no, I'm not dead ... just frazzled

Last night in a conversation with someone re upcoming books, I was reminded I haven't been keeping up with things here.  Guilty as charged.  For the last two months it's been insane Jane time here at casa mia; away from home, sick, company, away from home, more company, and vacation.  Not that I haven't been reading, because I have, but I still have books from way back in March that I haven't posted about!  Not laziness, no; just a case of needing time to breathe.

 I recently finished Nabokov's Despair (a wonderful book, by the way, and I'll post about it soon), which was focused on one of the most narcissistic/solipsistic characters ever in the history of my reading career. In that book, the main character Hermann decides that he has met his double/doppelganger, and he devises  some pretty nefarious plans built around the poor, unsuspecting guy. He also has one of the creepiest worldviews ever encapsulated in a novel, but more later on that (and hopefully shortly). After finishing it, I found myself fascinated with literary doppelgangers, so added to my already lengthy, never-ending tbr pile are the following:

1. The Poor Clare, by Elizabeth Gaskell
2. Aiding and Abetting, by Muriel Spark
3. The Double, by Dostoevsky
4. The Devil's Elixirs, by ETA Hoffman and
5. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg

So no, I'm not dead but just trying to keep my head above water book- and otherwise. Don't worry, Lisa!

popping out all over! More best books of 2014 -- part six

Just in time for Black Friday (sorry, but I'm a cynical person), more best of 2014 lists have appeared.

Let's start with "The Ten Best Books of 2014" from The Washington Post.
 (in order of appearance)

1. A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James

2. Fourth of July Creek, by Smith Henderson 

3. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan 

(...that's good to know, since I'm going to read it here shortly)

4. The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters 

(I'll definitely agree)

5. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

6. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

7. Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries, by Rory MacLean

8. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, by Gary Krist

9. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert

10. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr

As an added bonus, you can also find the Washington Post's selection of the best fifty fiction books of 2014 in the same issue. 

Moving right along, Tim Martin of the Telegraph in the UK says, "forget Amis, McEwan, and the Booker winner" -- he has his own standouts for the year (or at least up through Christmas...same thing).  After sweating through Kirkus' top 100, I'll just leave you the link to Martin's choices. They are legion. 

Flavorwire has its own take on the top books -- "2014's Best Indie Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014." There are fifty books in this list, so again, I won't reproduce them, but  I will say that while I don't often read Flavorwhile, kudos to them for focusing on the smaller publishing houses.  You can see them for yourself in the article, but I'll mention a few here:

Two Dollar Radio

Europa

Graywolf

Dalkey

New Directions

Melville House

Dorothy

OR Books

Verso

Dzanc 

and many, many more.  It's about time these little presses were publicly acknowledged in a wider reading venue -- and good on you, Flavorwire for doing so. 

That's it for now -- I'm sure that the cheap TVs, toys,  DVD players, gaming systems and other such things people stand in line for over a period of hours will be the hot ticket items again this year, but  all of those things will become obsolete next year, and books never go out of style. 

best of 2014, part five: Publisher's Weekly

Somehow, I overlooked Publisher's Weekly last week, but they've also jumped on the pre-Thanksgiving  best of 2014 books list bandwagon early this year. Less in the mainstream than any other list I've noted here, PW's top ten is a varied mix of nonfiction and fiction, with two books coming from Graywolf Press and one from Europa.   Here's what PW has to say:

"Each November, our reviews editors look back at the nearly 9,000 titles we reviewed over the course of the year and pick favorites in several categories: fiction, poetry, mystery/thriller, SF/fantasy/horror, romance/erotica, comics, picture books, middle grade, and young adult. From those longlists, the editors choose an overall top 10, including five each of the year’s best fiction and nonfiction titles."

 Here's their top ten (offered in the order as they are listed on the website):

On Immunity: An Education, by Eula Bliss  (nonfiction)

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David, by Lawrence Wright (nonfiction)

The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, by Hassan Blasim

Limonov, by Emmanuel Carrère (nonfiction)

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elena Ferrante

A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James

The Empathy Exams, by Leslie  Jamison (nonfiction)

Bark, by Lorrie Moore

The Dog, by Joseph O'Neill

Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free, by Héctor Tobar

Kirkus hath spoken: the best fiction books of 2014 -- Part 3 in this year's "best of books" lists

Kirkus has gone all out with its version of the best of the year, offering its readers 100 books it has deemed "best fiction books of 2014."  Here's the full list, in alphabetical order.  Note: Euphoria, by Lily King, won the Kirkus Prize this year. Evidently, I'm reading all of the wrong books.

