 2014. Also an interesting looking one by Monica Hesse.

SO glad you weren't disappointed with Dragonsbane, Kerry. I think it ends at the perfect place, personally, and have heard persons who read the sequels not like where it took them. And it isn't a traditional dragon story. I love the characters.

Hi Roni, yes, liked it a lot and pleased that I don't have to read another series. You should look into Gingerbread, I read a really good review of it and the start is good.
http://bobsbooksnz.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/gingerbread-by-robert-dinsdale/

80) Fields of Exile by Nora Gold (2014)
fiction
I came across mention of this book on a blog I was reading and it sounded a little different. I was interested in how the author dealt with the issues she wanted to address in a fiction setting.
Judith is a Canadian who made aliyah (immigrated) to Israel ten years ago, she's returned to Toronto in order to nurse her dying father and now has stayed on to attend a graduate program in her field of social work. In Israel she has been a left wing activist, volunteering in a number of programmes designed to bring ordinary Palestinians and Israelis together. She is passionate about her political beliefs, religious and keen to get back to Israel once this year of study is over. She has also picked up an old relationship with her previous boyfriend, they love each other but it is clear that he is never going to do aliyah, he is too career oriented and so she knows she'll have to leave him.
Everything starts well, she's considered a star student by her professors, she forms good friendships with a few other women.Then she discovers that the college's Social Justice committee is bringing in a keynote speaker who is a supporter of terrorism against Israeli citizens (book is set during 2nd Intifada) for the annual Anti-Oppresion Day, the opposition is against her, as an Israeli Jew, when she tries to speak up for dialogue not vilification. The lack of support makes her question her own beliefs, those of people around her and slowly her life begins to fall to pieces.
I read this with interest even though it isn't necessarily a great novel, not nuanced enough, and the ending is a bit overwrought. The debate over hate speech versus free speech on campus, and a growing normalisation of anti-Israel content in classes needs to be addressed, but this novel is a bit too clunky - I don't need explicit passages about her lovelife. And fairly polemic, though as the book centred so much on the main character and considering the author wanted to raise particular issues within her story I was able to accept this. I liked how Judith's love of Israel was always present throughout the novel, it is Judith's raison d'etre and yet she is realistic about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I also liked the weekly ritual of Shabat that she shared with her boyfriend, they did have a great relationship, just in the wrong (for Judith) location.
Possibly my verdict is that this topic works better in a nonfiction treatment, but I had no trouble racing through the book in a couple of days.

The writer is an academic who has researched and lectured about anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism for many years.
There's a useful Q&A with the author here: http://www.erikadreifus.com/2014/05/from-my-bookshelf-helpful-to-israel-and-the-...

My plans for July:

Finish - The Ringed Castle by Dorothy Dunnett - I love these Lymond books but always seem to put them to one side after a few pages in order to get library books read or non-fiction completed. This one was started in March.
TIOLI:
Challenge #1: Read a book which offers advice on page 85
Phoenix by SF Said
Challenge #2. Read a book with a central character who is Irish
Across the divide - Brian Gallagher - children's fiction
Challenge #3. Read a genre novel that has been translated to English
Tattoo (Spanish / Crime) - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - Pepe Carvalho #2
Write to kill (French / crime) - Daniel Pennac - Malaussène #3
Challenge #4. Start a series and continue if you want
*The Cuckoo's Calling - (Cormoran Strike #1)- Robert Galbraith
*The Silkworm - (Cormoran Strike #2) - Robert Galbraith
Challenge #5. Read a book that has on its cover some kind of geographical identifying feature
Foreign Bodies - Cynthia Ozick - (Eiffel Tower: Paris)
Challenge #11. Read a book that centers on People, Places, or Things
The Tin Snail - Cameron McAllister (THING) - 2CV Citroën
Challenge #13: Read a book by a living author who is older than you are
The Letter for the King - Tonke Dragt
An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler
Challenge #14. Read a book where the author has only one A in his/her name
The Dig - Cynan Jones
Fred & Edie - Jill Dawson - my Orange July read
The glass zoo - James McNeish
The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly - Sun-mi Hwang
The quick - Lauren Owen
Challenge #16: Read a book where the author's first and last names end with a vowel
Wolfborn - Sue Bursztynski
Challenge #17. Read a book that has something to do with California
Legend - (Legend #1) - Marie Liu (Los Angeles)
Challenge #18. Read a book of short stories
War Girls
Challenge #19. Read a book whose author is from a country that competed in the 2014 World Cup
The Minnow by Diana Sweeney (Australia)

