Who is this girl? The back of the photo says that her name is Martha. Where is she? It looks like she might be at a camp. Where was she heading before she half-turned back to smile for the photographer?

Where is this house? Who lived here? Was it a big family? Did they like to sit on that beautiful porch in the summer? Where do they keep their car(s)? Is this house still standing? Who lives there now?

Who is this man and this woman? How do they know each other? Are they a couple? She has a lovely hat on. Who took the photo? Were they dressed up for an occasion, or did they always dress nicely to go out?

I think Elena Mauli Shapiro and I are kindred spirits, because this type of curiosity is how she wrote the novel 13, rue Thérèse. From the book jacket:

Elena Mauli Shapiro was born and raised in Paris, France, in an apartment below the real-life Louise Brunet’s. Shapiro found herself in possession of a box of Louise’s keepsakes after her neighbor died and no relatives arrived to claim them. These postcards, gloves, photographs, coins, letters, and other mementoes utterly captured her imagination.

So, this novel was right up my alley. Shapiro took the objects left behind and imagined the life of Louise Brunet that surrounded them. Very little is known of the real Louise, but her keepsakes inspired this work of fiction. Printed throughout the novel are color photographs of the actual objects. You can go to http://www.13ruetherese.com to see the objects and learn more about the book.

This novel has:
1. Time Travel
2. Romance
3. Paris
4. Color photographs of real letters and photos

…what’s not to love?

This novel was a lovely and unusual read. I think those who enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will enjoy 13, rue Thérèse. It has the same combination winning combo of historical fiction and wartime letters, but with more passion and mystery. I didn’t want to put it down.

Here are my two favorite lines from the book:

“She leans in and kisses him, kisses his lax and comforting lips. She does love him. Yet she is riddled with flaming foolishness – and she knows such things don’t last, but she cannot accept that such things are false just because they are fleeting.” page 131

“He is driven by something he cannot understand – some unknown thing inside him pushes him on and he yields. It must be that whatever is to follow is already written.” page 191

I can never resist a book about Reading, so when I saw The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, I immediately added it to my Christmas wish list, and Ryan obligingly got it for me. :)

Anyone with fond memories of the heroines that shaped their childhood (or adulthood) reading will adore this book. Each chapter focuses on a different Heroine and what exemplary trait they teach us about.

Heroines discussed:
-Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
-Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God
-Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables
-Celie in The Color Purple
-Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
-Claudine in Colette’s Claudine Novels
-Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind
-Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird
-Laura Ingalls in The Long Winter
-Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre
-Jo March in Little Women
-Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden

The end of each chapter also recommends other “literary sisters” for each heroine, to help you discover other books with excellent Heroines that you may not have discovered yet. Reading this book made me want to re-read or read every single one of the books featured. The Heroine’s Bookshelf is a fun, nostalgic, and quick read, and I highly recommend it.

My favorite literary Heroines growing up were: Betsy Ray, Alice McKinley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anastasia Krupnik, Anne Shirley, and Ramona Quimby. Since then (as an adult), I’ve added: Elizabeth Bennett, Francie Nolan, Jane Eyre, Thursday Next, Jo March, Anne Elliot, Hermoine Granger, Meg Murry, and Auntie Mame.

Who are your favorite Heroines from literature?

I’ll confess this right now: I bought Skippy Dies for the cover. I read the blurbs too, and it sounded like a good book and justified the purchase. But what really sold me on this book, above all the other books I saw while popping in and out of every bookstore I passed in Ireland, was the cover. It’s gorgeous. It’s also, conveniently, a great book. It’s a sprawling tragi-comedy. It might be a little Dickens-esque. I think what I loved above all were the characters – it has a very large cast of them, and it changes point of view frequently. Even the terribly flawed characters are painted with love. I recommend this book for when you’re in the mood for a great big story full of life and sorrow and humor – it will hit the spot. Plus, you’ll be able to gaze at its beautiful cover, a nice bonus.

Here is my favorite passage from the novel:

He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and whatever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely – from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends. (page 300)

I think it says a lot about how good At Home by Bill Bryson is that I was in the middle of it on Tuesday, August 24, when Mockingjay was released, and I didn’t want to put it down to start the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. (I eventually did, because I wanted to hurry up and read Mockingjay along with everyone else, so I could join discussion and avoid spoilers.)

Here’s the book’s description, from Publisher’s Weekly:

Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I’s pilfering of a subject’s silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson’s droll prose–”What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing”–to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors, and I was incredibly excited to read his latest book. I loved being able to snag it early in Ireland while I was there this summer. I am also pleased to report to Bill Bryson’s many other fans out there that this book is just as fantastic as his other books. I loved the concept & format of this book – it’s like taking a guided tour of a house and learning all the pieces of history that combined to make it the way it is today. The amount of interesting information packed into this book is incredible. So much fun to read, highly recommended!

If all non-fiction books were as interesting, readable, and funny as Bill Bryson’s are, I’d probably read a lot more of it. :)

Find this book: IndieBound, Book Depository, Barnes and Noble

Rather than say more, how about some of my favorite passages?