1. The Fever, by Megan Abbott

2. An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine

3. Song of the Shank, by Jeffery Renard Allen

4. Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear

5. Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes

6. The Bones Beneath, by Mark Billingham

7. Do or Die, by Suzanne Brockman

8. Night Heron, by Adam Brooks

9. The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton

10. One Kick, by Chelsea Cain

11. A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, by Will Chancellor

12. The Author and Me, by Eric Chevillard

13.  Monday,Monday, by Elizabeth Crook

14. Romancing the Duke, by Tessa Dare

15. Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle

16. All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

17. The Wilds, by Julia Elliott

18. Hiding in Plain Sight, by Nurudin Farrah

19.Kill My Mother, by Jules Feiffer

20. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elena Farrante

21.  All I  Love and Know, by Judith Frank

22. The Secret Place, by Tana French

23.  The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith

24.  American Innovations: Stories, by Rivka Galchen

25.  The Stories of Jane Gardam, by Jane Gardam

26.  An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay

27.  The Word Exchange, by Alena Graedon

28.  Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory

29. The Magician's Land, by Lev Grossman

30. Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway

31.  In Your Dreams, by Kristan Higgans

32.  The Hour of Lead, by Bruce Holbert

33.  The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt

34. The Hunting Gun, by Yasushi Inoue

35. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, by Mira Jacob

36. Three Weeks With Lady X, by Eloisa James

37. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories of Tove Jansson, by Tove Jansson

38. A Map of Betrayal, by Ha Jin

39. Broadchurch, by Erin Kelly

40.  The Last Illusion, by Porochista Khakpour

41.  Euphoria, by Lily King

42. Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King

43.  Redeployment, by Phil Klay

44. My Struggle: Book Three: Boyhood, by Karl Ove Knaussgard

45. Those Who Wish Me Dead, by Michael Kortya

46. Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal

47. The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

48. Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, by Sarah MacLean

49.  Bird Box, by Josh Malerman

50.  Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

borrowed from http://jackiedana.com/2014/04/15/the-halfway-point/

51.  The Invention of Exile, by Vanessa Manko 

52. The Assassination of Margaret Thacher, by Hilary Mantel

53. The Other Language, by Francesca Marciano

54. The Killer Next Door, by Alex Marwood

55. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride

56.   Thunderstruck and Other Stories, by Elizabeth McCracken

57.  The Children Act, by Ian McEwan

58. Defenders, by Will McIntosh

59. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu

60.  Accidents of Marriage, by Randy Susan Meyers

61. Mermaids in Paradise, by Lydia Millett

62. The Red Road, by Denise Mina

63. The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

64.  Crown of Renewal, by Elizabeth Moon

65. Arcanum, by Simon Morden

66. The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, by Jude Morgan

67. Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

68.  Florence Gordon, by Brian Morton

69. Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, by Alice Munro

70. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami

71.   The Son, by Jo Nesbo

72. Waiting for the Electricty, by Christina Nichol
73. Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyemi

74. Alphabet, by Kathy Page

75.  The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny 

76. Heroes are my Weakness, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

77. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, by Francine Prose

78. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, by Tom Rachman

79. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman

80.  Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

81. Children of the Revolution, by Peter Robinson

82. The Remedy for Love, by Bill Roorbach
83. Reckless Disregard, by Robert Rotstein
84. Dominion, by CJ Sansom
85. Lock In, by John Scalzi
86. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer
87. Family Life, by Akhil Sharma
88. Shield of Winter, by Nalini Singh
89. How to Be Both, by Ali Smith

90. The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross

91. Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories, by Paul Theroux
92. All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews
93.  Nora Webster, by Colm Toibin
94. Barracuda, by Christos Tsiolkas
95.  The Cold Song, by Linn Ullmann
96.  The Tao of Humiliation, by Lee Upton
97.   Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
98.  The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
99. The Martian, by Andy Weir

and whew!

