Top Ten Tuesday: Santa, May I?

 Oh, the Top Ten Tuesday meme.  It's so much fun to participate, and all the more so when I have time to write up my answer the week before.  This week, the good folks at The Broke & the Bookish want us to list the top ten books we hope Santa (or the fairies, or the Christmas Pig, or your childhood guardian of choice) brings us.  Like the rest of the book blogging world, I love getting books for Christmas.  Unlike the rest of the book blogging world (or at least unlike most of it), people rarely gift me with books.  You see, I work in a bookstore and now everybody who might have bought me a book feels intimidated about buying books for me.  I get it, I suppose.  I have access to advance reading copies, not to mention a generous employee discount and a good relationship with sales reps who are generally happy to send me books, gratis.  But it also makes me sad because nobody ever gives me a book and says, with real urgency, Read This.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Woe is I.  There are much worse problems to have, so without further ado, here is a list of books I'd love to receive:

1. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.  It's a door-stopper, but also a literary game changer.  I want this one.

2. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi.  I just had a customer rave about this book to me.  (In fact, it was local writing sensation Kelly Link who raved about it, which makes me want to read it even more.  We just discovered that we both love Molly Gloss's book, The Hearts of Horses, so I had a booksellerly moment.)

3. If I Loved You I Would Tell You This by Robin Black.  This looks really good.  I've got a coworker  (Nieves--she's awesome) who has been raving to me about this book, and she's even let me borrow it. You see, I'm not a particularly good book borrower (don't ask me how, but when I handle borrowed books they inevitably end up damaged), but if it were my own, I wouldn't have to worry about damaging it.

4. Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan.  This is the sequel to The Last Werewolf and I can't wait to sink my teeth into it.  Pun absolutely intended.

5. General travel literature.  Especially if it's funny or about a warm climate.  A la Bill Bryson or J Maarten Troost.  Maybe Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes or even the 2011 Best Travel Writing anthology. 

6. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes. 2010's Matterhorn was a monument of Vietnam literature, but it wasn't my piece of cake.  I think, though, that I would like Marlantes' non-fiction account. 

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I never actually read this book, though I'm not sure how I escaped it.  But my husband recently read it and loved it, so maybe he'll give me his copy. 

8. The last book in the Incarceron series by Catherine Fisher.  Don't know when it will be published, but if there's an ARC floating around out there, I'd love for Santa to bring it to me.

9. Well-written memoirs of interesting women.  This year I read Alexandra Fuller's memoir/bio of her mother, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, which I loved. Anything else that fits the bill would be great.

10. Any book that the giver has read and loved and wants me to read, too, so that we can have a shared experience.

What about you?  What is the #1 book on your book wish list this year? 

NB: Last chance to win a copy of Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver.  Click here to sign up! 

Book Review: White Truffles in Winter by N. M. Kelby

First of all, isn't this a lovely cover, sensuously hinting at all of the good food writing contained therein?  I do believe that it is the cover the first drew me to this book back when my Norton sales rep, David, was in town.  He left me a copy of the ARC months ago but I'm just now getting around to reading it.  Like that sweatshirt that my mom got me says, it's always a case of So many books, so little time. 

This is the story of the great French chef, Escoffier, and his life and loves, told in a variety of ways: from the present, in which his wife Delphine, is dying but longing for him to create a dish in her honor; from chapters of the memoir which the present Escoffier is currently writing; and from the past, in which we get third person accounts of Escoffier's feats, ranging from wartime survival to loving Sarah Bernhardt, to running the kitchen at the famed Savoy in London.  This hodgepodge of narratives robs the book of any real coherence.  Early on, at least, the chapters alternate on a regular basis but in the latter half of the novel it switches a little willy-nilly and the novel suffers from this lack of continuity.

There are some gorgeous passages describing food in this novel--probably the best food writing I've read since Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody.  And I found my heart aching a little bit for Delphine, who on her death bed wants her husband to pay her the same compliment that he's paid his lovers through the years: to immortalize her through food.  But there is very little character development here, and what little there is of Escoffier's development leaves me vastly disinterested in him.  He seems to be a man of neither action nor honor. 

The writing serves the story well enough, and there are a few moments of simple eloquence of art, food, & truth--and that narrative integrity simply be a matter of perception:

"Impossible stories--they are the key to all good restaurants.  It [the "fresh" sole] could be frozen; it makes no difference. The diner will think it fresh, glorious. He pays for the story. If the story is told well, with imagination and conviction and the right amount of ego and embroidery, then it is true enough.  And something that is true enough is all anyone can ever ask for."

