Nom de Plume

From Masha Hamilton via The Elegant Variation:
The Camel Bookmobile made its first run almost a decade ago. Three dromedaries trudged through dusty, arid northeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia to bring a library to settlements so tiny and far-flung they’d become nearly invisible; places lacking roads and schools, where most people had never held […]

I rarely read short stories; they seem to require a curious mindset, in which one feels intelligent but mildly ADD. Generally, I feel one or the other. That start and stop, start and stop puts me off, before I even begin. And it’s a shame, because my bookshelves are teeming with shorts. Like Mark Winegarder’s […]

The village of Fetherhoughton is a dour place, indeed. Anchored by moors, the people are superstitious and humorless in their isolation. The Catholic church is presided over by Father Angwin, who has lost his faith, and Sister Perpetua (otherwise known as Purpit) of the convent, an austere, cruel terror of a a woman. When the […]

Good airplane reading. May the person who found it in the seat pocket enjoy.

I had thought that this was an overrated book. I had thought it overhyped. I had thought that it wasn’t nearly as press-worthy as it appeared to be.
Reader, I was wrong.
I’m coming into this a little late in the game, so there’s no point in recapping the story. All I can say is that […]

Someone, somewhere (I wish I could remember who) said that Diana Norman was a great historical writer, so I promptly bookmooched the one book I found, which just happened to be A Catch of Consequence. It’s the Boston Tea Party, and Makepeace Burke rescues a drowning Englishman and hides him in her tavern–the […]

Alternative titles to this blog post:
1. I wasted enough time on the movie. I don’t need to finish the book.
2. Damn those nefarious Border “3 for 2″ book schemes, especially in an airport when one is afraid of running out of reading material.
3. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
4. […]

Hannah Green and her father have escaped the Spanish Inquisition–but only after Hannah’s mother has been burned at the stake for being a Jew. Newly resettled in London, the illustrious Robert Dudley and his tutor come in to purchase books from her bookseller father, it is revealed that Hannah has a gift for the […]

Have I mentioned how much I love bookmooch? Maybe once or twice … Prose, in typical fashion, turns her sharp, skewering eye on college writing programs and the paranoid atmosphere of sexual harassment in the 90s. Swenson, a professor of creative writing at a second-rate New England college, is in a rut. His own […]

Well, we all know by now that I despise the New York Times Reviling of Books, and tend to disagree with them about everything out of principle.
However.
It turns out that we agree on one thing: Harr’s The Lost Painting is fantastic. It’s a shameless page turner about the various people involved in finding […]

Another kiddie lit novel, in which Tom Ward–who is the seventh son of a seventh son–starts his apprentice with the Spook, whose job is to rid the countryside of various supernatural beings. The story itself wasn’t that thrilling, but the illustrations–done by the same guy who does the covers for Gregory Maguire’s novels–were fantastic […]

What better book to read while in Jordan than a lovely foodie memoir of a Jordanian-American? Diana Abu-Jaber chronicles her youth as the daughter of a displaced Jordanian man who loves to cook and an American mother–and I have to say, her prose sings. It’s gorgeously, gorgeously written (and much more enjoyable than either […]

In the mid-80s, we lived in Bucharest. My mother was the director of the American Library, a part of the U.S. Information Agency. One day, an American man and his wife waltzed into her office. “My name is Sidney Sheldon,” he said, “and I’m writing a book. Can I take you out to dinner and […]

I saw this at the bookstore, and despite having given up on the Bartimaeus Trilogy, thought it sounded interesting. On my hold list at the library it went, and when it came, I found myself riveted. For about three chapters. Basically, one of two orphaned brothers who live with their short-tempered sister in a small […]

It’s the future and we’re running out of natural resources. Never to fear: scientists have discovered to go back in time to a slightly different dimension. The place in question is the Scottish border in the 16th century, peopled by a fierce group of warriors called the Sterkarms. Treaties abound; the Sterkarms are still untrustworthy. […]

Aza is 15 and tremendously ugly. But her voice–in a magical kingdom where song is the most important thing of all–soars above the rest. When she is taken to court, she discovers that the new queen has the voice of a toad. On discovering that Aza can throw her voice too, the queen blackmails her […]

I can’t remember where I got this author reference. All I can say is that I keep trying to read adult fantasy, and keep going back to the kiddie stuff. This was fine, it was okay, but the prose was so self-consciously dense and it could have ended about 100 pages before it really did. […]

I’ve been hearing what a great children’s writer Lois Lowry is for a long time, but somehow had confused her with Lois Duncan, a writer I loved when I was a kid. Her novels were creepy, thrumming with tales of possession and the channeling of dead spirits. My particular favorite was a novel about two […]

This was one of my lovely bookmooch finds, and I have this to say:
1. The first is the best, by far. Everything else pales in comparison.
2. Anne becomes more irritating the older she grows.
3. Paul Irving is a smarmy little pansy. Davy, on the other hand, rocks.
4. Marilla tells it like it is when […]