100. Eyrie, by Tim Winton

part two in this year's "best of books" lists -- Amazon.com

Just over an hour ago, CBS news published Amazon.com's list of top 10 books of 2014.  There is always an ongoing "best books of the year so far" kind of thing at Amazon, but according to the news article, the editorial team at Amazon chose the top 100 out of 480, and decided that these books were top-ten worthy. Here's the list:

Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette, by Hampton Sides*

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs

Redeployment, by Phil Klay

Revival, by Stephen King

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman

The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henríquez

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

There's only one book that repeats from the Hudson Booksellers' list, and that is All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. 

I would love to join the editorial team at Amazon -- getting paid to read? What a great concept! Can I telecommute? 

stay tuned...I'm sure there will be many more "best of 2014" lists to come.

*Take that, Amy Poehler!   Hampton Sides' book is absolutely stunning and deserves a spot on every "best of"  list that comes out this year. 

... and so they begin - the "best of" book lists of 2014 -- Part One: Hudson Booksellers

Amazing how these "best of"  lists start in November, you know, right in time to buy that someone special something on the list before the holidays.  What -- no books are being released in November?? 

In my morning-coffee internet session today, Shelf Awareness supplied me with Hudson Booksellers' best of 2014 list, "selected through a nominated shortlist and voting process by a panel of Hudson's booksellers across the country. Books were selected for "achievements ranging from literary style and innovation, entertainment value and readability, to timeliness and treatment of subjects and themes." 

I'm sure there will be plenty more, but let's just call this part one of an ongoing exploration into what various  people think were the best books of 2014. In this case (Hudson),  I'm not including a couple of categories, Best Young Readers and Best Business Interests.

Hudson's best book of the year? All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Here's the list, direct from today's edition of Shelf Awareness Pro.  

Best Fiction:

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The Martian by Andy Weir

Best Nonfiction:

The Human Age by Diane Ackerman

New Life, No Instructions by Gail Caldwell

Empires Crossroads by Carrie Gibson

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

Internal Medicine by Terrence Holt

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar

Hmmm. All I will say here is this: Amy Poehler? Seriously? 

rereading... it might just be a good thing

No, I don't have a fixation on Sarah Waters right now, but an online group I belong to is reading her The Little Stranger this month as a Halloween read sort of thing so I'm rereading it.  Coming at it again after years away and with a little more reading experience under my belt is a huge plus -- I'm seeing more this time around than I did earlier.  This whole rereading thing started me thinking about which books I'd really want to pick up again -- so I had to ask myself which ones I'd be most likely to be the most serious about and here's what I came up with:

• Nabokov - Lolita --  I seriously didn't understand the concept of unreliable narrators when I read this, so I was stupid enough to believe what I was told
• Camus - The Plague --  I know a little more about the history of Occupied France & the Holocaust now than I did when I first read this book so I probably won't be shaking my head this time around wondering WTF did I just read
• Mervyn Peake - the complete Gormenghast trilogy --  yeah. Like I fully understood it at the age of 17-- you know, when I was so sure that I was so sophisticated and so intellectually gifted as do all 17 year old girls in their fourth year of  French club
• E.M. Forster - A Passage to India -- I read this after seeing the movie on television when I was younger and then became upset that the book was so complicated and not like the film
• Truman Capote - In Cold Blood -- Just to see why people hate it so much. I liked it, so I'm sure I  must have missed something.  

 I'm sure there are more, but those came straight from the top of my head.

trash talk

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Don't Look Now (which I'll get into more tomorrow when I talk about it here) a collection of nine stories by Daphne DuMaurier from NYRB books.  My favorite story in this collection turned out to be "The Birds," the story  that Alfred Hitchcock loosely adapted for his movie of the same name. In fact, I was so taken with this frightening little tale that I went on line to see what other readers had thought of it.   I didn't make it past the second place I landed, which is a blog that shall remain anonymous.  It wasn't so much what the blogger had noted, but one of the comments on what he'd written that stopped me in my tracks -- the person wrote something along the lines of "Du Maurier's  work is trash, but fun to read." There was no explanation given about what the term "trash" means to that person.

