I've been saving items of interest from Shelf Awareness, and though I've not been able to post a review for awhile (holidays, Crohns and inertia, are the top three reasons why), I figured I'd better start putting these on the blog before they all go stale.
Here's some excellent excerpts from a book for kids that sounds like one of those books full of wisdom that adults would enjoy as well:
The result is Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers
from Great Minds (public library), one of the best children's books of 2012 – a
compendium of fascinating explanations of deceptively simple everyday
phenomena, featuring such modern-day icons as Mary Roach, Noam
Chomsky, Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, and many more, with
a good chunk of the proceeds being donated to Save the Children, and also one of the best science books of 2012.
Most of the time, you feel in charge of your own
mind. You want to play with some Lego? Your brain is there to make it happen.
You fancy reading a book? You can put the letters together and watch characters
emerge in your imagination.
But at night, strange stuff happens. While you’re
in bed, your mind puts on the weirdest, most amazing and sometimes scariest
shows. … In the olden days, people believed that our dreams were full of clues
about the future. Nowadays, we tend to think that dreams are a way for the mind
to rearrange and tidy itself up after the activities of the day. … Dreams show
us that we’re not quite the bosses of our own selves.
My favorite answers are to the all-engulfing question, How
do we fall in love? Author Jeanette Winterson offers this
breathlessly poetic response:
You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole.
You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private
planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks
different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big
surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on
your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to
you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump.
Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might
decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring
your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your
odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you
found.)
And you can bring your friends to visit. And read
your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump
that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s
it.
PS You have to be brave.
I really want to read this book, which sounds incredible.
Vanity Fare:
A Novel of Lattes, Literature, and Love
by Megan Caldwell
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Molly Hagan, the protagonist of Megan
Caldwell's Vanity Fare, is a
40-year-old single mother who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She suffers the sting of
a husband who left her for a younger woman; a traumatized six-year-old son who
asks too many questions and is begging for an exotic pet; a mother whose
finances have collapsed and who now has nowhere to live; and well-meaning
friends and a shrink who pressure Molly to make changes in her life. Molly's
troubles grow even deeper when she learns that she's penniless and can't even
pay the rent.
When an old friend offers Molly a
copywriting job at a new bakery, Molly jumps at the chance for employment. The
venue is located near the New York Public Library, and the owner wants to make
the bakery "a destination point." Inspired by the challenge, Molly
comes up with a "literary-food-is-delicious" schematic for what she
envisions will become "Vanity Fare." In the midst of pulling together
her presentation, Molly suddenly finds herself being wooed by both the sexy
British pastry chef with an "upper-crust, devil-may-care Hugh Grant
accent" and his aloof business partner (who becomes more emotionally
attractive as he forms a bond with Molly's son).
Each chapter commences with blurbs that
cleverly pair literary references and puns with bakery offerings, such as
"Much Ado about Muffins," "A Room of One's Scone" and
"Catcher in the Rye Bread." Caldwell has whipped up a delicious,
well-plotted romance where a smart, self-deprecating heroine conquers
real-world issues with good humor. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Discover:
A copywriting job for a new bakery sweetens the life of a struggling single
mother in this delicious romance.
After watching the season 3 premier of Downton Abbey last night (and loving every minute of it) I was glad of this tidbit about one of my favorite comedy authors, PG Wodehouse:
Wodehouse TV: Blandings & An Innocent Abroad
BBC1 may be looking "to steal
Downton [Abbey] ratings with two helpings
of P.G. Wodehouse," according to
the Guardian, which reported that
Blandings
"offering a humorous glimpse of
aristocratic life, may clean up." The
six-part series, which stars Jack
Farthing, Jennifer Saunders, Timothy
Spall, David Walliams and Mark
Williams, is "based on Wodehouse's
much-loved accounts of the fictional
life and times of Blanding Castle's
9th earl" and "will follow
the fortunes of the amiable, befuddled
Emsworth, played by Timothy Spall,
and his beloved pig, Empress."
A Wodehouse-lovers "golden
year" may be underway, since in March the
"darker side" of the
author's legacy is being be explored on BBC1's An
Innocent Abroad, "which will
re-examine the controversial period that
the author spent in Nazi
Germany," the Guardian wrote. Tim Pigott-Smith
portrays Wodehouse in this project.