I also have some other library books, kindle books I'm reading including:
Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale
The Middle East by Bernard Lewis - stalled
Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor

81) Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (1888)
fiction
My first Persephone read, one of three that I picked up last year from the actual Persephone bookshop/office in Bloomsbury.
Quite an interesting read, it depicts the Jewish community in London in the late 19th century. Possibly a product of its times, there are attitudes expressed in the book that you would not write nowadays, but overall so beautifully written. Judith is in love with her cousin Reuben, and is sure that he has feelings for her, but the conventions must be kept and he is expected to make a fine match that can further his political ambitions. Whereas Judith will be lucky to find a good-enough husband. This short novel gives us a glimpse into the lives of Jewish families that are beginning to asimilate into English society.

My heart is laughing by Rose Lagercrantz ill. Eva Erikson (Eng 2014)
children's fiction

This is for the emergent reader and is an English translation of one from a Swedish series about a quiet young girl called Dani. In this story she is missing her friend who has moved and she is also the target of two classroom bullies. The illustrations are quite delightful. The language is simple and the story engaging. Translated by publisher Julia Marshall who spent several years in Sweden before coming back to New Zealand and starting her own publishing company, Gecko Press, for 'curiously good' translated children's literature.
My happy life is the first in series, so it looks like GP might continue to translate this series.

Happy weekend Kerry!

Thanks Rachel. Must visit your thread.

I'm pushing to get through the Michael Oren nonfiction about the US in the Middle East. It's on audio, so I've been baking and doing other stuff in the kitchen while listening and have 4 hours left out of the 27. It's doable I have 34 hours left till the end of June! It's really interesting, and while at times going over familiar ground, it is always considering the US perspective.

I'm also well into The Cuckoo's Calling which I need to finish in July for the TIoLI challenge #4 so as not to upset all the shared reads of book #2. And as you can see in post #167 I'm already overcommitting myself for July, but have enjoyed looking out books for the various TIOLI challenges, something I haven't done for a long while. Still can't find anything for challenge #1.

Library pickups today:
The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks - YA that won the Carnegie Medal (2014)
Danton by David Lawday - a bio from the French Revolution, not sure what inspired me to request this one
DVD documentary - War Machines: past, present & future - 600mins, for my son, though I usually enjoy this warfare stuff too.

Dvds I've been watching:
not much, but did watch series 1 of the BBC sitcom My family. Wow, just looked and saw that it ran from 2000 thru to 2011. Entertaining in that silly British humour way. Stars Zoë Wanamaker as the mother.

Hi Kerry; just a quick fly-by wave.

82) Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the present by Michael Oren (2008)
nonfiction, audiobook
This came in at just shy of 28 hours and was a bit of a marathon tbh. At the 6 hr mark the book suddenly disappeared on my iPod and today it did the same again with 25mins to go so I ended up listening to the home stretch on my laptop.

This is for anyone questioning when the US became involved in the Middle East. Well, right from the first days of independence in 1776 when American shipping came under attack by barbary pirates, no longer under the protection of the British Navy, they were easy prey for the North African kingdoms. Civil War veterans were taken on by the Egyptian king to build his army, missionaries brought education to the masses and then there was the oil...that dominated most of the last 80-90 years of US-Middle East politics not to mention the founding of Israel, the Cold War with Soviet Russia and the growing threat of Islamism, terrorism and much more. Oren covers it all in brilliant detail, this is an invaluable overview of the subject.
I really loved his Six Days of War and this is also an excellent resource. One point that I found interesting was that many of the diplomats, advisors, oil company executives etc sent to the Middle East were the children of missionaries and had spent parts of their childhoods in the Arab countries. Will leave it at that, I don't feel like churning out a long review as I don't have the book in front of me so can't look up particular details.

