Harry Potter Film Wizardry – Book Review

Nov 302010

Harry Potter Film Wizardry by Brian Sibley
Published by Collins Design, an imprint of Harper Collins

Okay, this is a seriously awesome book. Just go ahead and order it for the fan of the Harry Potter movies on your holiday gift list. If they love the movies, they’ll love this, 99.9% guaranteed.

…Okay, now that you’re back, let me tell you a bit about what you just bought for your favorite Harry Potter fan.

As someone who has multiple times read the Harry Potter series and seen all of the movies, I was amazed at how much new stuff I learned from “Harry Potter Film Wizardry.” Absolutely fascinating details about props, casting, and how the movies brought J.K. Rowling’s fascinating books to life.

Even better, the book is filled with replicas of some of the props from the movies. There is, for example, an envelope that folds out of one of the early pages, in which can be found Harry’s Hogwarts acceptance letter. Other such pieces of realia include the Marauder’ s Map, a program from the 422nd Quidditch World Cup, and the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes product catalog. From characters, to sets, to major events, I cannot think of a single thing from the movies that I found missing in “Harry Potter’s Film Wizardry.”

Very highly recommended for wizard-loving muggles.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

Source: Publisher.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Frankenstein’s Monster by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe – Book Review

Nov 292010

Frankenstein’s Monster by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe
Published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House

Set in the years following the death of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, “Frankenstein’s Monster” follows the plight of, well, Frankenstein’s monster as he tries to make his way in a world which no longer includes his creator. Unfortunately, explorer Robert Walton, the man to whom Victor Frankenstein told his tortuous story, has assumed Frankenstein’s hatred for his unfortunate creation and has been tracking the monster unceasingly since his friend’s death. After Walton manages to destroy what little life the monster has built for himself, the monster adopts the name Victor Hartmann and vows to destroy Walton’s family as Walton destroyed his own. What Hartmann doesn’t expect, though, is that Walton’s niece, Lily Winterbourne, will test his resolve, as well as his humanity or lack thereof.

Thank you, Susan Heyboer O’Keefe for writing what I think is a fabulous continuation of an extremely well-known classic. Actually, the style and development of the plot and the characters were much closer to what I imagined that “Frankenstein” would be than to what it actually was. I found “Frankenstein” to be an interesting concept with poor execution, but I think O’Keefe continued Mary Shelley’s concept with much better structure and follow-through. Hartmann, nee Monster, struggled constantly with the degree to which he might or might not be human, and to which nature he should give in. There was also the interesting question of who was more monster: Hartmann or Walton.

Whether or not you have actually read “Frankenstein,” anyone with a good deal of familiarity with the story is likely to really enjoy “Frankenstein’s Monster.” Recommended.

If you’re interested in this, you may want to check out the first episode of my podcast with Nicole from Linus’ Blanket, What’s Old is New, in which we talked about “Frankenstein’s Monster” and other books based on Shelley’s original work.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

This review was done with a book received from the publisher for review.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

TSS – Thankfully Reading and 2011 Challenges

Nov 282010

I hope everyone is enjoying Thankfully Reading Weekend! I have a mini-challenge and prize up right now, and there is another over at Beth Fish Reads. Speaking of the Beth Fish Reads mini-challenge, actually, I wanted to show you all some of my TBR shelves. These are my library and review copy shelves, not including books from BEA and GLiBA.

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Thank goodness I have a spreadsheet, because I can’t actually see all of those books. I wish I’d made a bigger dent in this TBR pile over Thankfully Reading weekend, but with family in town and a toddler I haven’t had a ton of time. Still, I’ve made a point of being thankful for the time I have, instead of regretting the time I don’t have. I have finished one book and an audiobook, as well as made a good dent in the podcasts I was behind on.

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Last year I joined about 20 challenges, and I failed the majority of them, so this year I am only joining two challenges, my own, The Debutante Ball Challenge, and this year’s What’s In A Name Challenge.

By the way, the What’s in a Name 3 Challenge was one of the few challenges I actually finished.

Body of Water – Dead-Tossed Waves
Food – Mr. Peanut
Music – The Dead Beat
Place name – East of Eden
Plant – The Language of Trees
Title – A Friend of the Family

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Okay, now for what I’ve read this week. It may look impressive that I finished 6 books, but three of those books (2 print, 1 audio) I was reading the majority of the week before and I finally finished them on Tuesday.

