Overdue

The Year ( 15 months) Abroad

6:38 pm 22 February 2014

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison - Piper Kerman

There's lots of buzz about this series on Netflix. I watched the first episode and thought this might be a fun trashy book. WRONG. This memoir is not really fun and not Trashy. It's a heartfelt memoir of Piper, a Smith graduate who rather than do an unpaid internship, got involved with an older woman who was a successful drug runner.

8:38 pm 18 February 2014

3

Charlotte's Web

1:02 pm 9 February 2014

2

1

Where the Sidewalk Ends

1:00 pm 9 February 2014

7:45 pm 8 February 2014

Black Water Coursing Through Veins

6:40 pm 7 February 2014

The Blackwater Lightship came highly recommended to me. I'm not sure why. It is the story of three generations of angry women. They are cold and hard on the outside. On the inside they are seething. If you go even deeper, they are loving mothers.

"You will survive .

7:01 pm 6 February 2014

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel - Anthony Marra

This novel deserves at least 6 or 7 stars out of 5. I can't stop thinking about the horrors of Chechnya, a country that I probably would have a hard time finding on a map. The characters, all built of their country's strife are also in some way torn apart by it. This new author, Anthony Marra, creates new and vivid images which help us see, hear, feel, taste and smell: love, fear, desperation, guilt and just about every emotion his finely drawn family of characters have. For example:

"She drifted, a kelp rope on the tide that washed away her country, family and future."

"The rind of buffer states diminished as republics peeled away."

"You will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space.
For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed."

Haava, the youngest character, is introduced to the reader on the first page. She is precocious, adored and the nexus of much of this saga. Each of the other characters have a significant role in the next few days of her life, it is amazing how Marra is able to seamlessly create a collage of these characters' lives, loves, foibles, self destructive qualities and the effects of, living in a country which is ravaged by desperation and cruelty. The refugees who pass through their small town, the townspeople who are "disappeared " are not lost because they are carefully jig sawed into this masterpiece .

As I think about the war crimes described in detail, I like to think that this happened over there, in the middle of nowhere, by starving peasants. The problem is that it is happening in the Middle East and Africa. Some of the Americans were involved in it in Abu Grave with the knowledge and permission of at least some senior officers and some of the American statesmen. On our soil, two very bright, alienated teens in Colorado, set traps and picked off as many of their peers as they could before killing themselves. How many times do we read about young men gang raping girls or maliciously attacking a suspected gay person merely because they can. Happily lynchings are now few and far between. But we certainly have the same DNA as the Chechnian rebels and Feds. When we are hungry, hopeless, unloved, drunk or drunk with power, we destroy ourselves by destroying others.

Marra also writes about love, familial love, fraternal love and romantic love. The love that these characters feel keep their deceased siblings, parents, lovers and friends alive. It made me think of my brother, parents, aunts and uncles, and friends who I carry around with me. Death doesn't really take them away , just moves them to another place.

Two of the characters are artists. Their pictures also resurrect that which has been destroyed. Two of the characters are doctors who try preserve life too. One of the most important characters is a historian , again trying record for future generations what has passed. The saddest character is the informer who has given up his neighbors, friends and his self respect after the rebels have taken away his manhood, his chance for posterity.

I can't think of a more important or more satisfying book. Don't leave this on your To Read List

6

6:21 pm 3 February 2014

Remember Wuthering Heights and Ethan Fromme. Their settings are both cold winter scenes and begin with an outsider trying to put the pieces together, to know why Heathcliff is cold and crazed and why Ethan walks as if he is dragged down by a ball and chain.To know the unknowable. Well, this is how The Burgess Boys begins. Very slow, gossipy and foreboding. Again, we, the reader, are in for a story, a story about a family, a family of siblings, parents, in laws, marriages and notoriety.

6

1

The Seamy Side

9:51 pm 1 February 2014

The Crimson Petal and the White (Harvest Book) - Michel Faber

This novel transported me to the darkest dirtiest corners and sewers of London in the 1860's. The heroine of this novel is the brilliant jewel, Sugar. Not only is she one of the most sought after prostitutes on Church Lane, but she's smart and believe it or not, the only adult character in the book who is sincerely virtuous.

Shhhhh! Danger. Reading can change everything.

8:38 pm 28 January 2014

Does the U S still have soul?

6:55 pm 26 January 2014

http://www.buzzfeed.com/wordsbydan/28-quotes-about-libraries-on-photos-of-beautiful-l-b6bd?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral

4

1

Chicken Soup for the brain

6:28 pm 26 January 2014

I guess why that is why libraries are being defunded!

6:27 pm 26 January 2014

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz7009645Biz19775764

Practice Makes Perfect

4:11 pm 26 January 2014

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/22/daniel-goleman-focus-10000-hours-myth/

Blood Suckers and the Walking Dead

9:06 am 26 January 2014

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America - George Packer

S

The Unwinding is one of the scariest books I've read in a long while. It reminds me of one night while I was in the hospital undergoing a process called plasmapheresis, plasma exchange. I lay in a bed hooked up, while my blood was drained, cleaned out and returned with Albumin mixed in. In the bed next to me, lay another patient watching a vampire/zombie movie. I couldn't hear it, but I saw characters suck blood from others, I saw transformations, I saw fires destroying a mansion and chandeliers impaling creatures. I don't go in for blood, gore , vampires, cruel and tortuous punishments. I don't watch movies like this, but I was stuck on a bed with blood entering and leaving a portin my jugular vein.

5

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