>172 humouress: Wave back

The girl who brought mischief by Katrina Mannestad (2013)
children's fiction
This is set in Denmark in 1911. Inge is a delightful character in the style of Anne of Green Gables or Heidi. Newly orphaned, she has come to live with her grandmother on the island of Bornholm. There doesn't seem to be much lightness of spirit happening on the island, just stern people and dull rules about behaviour. But Inge soon manages to inject joy and happiness in the lives of her grandmother and neighbours, mostly due to her mischieviousness and love of Hans Christian Andersen's stories. There is a particularly hilarious chapter where she is followed home by all the cats in the village after she hides in the herring smoke house. I enjoyed this and though there are a few quibbles overall I was quite charmed. Great for a newly confident reader.


The three bears....sort of by Yvonne Morrison ill. Donovan Bixley (2013)
picturebook, new zealand

The narrator begins to tell the tale of Goldilocks only to be continually interrupted by the child who questions the type of bear, whether bears truly live in house, use a stove, eat porridge, talk etc etc. A fun treatment of a traditional folktale. The illustrations are typical Bixley, not my favourite style but appealing for all that.

Hi Kerry- I hope you had a nice weekend. I managed to snag The Cuckoo's Calling & The Silkworm on audio. A few of my LT pals really liked the first one, so I might give it a shot.

>173 avatiakh: Another BB!

Hi Mark - I'm steaming through The Cuckoo's Calling, very enjoyable and I have The Silkworm on hand as I rented a bestseller copy from the library, you get 2 weeks for $5, which is great as I was 203/483 in the request queue, the book retails for between $30-40 here at present.

Roni - you'll find that one an interesting read for sure. I might get a hardcopy out from the library so I can look up some of the names and check out his bibliography etc etc. I have another of Oren's books around, it's a novel, Reunion, based on his father's experiences during WW2.

Have you read Franny and Zooey? Do you like Jeeves? I found advice in both on page 85, specifically in Carry On, Jeeves for the second book, though I'm sure the whole series offers plenty of advice somehow. I've listed both in Madeline's challenge in any case.

I read Franny and Zooey a couple of years ago, haven't tried Jeeves yet. I'm not actively looking any more, I have too many books now lined up for July. I do like to add a book to Madeline's challenge each month and I'm sure something will turn up. I've just started listening to Officers and Gentlemen so maybe that will turn up trumps.

My main concern at present is to get through the two Galbraith books in the next two weeks.

83) The cuckoo's calling by Robert Galbraith (2013)
fiction
This is JK Rowling's new crime series featuring PI Comoran Strike. Strike is an interesting character, an ex-army officer who keeps meticulous records but has basically hit rock-bottom in his life, both private and professional. In the first chapter we meet his new temp secretary, Robyn, who comes across as very efficient and resourceful, in fact her only liability seems to be the hapless fiance who disapproves of her current boss. She is rapt to be close to living her childhood dream of being a detective. The case they are set to investigate is suitably complex with lots of players and makes great reading. I enjoyed this alot and will dive straight in to the next book as I have it home from the library as a 2 week bestseller rental so I'm 'forced' to get to it quickly.


84) The hen who dreamed she could fly by Sun-mi Hwang (2000) (2013 English edition)
fable, South Korea

Sun-mi Hwang is a well known South Korean writer that I did not know about and I would never have picked up this book but for a RL friend who recommended it to me via goodreads. Anyway I knew she keeps chickens, loves children's literature but reads widely so wouldn't recommend a dud. This is a delightful tale about a little hen who has spent most of her life in a cage, laying eggs and not much else. Her position in the shed gives her a view of the yard outside a barn, she sees the rooster, a hen, a gaggle of ducks and the farmer's dog...and of course all she wants is to be able to have her freedom, have an egg that she can nurture to hatching. The little hen gets her heart's desires but in unexpected ways, nothing is given, she must sieze each moment and turns into a very resilient mother. This is delightful, the ending is particularly soulful.
The illustrations by Nomoco, a Japanese illustrator are spare, simple and a delight.


