Archive for August, 2008

Interested in reading a blog that was written 70 years ago? The Orwell Prize has created a site that is reposting all of George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. The entries were written between August 1938 to October 1942, and will be reposted on the blog on the same days of the month that he wrote each entry. I think this is idea is so much fun! Big thanks to my Rory’s Book Club friend Carma for sharing the link.

Amanda, from the blog Life and Times of a “New” New Yorker that I recently discovered, wrote a fun post that continues the theme of buying books you already own. I’ll let you click through to find out what novel she likes to collect. :)

NY Mag’s Vulture blog posted a funny list today of Ten Other Entertainment Events That Should Happen Once Every Four Years.

I’m pining for this set of four Gothic Dessert Plates. (found on MightyGoods)

My favorite design blog, Design*Sponge, has a great recurring feature called “sneak peeks” that consist of many photos of designer’s or artist’s homes. I almost always like the home featured, but today’s I positively adore. I’d move in right now if I could. The house itself is amazing and the decor is exceedingly charming.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Occasionally I buy a new copy of a book I already own. The reason I do this is usually one of these three reasons:

1. There’s an author event coming up that I plan to attend, and I’ll buy a nice hardcover copy to replace my paperback copy.

2. The author is one of my favorites, and I’ve found a really cool other edition of one of their works. This happens most frequently with Kurt Vonnegut books – I own a lot of new Dial paperbacks that all have similar covers with the V. Strand often has very old (not first editions or first printings, but old nonetheless), very cool hardcover copies that came out within a few years of the original edition. They sell them for $7.50, and I’m always thrilled when I find one I don’t have. In fact, they are holding just such a copy of Breakfast of Champions for me, which I’m going to try to pick up tomorrow.

3. I’ve found a very cheap copy (usually 50 cents or 1 dollar) of a book I absolutely love. I usually find these at Friends of the Library book sales. Often, I give these copies to my good friends – happy to find a cheap copy of one of my favorite books to share with others. However, since I give them away, it doesn’t really count as buying a copy of a book I already own, since I wouldn’t count new books that I bought as gifts. The occasions where it does count though, is when I buy a copy under the same circumstances, but plan on keeping it as a “lending copy.” I don’t like to lend books generally, which is horrid but true. Especially nice copies or my favorite books. I’ve found out too many times the hard way that many other people don’t have high standards of taking care of other people’s books. I’ve gotten copies back that I lent out like new, and they’ve come back months later with dozens of dog-eared pages, bent covers, and blackend edges. But I still like to share books with friends, so if I see a super cheap copy of a great book, I’ll buy it and lend it. I just did that with The History of Love by Nicole Krause. I have lots of friends at work who read, and I’ve been passing the book around from person to person.

So now I’ve willingly admitted that I’m completely obsessed with books and book collecting, not just reading. (Though if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you probably already know that.) My love of reading is the force behind my love of book collecting, but I am aware that it’s still a huge fixation.

If I buy another copy of a book for any of the reasons listed above, I don’t list them in my monthly Polysyllabic Spree posts. This is because the intent of my Polysyllabic Spree is to track the flow of books acquired (books to read) verses books I’ve read. Buying another copy of something I already own does not affect this, so I omit them. I also don’t list children’s picture books, mainly because they can be read in about 5 minutes, and I don’t want to falsely inflate my book read list.

Anyway, the reason behind all this back story, is that I want to start posting pictures of some of the cool old editions I find. When I was visiting in Boston a few weeks ago, I went to a great used book store in Concord called Books With A Past. I found two wonderful old copies of J. D. Salinger books.

The first is a Modern Library edition of Nine Stories. It was $10.

Nine Stories

The second was a very old, beat up paperback of The Catcher in the Rye. It seems very appropriate to have an ancient copy that was used in a high school, well worn from many adolescent reads. Despite how beat up the cover is and the markings, the book is in pretty good condition. It’s not falling apart at the seams, and the text is clean and has no writing or underlining. It looks like it’s the 25th printing of the Bantam paperback, printed in August 1969. It was only $1.50.

Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye

I will post some picture of Breakfast of Champions after I get it, and maybe I’ll occasionally post pictures of some of the other old Vonneguts I’ve collected.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

Stephenie Meyer

When something gets a lot of hype, I tend to get a little resistant to it unless I’m already “a part of it” – so to speak. I got into Harry Potter just a smidge before the maddness, so I was able to unabashedly join the mayham. I still have not, however, seen Titanic.

The main reason I have not read the Twilight series though, despite the fact that I love YA Lit, is that I am uninterested and indifferent to vampires, and for a long time the Twilight books were just vampire books to me. It was easy to keep up this mindset since I have a lot of other books and media to consume and distract me from anything I’m not interested in.

However, the hype for the fourth and final book, Breaking Dawn, that was released Saturday made me miss the Harry Potter release parties and the fun and anticipation surrounding the release of a long awaited next installment. Plus, I began to admit that there must be more to the Twilight books than just vampires, since so many of my trusted reading buddies on RBC have read and loved the series.

I picked up Twilight, the first book in the series, at a bookstore last week and read a few pages from the middle. It seemed like I would enjoy it. What completely sold me on trying out the series was that Amazon had the paperback on sale for only $6. It arrived today, and I intend to read it this month. I’ll post about it as soon as I finish it.

The only thing that’s a little discouraging is that I’ve seen a lot of very negative reviews of Breaking Dawn so far. If I do like Twilight, it will be a bummer to read the whole series and be unsatisfied with the final book. I have not yet heard the thoughts of RBCers that have finished the book though, and I’m very interested in hearing what they think. So if you are one of the RBCers I’m talking about, I hope you’ll leave me a comment when you’re done with Breaking Dawn and let me know if you liked it. Especially since I will probably be wary of the threads about it in the forum, since I won’t want to see spoilers. :)

…………

Today I got thinking about my resistance to “hype” because I read a blog post on a publishing company’s blog by a girl who is considering giving the Twilight saga a try. Like me, hype can turn her away from trying something. Despite deciding to possibly read Twilight, she said in the post that she still maintains a strict “no-harry-potter-4-life” policy. (The publishing company’s blog that I was reading obviously wasn’t Scholastic or Bloomsbury.) Reading that, my first thought was how narrow minded and ridiculous she sounded to me. How sad to deny something to yourself (even if you don’t realize you’re missing out) just because it’s popular. I felt bad for her, because I know what a special place Hogwarts and the entire HP world holds in my heart, and how I feel cozy and contented just by picking up any one of the seven books and reading. How sad to not even give it a chance, to just read the first book, only because it’s hyped. After reading that post, I made a concious decision to make more of an effort not to get discouraged by hype. I know it’s said often – but things that are wildly popular are wildly popular for a reason: many people love whatever it is, and chances are you might too.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even watch Titanic someday soon. :)

PS – I just read the blog post I referenced above, and I’m not actually sure it’s a girl writing it. So just thought I should put that disclaimer out there.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Books Purchased: July 2008

Books Purchased:
*The Hours by Michael Cunningham
*The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
*The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
*Lanterns and Lances by James Thurber
*The Road by Cormac McCarthy
*From Time to Time by Jack Finney
*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood
*Jeeves and the Tie That Binds by P. G. Wodehouse
*The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
*Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
*Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
*The Inn at Lake Divine by Elinor Lipman
*The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
*The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
A Taxonomy of Barnacles by Galt Niederhoffer
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman (not pictured, at work)
The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins
Novel Destinations by Shannon McKenna Schmidt & Joni Rendon
A Reader’s Delight by Noel Perrin
Shelf Life by Suzanne Strempek Shea
Who the Hell is Pansy O’Hara? by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy
A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick

*This list is pretty embarrassing in size, but in my defense a great number of these were purchased for $1 or $2 at the Friends bookstores at the Kalamazoo Public Library and East Lansing Public Library, or acquired with trade in credit from the Book Nook in Cadillac, Michigan. I’ve put an asterisk by all books I got for $2 or less, or with credit. I also got great deals on all the others (except the last two).

Books Read: July 2008

Books Read:
American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (re-read)
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Emma by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Here are some thoughts on the books I’ve read that I haven’t already blogged about:

American Bloomsbury was fascinating.. I read some user reviews on Amazon and apparently there are a few factual errors in the book, which is disappointing. Apparently later editions of the book correct the errors. Nevertheless, I loved the book, and I plan on reading many more books about Literary Concord.

Little Heathens is a memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm during the depression. Times were certainly tough for everyone’s finances, but it seems like living on a farm ensured that everyone had plenty to eat, despite any economic problems. What makes Little Heathens so fun is that it’s not a downer depression-era book. Mildred Armstrong Kalish had an absolutely wonderful childhood on the farm, and she lovingly describes her daily life, family members, and the farm.

July marked one year since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I was thinking about this and realized that I had not re-read it since I marathon read it in less than 24 hours after it was released. So I decided to re-read it, trying to go a little slower this time. I still found myself rapidly turning the pages during the tense parts, unable to slow down because I got so caught up in the action. I had so much fun reading this again. It made me want to re-read the entire series again, 1 through 7, like I did leading up to the release last year. I think I’ll wait a bit longer to do that, since I need to tackle these huge stacks of un-read books.

The Code of the Woosters was my first Wodehouse. The first of many, many more that I plan to read because this one was so hilarious. It’s wonderful to discover you love an author that wrote close to 100 books.

Embroideries was an impulse buy at Strand one day, and I read half of it on the train home. It’s a short little book, I would describe it as graphic novel equivalent of an essay. I really liked it though, and recommend it to fans of Persepolis.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was amazing. It was a little strange to read, since lately I’ve been reading much longer short stories. I had to adjust to how short his stories are, and how inconclusive most of them are. But I love his style, and I like how human they are. It’s like peeking in the windows of strangers at night. The details vanish before you’re tired of the subject, but what you see is always real and fascinating. I need to purchase his other collections. It’s a bit odd that there’s no mammoth collection of complete stories. Or maybe there is and I just haven’t seen it.

I got through most of A Natural History of the Senses right after I got it, and then somehow got sidetracked with 72 pages left. I picked it up at the end of this month and finished it. I love her writing style and it fits perfectly with the subject matter of this non-fiction tribute to the five senses.

The Jane Austen Book Club was a treat after reading all six of Jane Austen’s novels. I’ve been wanting to read it since seeing the movie (which I loved), but I wanted to read her entire oeuvre first. It was an extremely cozy book to read, and made me wish my best friends were closer so we could do the same thing.

The wonderful thing about Jhumpa Lahiri is that a reader who has never read one of her books could pick up any one of her three books and be wowed and want to read the others. They all are fabulous and hold up in comparison to each other. Many of my favorite authors have one or two books that are better than the others and that I would recommend others to read first. I loved Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake so much that I should have been antsy about Unaccustomed Earth. But for some reason I wasn’t; I trusted her and she didn’t let me down. My favorite stories were the last three in the collection, the ones about Hema and Kaushik that broke my heart. Overall, I’m partial to The Namesake, most likely because it’s the only novel and I got more attached to Gogol, but I highly recommend all three of her books, in any order.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)