What books do you have next to your bed right now? How about other places in the house? What are you reading?
I just finished The Sorceress tonight, so I am shockingly without any book in progress at the moment. I have no idea what I’ll read next — possibly another fantasy story for the Once upon a Time challenge or maybe something nonfiction for the Nonfiction 5 Summer Challenge. Or one of those top kids’ books I’ve missed out on.
Next to my bed are a rather dusty pile of books:
L. Frank Baum’s Queen Nixi of Ix (a fairy tale finished last week and awaiting a review)
The Hobbit (read)
Love, Rosie (put down part-way through over the winter)
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (re-read at Christmas)
Revisions Of (unread)
Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three (read)
The Tales of Beedle the Bard (unread)
The Olive Farm (unread non-fiction)
A Moveable Feast (unread)
Elsewhere in the house are similar commingled piles of read and unread tomes, waiting for me to sort them out.
This list of Top 100 Children’s Books from the School Library Journal offers plenty of inspiration for summer reading. Bolded are the ones I’ve already read: (more…)
Surprise, surprise, it was not all reading all the time here at the Burrow this weekend.
This morning Rudi and I headed to the market where there were carrots, nettles, asparagus, and ramps to be had, amongst other things. We used every dollar we took with us, down to the last one that I used to buy a single yellow tulip to cheer our kitchen. It looks great atop the fridge nestled next to (but not in the same container as) the asparagus.
We spent midday up in Columbia Heights where Sarah was kind enough to invite us to celebrate her birthday with brunch and some hanging out. Everyone agreed that the food was quite tasty even if our waitress seemed a bit … distracted.
We came back home where I laid down for a teeny before we headed to the garden to dig. We weeded our plot, turned over the soil, envisioned where our square-foot garden sections might go, improved the soil, and planted cabbage babies, which despite sitting in my gardening bag for a week, did not seem to be too worse for the wear.
It’s been a quiet night at home since then with lentils and ice cream (although not together; that would be gross), Chuck and Bones (we’re still a week behind on the latter), and knitting. Shortly, we’ll be taking some ibuprofen (hoeing is hard on the back) and heading to bed.
Seems like a nice way to finish a weekend to me…
What did you get up to this weekend?
A few final thoughts on Saturday’s readathon:
After writing the last book review and leaving a few encouraging comments for fellow participants, I did take my book to bed to try to read there, but decided within minutes that it’s hard to read through closed eyelids. I turned off my book light and went to bed — probably sometime around 4 — and didn’t wake up again until after the 24 hours had concluded.
In the end I completed three books and the first three chapters of a fourth book for a total of 1,072 pages. I probably only read for 12 of the 24 hours, but it did prove that I would not like to read all the time, despite what I always thought as a kid.
Category: books,garden. There is/are Comments Off on weekend roundup.
I’m definitely feeling it now. Would it be cheating and self-defeating to go read in bed?
Kwaïdan, by Jung and Jee-Yun
From the jacket: “In 12th Century Japan, one sister’s spiteful jealousy begins a complicated web of revenge and redemption that spans two centuries. Ghostly encounters, samurai swordplay, undead armies, beautiful landscapes, and strange demons are brought to life by Jung’s lush, expressive artwork. The lost spirits of two unlucky lovers may still find freedom in the supernatural birth of a strange girl … and her ability to unravel the secrets of the restless ghosts that haunt her, the Kwaïdan.”
My take: I believe this was a gift from a representative of Dark Horse Books who was a fellow vendor at an ALA show several years back — the year we were in Orlando. Bill of Overdue Media introduced me to Thea and when I expressed interest in learning more about manga, she suggested this was a good gateway title.
I’m tired so my review is going to be a bit jerky, but basically this is a Japanese ghost (kwaïdan) story. Two sisters are in love with the same man. The homelier, Akane, scars the pretty one, Orin, with burning oil, who then drowns herself out of what would seem to be preemptive self pity. The guy returns from war, learns she’s dead, and gouges out his eyes on the bank of the lake. The sister, too, eventually ends up at the lake, but we later learn it’s so she can achieve some sort of twisted immortality. Confused yet?