85) War Girls by Adele Geras & 8 others (2014)
YA, short stories

This collection looks at the First World War through the eyes of young women, all teenagers. Each story is by a different UK writer and they convey how the war changed the role of women in society. I enjoyed all the stories and loved how it ended with, Going Spare by Sally Nicolls, a story about the 2 million young women who had no chance of being married at the end of the war. A young girl visits her elderly neighbour in the 1970s, her mother has told her of the lack of husbands at the end of the war, her neighbour, Miss Frobisher, tells how the women first understood that many would not be getting married when she and her sister attended a ball shortly after coming out. The room was full of girls in beautiful dresses and only about 10 young eligible men, one of whom was her brother. But this predicament saw her take on a career in journalism and she became a war correspondent in the Middle East during WW2 and had a thoroughly exciting life.
The writers are Adele Geras, Melvin Burgess, Berlie Doherty, Mary Hooper, Anne Fine, Matt Whyman, Theresa Breslin, Sally Nicholls, Rowena House.

86) The Minnow by Diana Sweeney (2014)
YA, australia

This won the Text Publishing Prize last year, which is an Australia/New Zealand writing prize for a YA manuscript, I think for an unpublished writer. Anyway I've sort of vowed to read all the winners once they are published though I haven't got round to the 2012 winner as yet, Zac & Mia.
This is quite a challenging read, the book is set about 18 months after the terrible 2010 Queensland Floods and the small town where Tom (Holly) lives has been one of the hardest hit. Tom is about 14 or 15 and is the sole survivor of her family apart from her grandmother who lives in a nursing home. She had been living with Bill, a friend of the family until he had sex with her. She's now pregnant and living at the house of her schoolfriend, Jonah who lost his parents. She lives partly in the past, dreams and nightmares about the day of the flood, she's comforted by the presence of her Papa, the ghost of her grandfather who died before she was born and she talks a lot with The Minnow, her unborn child as well as Oscar, a carp at the pet shop. The community has lost a lot in the floods, not just people but facilities and services as well. The local government has shut down bus routes, schools and the local hospital due to the fall in population.
I ended up quite liking this, though at times I wasn't sure who was alive and who was not, probably my own fault for reading it alongside too many other books. The childbirth scene was quite amazing, Sweeney has Tom blacking out and re-experiencing her time in the floodwaters. I also liked how the locals were all quietly supportive of Tom and not judgemental, it was clear that the community was still recovering.

Just saw this tweet:
John Connolly ‏@jconnollybooks Jul 4
Something has gone very wrong if we'll pay $5 for a greeting card, $3 for gift wrap, but resent paying more than $2.99 for a book.

I'm so far behind.... I am glad you liked Lucky Jim - which is one of my top ten funny novels.

Hi Lucy - I've just lost the two reviews I was writing up so I'll wave to you instead. I love that sort of humour too.

87) The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (2014)
fiction
The second Cormoran Strike book. This one involves a novelist who goes missing. Strike is asked by his wife to locate him, but it's the body that turns up. Another enjoyable read. I'll keep reading these.


Hidden: A Child's Story of the Holocaust by Loïc Dauvillier (Eng 2014) (2012 French)
children's graphic novel
This holocaust story is appropriate for the age group and would be an excellent classroom resource. I'd recommend that an adult is present to support the child's reading of it and immediately answer any questions.
A young girl, Elsa, gets up during the night time and sees her grandmother sitting alone on the sofa looking at photos. Elsa cuddles up and askes her what is upsetting her that she can't sleep. The grandmother after some prompting tells her about her experiences during the Holocaust when she was a young girl. The story is set in Paris and covers most of what happened to the Jews there, the girl is eventually taken to live on a farm, after being hidden in a suitcase and rescued by the neighbours when her parents are taken. After the war only the mother returns from the camps. The next morning we find out that the grandmother has never told her son, Elsa's father, about her experiences.
I have to say that I was quite jolted by the illustration of the returned mother, very haunting.




Here's an article by Elizabeth Wein about Hidden and a couple of other Holocaust titles for this age group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/review/loic-dauvilliers-hidden-and-more....

