All Booked Up
Treasure Trove
For one reason or another, I'm always something of a latecomer on the scene where new trends are concerned. The first time I ever surfed the internet was late 1997 and I didn't own my first computer until the year 2000. I didn't have a cell phone until just a few years ago and when I did get one it was a very outmoded Nokia 3310. It doesn't even have a camera, if you can believe it, and the only mp3-player in this house belongs to my ten-year-old daughter. I haven't seen the latest movies or heard the latest music and my idea of haute couture is a gently-used wool coat from the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that I've only recently been turned on to eBay. Read more.
Bridget Jones's Diary
I'm well aware that Bridget Jones's Diary is old news to the rest of the world, but I've just now--ten years after its publication--gotten around to reading it. For some reason or other I gave it a miss when it was current, then after seeing the movie I figured I might as well cross it off my must-read list. I knew the story, I reasoned, and though I liked the movie well enough, I didn't love it and felt no interest in rehashing it in book format. Read more.
The Blind Assassin
When I put together my 2005 Book List, the book I was most looking forward to reading was Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Atwood is a masterful writer, unmatched, I think, on the contemporary fiction scene, and The Blind Assassin, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, is considered by many her masterpiece. Read more.
Fall on Your Knees
A year or two ago a friend of mine raved about a book she'd recently read, Fall on Your Knees, the debut novel of Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald. This particular friend is one whose book sense I've learned to trust, so even though I was busy slogging--with mixed success--through my 2005 Book List, I ordered a copy to save for later. As it turned out, my book list was too ambitious by half, and I managed to get to Fall on Your Knees only by putting aside (temporarily, I assure you) a number of my earlier picks. After reading it, however, I don't feel a lick of guilt for bumping it to the top--if anything, I'm guilty of not putting it there from the beginning. Read more.
Book Talk
by Barbara Kowal
In Wallace Dorian's intriguing first novella, "Desert Rain," he takes his heroine Cynthia Ryan into a heart of darkness. But unlike Joseph Conrad's famous classic, Cynthia's journey takes her into the American Southwest, as she makes a film of the Kachina cult and the Hopi people, their lore and their prophesies. Read more.
A Modern Classic
I'm a cookbook junkie, I admit it. I have shelves full of cookbooks that I've never made even one recipe from, yet I won't part with them and I continue to buy more. My latest favorite, however, is one that I can't use enough, the Swedish classic baking book, Sju sorters kakor. Read more.
Timeless Favorites
When I was in grade school, my favorite time of day was after lunch, when the teacher would read aloud to the class, using stories to reel us in and bridge the gap between the freedom of recess and the calm of afternoon instruction. I'll never forget the sense of anticipation that would come over the classroom when we kids were all settled in our desks and the teacher pulled out The Book. I first became acquainted with some of my most-loved books in those quiet story-times. Read more.
Off List Picks
It's confession time. I didn't read all the books on my 2005 Reading List. I didn't even come close. I did buy most of them, if that counts for anything.
Another confession: buying books is the reason that I wasn't able to cross all the must-reads off my list. Even though I had a stack of books I had vowed to read by year's end, more and more and more books that I couldn't live without kept finding their way onto my shelves, and I read many of them--not all, not by a long shot--instead. Every time I turned around, it seemed, someone else was talking about the great book she'd just read, and I couldn't resist reading it, too. So, rather than an update about one of the books from the list, I thought I'd share with you some of the gems I uncovered while I was supposed to be reading something else. Read more.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Check another one off my list! Last week I sat down with Maya Angelou's most well-known work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and read through it in a couple of days. Wow, what a good book! Read more.
My Ántonia
After a few weeks of approaching My Ántonia in fits and starts, I finally settled down seriously with it and read through it easily in three or four days. It's not an especially long book and it's an easy read both in terms of language and storyline. It's the third book I've gotten through on my 2005 Reading List, and it's great to be able to cross another one off (boy, do I have a lot of reading ahead of me in the next couple of months if I hope to get the rest of them read!). Read more.
The Poisonwood Bible
At the beginning of the year, I ambitiously set out a list of ten books that I resolved to read by year's end. I got something of a slow start, taking months to struggle through the first book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and once I was finished I had a hard time motivating myself to get going on the book I'd decided was next, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It turns out, however, that I oughtn't have felt daunted by the book's thickness, as it was a fairly quick read that kept my mind engaged from the first chapter to the last. Read more.
You'll Laugh, You'll Cry
These days most of the people I know have a list of a few--or a few dozen--blogs they read faithfully. I'm no different; I've got a Live Journal "friends list" some fifty names long, and nearly thirty more favorites listed on my own blog. Some of the best writing I've come across in the past couple of years is on other people's blogs, and it all started with Pound. Read more.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Though we're a third of the way through the year, I've just now--ten minutes ago, in fact--finished reading the first book on my 2005 Reading List. As I had been warned by more experienced readers, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was a difficult read. As I had been promised, it was well worth the difficulty. Read more.
Annual Book Sale
As I write this we're but days away from a major event that will capture the imagination of all of Sweden. "What could it be?" you wonder. The introduction of a genetically-engineered super-herring? An ABBA reunion tour? The publication of an unauthorized tell-all--complete with pictures--about the lurid love-life of Marcus Schenkenberg? Read more.
I Resolve to Read
When I was growing up, I painstakingly made an annual list of New Year's resolutions that was most often forgotten by the first of February. I gave up the habit ten or fifteen years ago and have felt none the worse for it, but a couple of weeks ago I got to thinking that this year it might be fun to make a different sort of list. Read more.
Stephen King
I'm a wimp, I admit it. Horror movies give me nightmares and scary books leave me freaked out for weeks. I like happy endings. It should go without saying, then, that I'm no fan of Stephen King, right? Wrong. Read more.
Still a Pest, After All These Years
I've been an avid reader as long as I can remember, something I inherited from my mother. I've hardly ever seen my mom without a book close at hand, and she passed her love of books on to my two younger brothers and me. When we were growing up she read to us on a daily basis, even recording herself on cassette for us to listen to on the nights she was away from home, attending evening classes toward a degree in English. Read more.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
I've always wanted to write and, immodest though it may be, always considered myself a fairly good writer. Much as I might yearn to be a novelist, however, fiction has never been my strong suit. When I say that I consider myself a good writer, I mean it in a purely mechanical sense. That is, I have a wide vocabulary, strong spelling skills, and an almost obsessive love of grammar. The heart-and-soul part? Well, I'm not so good with that. Should I ever lose my self-consciousness sufficiently to be able to write a novel, though, I know exactly the kind of fiction I would write. I would write a book about ordinary people and the extraordinary things that happen in ordinary lives. I would write the kind of modern fiction that is so expertly crafted by the following women, some of my favorite writers. Read more.
You're Reading What?!
Since discovering Harlequin paperbacks at the tender age of twelve or thirteen I have been a sucker for a good romance novel. Now, it's no secret that romances are considered trash by most anyone with even a smidgeon of intellectualism, and I learned early on not to tell just anyone about my guilty pleasure. And it is a guilty pleasure--every time I crack one open I hear a little voice whisper that I should be reading the classics or mind-enriching non-fiction or even some highbrow modern fiction, like Toni Morrison or John Irving, and I admit I hesitated a little before listing on the front page of my blog that my current read is a romance novel. Read more.