~

Eventually we decided, after much discussion, that our different approaches to character could be seen as a continuum. For me, as a playwright, the creation of a character is like listening to something faint and distant. It’s like trying to remember someone one knew slightly, in passing, a very long time ago, but to remember them so that one knows them better than one knows oneself. It’s like trying to know a family member who died before one was born, from looking at photographs and objects belonging to them; also from hearing the things, often contradictory, that people say about them, the anecdotes told. From this, you try to work out how they might speak and how they might react to any given circumstance, how they would interact with other characters whom one has come to know by the same slow and delicate process. And out of all this comes a play, where, as in life, people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say, where they act against their own best interests and sometimes fail to understand those around them.
pages 7-8

Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.
page 32

When I went back down to the kitchen I was struck by how it had changed since the morning, with the changing light of the day. I had seen this room – and this house – at all seasons, at all times of the day and night. I had been here when the whole place was cocooned with snow. I had seen it by candlelight. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden.
page 159

The seating of the auditorium was arranged in curved rows, and from where I was placed I was able to observe not only the stage but also the audience. I could see all the people by the light of the stage, their rapt faces, the quality of the attention they were giving to what they were watching. Each of them was making their own private connection with the work, each bringing their own experiences and emotions to bear upon the play, to interpret it and integrate it into their own imaginative life. That this was happening in the presence of so many other people was crucial. In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets. That night when Molly appeared as the Duchess, I looked at the audience and I thought, nothing surpasses this.
page 213

Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invent as we go along, almost as a social reflex? Perhaps it is instead the truest thing about us, and it is the revelation of it that is the problem; that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial.
page 214

I had the pleasure of hearing Mary Roach speak at an author breakfast at Book Expo this spring. She is a gifted speaker and tremendously funny. She comes across as very personable and intimate, even when speaking to a room full of hundreds of people. That style comes through in her writing as well, making an essentially scientific book come alive with warmth, humor, and personality.

The focus of Packing for Mars is not on the science of how we space travel, but the science of what happens to humans when we space travel. Topics covered include: selecting astronauts who will thrive in space, motion sickness, hygiene, eating & nutrition, bone loss, surviving malfunctions and re-entry, and (perhaps most humorously) the complications of going to the bathroom in space.

This book is a great read regardless of your level of interest in NASA, space travel, or astronauts. (Although didn’t most of us want to be astronauts at some point?) It’s fascinating to read about the effects being in zero gravity for extended periods of time have on our body and mind. Learning more about how NASA tests these effects on their equipment and astronauts is equally as interesting. And the key selling point to all this is that Mary Roach makes it extremely fun to read.

To read a Teaser Tuesday passage I posted from Packing for Mars, click here.

PACKING FOR MARS GIVEAWAY

To enter to win an review copy signed by Mary Roach, please leave a comment and share what comfort from Earth you would miss most during space travel.

For up to 2 extra chances to win, tweet and/or blog post a link to this giveaway, and leave another comment here with the link(s).

This giveaway will be open through August 18, 2010, and is open worldwide.

A few years ago, a book of humorous essays got a large amount of positive buzz. It was called I Was Told There’d Be Cake. Titles just don’t get much better than that. It also had a fantastic cover. Those three forces combined into one irresistible book, and I immediately bought it, read it, and loved it. Sloane Crosley was also a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor for that collection. I think it was over a year ago that I first heard Sloane Crosley had a second collection in the works, and that news made me incredibly happy.

I’m delighted to report that the new collection, How Did You Get This Number, does not disappoint. It even soars a bit higher in some moments. Not every essay is fantastic, but all are enjoyable. The last two essays are particularly wonderful, about a trip to Paris and a difficult break-up. Good memoirs & essay collections make you feel like the author is an old friend. Even better ones are when you recognize pieces of yourself, especially the silly pieces. For me, Sloane Crosley accomplished both.

I might recommend starting with the first collection, but this collection stands well on its own. I’m also always partial to the order I read things in, probably because I can’t imagine reading them in any other order. :)

One last note: one essay in the collection brings up the classic girl’s slumber party game of the 80s/90s, Girl Talk. I had forgotten all about this amazing/disturbing game. Raise your hand if you remember having to stick a red “zit” sticker on your face or finding out that you were going to have 9 kids because you were born in the month of September.

A few favorite passages:

There’s no way to convince someone that a doll-head chandelier is tasteful. But this one was. (page 64)

“Is that like cartography?” I asked, wondering if there was a use for such a thing anymore. I was under the impression that the world was kind of done, that we had accepted its parameters and moved on. Like ashtrays. Or ketchup. Or bricks. These things were about as good as they were going to get. (page 155)

Extras: Video Trailer, Sloane’s website & tour info

During April, in honor of National Poetry Month, I read 77 Love Sonnets by Garrison Keillor. (Here’s a link to purchase this collection at an Indie Bookstore.) A modern collection of sonnets is, unfortunately, rather hard to come across. I was delighted last year to find out that Garrison Keillor was publishing a collection of his sonnets, and I bought it right away. I had been reading from the collection somewhat sporadically, and decided to read the collection from front to back in April. Many of them are about romantic love, and others are tributes to a variety of other people/things. All of them are lovely.