The Boring Book by Vasanti Unka (2013)
picturebook
This won the New Zealand Post Children's Book of the Year Award a couple of weeks ago. Unka is a designer and graphic artist who did the fantastic illustrations for Hill & Hole one of my new favourite NZ picturebooks. Here she does it all. The boring book is just that, noone wants to read it, so one day the words and letters all decide to escape and have some fun. The design of the book itself is rather special with 'the boring book' itself inserted in a 'lift the flap' sort of way on several pages, each has a 'playful' take on the text which in the first insert looks like a deadly dull page of text without paragraphs, and another has the text as a tree with playhouse, then the text escapes the book altogether. At the end an 'insert' book is left blank so a young reader can write their own text.

_
_




Judges' comments: 'The New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year is a remarkable book that exceeds any expectations of its genre. It exhibits the highest quality of design and its presentation is thoroughly original. The story takes delightful unexpected turns that charm afresh with each reading. Small children and older readers alike will be delighted by its subversive touches and entertained by its warmth and fun. The risks taken by the author perfectly illustrate the dangers of being careless with those powerful things – words. For a long time to come, a well-loved companion for readers of all ages is sure to be The Boring Book.' --Judges' Report, New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults

>187 avatiakh: What a wonderful looking book! 'Boring' I'm sure it's not.

Hi Nina - I had to take photos of the book insert pages as I didn't think I explained it very well. No, not boring at all.

88) Legend by Marie Liu (2011)
YA dystopia

First in a trilogy. Fairly predictable storyline that is reasonably written and well paced but doesn't raise the bar at all. I won't continue, only because there are too many other books on my tbr pile. Don't take my mild disinterest too much to heart as I read so many of these dystopian YAs that I can easily drop a few from time to time. This was a shared TIOLI read with Ilana.
Follows two teens, one a boy rebel, wanted by the totalitarian leaders and the other a girl prodigy who is part of the elite group. I wonder what happens?


Otto: the autobiography of a bear by Tomi Ungerer (1999)
illustrated story
I came across this when reading a Brainpicking article about Tomi Ungerer and it reminded me a little of the junior novel, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate de Camillo, though it predates it by several years. Anyway the story starts off in prewar Germany, a young Jewish boy is given a teddy bear which has lots of adventures with him and the boy's best friend, Oscar. When David is sent with his parents to a concentration camp his friend is given the bear. The bear ends up in the hands of a US soldier and saves his life. Eventually, the bear has spent several years in a New york antique store when it is seen by an elderly Oscar. He recognises the purple ink stain on Otto's ear. The news story about a German refugee being reunited with his childhood toy is seen by David, who also survived the war and lives in New York....
A gentle story to introduce a child to the sad history of the Holocaust and WW2. Another favourite war themed picturebook is The staircase cat by Colin Thompson.
Illustrations can be seen here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/tag/tomi-ungerer/

now I just have to get my hands on William Cole's The Cat-Hater's Handbook which is illustrated by Ungerer and looks like fun.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/21/cat-haters-handbook-tomi-unger...

>189 avatiakh: Your explanation was fine, but the photos show the book was more than I imagined.

>190 avatiakh: You know, I almost know what Mark Twain means. :0)

>190 avatiakh: Hilarious comment from Twain; and I quite agree with him.

That said, my cats have been unusually calm and quiescent today.

I'm launching into The Silkworm now...

>191 humouress: >192 Chatterbox: Yes, Twain sure has a way with his words.
>192 Chatterbox: I think you'll like Rowling's treatment of the publishing industry


89) The Tin Snail by Cameron McAllister (2014)
children's fiction
Loved this story set in the French countryside during WW2. When McAllister came across a news item about the 1995 finding in a barn of a hidden prototype for the beloved Citroën 2CV, he knew he had to write a story around it.... and what a great little one he's come up with. Industrial espionage by wartime Nazis, sabotage by the head of Citroën, who was forced to produce trucks for the Nazis so altered the markings on the oil dipsticks. A whole village comes together to foil the Nazis by hiding the parts and especially the revolutionary suspension from the prototype that two Citroën engineers had been working on, a 'tin snail', the 2CV, a cheap affordable but extremely durable car for ordinary rural French people. It finally went into production in 1948.
My only quibble is that the book should have been written back when the 2CV was still being produced, there aren't that many around anymore.



