Archive for May, 2009

Today at Book Expo one of the galleys I got was Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. However – it’s not a traditionally galley – it’s an e-book download.

I went ahead and downloaded it when I got home, and I have it open now. I almost started reading it. It’s just over 100 pages, so it wouldn’t be too bad to read at my computer. I’m so excited about the thought of another excellent children’s novel by Neil Gaiman – I really want to read it! It doesn’t come out until September!

But when I started reading page 1, I realized that I couldn’t commit yet. I really want to read this, and yet I feel like something’s missing. As early as page 1, I felt like I was getting a scaled down experience (and not because it’s a galley). I wanted the actual book in my hands. I want the tangible paper in my hands. I want to be able to stuff my nose into the spine and smell the new book smell if I want to. I want a cup of coffee in the other hand. I want to feel the paper between my fingers as I turn the pages. I want to read the book.

As cool and as fabulous as it would be to read it now, and not wait until September, I don’t know if I can do it. I’m really excited for this book, and I don’t want the experience to come up short because I read it on a screen.

I know this is an obnoxious dilemma to have, and I apologize for that. And I really do understand why publishers would use e-books for galleys – they give them away for free, and printing is expensive. I just need to decide whether I’ll bite the bullet and read this as an e-book (and if I do – I promise to post a review), or wait until I can buy a pretty copy in the store.
Previously posted: Why I won’t switch to digital books.

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Lisa See

The Lisa See event last night was excellent. It’s wonderful to hear her speak about her books and the research that goes into them, and her family.

I tried to scribble down notes to share with all of you, and sort of succeeded. I definitely don’t have anywhere close to everything that she spoke about, nor are my notes nearly as eloquent as her storytelling was. Here are my notes, and apologies that they are sort of a hodge-podge.

When she began to think about writing this book, she knew she was interested in writing about three things:
1. Her Great-Grandfather brought a lot of “paper” merchants into the country, and his wife was a paper wife.
2. After the second major fire in China City, only one building remained intact. Her family moved their store into this building, and she spent a lot of time there as a child.
3. The confession program in the late 1950s that targeted the Chinese in America. People were asked to confess that they were here illegally, and by doing so were promised citizenship. The catch was that you were expected to rat out your neighbors and even your family members. You hit the jackpot if you could identify someone else as being a “communist.” This program destroyed communities and families.

-Many people who lived through the Confession Program don’t like to talk about it (understandably). However, some people were willing to talk about it, and Lisa See heard many of their stories. One man who now lives in Washington DC had a family – 5 kids (all born in the US) and his wife. He confessed to try to gain citizenship for his family, but his wife was deported. They fought in court for 8 years before they won. Another example was a man now in his 80s – he and his brother went together to confess to get their citizenship. 52 years later – they have never told their children or their grandchildren that they came here illegally before eventually confessing for their citizenship. The reason? They feel that since they aren’t dead yet, it’s still not safe for them to tell.

-The deepest part of Shanghai Girls is about the sense of loss that we feel for people we no longer have in our lives. People who are gone, who we’ve lost; places that we can never go back to and wouldn’t recognize even if we could.

-She and Amy Tan recently went to China together to do some research in some of the smaller villages. They lived in the same house and traveled together. In a few years when the books that each of them were researching come out it will be interesting to see what the books are like and how they each used the same experience in different ways.

And – perhaps the most important thing I learned last night (and important to others who have already read Shanghai Girls) – her next book is in fact a sequel.

Shanghai Girls – Signed by Lisa See

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Shanghai Girls: A Novel

Lisa See

Last year I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and then ran right out to get Peony in Love when I was finished. Since then I’ve been eagerly waiting for her latest book, Shanghai Girls, and was very happy to have an advance copy to read and review over the holiday weekend.

Shanghai Girls is another engaging and fascinating novel from Lisa See. I love how much I learn about Chinese culture and history when I read Lisa See’s novels.

This novel is set just before, during, and after WWII, and takes us on a journey with two sisters from Shanghai as they are forced to leave their country and everything they’ve ever known and start a new life in the United States. (You can read a longer description of the plot, from the jacket copy, here.)

I loved the time period this was set in, and it was interesting to compare what I learned about 17th & 19th century Chinese culture in Snow Flower and Peony in Love with Chinese culture & traditions in the 1940s. Arranged marriages and foot-binding may have been (mostly) outdated, but their rich traditions and culture still thrive.

This is the perfect summer read – a page turner that you wont be able to put down, with the wonderful bonus of being very educational as well. You’ll most likely learn a lot about what life was like for a Chinese-American family during the war and the subsequent Red Scare.

If you’d like a sample, you can read the first chapter on Lisa’s website. There’s also a Q&A with Lisa See posted on her site.

I’m seeing Lisa See tomorrow night at her event at the Barnes and Noble on the UWS. Very excited!

