Borrowed from Lauren & Peter. A Holocaust memoir. What a crazy combination of luck, intelligence, and kindness helped Szpilman to survive the devastation. Very moving.
Memoir: The Pianist, by Wladyslaw Szpilman
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Category Archives: Books
Short Stories: The Feminists Go Swimming, by Michael Collins
Bought in Dublin, Collins is a writer I’ve read in the past and often had a hard time finding his books in the US (I’ve occasionally ordered them from Amazon UK) so I was on the lookout for him.
These stories are such a unique combination of funny and harsh: you’re sometimes embarrassed to be laughing at the funny parts, particularly as they’re so quickly followed by the serious and dark.
Catholics dealing with the prophesised end of the world; the portioning out throughout the day as an alcoholic drinks himself to death… I think my favorite may have been “The Horses” where a man is a wildly accurate race picker to no benefit to himself.
Mystery: Circle of the Dead, by Ingrid Black
Bought by Silvia on our trip to Dublin.
Entertaining enough; I enjoyed the brusque “what the author thinks is Americanness” of Saxon’s character. But it was a bit convoluted and one of those mysteries with too many twists, to the point where it becomes not very believable.
Fiction: City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza
Bought after reading about it at the Tournament of Books (where it made it to the final round but lost to Toni Morrison’s latest).
There are really three storylines here: Craig and his middle-class white family; SJ and his lower-class black family; and the historical facts of Hurricane Katrina. They pretty much trade off chapters throughout and in the beginning of the book, I definitely found the “fact” chapters a bit distracting; taking me away from the action to just recite numbers. But toward the end of the book, I found them a welcome emotional relief; a way to ground yourself in the reality of how many people this actually happened to.
I thought it was a great book, perhaps made more weighty by being woven in to such a recent past. The characters and their struggles with moving on vs turning back felt very real to me.
Clearly Piazza loves New Orleans, and continues to struggle with the thought of his city in destruction. Huffencoopers, have you read this yet? I think you’d love it.
À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…
Eating: Today: nothing. Tomorrow: a cake like this one, I hope.
Making: Good week for dreaming of projects a-plenty. Bad week for actual crafting.
Reading: Just started this month’s challenge book: “Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem. Loving all the Tourettes’ word experiments.
Watching: New season of Burn Notice, yippee. Also about to start in on the Band of Brothers DVDs. For real this time.
Listening to: “Orange Sky” and “All of My Days” (Alexi Murdoch, both) back to back to back. Thanks to seeing “Away We Go” last night (a: it was AWESOME and b: Murdoch was basically the entire soundtrack), I just can’t listen to anything else.
Failing at: Focus. Control. Willpower. The usual.
À la Nick Hornby, books in/books out for May.
Bought:
- Definitely Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- From Dead to Worse, by Charlaine Harris
- Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre
- What We Eat When We Are Alone, by Deborah Madison & Patrick McFarlin
- In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
- Blue Diablo, by Ann Aguirre
- Wanderlust, by Ann Aguirre
- Dead and Gone, by Charlaine Harris (for kindle/iphone!)
- Gone Tomorrow: A Reacher Novel, by Lee Child (for kindle/iphone!)
Read:
- Dead as a Doornail, by Charlaine Harris
- The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris
- Definitely Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- From Dead to Worse, by Charlaine Harris
- Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre
- Wanderlust, by Ann Aguirre
- Dracula, by Bram Stoker (re-read)
- All Summer, by Claire Kilroy
- Dead and Gone, by Charlaine Harris
À la Nick Hornby, books in/books out for April.
Bought:
- City of Glass, by Cassandra Clare
- Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
- The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris
- Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris
- Living Dead in Dallas, by Charlaine Harris
- Club Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- Dead as a Doornail, by Charlaine Harris
Read:
- Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
- City of Glass, by Cassandra Clare
- Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
- Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson
- Tell No One, by Harlan Coben
- The Three Evanglists, by Fred Vargas
- Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris
- Living Dead in Dallas, by Charlaine Harris
- Club Dead, by Charlaine Harris
- Eureka Street, by Robert McLiam Wilson
- The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart
À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…
Eating: I’m drinking so many calories, there is no room left for eating. Bygones.
Making: Finishing the second of the two baby boy quilts. And an awesomely cute pair of wrist warmers that are sadly not for me. Sigh.
Reading: Another Dublin purchase “Eureka Street” by Robert McLiam Wilson. It’s self deprecating and fun and I quite like both the scruffy narrators/heros.
Watching: All the TV there is available to watch. Plus lots of old movies on random cable channels now that I got rid of all my 975 movie channels, in a preemptive “I may have no income soon” move. Oldies like Top Gun. Ah, Top Gun.
Listening to: New Great Lake Swimmers “Lost Channels” which I LOVE; new U2 “No Line on the Horizon” which I like a lot of; and an awesome new playlist made by yours truly on which I mixed in a few oldies more than my norm. Shouldn’t EVERY song sample the BeeGees? SHOULDN’T THEY ALL? Want a new mix? Got something I’d like in trade? E-mail me and we’ll see.
Failing at: Restraining addictions. Of many kinds.
Fantasy: The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan
Soooooo good.
I bought this after reading about it on John Scalzi’s blog.
Tactile and intense. Made me cry on the El train. I felt like I was in Mary’s head. I could barely put it down.
Wow, what a book. Spring 2010 is tooooo long to wait for the next one! Too long!
Sure, you won’t be able to read it without thinking of M. Night Shymalan’s The Village (a movie most people hated but I loved mostly for Joaquin’s quietly brooding performance. That scene where they’re on the porch? Sigh.), but just put it out of your mind as the similarities are only circumstantial.
Poetry: Domestic Violence, by Eaven Boland
Another Dublin purchase/Irish author. My dad introduced me to Boland a few years ago.
As intense and personal as the work of Sharon Olds, these also have highly literary sensibilities and allusions, along the lines of Anne Carson (but perhaps more approachable for the lay person).
Not just because books of poetry tend to be slim, but also because poems reach further into you with each reading, I tend to not put a book of poetry on the list as “finished” until I’ve read it five or six times over a few days. These are poems I could read for months and not be done with.
From “Indoors”:
Find me a word for love. Make it damp. Sinuous companion,
knowing how to enter, settle in wood, salt the sheets
with cold, saying by this that we could never be
anything but an island people.
From “Letters to the Dead”:
How many daughters stood alone at a grave,
and thought this of their mothers’ lives?
That they were young in a country that hated a woman’s body.
That they grew old in a country that hated a woman’s body.