I have to say that the use of the word "trash" really bothered me.  What exactly does it mean to say that an author's work is trash?  Does it mean not literary enough?  Does it mean strictly grocery-store fare?  Does it bring to mind bodice-ripping romance novels with very little in the way of plot but lots of steamy sex and the use of the words "his throbbing manhood?" Is it fiction that gets churned out by certain authors who seem to have a new book every year? Is it just genre fiction in general? Is there a consensus on the definition of "trash" that has been put together by some cabal of  elite literary critics? Or can it be that "trash" is merely in the eye of the beholder?


I googled "trashy books" and one of the first entries that wasn't based on romance novels was from Flavorwire. In all honesty, Flavorwire is not one of my normal reading sites, but for my purposes of trying to get a handle on what books someone might consider trash, it's a good starting place. The article I've linked is called "40 Trashy Novels You Must Read Before You Die." Here the author comes up with a list of 40 novels she considers are trash, without saying exactly what she means by trash.  Here are the ones I've read:    #17 is Lady Chatterley's Lover, by DH Lawrence. Trash?  #24 - Silence of the Lambs? If you like serial killer novels, this is one of the grandaddies of them all. Will it go down in the annals of the world's greatest literature? No. Is it creepy fun? Yes.  #26 - The Bad Seed, by William March. If you ask me, this is a good one, and even though it was written in 1954, it asks questions that are very much pertinent today.  And #28 - really? It's The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which was a retelling of the story of King Arthur from the pov of the women. #32: The Stand, by Stephen King: while his Dark Tower series is my favorite out of all of his work, The Stand scared the bejeezus out of me when I first read it.

It wasn't until the day after her article was published that the author of said article offered a definition of "trash"  after an internet flaming session led her to write:

"When I think of the word “trash” I think of work written to titillate and entertain." 

So, is "titillating" at the root of trash?

What exactly constitutes trash? The books I noted in the paragraph above didn't seem "trashy" to me at the time, so I'm still NOT sure what it means. If someone could enlighten me, I'd be forever grateful.

My mind is at the end of its tether. Thank you HG Wells for putting how I feel so succinctly.

I was laying in bed last night long after midnite trying to finish a book that I need to do a write up on soon, and  all I could think of was how many potentially excellent books I have in my library that are just sitting there unread waiting for me.    So I came to the conclusion that as nice as it may be (in most cases) to read a book before its release date, and as much as I want to help support indie authors & publishing houses, after I finish with all of the books I've said I would read, I am just done.  It is very cool to have my hands on a book sometimes months before it's published, but enough is enough. I keep watching the UPS guy and the postal person delivering new orders to my door only to have to put them away for later. And then I respond to review requests and later becomes even more later, while all the while even more books are piling up.  It's enough to drive a person effing insane.   The freebies are no longer worth it. I will, however, make a couple of exceptions for people I enjoy working with.

 I mean, seriously -- if it's a book I want enough to say yes to a pre-pub review request, I'll probably buy it anyway.  And then there's this: a majority of the time I bust my butt to get the book read & posted on time, and then what? Where's the freakin' publisher saying "thanks for the review" if it's a good one, or "hey, sorry you didn't like it" once it's posted? I mean, sometimes I feel like a tool and I'm so done with that.  And god forbid you should tweet to an author about how much you enjoyed his or her book -- there have only been a couple from whom I've heard  anything back.  It's not like I want to be the author's best friend, and I don't need twitter followers, but I mean seriously -- I take the time to help with publicity for a book he or she has written, and not hear even a freakin' thank you?

The word "no" is soon to be a major staple of my vocabulary. I've know I've done this to myself, but enough is just enough.  As soon as I have fulfilled my obligations, I'm done.

30 book reviews a week?

Doing my leisurely Saturday morning coffee internet reading, I came across an article from the Washington Post highlighting a woman who reads and reviews on average thirty books a day [The link to the article is here if you're interested in checking it out]. She reads anything  “from Jane Austen, to 1970s bodice rippers, to contemporary books about the philosophy of physics.” Then, in her spare time, she's a writer.