Here is one of my favorites:

November

How is your bookstore doing? people ask, and I say,
“Holding its own.” And they smile and say, Great.
A bookstore is like an old father. If he has a nice day,
Goes for a walk: fine. It’s enough to perambulate,
No need to run a six-minute mile.
A bookstore is for people who love books and need
To touch them, open them, browse for a while,
And find some common good – that’s why we read.
Readers and writers are two sides of the same gold coin.
You write and I read and in that moment I find
A union more perfect than any club I could join:
The simple intimacy of being one mind.

Here in a book-filled sun-lit room below the street,
Strangers – some living, some dead – are hoping to meet.

Title: The Postmistress
Author: Sarah Blake
Published: 2009
My edition: Putnam Hardcover 2009
Borrowed From: The Hoboken Public Library
Pages: 326

Synopsis (from Strand): As the dawn of World War II sweeps throughout Europe, Americans are still relatively at ease and holding fast to Roosevelt’s promise that we’d be safe at home. Though, one American radio reporter, Frankie Bard, whose been stationed in London is bent on extending warnings to those in Europe and back home. While many of these broadcasts go unheard, Franklin, MA, resident Iris James has heard the call and heeded the warnings. Along with Iris, whose concerns are still veiled behind feelings for a local mechanic, Will and Emma Fitchs’ lives are about to be changed by the warnings as well. In “The Postmistress” author Sarah Blake offers us a novel that shows us 4 lives forever changed and intertwined.

I read this because: I saw about 400 fantastic reviews, and had to check it out for myself. It also sounded like exactly the sort of novel that I would enjoy.

My thoughts: To put it very simply: I love this book. It was almost like I made a checklist of everything I’d love in a novel and Sarah Blake wrote it: Historical fiction, WWII, strong & likable characters, letters, a love story, multiple points of view, a small town on the Eastern seaboard.

I was craving a good novel, too. As much as I adore memoirs, poetry, non-fiction, food writing, short stories, etc; I often need a compulsively readable novel. I want to be told a story. From page one I was completely drawn into this story, and didn’t want to emerge from it to do things like eat, sleep and work.

One thing that this book made me think a lot about is our society’s relationship to the news. There are many people who follow world news extensively, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. (I’ll be the first to admit that I often fall into the latter category.) A common excuse is that “there’s too much sadness & bad news out there.” This book really brings that attitude into perspective, especially through the character Frankie Bard, who travels around Europe riding evacuation trains and interview people to find out their stories. Some (ok, most) of these stories are heartbreaking. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it, there are heartbreaking stories happening all over the world, right now. (The passage I quoted below relates to this.) It doesn’t mean we need to spend our whole life being sad about what happens in other areas of the world, but we can certainly try not to be blind to it, and we can do what’s in our power to be educated about what’s happening and help however possible.

Book club worthy? Yes.

You might like this book if you like: The Help, Water for Elephants and historical fiction in general.

Links to purchase: IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Strand

My favorite passage:

I wanted to write about this somehow – this aspect of war and its terrifying accidents and how we come to terms with the fact that wars are being waged right now, even as I write (and you read) these words. How do we imagine that simultaneity? (page 324, from the afterword)

Extras: Read the first chapter online, BookPage interview with Sarah Blake

Title: Auntie Mame
Author: Patrick Dennis
Published: 1955
My edition: Broadway Books Paperback 2001
Purchased From: Strand
Pages: 299

Synopsis (from Strand): The world’s most beloved, madcap, devastatingly sophisticated, and glamorous aunt, Mame is impossible to resist, and this hilarious story of an orpahned ten-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt is as delicious a read in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s.

I read this because: I saw the copy that my friend Jon was re-reading, and it looked like just the sort of thing I would like too.

My thoughts: I adore Auntie Mame. I can’t believe I had never heard of the books, the movie, or any of the stage adaptations. Thank goodness I’m no longer in the dark. It’s an extremely fun book, and very witty. Auntie Mame is one of the most memorable and likable characters in literature. She’s fabulous, ridiculous, charming, and mischievous. Reading this book is a treat. It’s a great book to read at any time, but would be a particularly good one to read while traveling, or anytime you want a lighthearted (but still smart), funny book to make you smile.

Follow up required: I’m looking forward to reading the other Auntie Mame book: Around the World With Auntie Mame. I am also incredibly excited to see the movie version with Rosalind Russell, which I’m watching later tonight with a few friends.

You might like this book if you like: P. G. Wodehouse

Links to purchase: IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Book Depository, Strand

My favorite passage:

By one o’clock there were more than a hundred and twenty relatives milling around Peckerwood, all talking, and all talking loud. Mrs. Burnside indicated her disapproval of all this with a fanfaronade of flatulence. (page 70)