If I had gone into this novel with any sort of expectations, I might say that I was disappointed. But instead I'll say that this was a pleasant interlude between far more serious and literary novels--an amuse bouche, if you will.  In the end I found myself not caring much whether Escoffier created a dish for Delphine or not, or whether he had betrayed his country or not, or whether Sandra Bernhardt was pitiable or not.  Reading about the intense passions the French reserve for their food, however?  Now that was worth the prix fixe dinner! 

Broke & Bookish Secret Santa, or What a Haul!

I wasn't sure what to expect when I signed up to participate in this year's Secret Santa, hosted by the good folks at The Broke and the Bookish (yes, the same good folks who sponsor the Top Ten Tuesday meme). But when TB&B matched my Secret Santa to me, I really hit the jackpot.  Ms. Thorp (whose blog is unknown to me--I'd love to find out more but a Google search didn't turn anything up) knows how to treat a gal: she filled my box with loads o' goodies: yummy gummy candies, two pairs of cheerful Christmas socks (Dobby would be *so* jealous), and a magnetic kitty notepad, which would be awesome enough on their own.  But she also sent me lovely copies of Jennifer Donnelly's Revolution and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country, two books which, while vastly divergent, have been on my reading list for some time. 

So this is my space to say thank you, Audrey Thorp, for your extreme generosity and goodwill.  I can't wait to start my new books, and if by some remote chance you see this post and wish to make your blog known to me so that I can become an ardent follower (but not in a stalkerish way), I'd love that!

Book Review: Two Short Story Collections by Nathan Englander and Rahul Mehta

It wasn't my express intention to travel with two collections of short stories last weekend when I traveled to Jackson, but that's how the ball bounces sometimes.  The first, Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta is a backlist book from Harper Perennial that I originally purchased for vacation in October but never got the chance to read.  I bought it after reading a review on somebody's blog that I follow, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.  The stories in Quarantine are definitely discrete stories (in other words, this is not a novel-in-stories), but they are all explorations in character for young, gay men of Indian extraction.  I found the collection good; always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing.  Family and cultural expectations weigh heavily on these young men, often resulting in unintentionally cruel or destructive behavior to both their partners and elders.  This appears to be Mehta's first published book, and his short stories are in the popular modern US style (think of the kind of short stories published in The New Yorker these days), which is not my preferred short story style (my two favorites are Jhumpa Lahiri and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt).  But just because it's not my cup of tea doesn't meant I'm not looking forward to his future work, and I think his is a voice to be reckoned with. (NB: This book qualifies for my South Asian Challenge)

The second collection I read on my trip, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander, gets the award for unwieldiest title of the year, all homage to Raymond Carver aside.   I very much admired Englander's debut collection of stories many years ago called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and thus was happy when Ann Kingman, my Knopf sales rep, gave me an ARC of this new one to read. Like Mehta's, these stories are about the lives and times of a particular contemporary cultural group--in this case, American and Israeli Jews.  And like Mehta's, these stories are always thought-provoking and occasionally disturbing, and of a New Yorker-y style (I know for a fact that the titular story was published there earlier).

I didn't realize that I would be essentially writing the same review for two story collections that on the surface are quite dissimilar, but when you boil 'em down turn out to be surprisingly identical.  There's a certain narrative remove from each collection, and while Englander has an unconventionally structured first-person story that is presumably somewhat autobiographical, each book has a sameness running throughout it.  I used to think that Englander's voice was one to be reckoned with, too, but now I have to question my judgment.  This collection may be strong in terms of the writing, but it doesn't show much range.  Then again, I have a co-worker who levels that same criticism against Lahiri, whose work I love and emotionally engage in, so maybe you shouldn't pay attention to what I say.

Eating (and Drinking) My Way Through Jackson

As soon as I learned that my husband and I would be traveling to Jackson last weekend, I began compiling a must-visit list of restaurants and foods that would complete our trip. There are many things that I love about New England compared with Mississippi, particularly the politics and the summers, but  regional cuisine ain't one of them.  Up here in the Kingdom of the Yankee, bbq is more like a noun than a verb, and if you can find grits or sweet tea at all, even mediocre samples, you're lucky. We were traveling so that DH could promote his newest middle grade book, The Cheshire Cheese Cat, and as such we were tied a good bit to the itinerary that Peachtree Publishers and the host bookstore, Lemuria, had planned, but that still gave us plenty of room to maneuver, as you'll see.

