Audiobook Week approaches!

Apr 282011

Last year, I decided I need to devote an entire week on my blog to audiobooks, mostly because I was really behind in reviewing the ones I had been listening to. Other people got interested, and it turned into a really fun week during which the blogging community celebrated the magic of audiobooks. I have had quite a few people asking if Audiobook Week would be back this year and the answer is YES! I am hosting audiobook week again this year – June 6-10 to coincide with Audiobook Month – and it will, I hope, be even more fun than last year. We also have a brand new button, feel free to grab it:

AudiobookWeek picture

You can either right-click and save it for yourself, or use the html below:

<img src=”http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k609/devourerofbooks/AudiobookWeek.png” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”>

If you have audiobooks that need to be reviewed, I encourage you to start scheduling your reviews for that week, as there will be places to link your reviews and get them discovered by other audiobook lovers participating in Audiobook Week. There will also be daily discussion topics (to be announced in late May) and prizes for those participating. In addition, a couple other members of the planning team have some fascinating audiobook-related posts in store for you, all of which will be linked from here.

I hope to see you back here in June, loving on some audiobooks!

High School Book Drive Reminder

Apr 282011

Just a reminder, the end of the school year is fast approaching! If you have any books you would like to donate to the low-income students at my husband’s school, please send them by the end of the first week in May. Full details about why I’m doing this are at the original High School Book Drive post.

Here’s where we are as far as donations currently in our possession:

If you’d like to send something, please mail to:

High School Book Drive

C/O Jen Karsbaek

738 E Dundee Rd #194

Palatine, IL 60067

I also request that if are sending something you fill out the form below if at all possible, so we know to be on the lookout for it:

Thank you!

Loading…

The Violets of March by Sarah Jio – Book Review

Apr 272011

The Violets of March by Sarah Jio
Published by Plum, an imprint of Penguin

When Emily’s marriage falls apart, she doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t rage. In fact, her best friend is a bit worried about the degree to which she is repressing her feelings and Emily quite clearly isn’t actually dealing with her divorce. As a novelist – and a stalled one at that – there is no 9 to 5 job where Emily must clock in, so she finally decides to visit her Great Aunt Bee on Bainbridge Island in Washington for a change of scenery. While there, she runs into an old boyfriend from her youth summering on the island, as well as a slightly mysterious yet handsome neighbor. Even more compelling to Emily than the men she meets, though, is the red journal she finds in the room she is staying in. Did Aunt Bee try her hand at fiction, or is this really the diary of a woman named Esther? And, if so, what happened to her, and what does any of this have to do with the unhealed schism between Aunt Bee and Emily’s mother?

The Violets of March was simply a lovely book. Jio clearly loves her characters dearly, and her fondness for them makes them irresistible to the reader. This may sound like a setup with the potential to be saccharine, but Jio has a great sense of balance and narrative that prevents her story from turning campy or emotionally manipulative, while allowing it to be genuinely moving. Both Emily’s modern story and the mystery of the diary were well drawn, and Jio did a masterful job weaving them together in a way that detracted from neither story.

This was a beautiful and well-written story of redemption, hope, and starting over. I can’t wait to see what Jio has for us next. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

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.

BOOK CLUB – Galore by Michael Crummey

Apr 262011

Welcome to BOOK CLUB, which I run with co-conspirator Nicole from Linus’s Blanket. Today we will be chatting about Galore by Michael Crummey, which was released at the end of March from Other Press (website | twitter | facebook). For those of you reading this post, please remember that this discussion is likely to contain spoilers.

Here is the synopsis of the book I wrote for my review:

Paradise Deep and Gut are insular, isolated Newfoundland communities. Theirs is a hardscrabble life where nothing much changes, in many of the families one generation seems largely interchangeable with another, a constant cycle of birth and death, and birth again. But then, a whale washes ashore. A beached whale represents a bounty for a community that does not have the resources to catch more than cod, but when they slice open the whale’s stomach, a strangely pale man tumbles out. Named Judah due to a disagreement about whether it was Judas or Jonah who was swallowed by the whale in the Bible, the mute man is s subject of fear and wonder for the community by turns.

