I Heartily Disagree

Why You Should Throw Books Out, by Tyler Cowen

So you have to ask yourself -- this book -- is it better on average than what an attracted reader might otherwise spend time with? No I'm not encouraging "censorship" of any particular point of view, but even within any particular point of view most books simply aren't that good. These books are traps for the unwary. A lot of books don't make the cut of "above average to those readers they will attract" and of course since you've spent some time with the volume you ought to be in a position to know.

I donate my books to the Nova House book sale every year. They raise a lot of money for abused women and children and it's an easy way for me to help.

Story House

Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor's sophomore novel, Story House, has all the wonderful qualities that made his first novel, Stanley Park, such an engaging reading experience. In fact there are several similar themes: work (architecture rather than cooking this time), the father-son relationship and Vancouver . When I read the initial reviews I was a little turned off by the description of a boxing match the architect father, Packer Gordon, had arranged between his two adolescent sons. The boys, half-brothers, had a complicated and rocky relationship and their father misguidedly felt a violent physical encounter would ameliorate the fractiousness. He engaged a retired fighter, Pogey Nealon, to teach them how to box then put them in the ring together. Needless to say this encounter does not remedy their enmity toward each other. I don't like boxing in books or movies or real life and I certainly don't like the idea of a retired boxer with a cliched name like Pogey but this book is not about boxing although the match is pivotal and sets the scene for everything that follows. The characters are unusual but well drawn and their interactions are complex. Add a bit of fishing, criminal activity and a reality TV show about architecture and you have a mix that is intelligent and imaginative. I recommend it.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp book covers from 1954 :

"They are from the 1954 Signet paperback edition, and are quite unlike the covers for any other editions that I've seen for Orwell's most well-known novel, which tend toward minimalism, with the numerical title almost always taking up the majority of the space."

Brief, Bitter, Bierce

On this day in 1842, the writer-reporter-wit Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio.

One of my favourites

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The reluctant propagandist

"Declared unfit for military service, Dylan Thomas spent much of the war writing film and radio scripts for the Ministry of Information. One of these, The Art of Conversation, is published here for the first time."

A wee bit of Joyce on Bloomsday

Via Nag on the Lake

The Power of Books

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Food for thought

"From chewing matches to leaving cups of tea to go cold, eleven writers reveal their unusual naughty nibbles."

Girls Without Heads

Trend Alert: Chick Lit Cover Girls, Without Heads


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Festivalandco

Shakespeare and Co in Paris is holding its third annual literary festival June 12-15. It will celebrate the theme of “Real Lives.”

Wish I could be there but alas I'll have to wait until September to return to my favourite city.

Festivalandco

March

Geraldine Brooks has taken Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and has imagined this marginal character into the stuff of a novel. Little Women was a favourite of mine when I was a little girl but, as I grew a little older, I found it unbearably saccharine. Brooks halves the sugar content by portraying March as a chaplain who flirts with adultery, a coward who allows a man to die for him while he hides trembling, an idealist who makes ill-informed decisions that result in his family becoming almost destitute and having to rely on the kindness of others. He is sufficiently self-aware to be ridden with guilt over his moral failures. The saintly Marmee of Little Women is a hot tempered harridan in this novel. The middle aged March goes off to war to act as a chaplain in the Union army, eager to support the abolitionist cause. He becomes disillusioned by the actions of his own troops who are every bit as racist as the slave owners March abhors. Real life poses a difficult challenge to March's idealistic principles. The slaves, though, are all good, brave and intelligent; I find this generalization off-putting.
I wouldn't describe this novel as riveting but it kept my interest, especially the parts about the Underground Railroad and the plight of freed slaves under Union occupation.
If you want to read something by Geraldine Brooks I suggest you start with Year of Wonders, a little gem about a town whose residents go into self-imposed quarantine during the plague years in England. It is, in my view, a much better novel.

Found in Books

Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books...

I buy a lot of used books but I haven't discovered any treasures between the pages. Maybe I'll spend the rest of the day riffling through them again.
Via Uncertain Times

Onitsha Market Literature

Onitsha Market Literature consists of stories, plays, advice and moral discourses published primarily in the 1960s by local presses in the lively market town of Onitsha, an important commercial site in the Igbo-speaking region of southeastern Nigeria.

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why? books

French book covers

French book covers, the blog. C'est fantastique!
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