(Image found online)

Now, I'm not a fast food fan.  I eat meat but I try my best to avoid any factory-farmed food, which eliminates most fast food options.  I cannot, however, resist the siren call of Krystal Burgers when I head South, and thus our pilgrimage began during our layover in concourse A in ATL.  My DH also confesses to a deep-seated fondness for these sliders, as the chain began in his hometown of Chattanooga, TN.  It really is the perfect blend of mustard, pickle, and onion, and oh, those warm, pillowy buns.  We each ate two burgers and shared an order of fries and sighed with satisfaction before boarding our connecting flight to JAN.

Patrick & Elizabeth, a dynamic sibling duo! Note the stained glass.

Next up was dinner at El Charro, a Mexican restaurant that has opened in Jackson since I lived there.  My dear friends, Patrick & Elizabeth, and I have a tradition of eating Mexican food together when I'm in town and El Charro was a good addition to our food ritual.  The atmosphere is a fun one, filled with both families and local college students, and the food was really quite good.  I had one of the vegetarian platters with chile relleno and spinach enchiladas.  Not, perhaps, thoroughly authentic, but I was more than satisfied, and the price simply cannot be beat.  My entire platter was only $7.99.  My main complaint about Mexican food at home is that it is either good or affordable, but never both, so I wish there was a place like El Charro in western MA.  Plus how can you not like a restaurant with fun stained glass windows like those?

Broad Street Bakery

Those grits are mmm-mmm, good!

On Friday, Emily Grossenbacher, the children's bookseller at Lemuria, had arranged for us to visit a couple of local schools to talk about Cheshire Cheese Cat and the art of illustration.  To use my DH's own colorful language, the thought of talking to hundreds of 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade children makes his ass suck wind, so clearly we had to fortify ourselves with breakfast at Broad Street Bakery, housed in the same building as Lemuria.  As a transplant from WI to MS, I was leery of grits, but once I embraced them, it was with the fervor of the twice-saved finding salvation through Jesus.  So believe me when I say that Broad Street's cheese grits are unparalleled--I've paid twice as much for half as good in the heralded breakfast restaurants of New Orleans (Brennan's, Commander's Palace, etc). Creamy and cheesey and hot and delicious and yummy and I'm about to run out of ways to praise them 'cause my mouth is watering at the sheer memory.  You don't know from grits if you've never eaten them at Broad Street. Just a cup of grits and a side of their minted fruit salad was enough to send us once more into the breach of those middle schoolers. 

After DH's last presentation for the day, all three of us were hungry so we stopped in at The Hickory Pit to nosh on some pulled pork sandwiches.  I'm afraid that I inhaled my own sandwich so quickly that I neglected to take a photo of it, but I found a photo on the Jackson Metromix website that shows the unsauced pulled pork, served up with coleslaw (on the sandwich, not the side) and a side of chunky fries where you can actually taste all of their potatoey goodness.  Note to Yankees: if you're served a pulled pork sandwich that's already doused in sauce, you're not getting authentic BBQ.  The customer should always be the one to add the sauce, and ideally there should be more than one option.

photo credit: Jackson Metromix.  Note lack of sauce.

At Hickory Pit, you get your choice of hot, mild, or sweet sauce.  They're all good. Plus, it's affordable.  It's done fast-food style, so you pick up your food at the counter and bus your own tables, which keeps overhead down.  Many so-called bbq places up north where I live charge you three times what we paid for our sandwiches AND they have the gall to serve wine.  No, sir!  Beer or sweet tea, or water in a pinch--those are the only three permissible beverages to accompany bbq.  (I nearly drank my weight in sweet tea that day at Hickory Pit.  They've got the best ice and their lemon wedges ain't stingy.)

Primo's Cafe & Bakery

We had one mission to complete in-between leaving the bookstore and meeting friends for dinner, and that was procuring a caramel cake for the following evening.  I don't know why, but caramel cake doesn't seem to exist north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Come to think of it, that might be what the War of Northern Aggression was really about.  (Just kidding--I don't really think that, or call the Civil War that, except around Yankees who judge me based on my accent.)  Anyway, back to the cake.  Caramel cake is nothing but a yellow layer cake with caramel icing.   It's not complicated to make, exactly, but it is a little fiddly to get the icing right since there's a small window of temperature between grainy icing and burnt sugar.  We called Campbell's bakery first, but they need 2-3 days' notice to make a caramel cake. We found one at Primo's bakery, which is cute as a button. Best $37.50 I've ever spent.  We also picked up a small round layer of strawberry cake, which is another Southern delicacy not easily found up  north, more's the pity.