'Designed from the now famous brief, it must be able to transport a hat wearing french farmer across a ploughed field carrying a basket of unbroken eggs'

I see we pretty well felt the same way about Legend, Kerry. Definitely predictable, and I won't be looking for the other two books either. I'm about halfway through the Silkworm audiobook now.

Yeah, it was fairly average, entertaining enough but not great. I'm reading a children's scifi, Phoenix by SF Said, it has wonderful illustrations by Dave McKean. I might have to get my own copy.

I hope you are enjoying The Silkworm, I quite like Strike and his assistant.

I like Strike and Robin too, though I can't imagine for the life of me what she's doing with that jerk Matthew.

Oh; they don't make the 2CV anymore? :'0(

Didn't like "Silkworm" as much as the debut, and really am not all that sure I learned terribly much about publishing. Yes, it's a gossipy place, but so is every industry? I think I had more fun on that front with Lost for Words, St. Aubyn's satire on the Man Booker prize. I think the first book in the series was much better; this one was too filled with grotesques for my taste. But Strike is, on his own, a strong enough and interesting enough character to carry the whole series, so I'll be back for more.

>197 humouress: Nina, you might like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ktMcCDZvk
Production stopped in the 1990s

>196 Smiler69: >198 Chatterbox: I read both end to end so my take on the books is sort of merged. I definitely liked Strike & Robin more than the crimes they were investigating.
>198 Chatterbox: There's another book awards novel, The Parrots by Filippo Bologna, I had it home from the library but didn't find time to read it.


90) Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh
fiction / audiobook
This is the second in the Sword of Honour trilogy, and on finishing it this afternoon I was delighted to see that there is a tv movie starring Daniel Craig from 2001. The dvd has already been requested, so I'll make a start on the last book.
Set during WW2, the books follows the fortunes of 30-something Guy Crouchback, who becomes an officer with the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Here Guy goes to Scotland for commando training and then ends up in Egypt before going to Crete a few days before the evacuation. Again nothing much as far as fighting ever seems to happen, I think this sentence from wikipedia sums it up: It paints an ironic picture of regimental life in the British Army and is a satire on the wasteful and perverse bureaucracy of modern warfare.
Highly enjoyable.

91) Phoenix by SF Said (2013)
children's scifi
This has just been longlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize for children, so I was eager to finally read it after having it home from the library on a couple of other occasions. Loved this compelling space opera that is perfectly pitched to an older child but still an enjoyable read for teens or adults. Lucky wakes from a strange dream, and almost immediately must embark on a journey across the galaxy in the company of 'aliens'. He has a strange power that he must learn to control or it could destroy him and those around him. Storyline sounds a bit hackneyed but this one invokes star mythology that gives it an edge...and Lucky is a great character.
As with Said's Varjak Paw the book is stunningly illustrated in b/w by Dave McKean.

Really cool book trailer by Dave McKean here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5yQjwqDFXA

Also a good interview with Said - http://dorkshelf.com/2013/08/20/interview-phoenix-author-sf-said/

I need to start a new thread as I have too many images in this one, getting really annoyed with loading.

>102 avatiakh:..I'm envious of all that shelf space.
I'm perusing the books you read, as usual, you have some fantastic reads.

Excited to learn that the Waugh has been filmed!

Hi Linda - I've been guilty of just lurking on your thread this year.

Lucy - I did not have the Guy Crouchback/Daniel Craig combo in my head for the first two books, not even sure I can picture him as Guy for the last book which I've already started listening to. Will sure be great to watch especially after seeing him in Defiance.

So have become quite absorbed in my current kindle read - Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
Also made a good start on Scarlet as that's due back at the library this week.

Just some picturebooks I've been looking at lately:


Kissed by the moon by Alison Lester (2013)
picturebook / australia
Lullaby text accompanied by natural world settings for a baby and toddler. Quite lovely and gentle read. Soothing. I saw it suggested as a welcome baby gift book. Lester is the current inaugural Australian Children’s Laureate,




Alfie's search for destiny by David Hardy (2013)
picturebook / australia
I saw this one on an indigenous booklist so requested from the library. The author was for some time a Disney animation employee. I don't like this type of illustration for picturebooks, it doesn't have any charm or soul. The illustrations did not strike me as particularly Australian, I saw hints of Africa, especially in the mother.
The story was fairly bland. I've read more traditional picturebooks with either the story or art being very much like you would expect so was hoping for a modern take on that.
A small aborigine boy goes looking for his destiny only to find that it is at home with his family.