Well, it turns out that after several centuries, Orin is able to temporarily escape the lake and imparts a portion of her soul to an about-to-be-born child, whose mother is then murdered by Akane’s demon army. The baby, Setsuko, is born, but missing a face, a symbol of her fragmented soul. Tormented as a child, the masked girl ends up in a brothel but later leaves to follow a blind artist who is known for perfectly painting the face of a beautiful woman he has never met. The two of them embark on a journey to the lake, where they hope to unravel the mystery of what has brought them together.
There’s an army of demon children. There’s a friendly ghost (named Toshiro, not Casper). There are creepy golem-type creatures that serve Akane and act as Orin’s prisoner.
It was good, but not great. But if you know of someone you’d recommend The Woman Warrior to, this is probably a good companion to that novel.
I admit it: I totally fell off the wagon for five or six hours this afternoon when I had a mini hissy fit, took a clearly much needed nap, and then went on a walk with Rudi. We stopped for a hot chocolate before taking a new way to our neighborhood park, which showed us a little crevice with chairs and tables next to a waterfall clearly meant for weekday lunches but which didn’t seem to be cordoned off from others who might want to sit there. Exciting, no?
I’ve put down my gardening book, haven’t started the book I took on my walk, and instead have picked up a book I’d bought years ago from my favorite local bookstore chain which has since gone out of business.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick
From the jacket: “Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks — like the gears of the clocks he keeps — with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the train station, Hugo’s undercover life and his most precious secret are put in jeopardy A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo’s dead father form the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery.”
My take: You know how when you’re a kid they tell you that you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover? It’s true, but also a total lie. You shouldn’t, but people do it all the time. And I did it with this book. This book may have my favorite cover of all time (ooh! I should have thought of it this morning when that question came up!) and I totally judged the type of book it would be (fantasy) based on what I saw. I even bought it based on that.
But it’s absolutely not. It’s historical fiction. And it’s innovative at that, combining an engrossing fictional main character with a real life Frenchman from early in the 20th century with 284 drawings plus photos to create something that blurs the line between historical fiction, graphic novel, and cinema.
Hugo is twelve and living alone in the walls of Gare Montparnasse, a Parisian train station, after his father is killed in a freak accident and his drunk uncle disappears. Fearing what will become of him should anyone guess his secret, he keeps up his uncle’s job of winding the station’s 27 clocks, hoping to remain under the radar of the Station Inspector.
Yet Hugo has a second, more precious secret. He has the project his father, a clockmaker and tinkerer, had been working on at his death hidden in the station, too, and is desperately trying to finish his father’s work, hoping for a message from beyond the grave. [By the way, can someone help me recall the word I’m looking for? I wanted “from beyond the grave” to correspond to “preternatural,” but according to the dictionary that’s wishful thinking on my part. Does the word I actually want spring to anyone’s fingertips?]
Yet to do that, Hugo’s forced to steal parts from the local toyshop, where he’s eventually caught by the owner. His father’s notebook is taken and later, the old man claims, burned. But the man’s young charge, his god-daughter Isabelle, says otherwise. To find out the truth — and to finish his father’s work — he must stay close and work to get back the only thing that truly belongs to him. Or does it?
Anyone who loves an afternoon at the movies should read this book. Know that the high page count is related to the massive number of drawings and it’s cinematic approach and that the reading time will fly past. It may take younger readers several days to finish, but more advanced readers can easily finish it in several hours, even with time to savor the work as a whole.
Pick up a book that you’ve read today, or are currently reading.
Choose a song that goes with the book -– could be that it fits the overall feel of it or even a certain scene.
Create a blog post.
As I’m currently reading All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew, we need a gardening song. And this one, “The Garden Song,” as performed by John Denver, is my favorite:
But since the whole point of the book is that we should not be planting “row by row,” but instead in squares, I figured I’d better add a second song to help alleviate any confusion:
That would, of course, be the ’80s classic, “Hip to be Square” performed by Huey Lewis & the News.
At last! A post!
I’m definitely feeling it now. Would it be cheating and self-defeating to go read in bed?