Print:

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Audio:

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This past week I had a special feature which I called “Harvest Week.” In addition to my explanatory post, I posted three reviews (covers link to reviews):

For Saturday Story Spotlight I unveiled a new button, courtesy of Sheila at Book Journey and showcased a book that Daniel has loved for months:

Thankfully Reading Weekend – Reading Community Mini-Challenge

Nov 272010

Don’t know what Thankfully Reading Weekend is? Check out the introductory post over at Jenn’s Bookshelves and sign up to spend the weekend reading and being thankful.

I hope you’ve been having a great weekend reading so far. Have you been using the #thankfulreading hashtag on Twitter? Reading is a solitary activity, but it is something that is even better when you have a reading community surrounding you, which is part of the reason that many of us started blogging in the first place.

So what I want to know, is what reading community are you thankful for, and why? Are you thankful for book bloggers? The book community on Twitter? Your spouse or family that lets you ramble on and on about what you’re reading and doesn’t complain (at least not too much) about the myriad of books flowing into the house?

You can answer with a post on your own blog linked onto the Mr. Linky below, or leave your answer in the comments below.

One respondent with a US mailing address will also win this bag from Cafe Press: GIVEAWAY CLOSED

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You can find millions of custom sweatshirt hoodies and funny t-shirts at CafePress – even personalized Christmas gifts!

Whether you link your answer or leave it in the comments, please let me know in the comments if you wish to be entered for the bag.

Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs – Saturday Story Spotlight

Nov 272010

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my new feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy, since we are definitely reading more than one book a week!

Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs by Sandra Boynton
Published by Workman Publishing

“Dinosaurs happy,
dinosaurs sad.
Dinosaurs good,
and dinosaurs bad.”

Ah yes, another of Daniel’s books that I can recite virtually all of without even glancing at the page (a very helpful skill, that, when he is being a squirmy wormy).

“Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs” is and has long been our favorite Sandra Boynton book, and we do love Sandra Boynton. The dinosaurs in this book are hilarious and endearing, and appear in pairs of opposites. Like so many of Boynton’s books, this one has a great rhythm, and really lends itself to fun vocal expression.

Now, at 17 months and after reading this book since we received it at his first birthday, I must say that Daniel is starting to get the slightest bit tired of the book and doesn’t ask for it or automatically bring it to me as he used to do, but nearly five months worth of daily readings says to me that this book holds up pretty well. Honestly, even my husband and I didn’t get tired of reading it so often, because it is such a fun book.

I highly recommend “Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs.”

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

Source: Personal copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Thank you to Sheila from Book Journey for creating my button for this feature!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver- Book Review

Nov 262010

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins

Although Barbara Kingsolver and her family enjoyed the time they spent living in Tucson, Arizona, the severe water shortage and lack of locally grown food was something that always somewhat bothered them. So the family packed up and relocated to their land in Appalachia to experience an entire year eating locally so that they could pay close attention to what they were actually eating, and so they could reduce the oil used for their food to travel to them. Over the year they primarily utilized their own land and the local farmers’ market.

Wow. Not only does Kingsolver have beautifully lyrical prose, but she and her family are totally hardcore as well. All four of them completely bought into this project, eschewing all forms of quick convenience food – not that they relied heavily on it to begin with – but also locally out of season fruits and vegetables. Of all of the books I read for Harvest Week, this was the one that most inspired me to want to get off of my butt and do something. There were times that I got somewhat frustrated feeling that what Kingsolver was able to do would not be feasible for a good number of families, but that annoyance was mitigated by the fact that Kingsolver acknowledged this fact and made suggestions for how to do what was possible. In many ways this was actually a very practical book. As Kingsolver narrated the family’s story, her husband wrote short articles bringing their story into a larger context, and her college-aged daughter did a sort of wrap-up for most chapters, including recipes and sample meal plans for the week.

The chicken report: Chickens played a pretty prominent role in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” particularly in the life of Kingsolver’s youngest daughter who adored the birds and had a very well thought out business selling eggs. What really captured my attention, though, was a different breed of poultry. Kingsolver raised a brood of heritage turkeys, and some of the facts she shared about the type of turkeys most of us buy at the supermarket put me off my Thanksgiving dinner just a bit. For instance, we have so screwed with the genes of our factory farm turkeys that mature birds are “incapable of lying, foraging, or mating!” I mean, is that even a real bird at that point?