Please note full moon rising above the restaurant

Source: Char's website.  Our booth is in the bottom left corner

It's truly a shame that we ate lunch so late in the day because it meant we weren't able to do justice for dinner that night.  DH and I met up with Elizabeth and her husband, Tim, for dinner at Char, another restaurant that has opened since I departed Jackson.  Well, it was wonderful. The four of us had a cozy semi-circle booth and we celebrated our first reunion since their marriage two years ago in New Orleans with a round of cocktails--all good, all generous pours.  Tim and I each ordered the house salad with comeback dressing.  (Lawd, but do you know how long it's been since I've seen comeback dressing on a menu?  Too long!)  They were good, and Tim gave his an A while I would award mine a B for being overdressed.  Elizabeth and DH only ordered one course each: a salad with grilled salmon for the former and an appetizer-portion of marinated crab claws for DH.  Tim and I then moved on to the filet mignon special and the bbq shrimp & grits appetizer, respectively.  All four main courses were excellent, and despite everybody at the table pitching in to share DH's crab claws, there were still some left over.

Tim obligingly demonstrates the size of the cake compared to the human head.

The piece de resistance, however, was dessert.  We ordered two for the table: the chocolate cake as big as your head express and their award-winning pecan caramel butter crunch.  I'm not a big chocolate cake person, but even I could tell that Char's was something special, but for me it was nothing compared to the butter crunch, topped with vanilla ice cream and a Granny Smith apple cinnamon glaze. That might be one of the best things I've ever put in my mouth.  It pained me to leave any of it on the plate, I tell you, but eating dinner less than four hours after a big lunch was simply not a challenge I was up for.

Besides the opportunity to catch up with Elizabeth and Tim, one of the best things about our dinner was our server, Lloyd.  He was soft-spoken, pleasant, knowledgeable, courteous and he possessed the rare instinct of knowing the exact number of times to check in with us without making us feel rushed, interrupted, or neglected. When I discovered that I had forgotten to photograph the chocolate cake the size of a human head before we all demolished it, he had another one made up in the kitchens for us.  That Lloyd.  What a sweetheart. 

This post is getting a little long in the tooth, so let me be brief about two meals on Saturday so that I don't waste space and readerly goodwill.  We breakfasted at Broad Street one more time before DH's booksigning: more cheese grits, some freshly-squoze orange juice (feel free to say "freshly-squeezed" if you want to, but don't expect me to say anything but squoze), a biscuit. My dad drove up from Purvis, MS, to have lunch with us, so we took him to Bravo, which was really good, but I have no photos to share, plus it's a restaurant owned by the same folks as Broad Street, so I've given them enough bandwidth for now. 

Cathead Vodka logo

That afternoon we met up with our  pal Mel Evans, who drove us up to Gluckstadt, MS, to see her son's new company, Cathead Vodka, the only legal still in MS.  Austin Evans and his business partner Richard Patrick started Cathead nearly two years ago as a means of combining two of their favorite things: booze and the blues.  We got a tour of the facility and sipped some of the goods, too.  Austin and Richard are joining forces with Lazy Magnolia Brewery (founded by my ol' MSMS classmate, Mark Henderson) to produce a whiskey made in part from the latter's Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale.

A portion of Cathead proceeds goes to support music & the arts

Richard & Austin in front of their still

Label maker for Cathead Vodka (it's yummy!)

After a while we bid adieu to Austin & Richard and headed back to the hacienda, Chez Evans at Fox Hollow, to get ready for that night's gathering. John and his bookstore staff work harder than anybody I know during the month of December (they elect to work every single day between Thanksgiving and Christmas--I remember doing it myself back in the day), so John decided to invite his booksellers out to his place on DH's and my last night there to kick back, share stories & beverages of the adult variety, drool over his library, and make fools of ourselves over his pool table. Some pizza pies and that fabulous caramel cake topped off this wonderful evening of books, blues, and brews.

'Tis a fine, fine thing

Look at all of that caramel goodness!