This also looks like a book I would love to read:
White Truffles in Winter: A Novel by
N.M. Kelby (Norton, $15.95,
9780393343588). "This richly
layered novel is based on the life of
legendary chef Auguste Escoffier, who
popularized French cooking methods
at his restaurants at the Savoy and
the Ritz at the beginning of the
20th century. Escoffier's love for
two women--the beautiful, iconic
actress Sarah Bernhardt and his
lovely, poetess wife, Delphine
Daffis--is at the heart of this
complex tale. The characters are vivid
and the food--oh, the food--is
delicious!" --Erica Caldwell, Present
Tense, Batavia, N.Y.
Interesting how much these books sold for, especially considering some of them are foreign language books:
AbeBooks' Most Expensive Sales in
2012
An inscribed first edition of Ian
Fleming's Casino Royale, which sold
for more than $46,000, was narrowly
beaten by a 1603 celestial atlas
($47,729) on AbeBooks annual list of
most expensive sales
Also showcased on the website are the
most expensive sales in science,
mathematics, children's and YA, art,
photography, poetry, maps and
atlases, ephemera, travel and
exploration, medical, science fiction and
fantasy, and books written by world
leaders.
The Most Expensive Sales in 2012:
1) Uranometria, Omnium Asterismorum
Continens Schemata, Nova Methodo
Delineata, Sereis Laminis Expressa by
Johann Bayer ($47,729)
2) Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
($46,453)
3) Die Verwandlung (The
Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka ($30,000)
4) A Latin Bible from 1491 ($26,200)
5) Where the Wild Things Are by
Maurice Sendak ($25,000)
6) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
($25,000)
7) A Polyglot Bible from 1599-1602,
edited by Elisa Hutter ($25,000)
8) Livre d'Heures (Book of Hours)
($24,680)
9) Cosmographia by Petrus Apianus
($23,681)
10) Les Ruines de les Splus Beaux
Monuments de la Grece by Julien David
Le Roy ($23,530)
Another book that sounds fascinating!
Review: The Painted Girls
Images of belle epoque Paris are
burned in our minds from the works of
its renowned painters. Cathy Marie
Buchanan's The Painted Girls explores
the internal world beyond the canvas,
from the point of view of the
teenage student dancer who modeled
for Edgar Degas's sculpture The
Little Dancer, Age Fourteen. Loosely
inspired by the true story of the
impoverished van Goethem sisters of
Montmartre, Buchanan's story follows
Marie, a struggling ballet dancer,
and her warm-hearted older sister,
Antoinette, as they battle what seems
an inevitable fate of destitution
and despair.
When their father dies, leaving only
their depressed and alcoholic
mother to care for them, threatened
with impending eviction and
starvation, the van Goethem sisters
face the challenge of simple
survival. It is with the hope of
earning enough money for food and
shelter that Marie enrolls in dancing
school, becoming one of the "petit
rats"--desperate girls working
to learn the discipline of ballet in the
hope of a stage career and a better
life for their families. Every girl
cherishes the dream of outshining the
others, and attracting the
patronage of the
abonnés--wealthy men with a particular interest
in dancers. First, though, Marie attracts
the attention of Degas, who
asks her to model for him in a
partnership that will eventually lead to
a sculpture that, in its bronze
reproductions, has been exhibited all
over the world.
From the daily routines at the barre
to the obstacles of a dancer's
life, Buchanan describes the world of
19th-century Parisian ballet in
meticulous detail. The immediate
threat of poverty is also vivid, giving
readers a constant awareness that
Marie and her family are on the verge
of being cast out in the streets.
Rather than romanticizing ballet, The
Painted Girls underscores the grim
need that fuels the dancers, raw
emotion that found its way into the
works of Degas in violent slashes of
pastel.
What may be most remarkable in the
novel, however, are the relationships
between women. In most novels about
competition between women, the
characters end up bitterly at odds;
yet here the most devoted
friendships are between the female
characters--Marie and her schoolmate
Blanche; Antoinette and the beautiful
prostitute Colette. And the heart
of the novel is the love between the
two sisters, which forms the
bedrock of their lives--and will
become, in a convergence of tragic
events, what is ultimately most at
stake. --Ilana Teitelbaum
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