“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is a fantastically well-written and very inspirational book, and I highly recommend it.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

Source: Personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell – Book Review

Nov 242010

The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Published by Harper Books, an imprint of Harper Collins

Josh Kilmer-Purcell, a former drag queen, and his partner Brent, the Dr. Brent of Martha Stewart fame, have a yearly apple-picking tradition. They like to escape New York City, getting far enough away that even the crowds of New Yorkers escaping to the country do not touch their weekend. On one such weekend, Josh and Brent discovered a small town upstate that looked dead but was full of wonderfully friendly people. During their reluctant trip back to the city, they stumbled upon a gorgeous old mansion on a farm.

Here’s another one for the LOVED pile! Not only did I finish “The Bucolic Plague” in a single day, I did so after sitting down with it at 7:30. I read it in a single sitting, so captivated by Kilmer-Purcell, both his story and his writing, that I didn’t put it down again until I finished sometime around midnight, and long after I had planned to go to bed. Okay, that’s not entirely true, I did have to get up to get a drink and stretch my legs once or twice, but I was always drawn immediately back to the book, to soak in life at The Beekman.

“The Bucolic Plague” had everything I look for in a memoir. First of all, there was an interesting story to be told. Two men rushing back and forth from their high-powered Manhattan jobs to their idyllic farm, trying desperately to make it work well enough that they can keep it, but with plenty of conflict and roadblocks along the way – what’s not to love? In addition, Kilmer-Purcell was both funny and honest. He didn’t shy away from talking about trying to market himself and his farm to keep it going. With their new show out, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys,” that could easily have been something that he tried to downplay, but then “The Bucolic Plague” wouldn’t have had the ring of both desperation and truth that it did. I also appreciated that he was able to look relatively objectively at his and Brett’s problems without ever seeming like he was being overly harsh on his partner. He acknowledged that they were both to blame for some of the tension between them and was remarkably even-handed in his analysis.

The chicken report: Chickens weren’t huge stars in “The Bucolic Plague,” but when they did appear, their presence stole the show. One of my favorite scenes in the entire book was the first night that Josh and Brent spent at The Beekman, when they decided to make their first meal in the house with their chickens’ eggs. Unfortunately, nobody had been collecting the eggs and they had no guarantees about how fresh any of the eggs were. And, well, you can imagine the rest (or buy the book and read it for yourself).

I absolutely adored this book, and I think that you will too. I highly recommend it.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

Source: Discovery Communications.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Coop by Michael Perry – Book Review

Nov 232010

Coop by Michael Perry
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of Harper Collins

After spending his early life growing up on a farm, Michael Perry has returned, this time with his step-daughter and pregnant life. The family’s aim is relative self-sufficiency, or at least living from their land – and Perry’s writing work. His wife Annaliese, who plans to deliver the baby at home with the help of a midwife, will be homeschooling their daughter Amy (theoretically they are both doing it, but in practice it is largely Annaliese), and all of them will be working to get their farm working again. Pigs and chickens populate their lives, as Perry recalls his youth on a nearby farm and the lessons it has taught him, and those he has still to learn, about his adult life.

“Coop” has the feel almost of being Perry’s diary, or a recording of his thoughts over this year of his life. He travels effortlessly between the past and the present without being overly obvious about where he is going, but also while managing to give the reader a roadmap to what is happening when. It was this highly effective subtlety that really impressed me about “Coop.” Perry’s remembrances of his past always tied in with what was going on in the present, as might be expected with the diary or journal feel that “Coop” had, but he never belabored the point. Instead, Perry gives his readers the tools necessary to make the connections and he trusts them to do just that, not even titling his chapters. And you know what? It worked. I got the themes, I understood the trains of thought, and I felt that Perry respected me as a reader by not explicityl spelling every last thing out for me. He is also brutally honest about his life and hardships and is always hardest on himself without being obnoxiously self-deprecating, which is hugely attractive in this sort of memoir.

The chicken report: Perry had both laying hens and meat hens. I’m really only interested in the former, I have no desire to butcher my own meat. I loved his love of the chickens, and his descriptions of their personalities. I thought he walked the line between loving the birds and not becoming too attached very well and, even more impressively, he helped his young daughter do the same.

