What are you reading?

[Enchantress]

Firstly 'Spilling Clarence' by Anne Ursu. I'm only up to chapter three at the moment, but I'm looking forward to getting more into this one. Secondly, 'Martin Sloane' by Michael Redhill. Another obscure pick, but I'm enjoying it as well. And then there's the final book in the Sookie Stackhouse series (the books that True Blood is based off), Dead Ever after by Charlaine Harris. This one is on my Nook and I'm savouring every last page. I think I'll be sad when I am through. But then again, maybe I'll just start book one and read them all over again!

There, I officially have a plan. Or, I could read the 17 other books that I have on the shelf. I confess, I'm a book hoarder ...

[Venus007]

Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

[~baby~doll~]

Just started



i have read two others in the series and loved them.

[ONLY]

Last night I started "Catching Fire" by Suzanne Collins, the 2nd book of "The Hunger Games"

[Kenna]

Foxfire....

[Kobi]

The cancer chronicles : unlocking medicine's deepest mystery / George Johnson.

When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way--an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.

[Kätzchen]

I had time today to stop by a local library and while browsing books to read, I came across two books to check out, tonight. I am beginning this one tonight:

Arlen, Alice (2000). She Took To The Woods: A Biography and Selected Writings by Louise Dickenson Rich. Rockport, Maine: Down East Books.

Here's an excerpt from the Introduction to this biography about wilderness writer Louise Dickenson Rich (I read it on my way home tonight by train and I'm already hooked):

"My acquaintence with wilderness writer Louise Dickenson Rich began years ago in the midst of research I was doing for a book on traditional Maine sporting camps. I heard her name and glanced down the "Carry Road" (originally a canoe portage trail) leading to her place by the Rapid River in the Rangely Lakes region of western Maine. I also took note of a log home occupied, I was informed, by Louise's longtime friend and neighbor, Alys Parsons. At that point, though, there were places to go, people and a deadline to meet, so I moved on.

My sporting camp book came out and I started recieving mail from readers. Several petitioned, "Please write a book about Louise Dickenson Rich." A librarian from the Midwest was very specific:
"We Took to the Woods (the 1942 best-seller that launched Rich's career) is still checked out on a regular basis. There has never been a biography written about her and I feel you are the person to do it."

I started to pay attention.

Soon I was stumbling into Louise wherever I went..... " (pp. vii).

Alice then goes on to talk about how she finally won the support of Louise's brother, Ralph, who sent Alice to see his sister, who eventually gave her a bag of notions belonging to Louise. It's going to obviously be a riveting account of LDR's life and times in the wild's of Maine; but to become more intimately aquainted with who LDR is and her style of writing and what she wrote about, years ago, is toward the back of the book, which includes titles, such as: Fogbound, Wish You Were Here, First Monday in March, Written in the Stars, Grandma and the Seagull, The Red Slipper, Can't Find My Apron Strings and more. Then, the reader is treated to unpublished writings belonging to LDR and a conclusion which is followed by an expansive index (appendice).

I'm looking forward to snuggling down with this particular book over the next few nights and into the coming weekend.

ps/ the photo below was taken last night by an photographer who is native to my home state of Oregon: It's rare for us to even witness the Northern Lights in our area, but he took this picture on the high desert, on a lonely road outside of Bend, Oregon. It's already snowing in our 'neck' of the woods (winter is here).

[Bad_boi]

Eragon book 1.

[sis]

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller ...... I found a book group here in Guangzhou that meets once a month! I. Am. So. Excited!

Deb

[PoeticSilence]

Shuntaro Tanikawa: Selected Poems


Editorial Reviews-


From Publishers Weekly

Author of more than 60 books of poetry, Tanikawa is perhaps Japan's most well-known and accomplished living poet, and garnered a 1989 American Book Award for the Floating the River in Melancholy, a fully translated single volume now out of print. This first U.S. selected edition, translated by American ex-pat William Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura (who together edit a Yokohama literary journal), draws from 11 volumes spanning five decades of quotidian-based, wryly self-conscious work. While the surface of Tanikawa's poetry in these translations is practically hyper-literal ("I eat loquats,/ to do which/ I have to peel them;/ to peel them,/ I need hands"), the mind behind them is distinctly concerned with the shapes and inadequacies of meaning, and how it can be produced for an audience larger than one. At times, Tanikawa's awareness of his own practice is startlingly frank: "It is not clear what materials and techniques will go into the writing of this composition called `Starvation', and furthermore I doubt that it will stand as a valid composition." Tanikawa is clearly interested in a poetry that is colloquial at its core (he is the Japanese translator of the late Charles Schulz's Peanuts strip), free of traditional Japanese forms and interested in Western culture, though certainly not derivative of Western poetries. His sense of humor ultimately cuts through the questions of translation and cultural and linguistic differences to display the brooding charm that has won Tanikawa such acclaim: "I feel that I'd like being trapped forever/ but the snare rejects me humourlessly,/ pushing me back to the native milieu of people/ where humour is the only refuge." North American readers will find this a welcome refuge indeed.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc

[Kätzchen]

Was very tired last night when I made my former post above:

It's LDR's son Rufus - not Ralph (Louise and Ralph lived together) - that Alice Arlen, author of the aforementioned book that I am reading, was prompted to visit, in leiu of finding out more about the life of Louise Dickenson Rich (who turns out to be related to Emily Dickenson).