This woman holds the #1 reviewer spot on Goodreads --  which in itself is no big deal for someone like me who, unlike  most people,  has no interest in rankings of any sort, but the sheer number of books she reads seems very high. She  reminds me of someone on Amazon with the initials HK who caught a lot of flak for reading and reviewing several books a day -- I mean, seriously -- how does someone in the real world really achieve these numbers?   Maybe by speedreading, but still. Even when I do what I call "crap" reading which goes fast because I don't really have to think about it, I couldn't pull that one off.

 The author of the piece in the Post is Ron Charles, someone whose work I admire, and as he ends his article, he notes the following:

"In the time it’s taken me to write this blog post, I should have reviewed 16 books." 

I started my day with a chuckle, to be sure.

talking nerdy

 Today I got this major bug up my butt that I absolutely had to have a copy of Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel to take with me on my trip to Seattle.  So off we go to my local B&N to look for one. While I'm standing there becoming upset because they didn't have even one copy, I struck up a conversation with a man who was considering buying Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest.  He was saying how aside from the Larsson series he'd read one other book from a Scandinavian author & he couldn't remember the title, but then described the story. As it turns out, it was Henning Mankell's Man From Beijing, and so I felt like I had to introduce him to the Wallander series. Then I checked my iphone to see if the Larsson book was coming out in paper any time soon, and I thought we were finished with our little chat.  But no! He told me I couldn't leave because he felt he had to give me something.  This started a long and wonderful discussion of books translated from Spanish to English, and I was so impressed because the first title he gave me was Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo, and I had just received that book in the mail this week!  Then he went through a long list of authors (Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Saramago, yada yada) but all of the books he mentioned I'd already read (or they're on my shelf to be read).  But still he said "don't go...I want to give you something."  So finally he comes up with author Laura Restrepo, whose books I'd never read (and which are also NOT carried at the local B&N).  Then it was time to go.
 
 What a cool conversation! I love when I find someone who shares my tastes in books and also enjoys talking about them, even when it's someone I'd never met before. I may try this again some time!

I'll read you in my dreams...

Has this ever happened to anyone but me? I was laying in bed reading The Singer's Gun and must have dozed off, but I don't think my brain was ready to give up the book.  I dreamed dialogue, plotline and could even see the characters doing their thing -- all within a very short span of time, and it all made sense in the context of the novel.  Next thing I know, I'm awake -- so I started reading again and of course, it wasn't the same as I had dreamed it.  I think if this happens again, I'm going to try to write it all down. 

July: light, relaxing reading

It's time for laying out by the pool with a cold drink and a stack of books.  Nothing too heavy or too thought-provoking, just fun.  The three Rs of summer: rest, relax and read. Yeah.

An open letter to an anonymous nattering nabob of negativity

I am referring to an email that I received from an anonymous poster today about my earlier review of Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Not only did this person attack me personally, but also three of my blogger friends who reviewed the same book.(I have left out the names of my blogger friends -- otherwise the email is as quoted here).

Here's the email

You are all idiots. Dave Cullen is nothing but a lying famewhore and anyone who has even the slightest bit of knowledge about Columbine knows this.

Nancy , the fact that you can read one book on a complex subject like this and think you know so much that you don't need to read anymore shows you as being ignorant and intellectually lazy.
The success of this book shows the sad lack of intelligence in today's book buying public.

Pathetic!

As it so happens, I know who sent this email. This person left a string of rants on Amazon.com on several reviews of this same book.  Here's another example of her work re this book:

on Amazon (12/2009):

You obviously work for/with Dave Cullen or his publishing house.
Either that or your mind numbingly ignorant.
Probably the latter.

The only thing that Dave Cullen deserves credit for is being a lying , egotistical famewhore with a gift for making frighteningly stupid people buy into his false, worthless bs.

note the use of the word "famewhore," which led me immediately to Amazon.com and this person. I'd read her comments before.

and again in February of this year, in response to another comment:

However, I do understand why all you small minded folks get upset when someone dares to state the truth about your lying famewhore idol Cullen and his worthless book that should rightly be labeled a book of fiction

How can so many people be so stupid? 

Once again, she uses the word famewhore, this time with such venom that I felt like I needed to stand away from my computer to protect myself.

So let's get this straight, point by point.

1."You are all idiots."
 Neither myself nor my friends are idiots. You don't even know us so how in the world can you say we are idiots? Here is the definition of an idiot:

id·i·ot (d-t)

n.