It is a bit difficult to say what Galore is about, because, at its heart, it is simply about the people of Gut and Paradise Deep. Even Jonah’s odd appearance – both in how he comes to the community and in how he looks – is not truly at the heart of this novel. Instead it is the people, the community as a whole, even.

galore picture Before we get started, here are some of the reviews of readers who will be participating today:

Caribou’s Mom
Devourer of Books
House of the Seven Tails
Indie Reader Houston
Linus’s Blanket
Picky Girl

If you plan on participating in today’s BOOK CLUB, please consider subscribing to comments at the bottom of the page (please use the TOP subscription option, the second option will subscribe you only to replies of your own comments). I will be updating this post with new questions and ideas over the course of the day.

Here we go…

First off, what were your general impressions of the book?
Is this a book you would have read had you not been reading it for a book club?
Judah was seen alternatively as a kind of curse or lucky charm for the community, did how he was seen by others change how you saw or felt towards him? How you felt towards the people around him?
It wasn’t until 30 odd pages into Book Two that I knew when Galore was set, when we were told that King-Me died sometime before the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The timeline became more clear towards the end of the novel, but until then seemed that it could have taken place almost any time. Do you think this was a conscious decision on the part of Crummey? Did it enhance or detract from the story for you?
Newman, the doctor, finds Newfoundland too fantastical to believe in when he is back in the states. Do you agree with his assessment? If so, was the land still believable to you while reading?
The end FASCINATED me. Thoughts? Opinions? Theories?
What kinds of questions did you have during your reading? Were they answered?
Do you have any other questions for the group?

Additional questions from Amy:

Has anyone read Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Do you think the comparisons between him and Crummey are valid? If so, in what ways?

12 review copies of Galore were provided by Other Press in order to facilitate this discussion. Thank you!

Galore by Michael Crummey – Book Review

Apr 252011

Galore by Michael Crummey
Published by Other Press

Paradise Deep are Gut are insular, isolated Newfoundland communities. Theirs is a hardscrabble life where nothing much changes, in many of the families one generation seems largely interchangeable with another, a constant cycle of birth and death, and birth again. But then, a whale washes ashore. A beached whale represents a bounty for a community that does not have the resources to catch more than cod, but when they slice open the whale’s stomach, a strangely pale man tumbles out. Named Judah due to a disagreement about whether it was Judas or Jonah who was swallowed by the whale in the Bible, the mute man is s subject of fear and wonder for the community by turns.

It is a bit difficult to say what Galore is about, because, at its heart, it is simply about the people of Gut and Paradise Deep. Even Jonah’s odd appearance – both in how he comes to the community and in how he looks – is not truly at the heart of this novel. Instead it is the people, the community as a whole, even.

What is particularly amazing about Galore is just how meaningful and riveting it is, given the number of people and the length of time covered. Although the Devine family – who shelter Jonah to the point of marrying him to a daughter of the family – and the Sellers family are certainly the major players, Crummey has created a rich cast of characters, each with their own particular foibles. The drama of the communities spans more than a century, the majority of that time passing in the second half of the book. This seems like it should be a recipe for a shallow and confusing story, but this is not the case. Certainly, I had to flip back and forth to the family tree at the front of the book more than once to remind myself of how certain people were related, but the characters have surprising depth and are surprisingly compelling given how many of them there are.

Galore is a masterfully written book with beautiful language and fabulous character development. The mixture of day-to-day life and fantastical happenings is particularly well done. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound.*

Source, Publisher for BOOK CLUB.
* 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.

Captivity by Deborah Noyes – Book Review

Apr 222011

Captivity by Deborah Noyes
Published by Unbridled Books

In 1848, Spiritualism was born in upstate New York when the Fox sisters began to claim that they could communicate with the dead via a series of rappings. Deborah Noyes’s Captivity focuses on Maggie Fox and her feelings about the way spirit rappings change her family and her future. The parallel story is that of Clara Gill, a well-bred woman now living in New York state with her father, leaving behind a scandal in London. Clara is a skeptic and essentially a shut-in, but when Maggie joins her young relative Lizzie as a servant in the Gill household to bring in extra money for the family, the two women form a deep and surprising connection.