[homoe]

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

[ONLY]

Originally Posted by ONLY

Last night I started "Catching Fire" by Suzanne Collins, the 2nd book of "The Hunger Games"

Just finished "Catching Fire" now I have started "To Kill A Mockingbird" then probably will read the 3rd book of Hunger Games.

[puddin']

jus' finished "a lion among men" (3rd book in da wicked years series)

gettin' ready to start "the dangerous islands", by ann bridge

[StillettoDoll]

check it out

[Kobi]

The baby business : how money, science, and politics drive the commerce of conception / Debora L. Spar.

Debora Spar argues that it is time to acknowledge the commercial truth about reproduction and to establish a standard that governs its transactions. In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, she combines pioneering research and interviews with the industry’s top reproductive scientists and trailblazers to provide a first glimpse at how the industry works: who the baby-makers are, who makes money, how prices are set, and what defines the clientele. Fascinating stories illustrate the inner workings of market segments--including stem cell research, surrogacy, egg swapping, #147;designer babies,” adoption, and human cloning--as Spar explores the moral and legal challenges that industry players must address.

The first purely commercial look at an industry that deals in humanity’s most intimate issues, this book challenges us to consider the financial promise and ethical perils we’ll face as the baby business moves inevitably forward.

---------------------------
Wonder women : sex, power, and the quest for perfection / Debora L. Spar.


Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act, why are women still living in a man's world?Debora L. Spar spent most of her life avoiding feminism. Raised after the tumult of the '60s, she presumed that the gender war was over; she swore to young women that yes, they could have it all. "We thought we could glide into the new era with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," she writes. "We were wrong." Spar should know. One of the first women professors at Harvard Business School, she went on to have three children and became the chair of her department. Now she's the president of Barnard College, arguably the most important all-women school in the country, an institution firmly committed to feminism. Wonder Women is Spar's story and the culture's. Armed with reams of new research, she examines how women's lives have-and have not-changed over the past forty years. The challenges confronting women are more complex than ever. They're problems that come inherently and inevitably from being female. Yet they're falling on generations of women who grew up believing that none of these things are supposed to matter now. Wonder Women gives us an important voice in an increasingly heated debate. In this wise, often funny, always human, and smartly conceived book, Spar asks: How far have women really come? And what will it take to get true equality for good?

[~baby~doll~]

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

In my eyes a somewhat sad biography of three women lost in history, Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland. All lesbian, all talented. They faded into the setting as less than glossy and memorable.

Follows is a review I liked from Amazon.

Each of these three women have receded in popular memory, and it is exactly this loss of fame which has attracted Lisa Cohen. Esther Murphy lived and conversed with many of the transcendent minds of her time in the first half of the 20th century. She started many a monologue with "all we know" and proceeded to share the extensive research and thought on a particular subject. Her passion was Madame de Maintenant whose biography she never finished. Mercedes de Acosta was the perhaps the prototype fan. She was obsessed with Garbo with whom she had a short affair. But her gift was in the appreciation and promotion of talent as she found it. Finally Madge Garland, a pivotal founder of British Vogue. She was linked with the Bloomsbury group and enmeshed the magazine with their creation as people of fashion and their contributions to the magazine. Huxley once asked her, "Are you dressed like that because you're on Vogue, or are you on Vogue, or are you on Vogue because you're dressed like that?"

This book is one Publisher's Weekly's top 10 books of 2012. In "All We Know", we see a history of modernism as seen by three women who lived at a time that the contributions of women were often considered to be correctly in the unsung category. All three were gay and had their lives judged in that light often to their detriment. All three were touched by alcohol in an era of the great social experiment. Temperance failed to the point that alcohol became key in the lives of public figures. Lisa Cohen shrived to make their lives visible again. This book then, in part, is a philosophical exercise in the examination of the person who left accomplishment rather than fame.

The writing is rich and draws a detailed view of a world of women in the twenties.

Enjoy!

[puddin']

finished "the dangerous islands.

now beginnin' "plan a, plan b, plan c (just in case)", by lois cahall

[Medusa]

LSAT prep manuals.

[Scots_On_The_Rocks]

Still working on "How Few Remain" by Harry Turtledove

Getting Ready to Start on "The Unfinished Tales" and "History of Middle-Earth" by J.R.R. Tolkien