I'd like to tip my hat to who ever recommended Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind. It was just what I needed in the middle of tax season... a good read that allowed me to giggle and smile my way through the book. As a former North Carolinian, I recognized a number of familiar characters. Hope you all find it as entertaining I did.

Book Swap Books

It was fun to see everyone at the book swap. Although, it may be a while before I can find time to sit down with my new Laurie R. King book Touchstone, Shizuko Natsuki’s novel Death from the Clouds or Faye Kellerman’s The Burnt House. The web has many positive comments regarding Shizuko Natsuki, so I am looking forward to reading her book. I’ve read both the other authors which means Natsuki is the only unknown quantity in the group. No risk taker here!

The Book Swap was fun as usual

Susan, Kathy K., Vicki, Jackie, Mary A., Kathy T., and I met at Acoustic for the Book Swap! As usual an interesting mix of books changed hands. One title, The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, was especially coveted.

I went home with Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley, Scarlet and Black by Stendhal, and the Blood Spilt by Asa Larsson. I'd eventually like to read Bel Canto.

I liked Swamplandia! after all

 I mentioned the book Swamplandia! at our book club meeting last night. I was torn as to whether I liked the book. I certainly liked the writing, especially the description. At my age, I feel foolish when I have to have a book explained to me. Perhaps ‘explained to me’ isn’t quite right; I need help to like it. So, this morning I went online to read a review of the book. And, I was reminded of the many aspects of the book I did like.

I learned something about geography. “We learn the Everglades’ history of governmental mishandling (the seeds of invasive melaleuca trees were sprinkled from airplanes in the 1940s) and environmental disaster.”

The description of people and places was lush: “Her first-person narration is not a transcription of a 13-year-old voice, but an evocation, in adult language, of a barely adolescent mind-set. This allows for a dazzling level of linguistic invention.”

I agonized with and loved the character of Kiwi: “The central joke is that his home-schooled erudition has left him as ill equipped for mainland life as some time traveler. ‘Telling your fellow workers that you were going to Harvard was a request to have your testicles compared to honey-roasted peanuts and your status as a virgin confirmed, your virginity suddenly as radiant and evident to all as a wad of toilet paper that was stuck to your shoe.’

OK, <blushes> I liked the book and I recommend it. “The plot of “Swamplandia!” is nothing special — dysfunctional family pull apart, then pull together — but the execution is. If the gothic whimsy of this novel is sometimes too self-conscious, the pleasures it offers are unforced.”

BTW, I saw online that a writer is being sought to transform this into an HBO movie. It’s one I would see.

All quotes from the NY Times book review 2011, Feb 3.

book for consideration later this year: Let the Great World Spin

I read this last year and found it intriguing. I think it would make for interesting discussion.

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal