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.
This is the last post you’ll see at Devourer of Books for awhile, I’m taking off posting for Christmas. I’ll be back on New Year’s Eve with my ‘best of’ list for the year. I may finish off that weekend with some resolutions, but that will depend on whether or not I feel like coming back to my computer at that point. Reviews will return January 3rd, although there may be some changes.
So what am I going to be doing if not blogging? Well, for starters I’m actually working the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so boo to that. Plus, we will have a bunch of family in town. Somewhere in there, though, I will also be reading. And since I won’t be thinking about getting things reviewed before the end of the year, I figure that I can read pretty much whatever I want, so I started gathering some of the books I really wanted to read:
Yes, there are 23 24 books up there. Evidently I fail at reasonable goals, since this represents about a week and 1/2 I have to read – during which I will be working and have a ton people to socialize with. But still, if I could just Drop Everything And Read, these are the books I would make a point to get to.
And, if you’re curious, here is a list of the books pictures, roughly left to right (the books are piled up there in no particular order). I’ve already started reading some of these, so I’ll try to cross off what I finish as I get to it:
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (reread)
Amberville by Tim Davys
Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy
A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Love Goddess’ Cooking School by Melissa Senate
You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
America Pacifica by Anna North
Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotry
Galore by Michael Crummey
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Godmother by Carolyn Turgeon (reread)
Inventing George Washington by Edward G. Lengel
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Schaffer
The Forever Queen by Helen Hollick
The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Late addition, not pictured:
A Thousand Rooms of Dreams and Fear by Atiq Rahimi
Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011
I loved it so much, but sadly I haven’t had a chance to get back to the other books (4 works packaged into 2 books) just yet, partially because I loaned them to my friend who just had a baby, figuring they were perfect post-partum reads: They are fun, yet not frivolous, easy, but not worthless. The Betsy-Tacy books are the same sort of deeply comforting read as “Anne of Green Gables.” I’ve only just gotten the books back, so if I could just Drop Everything and Read, I would start by finishing the Betsy-Tacy series, “Betsy Was a Junior” and “Betsy and Joe,” then “Betsy and the Great World” and “Betsy’s Wedding.”
HOWEVER! In the last year I have discovered some really great women’s fiction and, during this whole mess, one title I read and reviewed last year keeps coming back to me: “
The Lute Player & Eleanor the Queen by Norah Lofts
The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane
What happens when two New Yorkers (one an ex–drag queen) do the unthinkable: start over, have a herd of kids, and get a little dirty?
“Bad Marie” is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie’s mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen’s angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen’s husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she’s doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both baby and husband. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and, what it truly means to be bad.
On a sweltering August morning, a woman walked into a Buddhist temple near Phoenix and discovered the most horrific crime in Arizona history. Nine Buddhist temple members–six of them monks committed to lives of non-violence–lay dead in a pool of blood, shot execution style. The massive manhunt that followed turned up no leads until a tip from a psychiatric patient led to the arrest of five suspects. Each initially denied their involvement in the crime, yet one by one, under intense interrogation, they confessed.
To those around him, Emmett Conn is a ninety-two-year-old man on the verge of senility. But what becomes frighteningly clear to Emmett is that the sudden, realistic dreams he is having are memories of events he, and many others, have denied or purposely forgotten. The Gendarme is a unique love story that explores the power of memory- and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities and politics, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, this is a transcendent novel.
In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky s Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers troubles. Poor and single, Maze s mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth’s mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter. The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Maze s earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day. Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love. This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.
In the Basque Country in northern Spain, just before the Civil War, three men in dinner suits stop for a drink at a bar before continuing on their way to a wedding. Their trip is interrupted when their leader, the wealthy Don Leopoldo, has a stroke in the restroom.This event, bizarre and undignified though it is, begins to weave together the lives of two remarkable women: the bride, the beautiful and distinguished Isabel Cruces, and María Antonia Etxarri, the bar owner’s adolescent daughter. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, María Antonia is raped and Isabel’s newlywed husband, Captain Julen Herraiz, is shot. Both women find themselves violently altered, alone, and pregnant. A crippled but wise local doctor is the only witness to the mysterious, silent agreement these women conclude in the loneliness and desperation of their mutual suffering. Many years later, a young student, grandson to Isabel, returns to the scene of the events to spend an innocent summer studying for law exams. As he goes about his work, he unwittingly awakens the ghosts haunting both María Antonia and the doctor, and through their memories the passionate stories of the past unfurl before the reader.
The Wolves of Andover by Kathleen Kent – Reagan Arthur Books, November 8, 2010
Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander’s face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate . . . until she sees Ky Markham’s face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black.
Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno’s ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys — and most affecting love stories — in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human — to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.
Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants has become one of the most beloved and bestselling novels of our time. Now Gruen has moved from a circus elephant to family of bonobo apes. When the apes are kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our DNA.
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