Yes, caramel cake is a fine, fine thing.  But I really need to end with a photo of the two men I love most in the world: my DH and John Evans, the man who is mentor, friend, and father figure, all rolled into one.  They love each other, I love them both, and I would not have met (and married) the one if it were not for the other.  To friends and fellowship, I raise this particular glass of bourbon, and if it happens to go well with the caramel cake, so much the better.

My DH and John

 NB: Interested in winning a copy of  Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver's much-awaited sequel to Delirium? Click here!

A Poo in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush?

Mr Hankey, from South Park Studios website

Let me give fair warning: some readers may find this blog post vulgar at best and offensive at worst.  So if you're squeamish about any of the words in the title, I'd advise you to come back and visit my blog another time.  Otherwise, read on, you sickos.

It's not every day that one hears a humorous anecdote about pooing in one's hand, so imagine my surprise when this past Thursday when visiting Jackson, MS, I heard about two separate and completely unrelated poo-in-hand incidents.  My husband and I traveled to Jackson to promote his newest book for middle grades, The Cheshire Cheese Cat, and we were pretty stoked to learn that our arrival coincided with David Sedaris's reading at Lemuria, one of the country's great bookstores, and the store in which I first plied my trade.

I had met Sedaris once before about 12 years ago at Lemuria for his Me Talk Pretty One Day tour, one hot July day when the power happened to go out in our building.  Trust me when I say you don't want to be stuck inside a building with no windows that can open at the height of summer in Mississippi.  It's the kind of thing that makes tempers flare and egos grow larger than the Grinch's heart after he hears the Whos singing on Christmas Day.  Sedaris, however, was as gracious as he could be to the store staff and the customers who braved the swelter to meet him, and though I hadn't read him up until that moment, I have now become something of a completist where his work is concerned, reading all of his essay collections and owning most of them on CD to enjoy regularly on my daily commute.

Last week, though, Sedaris's fame in Jackson had grown considerably since my visit with him and he read to a sold-out crowd for the paperback release of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.  My husband and I got to play the former-employee-of Lemuria card, though, and perch on barstools with the rest of the staff at the back of the room.  After reading the titular story and an unpublished essay about what he'd do if he ruled the world, Sedaris started sharing some diary entries he'd written about outrageous stories people have told him through the years.  One of them was a bizarre little tale about poo.

Apparently somebody once confessed to Sedaris that when she was in a public restroom and in need of moving her bowels, she would poo first into her hand before gently letting the poo slide silently into the water, so great was her need to keep people in neighboring stalls from knowing what she was doing.  That's right; she pooed in her hand so that nobody would hear the tell-tale kersplash of her Number Two.  But that's not even the worst of it: Sedaris found himself relating this tale among friends and fans alike, with several people corroborating that they didn't think it was odd at all to poo in the hand instead of in the bowl--and in fact had either done it themselves or knew somebody who had.  Who are these people? And do we really trust them to wash their hands thoroughly afterwards?

Sedaris's delivery is uproariously funny (and even better in person than on audio) and my eyes were bright with unshed tears from laughing so hard.  But little did I know that two hours later over dinner with friends that I would be given the opportunity to say, "Speaking of pooing in your hand..." You see, my husband and I joined some dear friends for dinner after the reading.  Over dinner one of them casually mentioned a girl she knew who had to be monitored when she went to the restroom because she pooed in her hand.  Frankly, I don't think this segue to my talking about the Sedaris event could have been improved upon.

So you must see, dear reader, how compelled I was to share these anecdotes with you.  I mean, what are the chances that I would be treated to back-to-back poo-in-the-hand stories? The odds have to be astronomically high against, right?

I think I'll close with a photo that my friend thoughtfully shared with me that I think you'll find shows a certain synchronicity: it's a photo of that day's dessert in the cafeteria at school.  Tune in next time to read how I ate my weight in cheese grits and pulled pork sandwiches and caramel cake during my trip to Jackson.

 NB: Interested in winning a copy of  Pandemonium, Lauren Oliver's much-awaited sequel to Delirium? Click here!

Chocolate covered bananas. Yum!

Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorites

I love this week's Top Ten Tuesday theme, hosted each week by The Broke & the Bookish.  This week they are revisiting their first ever TTT by asking us to list our childhood favorites.  I spent my earliest childhood in a small mill town in Wisconsin and then later in a small town in MS.  We didn't have a lot of money for books but Wisconsin had an excellent library, which my mother encouraged, and I was lucky to have adults in my life who gifted me with books once I moved to MS (where the library was a joke, sadly).