A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

2. "Dave Cullen is nothing but a lying famewhore and anyone who has even the slightest bit of knowledge about Columbine knows this."
 I suppose you were there the day everyone was shot and you know that Cullen is lying because you saw everything firsthand -- you were the star witness of events 10 years ago.
If you read what I wrote in my review, I noted that I wasn't there, so there was no way at all for me to comment on Mr. Cullen's veracity on the subject. I guess since you were there, you can speak to my comment.

 3. "Nancy , the fact that you can read one book on a complex subject like this and think you know so much that you don't need to read anymore shows you as being ignorant and intellectually lazy."

a)Well, why don't you write to my former PhD advisers and the panel for my oral exams and ask them for yourself.  When you're finished with that, I'll send you translations of works in Chinese and Japanese I've done and we'll sit down over a lovely cup of tea and discuss them, along with a quick little conversation about the relationship between state-sponsored Shinto and WWII in Japan. 
b) Then we'll have a lovely chat with former university students I've taught and they can give you the scoop on how truly intellectually lazy and ignorant I was for them.
c) Point your finger back at yourself:  you are a bit lazy in your reading skills, because I never said that I "think I know so much."  Here is the exact quotation:

I think I've read all I want to read about Columbine -- I'm interested but not obsessed, and quite happy with Cullen's book. I'm sure Mr. Kass' book is fine as well, but I'm done with Columbine for now.

d) I have a life. I don't dwell or obsess, especially about something that happened 10 years ago.



4. "The success of this book shows the sad lack of intelligence in today's book buying public."

 Yes. Well, I've just added UFO Kids by Allan Zullo to my Amazon wishlist. You know, the one you reviewed on Amazon with 4 stars, saying

This enjoyable book tells the true stories of some encounters that children and teenagers had with aliens and their spececraft. The names and places were changed of course but these are all real documented cases. Most of the stories involved benevolent , kind aliens but one story in the book was about a group of aliens that seemed to have sinister motivations towards humans.I guess , just like people, they all aren't nice! This book had a fresh perspective in focusing on the experiences of kids and teens because its usually only the encounters of adults that you read about.

5. "Pathetic!"
See #4 above.

You can disagree with me all you want. In fact, I think it's absolutely wonderful that you don't have to think like me, and vice versa. What a dreary world it would be if that were the case. But know this: my thoughts about Columbine came from my head and they're my opinions. You don't have to like them and I don't write my book reviews to win any popularity contests. They're written so I can remember what I thought of a particular book at the time I read it.  To attack me and my blogging friends because you disagree with my opinion (and doing it behind a blanket of anonymity) is just uncalled for.  I have never attacked you or what you've written about any book so why do it to me? You don't even know me.  If you have something to add in terms of discussing the book, awesome. You can disagree, you can state why you think what I'm saying is not to your liking, but quit attacking me and people who share my interests in books. That's just wrong. I've never hurt you nor have I gotten in your business.

So please, just go away and leave me alone. I don't know you, nor do I want to. Discussion about books is fun, but not when you are bullying me or people who write on my blog. 

Woot is a hoot...look what I just bought

I just bought a t-shirt with this picture on it at woot.com.  Here's the blurb:

Dude, everybody can see your ISBN

If you purchased this book without a jacket, you should know that it is either stolen property or else some kind of perverted nudist that gets its sick kicks frolicking around in the altogether. It may have been reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, or it might have just shucked its garb and skipped off the shelf to prance through the countryside au naturale like a shameless pagan, but either way, neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this dirty, dirty “stripped book.”
Wear this shirt: between the covers, if you know what we mean.
Don’t wear this shirt: to the emergency PTA meeting about LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER. (Go topless!)
This shirt tells the world: “NAKED LUNCH is both my favorite book and my favorite meal.”

If you haven't met woot.com, go check it out. They have t-shirts for every occasion (and other stuff as well) but the shirts are what will catch your eye.  Seriously. 

Totally off topic: The end of an era -- goodbye Law and Order

r.i.p.