Captivitiy is a beautifully-written book. Noyes’s prose is simply outstanding, every sentence reads almost as if it were poetry. It does take an initial adjustment to get used to the way the prose flows, but once this happens, the reader becomes immersed in the language of Captivity.

Interestingly, as the book progresses it seems to focus more and more on Clara, and less and less on Maggie. By the end the Fox sisters are seen mostly through the impersonal lens of the investigations into whether or not they are charlatans, and through what Clara experiences of what is happening in their circle. Perhaps this choice was made to avoid dealing directly with whether the girls were faking their rappings. Although Maggie occasionally seems to despair of the overly show aspects of what she and her sisters are doing, it is never clearly stated that they are fakes or how they are producing their results, unlike in Paul Elworks’s book about a later dabbler in spirit rappings, The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead.

Captivity is a beautifully written book and an interesting peek into pre-Civil War American.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

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.

Oh, D.E.A.R. – Unbridled Books

Apr 202011

Do you remember D.E.A.R? At my elementary school that meant “Drop Everything And Read,” something we typically did for 10 or 15 minutes every day. Best part of my day, really. As my TBR and Library piles are battling for supremacy and trying to sneak in around the review copies who have staked out places on my calendar, I’m thinking back to the simpler days of D.E.A.R., when I believed I had time to get to any book I wanted. And that, of course, got me fantasizing about a world where I really could just Drop Everything And Read for more than just 15 minutes a day.

All this week I am catching up on books from a publisher I love: Unbridled Books. You can only read so many books in a week, though, and sad to say, I don’t have a whole month which I can give over to reading things from Unbridled Books. If I did, though, here are their titles I would drop everything and read:

Coming soon:

youbelievers picture

You Believers by Jane Bradley

When a young girl goes missing, her mother will do almost anything to find her and, when her daughter persists in missing, her mother must learn how to continue to live her life without her beloved child. It sounds like a heart-wrenchingly beautiful tale.

descentofman picture

The Descent of Man by Kevin Desinger

When two men try to steal Jim’s car, he goes out to get their license plate numbers, and ends up stealing their car instead, which quickly catapults him into a fight to regain a safe and normal life. I love the idea that this is about the ways that normal people can go so quickly off the rails.

Already out:

singersgun 1 picture

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

A literary crime novel about ne’er do well Anton Waker. This got fabulous reviews from bloggers I trust.

panopticon picture

Panopticon by David Bajo

I just adore the first line of the publisher’s description for this book, I need no other information to want to read it: “As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three reporters are oddly given assignments to return to stories they’ve covered beforeeach one surprisingly personal.”

strangerherebelow picture

Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld

This seems to be a relationship novel, three generations of women. I’ve also heard raves about Hinnefeld’s beautiful writing that have me wondering why I haven’t picked this up yet.

———————-

Do you have a favorite book from Unbridled Books? Is there something on this list you would particularly recommend?

Some of these books were provided to me for review

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert – Book Review

Apr 192011

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert
Published by Unbridled Books

The last book in a hugely popular children and young adult series, The Coffins of Little Hope, of the Miranda and Desiree series, is soon to be released, to the utter delight of young people everywhere. Essie Myles’s grandson, Doc, actually printed a great number of The Coffins of Little Hope in his printing press, expanded from his newspaper works. That seems like it should be enough excitement for a small town, to be part of a publishing process so secretive that people must be patted down when they leave work, to ensure they have not stolen any pages from the much-anticipated new book.

But then a little girl named Lenore goes missing. Or, at least, that’s what the woman who claims to be her mother says. Daisy gave birth to Lenore at home and she’s never been to school, there is no record of her anywhere, and very little in the way of children’s belongings at Daisy’s house. However, the drifter Daisy claims kidnapped Lenore is real enough, he has been seen around town for years, but he isn’t around now. So is Lenore real? If so, was she kidnapped? Or is she all a product of Lenore’s imagination? These questions, plus the Miranda and Desiree connection, are the recipe for a huge media circus.

The Coffins of Little Hope is an absolutely gorgeous books, I nearly ran out of my book darts marking passages.