In no particular order, here are the books that defined my childhood.  I'll use the sixth grade as a rough cut-off point between childhood and adolescence.  Looking back on these now, it's amazing to me that my mom found as many books with strong girl characters as she did back in the 1970s and early 1980s--all the more impressive since she has never, ever self-identified as a feminist.

1. Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink.  This was a Newbery award winner that happened to be set in Wisconsin.  Naturally I devoured it. 

2. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  The first book was also set in Wisconsin, which I loved, and I went on to read all of them, even the icky First Four Years with all of the romance and wedding and baby stuff. A grandmother figure gave me the entire boxed set on my birthday, which I treasured.

3. The Pippi Longstalking books by Astrid Lindgren.  Talk about strong female characters--Pippi was literally the strongest person I knew.  I might have loved the South Seas book best of all. 

4. The Trixie Belden mystery series by Julia Campbell and Katherine Kinney.  Lawd, I loathed Nancy Drew, but Trixie was a tomboy whose mystery solving I could really relate to. 

5. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery.  I loved the next two books in the series, too.

6-8. A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle.  I still remember the magic of first reading about misfit Meg, smart but with no way of fitting in. My adult sister gave me these for Christmas the year I turned seven and they helped me understand my world. 

9. The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.  I still remember the one-sentence description on the back of my edition: "How Aslan, the noble lion, saved Narnia from the White Witch."  I was instantly smitten.  The same grandmother figure gave me the entire boxed set for Christmas one year, which I read until they fell apart, but the first book was always my favorite.

10.  Not sure what book should go here since nothing else is a clear favorite.  I'll go with Edith Hamilton's Mythology, but it could have easily been Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe some of Walter Farley's The Black Stallion books. 

How about you?  What books are on your list?  Harry Potter would surely have made my list if they'd been written a couple of decades earlier!

NB: I've got a Lauren Oliver giveaway for her forthcoming book, Pandemonium, if you want to click here to enter.

Book P(Review) AND Giveaway: Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

One month ago I read Lauren Oliver's Delirium during the great power outage and I was surprised by how little it engaged me.  To avoid much redundancy from other posts, suffice it to say that I thought the book was derivative of other dystopian YA books I'd read.  Yesterday, however, I picked up my ARC of the sequel, pandemonium [sic], and was equally surprised by how hard I found to put it down.

Like many sequels, it picks up right in the middle of things, which I like.  And like Ally Condie's Crossed, the narrative POV switches every chapter, which I dislike.  However, instead of switching characters, it's the timeline itself that switches, so that we get chapters of Lena in the Wilds alternating with her new life in society. While I admit that it's an effective way of building narrative tension, I feel it's a pretty lazy plot device, allowing the writer to jump here & there without having to make the effort to connect the narrative dots.

Fine.  Disliking the POV and the present tense narratives are small enough quibbles.  And readers who are at all familiar with recent trends in YA books won't be surprised with the love triangle and the double-crossing and betrayals as they unfold in pandemonium.  Yes, the book is predictable in those (and a few other) regards.  And I didn't think Oliver's writing was up to par in this book compared to the first one.

That being said, the pacing and the plotting are strong in this second book and it was one I could hardly put down.  Unlike many sequels, it doesn't actually answer a lot of questions left open in book one; it seems more concerned with being its own entity.  Which I kinda dig.  I can't put my finger on why I found this one so much more compelling and readable, but I did.  So be it.  I like it, and that's enough for me.

Now, on to the giveaway part.  I have an ARC of this book, read once, that I will mail to a randomly chosen winner.  If you want to win, leave a comment on this post.  You don't have to follow me on Twitter or like me on Facebook.  I'd prefer it if you became a follower of my blog if you're not one already, but that's not required, either.  The book is published in March 2012 and I will be mailing the book out to the winner before the end of December, so the recipient will have it in hand about 3 months early.  Just leave a comment about why you'd like to read the book early--and if you have friends who might want to get their hands on an early copy, please send 'em here.

This giveaway IS open to international readers and it will close roughly around December 24, 2011 so that I will have time to contact the winner and obtain a mailing address before the year is out.  

Literary Blog Hop: How to Proseletyze for Literature

Once a month, the good folks at The Blue Bookcase host the literary blog hop.  Even if I don't always participate, the responses are always worth reading and I recommend that you check 'em out.  Today's prompt: What work of literature would you recommend for somebody who doesn't like literature?