Here's a list of 15 Australian picturebooks everyone should read (not indigenous): http://www.misrule.com.au/s9y/index.php?/archives/397-15-Australian-Picture-Book...
and here is a list of Australian indigenous picturebooks: http://readwatchplay.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/top-ten-indigenous-authored-childr...
For my liking, this is more what I think when I think indigenous australian -



The boy on the page by Peter Carnavas (2013)
picturebook , Australia
A boy falls onto a page and leads a rich and varied life in his book. Imaginative with lovely illustrations.
I've ordered a couple more of Carnavas's books from the library as I hadn't heard of him before.
Author singing a song about his book - very sweet, he ropes in his family: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yMvszuU8T0

I ws going to mention the papertigers.org website as a great resource for children's books from the Pacific Rim and I see that they have stopped this project and it is now only an archival resource, still very useful but now stranded in time. They've moved on to waterbridge: http://www.waterbridgeoutreach.org/
'WaterBridge Outreach: Books + Water seeks to foster empathy, understanding, and peace. It focuses on donating books in English and local languages and funding clean water and sanitation projects in communities and villages in the developing world. Our goal is to promote multicultural literacy, education, and development. Without the basics of life, what hope will children and young people have for the future?'

92) Gravity by Tess Gerritsen (1999)
fiction
I came across an article a while back about how Gerritsen considered a lawsuit against the film Gravity but decided against it, but when it won an Oscar or two she reconsidered and I believe she is pursuing some sort of case against the film because a writer or two of the film had worked on a script for her book back when it was optioned. I haven't seen the movie so don't know what the similarities would be but reading the article made me interested in reading her book, especially as I enjoyed reading the first few of her Rizzoli series.

Basically it's a medical thriller set on the International Space Station with the main characters being Dr Emma Watson, an astronaut on the ISS and her estranged husband Dr Jack McCallum, a de-commed astronaut. A microbe from a failed experiment escapes and evolves till it's a killer of the crew on the Space Station. Emma's husband, stuck on earth, has to race against time and NASA & US Army protocols to find a way to save his wife & her companions.

Book comes with a useful glossary of NASA acronyms and abbreviations.
I visited Kennedy Space Centre back in 2002 a few weeks before the Colombia reentry explosion. What a fantastic outing, I loved every minute of it, seeing the shuttle on the launch pad ready for its mission and then all the rockets, landing pods, runways, gantries that had actually been in use while I was growing up and looking at the level of technological knowledge of the 1960s/70s was just fascinating. We even got to clamber through a retired space shuttle - very compact. I have to say I was awestruck with how, in New Zealand we say, 'no. 8 wire' the actual space ships / rockets actually were. My brother was named, Glenn, as he was born during John Glenn's orbit of Earth in 1962.

The children who loved books by Peter Carnavas (2012)
picturebook / australia
Delightfully illustrated story about a family of limited resources who live in a caravan. They have lots of books but little room so get rid of the books, then they find that the books have been quite useful and miss that. When the daughter eventually brings a new book home from the library they draw closer as a family and the next day sees them visit the library and a huge pile of books coming home with them.
Quite a charming story, I loved how Carnavas conveys how even the physical presence of books had brought the family together. '...and because there was more space in their home, there was a lot more space between them all...' then a few pages later '... the children moved closer as Dad turned the page and read on...they huddled beside the lamp and listened to the story'



Jonathan! by Peter Carnavas (2014)
picturebook / australia

This one is illustrated by Amanda Francey. Another gentle story, where Jonathan goes around trying to scare his family. Outside he meets a dinosaur who does succeed in scaring them but then turns out to be....
Not sure why this hasn't been illustrated by Carnavas but these illustrations are sympathetic to the text.

I've read one or two Lesters and liked them, and their illustrations. I like the sound of The Children Who Loved Books - for some reason ;0)

>208 humouress: I've only read her picturebooks, they are all quite lovely.

ok, I really need to start a new thread, these images are really making my thread unusable.