Today I received an email about how to reset my Twitter account password and panicked because I hadn't asked to reset it. So I figured someone's trying to get into it (for the life of me I don't know why because I barely use it and then only for book-related things) and went to see if I made any postings I didn't know about in case I had been hacked (which I didn't). However, I was scanning down the tweets I've missed in the last couple of days and someone from Living Social (where I use Visual Bookshelf from Facebook) posted that Law and Order was being canceled. I'm like "WHAT??????????" and clicked on the link for the New York Times that the person left. Imagine my surprise when I found out that this was not just another rumor, but the truth.

Many people wrote in to the NYT  (myself included) to bemoan L&O's fate, and I read one comment there that said  "get a grip...it's just a tv show." While that may be the case, and while the loss of one long-running show may not change how the Earth spins on its axis or make me want to jump out of a window or something, it's still one of my favorites and I'm not alone in that category.

Let me just say that this is definitely the end of an era, not just for Law and Order, but for me as well. I can honestly with no hesitation whatsoever say that there is absolutely nothing left for me to watch on any of the big three original networks. Now that L&O is going away, there won't be a need to look at the on-screen directory to see what's on the regular network channels; it's only cable channels and PBS that will be on in the house when I'm ready to sit down for some television watching. I feel like something of a certain quality and intelligence has been taken away and I'm a wee bit sad -- after all of the many years of watching this show, I'm going to miss it. And to the powers that be at NBC....I have just one question: what were you thinking???????????

Goodbye, Jack McCoy and the DA's staff; see you later, Lt. Van Buren and all of New York's finest working with you -- it's been a pleasure.  You will all be missed. To the actors who played all of these people throughout the years...you rock. Thank you. To everyone connected with producing the show, well, you was robbed by the network.

happy mother's day to all of my reader friends

My hat's especially off to those of you with small children who still manage to find time in the day to read. I've totally forgotten what a tremendous feat this is! I'm in Seattle with my son & his family and reading time doesn't manage to catch up to me until about 8 pm.

I hope everyone has a great mother's day ...and now I'm going to go get dim sum.

home. tired. leaving again shortly.

home again after a mini-vacation and ready for sleep. How come whenever I go on vacation I come home exhausted? And it's off to Seattle the day after tomorrow for two weeks.

I got a lot of reading done but that's all going to have to wait for tomorrow, along with the roundup for April. I can't even think right now.

Used books are great, but not when they're supposed to be new.

Larry and I went to our local Barnes and Noble yesterday to pick up a few books for him to read on our upcoming cruise (yes, another one).  While he was over perusing what B&N stocks as far as Jefferson Bass, I was prowling the new fiction shelves and I picked up Craig Nova's book The Informer (on the wishlist forever) opened it up to page one, and the first thing I saw was a torn page, bottom right corner. Guess what else I saw on that page -- fingerprints that looked like someone had eaten a chocolate-chip cookie and forgot to clean their hands. To add to my woes, that was the only copy B&N actually had in stock. So what if I had wanted to buy it? Okay, I did (I figure buying a cruise read is a good excuse for breaking the self-imposed ban on buying books) but there was no way I was going to buy that particular copy.  How are they going to sell it?

I'm just standing there in a bit of shock, and Larry comes back to find me. I show him the book and start to tell him my opinion on readers who take their cappucinos, chocolate-chip cookies and a clean new book back to the comfy chairs to read and don't bother to clean their hands while doing it. As I'm launching into my tempest in a teapot tirade, a guy grabs a trade paperback off the shelf, sits down with his coffee and starts reading in the chair, and bends the cover all the way back so that only one page is showing.  You know darn well that when his coffee's finished, he's going to stick that book back on the shelf, now with a creased spine.Oh, the horror of it all.

So please people, if you're going to spend a quiet Saturday morning at the bookstore, taking care of your coffee fix and test driving a novel, please be clean about it. And for Pete's sake, please try to think of other people who may actually want to BUY the book you've just bent back or because you forgot to take a napkin with your cookie, you've left chocolate fingerprints on. If I wanted a used book, I'd have gone to a bookstore where I know the books have already been read, and even then, I wouldn't pick up the food-stained ones.

sometimes a book comes along...

where you don't want it to end. And that's where I am with this book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell. I'm at the last one hundred pages mark and bemoaning the fact that it's almost over. I will be back with a real review shortly, but if you have received an ARC of this book, get on it and start reading.