I'm so glad you asked!  I deal with variations on this question all the time at work.  But there is one book that I have recommended dozens of times to various types of readers that seems to satisfy them all: historical fiction, non-fiction, mystery/suspense, non-fiction, YA, and literature readers alike have all responded positively to this book.

David Benioff's City of Thieves seems to satisfy readerly cravings in everybody I know who has read it.  It's the story of Lev and Kolya, caught out of bounds during the siege of Leningrad during WWII.  Instead of the usual punishment of being shot on sight, they're captured and given a mission: to find a dozen eggs for the kommandant's daughter's wedding cake.  Armed only with letters of permission that expire in one week, Lev and Kolya set out on this impossible mission.  You see, the people of Leningrad are starving and not a single egg can be obtained for any amount of love or money. Along their journey, the two young men witness both acts of great brutality and great generosity.  Equal parts coming-of-age, survival, and war, leavened with humor and romance, and set against the backdrop of important world events, City of Thieves is a book that resonates with every reader I've encountered.

Last Month in Review: November 2011

It's been a fair-to-middling reading month for me.  With the power outage at the very opening of November, I got into a reading slump quickly.  And while I read a couple of books that will really stay with me, much of what I read was, sadly, forgettable.

1. Fracture by Megan Miranda. YA. Girl almost dies, girl recovers, girls falls in love with a troubled young man who may or may not have tried to kill her, girl senses when people are dying, girl almost dies again.  Ho-hum. I thought it would be riveting but it wasn't.  I blame the power outage for getting through it.  Review here.

2. Delirium by Lauren Oliver.  YA.  Surprisingly, I didn't care much for this, at least not the first 200 pages.  The last 150 pages were exciting but overall I thought it was derivative of the myriad dystopian novels I've already read, particularly Matched.  (I freely admit that if I'd read Delirium first that I might have thought Matched was the derivative one.)  Read this one during the power outage, too. Review here. 

3. Austenland by Shannon Hale (audio version).  Picked this up for $5.99 'cause I'd been recycling a LOT of Harry Potter and David Sedaris audios for my commute.  Alas, I'm not sure it was worth the money.  Made me want to pull my hair out, and yet I finished listening to it. 

4. Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai.  Read an ARC of this for work as a possible First Editions Club selection.  Liked the book, but alas, the publisher had sold out of first printings 3 weeks before the official release date.

5. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson.  This was quite the ride: North Korea, military ops, secret intrigues, kidnappings, killer peaches, fishing boats, and loneliness in the dark.  Oh, yeah, baby.  This was good.  I hope to get off my arse and review it soon.  It comes out in January and it will be that month's first edition club selection for my bookstore.

6. The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis.  I can't bring anything new to the table in terms of discussion and praise, but I will say that it's beautiful on multiple levels and its production qualities are impressive, particularly for the price point.  It also happens to be my store's first editions club selection for December. 

7. I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran.  This was a book of stories I could only force myself to read about 3/4 of the way through.  Everything felt stiff and two-dimensional.

8. The Darlings by Cristina Alger.  This book was a bit of a surprise to me and it acted like a palate cleanser after trying to read a few books and not being able to finish them.  It's the glittery world of privilege and money both old and new, set on Wall Street and the Hamptons, poised at the brink of the financial collapse a couple of years ago.  I picked it up one night to help me fall asleep, but it kept me reading until the wee small hours and I finished it the next day. 

9. Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron.  Holy cow, but this book was good! Forthcoming from Algonquin in January, it's the latest of the Bellwether Prize winners.  Here are some comments I wrote earlier about it, and with luck I'll have a full review for it in the new year.

10. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.  Yup, this was the second time I read it this year.  First time was back in April.  Then I got in another reading slump and picked this up to see if the magic was still there.  It was. I have a couple of Night Circus posts on this blog, one of which describes my dedication and dyeing my hair a bright red for the occasion. 

11. Arcadia by Lauren Groff.  I love Groff's writing, which carried me through this book despite its subject, which I dislike and distrust: so-called utopian communities. Review here.

So, two YA novels, one audio, one re-read, one not-quite-completed, and one picture book help comprise my list of 11 books here: not exactly a towering achievement, but that's okay.  It is what it is. And hopefully my reading slump won't carry over into December 'cause I've got a big stack of books I'm looking forward to!