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My new job involves working with social media, and I’m now using Facebook and Twitter for both personal and work networking.

I am really enjoying it – it’s very fun.

However, I feel like my current Twitter account is unfocused. I was mainly using it to write about books and reading (much like this blog) as well as other personal stuff like movies, music, etc. But now that I use that one for work, I felt like I should have another account where I only tweet about books and reading. The main reason is that I felt like I couldn’t update as much as I’d like (extremely often) about books to the main account, since more and more people are following me there for other reasons. So I made a second account:

NEW – http://twitter.com/emilylovesbooks – tweets about books I’m currently reading, book quotes, updates on book sales or shopping, author events, etc. Any and all things related to books and reading.

ORIGINAL – http://twitter.com/chowmeyow – tweets about what I’m doing, traveling, movies, music, links to fun stuff on the internet, and links to articles about social media

If you already follow me at chowmeyow, I hope you’ll continue, and I’d love to connect with you all on emilylovesbooks as well. :)

I hope this isn’t too annoying, the goal is to tweet more in general, now that I can focus what I’m posting on each account.

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This will be the 3rd summer that I’ve made a Summer Reading List of books to read. It’s not an all-inclusive list, I always leave myself room to choose other books as well. This summer I’m leaving myself a lot of room to choose. I want to read a lot of books this summer, so I don’t want to limit myself by feeling like I have to stick to a list.

So I only chose four books for my list this year. They are classics, and they are books I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while.

I have from the start of Memorial Day weekend (Friday May 22) to the end of Labor Day (Monday September 7) to complete the goal. Here are the books:

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour and Introduction by J. D. Salinger
The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Summer Reading List

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I’m very happy with this list, and excited for these and all the other books waiting for me and the warm summer months to read them in. :)

What’s on your summer reading list?

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James Taylor

Last year Emma and I decided we wanted to try hard to see James Taylor live in 2009. When his tour was announced, we were a little bummed that there were no east coast stops, or Michigan stops. I was willing to plan a visit to Michigan around a concert date, and if he had an east coast date then Emma could try to come out for that (though her schedule isn’t as flexible during the school year since she’s a teacher). The two closest stops were Indiana and Milwaukee. Milwaukee seemed like the most fun (and it’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit). Plus, Milwaukee’s date was on a Saturday, and Indiana’s was on a Tuesday night.

Having decided on Milwaukee, I was determined to get us good seats. I didn’t want us to drive 4.5 to 5 hours to sit in the balcony. Luckily, the presale was for Citibank credit card holders, and I have a Citibank card. I bought the tickets the second the presale started, and got us 3rd row seats! :) We were super excited.

Milwaukee

So we set out that Saturday morning, very early, to get to Milwaukee with time to explore before the show. We had our favorite bagels (Bruegger’s – which Emma and I both adore and don’t live near a location anymore), and went book shopping, sightseeing, etc. We had an excellent dinner at a place called Capone’s.

Milwaukee Theatre

We got to our seats at the Milwaukee Theatre about 7:58. I sat back and relaxed, and then noticed something very weird. Every single seat was filled. Normally people trickle into concerts during the first hour, to avoid being bored during the opening act. I’ve never been one to subscribe to that, since I’ve seen many excellent opening acts, some of whom went on to become famous themselves (most notably Andrew Bird). People who came late to the Flight of the Conchords show at Radio City missed a fantastic stand up routine by Kristen Schaal. But usually that’s how it is – the house doesn’t fill up until the “real” show starts. I began to wonder if these people knew something I didn’t, and sure enough – they did. James Taylor doesn’t need an opening act. He and his band came right out, and they played two full sets, with an intermission in-between. It was spectacular. He played almost all of my favorite songs, including: Up on the Roof, Your Smiling Face, You Can Close Your Eyes, How Sweet it is to be Loved by You, Fire and Rain, Hound Dog, You’ve Got a Friend, and Sweet Baby James.

People kept hollering for certain songs, and James was very funny and gracious – and ended up holding up the giant, two sided set list and showing it to us to promise that we’d get to the favorites.

James Taylor

He also signed autographs almost the entire length of the intermission – what a guy. Emma and I felt like the only people in the orchestra section who had never been to a James Taylor concert before. Fortunately, we won’t have to feel that way next time we see him, and we can’t wait. We’re definitely planning on seeing him again – it was a fantastic show.

Here are more photos:

James Taylor

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James Taylor

Here are all my photos from the show: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=james%20taylor&w=58887120%40N00

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table

Molly Wizenberg

I heard many good things about A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, and when I was shopping at Barnes and Noble while in Michigan I couldn’t resist it any longer. That was the first time I actually picked it up and flipped through it, and I immediately knew it would be a book that I loved.

From the book jacket:

When Molly Wizenberg’s father died of cancer, everyone told her to go easy on herself, to hold off on making any major decisions for a while. But when she tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, she knew it wasn’t possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was not in her studies but in the kitchen.

At first, it wasn’t clear where this epiphany might lead. Like her long letters home describing the details of every meal and market, Molly’s blog Orangette started out merely as a pleasant pastime. But it wasn’t long before her writing and recipes developed an international following. Every week, devoted readers logged on to find out what Molly was cooking, eating, reading, and thinking, and it seemed she had finally found her passion. But the story wasn’t over: one reader in particular, a curly-haired, food-loving composer from New York, found himself enchanted by the redhead in Seattle, and their email correspondence blossomed into a long-distance romance.

In A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother’s pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined. You won’t be able to decide whether to curl up and sink into the story or to head straight to the market to fill your basket with ingredients for Cider-Glazed Salmon and Pistachio Cake with Honeyed Apricots.

I did not want this lovely book to end. I love memoirs that center around food and recipes, and this is one of the best ones I’ve read. I’m happy that she also blogs so I can look forward to more stories and recipes from her coming into my feed reader. I also can’t wait to try many of the recipes she includes.

Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from the book:

“My ex-boyfriend Lucas liked a band called Dirty Three. I was always fond of that name, especially for a kind of melancholic, unshaven trio, which is what they are, but they had an album title that was even better. It was called Whatever You Love, You Are. Isn’t that perfect? That album title is probably a good part of why we got together – he told me about it on our first date – but I figure it’s as valid a reason as any. I mean, think about it: whatever you love, you are. I want to believe in that.” (page 153)

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys memoirs, especially food memoirs. It’s wonderful.

EDIT: I also found this link where you can read all of her monthly columns for Bon Appetit Magazine.

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Ryan had to stay in NY during my recent trip to Michigan and the road trip to Milwaukee, so I had fun keeping him updated on what I was up to by sending him photos from my iPhone. I think the collection is a decent summary of the trip – though it skews a little food heavy, since food tends to be happily photogenic. I’ll do a separate post with better (ie not taken on the iPhone) photos from the James Taylor concert too.

Just wanted to post a quick update:

I got back from Michigan late Sunday night, and have been pretty swamped since then.

I still need to respond to many comments, and catch up on my neighbor’s posts. More posts will come soon, and I have lots of pictures from the trip. Planning on catching up on everything over the weekend.

I hope everyone is having a lovely week!

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The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet

Reif Larsen

I love when I book I impulsively purchase out of the blue turns out to be a new favorite.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is probably not a perfect novel. I can imagine there are some persnickety readers who would not like certain aspects of it. I can see how there might be some sections/elements that some people might think don’t belong, or should have been handled differently. However, I loved every part of the book, exactly as it was. I think everything in it adds to the richness of the story.

It’s such a pleasure to find youself 100% engrossed in a novel and its plot. So much so that you don’t want to put it down for a minute, and you want to ignore whatever responsibilities you have and just run away with the book to a park bench or cafe and continue reading until the last page. I love reading, but I certainly don’t have that experience with every novel I start. I actually felt sad when I finished – I didn’t want to say goodbye to T. S. Spivet.

I have so many favorite lines and passages from this book, but I’ve tried to list a just a few that make sense out of context and that don’t contain spoilers:

“Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge.”  (page 90-91)

“I laid out all of my food. My heart sank. There was just not that much of it. If I was a hero, a cowboy, I would be able to last three weeks on this meager pile of granola bars and fruit that was before me. But I was not a cowboy. I was a little boy with a hyperactive metabolism. When I was hungry, my brain slowly began to shut down one section at a time: first I lost my mastery of social niceties, then I lost my ability to multiply, then I lost my capacity to speak in complete sentences, and so on. When Gracie rang the dinner bell, you could often find me gently rocking back and forth out on the back porch, famished and delusional, emitting little chickadee noises.” (page 111)

“I was really enjoying watching this scene of domesticity and sibling cooperation in the back of the minivan. It was better than television. It was like peeking into a world that had always been but that I would only be privy to for a couple of seconds, like passing a conversation on the street in which you only heard one line of dialogue, but it was an extremely choice line of dialogue, like: ‘And ever since that night, my mother’s had a thing for submarines.’” (page 115)

For those of you who’ve already read the book (or anyone not afraid of minor spoilers) Amazon has a great review that includes a short essay by Reif Larsen about the process of illustrating the book, and includes 5 illustrations that didn’t make it into the final edition. http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Works-T-S-Spivet/dp/1594202176/

Also, for those who have read it, here’s a great Powel’s interview with Reif Larsen (contains spoilers). Definitely worth reading. One cool part is that Reif Larsen says the book originally had an afterword, that provided more information on what happens to T. S., and that cutting that was the hardest part. He said that the book’s website will have clues on how to find that content – it will be hidden on the site. How fun! I’ve looked but haven’t found it yet. It looks like the full site is still being updated, there are some “coming soon” areas.

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