Some of you may say I’m just as bad as the worst of the people who’ve exploited the summer, fall, and winter of Lenore, that I’ve played this story like an accordion for the purposes of melodrama, squeezing and stretching, inflating, and deflating scenes and events at will. You’ll say I wasn’t everywhere; you’ll say there’s no way I can know all that I’ve depicted. But I stand behind all the truths in this story of deception. – p. 7

The characters are somewhat odd, and the storytelling is not at all linear, but The Coffins of Little Hope is still very accessible and extremely compelling. Highly recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

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.

Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye – Book Review

Apr 182011

Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Published by Unbridled Books

After the sinking of the Ragnark and the death of the majority of its crew, Olaf Torr turns to drink. Over the next 30 years, Olaf’s family falls apart: his wife has an affair, and he becomes estranged from his son and the worry of his daughter. And yet, when Olaf calls his son Noah, telling him that he is sick and needs help preparing his isolated house for winter, Noah flies to join him immediately. Noah has been more than a little annoyed with his father, first due to the drinking and lack of fatherly affection, subsequently for some inappropriate comments that Olaf made at his wedding. Even so, he knows that Olaf would not be calling if it were not terribly important. He arrives still annoyed and distant, but in the time that follows, he falls back in love with his father and begins to understand just how damaged Olaf truly was by experiencing the sinking of the Ragnark. As Olaf begins recounting to Noah the story of that fateful night, both men begin to truly find peace with themselves and one another.

At first I was unsure about Safe From the Sea. It is very well written, but with the kind of spare prose that isn’t always capable of grabbing me. In addition, the story of the shipwreck and shipping on the Great Lakes didn’t particularly appeal to me, nor was I sure I would be able to relate to Noah and Olaf’s relationship. Peter Geye didn’t let me down, however. His prose was sparse, but also evocative, particularly when Olaf is describing the night the Ragnark sank. Olaf and Noah’s relationship is so artfully reanimated that the reader cannot help but become invested in them and their interactions with one another, not to mention bereft at the thought that they are only now coming back to one another now that Olaf is so very ill.

Although it starts out a little slowly, Safe From the Sea is absolutely beautiful and will suck you in. Recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Publisher at a trade show.
* 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.

High School Book Drive Update #1

Apr 172011

Hopefully you all saw my post about a week ago where I announced the Book Drive I’m organizing for the students at the high school where my husband teaches. If not, I’ll take a minute while you click the above link and go read about it.

I’m here to give you an update, since we’re about a week in. So far we have collected over 130 books, which is AWESOME. We’re hoping to open this up to as many kids in the school as possible (I believe there are over 2,000) students, so I’m glad that I know about more donations on the way, too. Everything helps, whether you have 1 book, 10 books, or 100 books to donate. New or old, advance or finished copy, everything is appreciated. We’ve received books that are older than the kids (some that are even 20 years old than I am) but that are fabulous works of literature in great shape, and we’ve received advance copies of things not out until this summer or fall, we love it all!

Here’s a picture of not-quite-half of the books we have, under lock and key in the librarian’s office:

IMAG0033 picture

Here’s how we’re progressing:

This graph is interactive, so it will continue to update if you want to check back.

If you have some books you’d like to send in, you can send them to:

High School Book Drive
C/o Jen Karsbaek
738 E Dundee Rd #194
Palatine, IL 60067

If you are sending something in, I’d love it if you filled out this form. It helps me know what to expect and who to thank:

Loading…

Older Entries

Devourer of Books

Audiobook Week approaches!

High School Book Drive Reminder

The Violets of March by Sarah Jio – Book Review

BOOK CLUB – Galore by Michael Crummey

Galore by Michael Crummey – Book Review

Captivity by Deborah Noyes – Book Review

Oh, D.E.A.R. – Unbridled Books

The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert – Book Review

Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye – Book Review

High School Book Drive Update #1

Sponsors:

Shelf Awareness for Readers eNewsletter

Tumblring

Recognition

Regular Features/Special Events

Check Me Out

Follow Me!

Sponsors:

Shelf Awareness for Readers eNewsletter

Recognition

Regular Features/Special Events

Check Me Out