Perry seems to respect me as a reader and, as such, I respect him greatly as a writer. This is not the world’s fastest read, but it is a book worth taking your time with; I definitely recommend it if you are interested at all in the life of a man and his family returning to the farm.

Buy this book from:
Powells.*
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.*
Amazon.*

Source: Publisher.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Harvest Week: Why Harvest Week?

Nov 222010

5196759671 f379a6676e m picture Of everything I do on my blog, there is one feature which I have been wanting to do for a very long time, the feature which I am actually starting today, and that is Harvest Week. So now you have two questions:
1) What is Harvest Week?
2) Why have you wanted so badly to do this?

Glad you asked! Harvest Week is simply a (made up by me) celebration of those people who have marched opposite to the general flow of American society and made the trek from the city back to the farm. To celebrate I will be reviewing three books that are on this theme to varying degrees: “Coop” by Michael Perry, “The Bucolic Plague” by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver. I thought that Thanksgiving week was an appropriate time for this, since it was originally about celebrating the bounty of the earth which sustained the Pilgrims.

‘Why Harvest Week’ is a more personal question. Part of the reason was just that I wanted an excuse to make time for the books I will be reviewing this week. This type of food literature has been near and dear to my heart ever since I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan shortly before I began blogging. They really aren’t quite the same type of book as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” (which I loved), but they do typify the type of life I have been drawn to ever since reading Pollan’s book. As an aside, I don’t think that it will ever cease to be funny to me that his last name is POLLAN, and he writes about FOOD, and PLANTS in particular.

Anyway, ever since “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” I have harbored a not-so-secret desire to have a backyard that contains both a vegetable garden and chickens. They’ll eat my bugs! They’ll provide great fertilizer! Eating grass and my bugs will give their eggs a crazy good flavor compared to the generic junk at the grocery store!

Um, yeah, so anyway, there’s the thing you may not have known about me, I geek out over the thought of raising chickens. I don’t really know how it is done, though, so let’s hope that I pick up some tips from this week’s books.

TSS: Bookish Fun and Upcoming Projects

Nov 212010

This was sort of an odd week, reading-wise. I felt like most of the reading I was doing was moving really slowly – not bad books, just things I couldn’t get through quickly – to the point that it was really sort of aggravating. On the other hand, I had two books (“Life After Yes” and “The Bucolic Plague”) where I was so captivated by the narrative voice that I simply refused to put it down and finished the entire book in a single day. Although still impressive, “Life After Yes” was finished by reading off and on all day last Sunday. “The Bucolic Plague,” though, I started Friday night after getting home from a fabulous day I’ll talk about soon and then dinner with the in-laws and after Daniel was put to bed. I started it at 7:30 and read the entire 300 pages in what was, essentially, one sitting (I got up to stretch my legs a couple of times, but that was it).

But really, Friday was just a fabulous bookish day in general. First of all, my first blogging buddy, the lovely Jennifer from Literate Housewife, who will always hold a special place in my heart, was in town for work and to visit her sister, so we got to spend most of the day together. To make things even more bookishly awesome, Danielle, our main publicity contact at Sourcebooks, a publisher in the Western suburbs of Chicago, was gracious enough to spend 30 or 40 minutes showing us around Sourcebooks, along with Beth another great publicity person at Sourcebooks. We got to see the building and sit and chat with Danielle and Beth about books, blogging, and Sourcebooks, and it was absolutely fabulous.

Me, Danielle, Beth, Jennifer

And of course, what book blogger visit to the greater Chicagoland area would be complete without me dragging said book blogger to one of my very favorite places, The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn? Sadly Margie was out of town, but we did get to spend some quality time with Sue, who was working alone while we were there. We even had the chance to help some customers, one who told me that The Bookstore needed to hire me to work there, and another who assumed they already had.

I suppose between my awesome day Friday and two books good enough to be consumed in the course of a day, this was on balance a terrific week, as far as books go, even if I did have some minor reading stagnation. Here’s what I finished this week:

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You’ve already seen reviews of the first two last week. “Coop” and “The Bucolic Plague” will show up next week in my theme week, Harvest Week, which you will hear more about tomorrow. I’ll be doing another theme week in early December focusing on some recent releases from Algonquin Books, one of my favorite publishers. That’s still a couple of weeks away, though, so let’s get back to what I posted over the last week, in case you missed anything. Covers link to the post: