Deb Nance
Odile Souchet gets a job she loves at the American Library in Paris and she soon acquires a boyfriend and a best friend, all of this taking place just as Germany begins its takeover of France. Everything changes once France is occupied by the Germans—Odile's brother goes to fight for France, libraries are taken over by the Germans, and people Odile loves are forced to do things they do not want to do in order to survive.
There is a second timeline in this book in which Odile is an old woman living in Montana. Odile is befriended by a young neighbor, Lily, who faces problems Odile herself faced during her early years.
I liked the book, though there were lots of things that bothered me about the story. But the dual settings of two of my favorite places on earth, plus libraries, plus lots of bibliophiles who relished talking books gained this thin story bonus points with me.
Odie and his brother Albert are forced to escape the Lincoln Indian Training School along with their friend Mose and a little girl Emmy. This Tender Land is the story of the search of Odie and his new family for home. Along the way, the Vagabonds, as Odie names the four, encounter a series of vivid characters and engage in some unbelievable adventures.
Action...characters...plus a thoughtful evolving philosophy...this book has it all.
My First Summer in the Sierra is a diary naturalist John Muir kept during the first summer he spent in the Sierra Mountains. He worked as a sheepherder, but he had a lot of time to observe nature, write about nature, and to make pictures of nature.
I was taken by Muir's knowledge of nature and his detailed observational skills. He is also a brilliant writer, with fresh comparisons and surprising thoughts.
She's the stereotypical witchy career woman, who lives in the city, and eats men alive.
He's the stereotypical career man, who lives in the city, and who has a reputation as a tough-guy.
They meet. They don't hit it off. But there's something there. And then they meet again...
A gentle romance with lots of clever back-and-forth and some unusual main characters.
Bruce Ross guides us newbie haiku writers on the path to writing this classic Japanese poetry form. He includes many great examples, and offers suggestions for getting started. He also includes information and examples of haiku variations including tanka, renga, haiga, senryu, and haibun.
haiku—“The essence of traditional haiku consists of two things. First there is an association with nature through one of the seasons either by naming the season...or by suggesting the season through specific elements of that season...The second essential part of traditional haiku is setting up a relationship between two images and separating those images with a punctuation mark...“
senryu—“...there is a kind of poetry that is similar in form to haiku but deals exclusively with human nature and most often is expressed as a joke. This form is called senryu.”
haibun—“A haibun is a prose narrative that is autobiographical...that is expressed poetically...What is unusual about haibun is that it includes a haiku.”
tanka—“...tanka is...poetry filled with highly personal and emotional expression...But usually tanka, which was most often written in five lines or phrases in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern, connect these thoughts and emotions to nature.”
haiga—“A haiga is not so much an illustration of a haiku as an artistic expression of the spirit of the haiku's feeling.”
renga—“Renga (is) an overall term for a poem that is written with other people...Its three main characteristics are spontaneity, improvisation, and fun.”
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing—there isn't anything in it that doesn't depend on what comes before it for its meaning.”
A River Runs Through It is the semi-autobiographical story of Norman Maclean and his relationship to his brother, Paul. The story is told through the mutual passion for fly-fishing, a passion also shared with the two men's father. It's a brilliant story of the complexities of relationships, set in the raw world of western Montana.
Azar Nafisi writes letters to her father, with whom she often discussed literature when he was alive, about the power of controversial reading and its benefits for the individual and society. Nafisi writes during a time of great turbulence in her adopted country, America, and draws upon her struggles during a time of great turbulence in her home country, Iran.
Twelve-year-old David Hayden learns terrible secrets about his family during the summer of 1948, and as the secrets come to light and are dealt with, he comes to see the people in his family in new ways.
This is a powerful coming-of-age story set in Montana in the postwar period. We see people rise to do the right thing; we see people fall, doing the wrong thing. And whether people do the right or the wrong thing, we see how difficult it is to make a decision at all, and we see the consequences of the decisions made reverberating throughout an entire family, an entire community.
Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the five big extinctions and the small extinctions of individual species of Earth's past as well as the extinction we are currently undergoing, the first extinction caused by a single species on Earth, mankind.
A must-read.
A few quotes from the book:
“Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
“With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.”
“One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it's changing in ways that create barriers—roads, clear-cuts, cities—that prevent them from doing so.”
“By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.”
“Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what's most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”
“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”
The old world is gone, and the new world is here. Dex, stirred by the desire to hear crickets, leaves his job and becomes a tea monk, and he is good at his job. Still, though, he is not satisfied, wandering place to place, serving tea to comfort others, and one day he leaves that job, too, and heads into the wilderness. And there he meets what he'd never thought to ever see—a robot. Robots were first built to work for humans, but somewhere along the way robots sought liberation from that work and humans set them free. This robot, Mosscap, has sought out a human to make first contact, and it is to Dex that he directs his questions. Dex, too, wants something from Mosscap, guidance into finding an old hermitage in the wilderness.
And so Dex and Mosscap set out for the hermitage together, talking, reflecting, questioning.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a soothing little story, hopeful, and optimistic, offering a picture of a future for those of us who feel stuck in our desperately-imperfect, intractable world.
It's the last book of the series and it's the last battle. An ape dresses up a donkey in a lion skin and tells the creatures of Narnia that the donkey is Aslan. This donkey-Aslan doesn't behave like Aslan has in the past, and the creatures aren't sure how to proceed, but donkey-Aslan responds to its creatures with quick retribution and all the creatures fall in line. Soon the king of Narnia is alerted to this danger and the children from Earth appear and the children and the king must go to battle against the donkey-Aslan and the ape and those who profess to follow another leader than Aslan.
The racism of the series is strong in this book, so be prepared for that. In The Last Battle, Lewis translates the themes of the book of Revelation into a story for children. I was most taken with the confusion and discord that occur when those in a search for power spread lies and half-truths.
In her afterword, the author writes, “This book is my love letter to walking.”
I agree. You can see Annabel Streets' love for walking on every page of this book.
Streets draws on science to suggest fifty-two ways to walk.
I'll list the fifty-two ways here as a reminder to me.
Walk in the Cold
Improve Your Gait
Walk. Smile. Greet. Repeat.
Just One Slow Walk
Breathe as You Walk
Take a Muddy Walk
Take a Twelve-Minute Walk
Walk with Vista Vision
Take a Windy Walk
Walk Within an Hour of Waking
Take a City Smell Walk
Walk in the Rain
Take a Walk-Dance or a Dance-Walk
Walk with Your Ears
Walk Alone
Pick Up Litter as You Walk
Follow a River
Walk with a Dog
Amble Amid Trees
Walk to Remember
Exercise Your Curiosity Muscle—Walk a Ley Line
Take a Silent Stroll
Walk at Altitude
Walk with a Map
Walk with Purpose
Walk in Sunshine
Sing as You Stride
Walk with a Picnic
Walk Barefoot
Walk with Ions
Walk Beside the Sea
Walk in Water
Sketch as You Walk
Walk Beneath a Full Moon
Walk Like a Nomad
Walk with a Pack
Take a Foraging Walk
Climb Hills
Walk with Your Nose
Walk Like a Pilgrim
Walk to Get Lost
Walk After Eating
Walk with Others
Seek Out the Sublime
Work as You Walk
Take a Night Walk
Jump-Start Your Walk for Super-Strong Bones
Walk Hungry
Walk Backward
Walk in an Evergreen Forest (for a Good Night's Sleep)
Walking as Meditation
Walk Deep and Seek Out Fractals
New ideas to me: the comfort of evergreens and ions are a positive force.
Are you interested in finding out the best books from around the world? Would you like to be guided in your quest by a longtime professor? I can't think of a better guide than David Damrosch and I can't think of a better book than Around the World in 80 Books.
Just for my own information, I'm including a list of the books here:
Chapter one. London : Inventing a City
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh
Arnold Bennet, Riceyman Steps
Chapter two. Paris : Writers' Paradise
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Julio Cortazar, The End of the Game
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
Chapter three. Krakow : After Auschwitz
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Paul Celan, Poems
Czeslaw Milos, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
Chapter four. Venice-Florence : Invisible cities
Marco Polo, The Travels
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Donna Leon, By Its Cover
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Chapter five. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat : Stories within stories
Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
The Thousand and One Nights
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies
Chapter six. The Congo-Nigeria : (Post)Colonial encounters
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achelbe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Georges Ngal, Giambarista Viko, or The Rape of African Discourse
Chimamanda Negozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
Chapter seven. Israel/Palestine : Strangers in a strange land
The Hebrew Bible
The New Testament
D. A. Mishani, The Missing File
Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden
Chapter eight. Tehran-Shiraz : A desertful of roses
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Confessions of the Birds
Faces of Love: Haze and the Poets of Shiraz
Ghalib, A Deceitful of Roses
Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight
Chapter nine. Calcutta/Kolkata : Rewriting empire
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Salman Rushdie, East, West
Jamyan Norbu, The Mandela of Sherlock Holmes
Jhampa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Chapter ten. Shanghai-Beijing : Journeys to the west
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City
Mo Yan, Life and Earth Are Wearing Me Out
Bei Dao, The Rose of Time
Chapter eleven. Tokyo-Kyoto : The west of the east
Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves — 231
Muraski Shikibu, The Tale of Genji — 235
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North — 240
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility — 245
James Merrill, “Prose of Departure” — 250
Chapter tweleve. Brazil-Columbia : Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias
Thomas More, Utopia
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumours Memoirs of Brds Cubas
Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chapter thirteen. Mexico-Guatemala : The Pope's blowgun
Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works
Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President
Rosario Casstellanos, The Book of Lamentations
Chapter fourteen. The Antilles and beyond : Fragments of epic memory
Derek Walcott, Omeros — 309
James Joyce, Ulysses — 315
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea — 319
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopida — 324
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands — 329
Chapter fifteen. Bar Harbor : the world on a desert island
Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
E. B. White, Stuart Little
Chapter sixteen. New York : Migrant metropolis
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Epilogue: the Eighty-first Book
Evelyn sets aside her dissertation to go to work for the third-most popular internet company, using her knowledge of philosophy to work on a happiness app.
That's all I'll say about the plot. But let me say a little about why I enjoyed it so much.
I just floated through the reading of this book. It's everything I look for in a good book...quirky characters...uncertainty in the main character about how to proceed through life...gentle humor...a working-out of issues to the benefit of all...unexpected kindness...truth...a bit of philosophy...and a little more gentle humor.
It's 1950 and the war has been over for five years in London, but the people working in this London bookstore are still struggling. Vivian still misses her fiance, killed in the war. Grace's husband suffered a breakdown and Grace is trying to support the family and care for her children. Evie was one of the first women to be admitted to Cambridge, but the job she'd hoped for was given to a man instead. All three women face the discrimination against women that was endemic during this time.
I enjoyed this story of strong women working in a London bookstore, with all the bookish celebrities of the day popping into the narrative.
I would note (because I didn't realize this) that this book is a sequel to The Jane Austen Society.
In Patient Zero, physician Lydia Kang and historian Nate Pedersen tell the stories of the world's worst diseases. Kang and Pedersen share the symptoms of the diseases as well as stories about the first patients who were diagnosed with the diseases. They provide information about the human battles to fight the diseases. Diseases discussed include Ebola, Covid-19, Bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, HIV, measles, and many more.
I recommend this book highly to others.
A brother and a sister are bored, and their grandmother encourages them to work their way out of their boredrom, saying, “Use those beautiful and brilliant minds of yours. Lift your arms, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and believe in a thing.”
A wonderful story by the fabulous team of Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López .
A young girl loves to search for little treasures—a feather, a bird's nest, a snake skin—that she can share with her grandpa when he comes to visit. They often take walks together to find and save treasures.
And then Grandpa gets sick. And then he passes away. What will happen now?
A beautiful story of the connections between a grandfather and his granddaughter, and how those live on even after death.
I couldn't stop turning the pages. I started this book on Monday and I read every spare moment and then I reluctantly set it aside when I went to sleep and then I read again as much as I could on Tuesday and once again closed it when I had to go to bed and now I've finished it on Wednesday. It's that good.
Elizabeth Zott is a woman we all were in a world we all once lived in. Well, maybe slightly exaggerated, but, if so, it's just for effect. Zott wants to be a chemist, but she is thwarted in school as well as in the workplace for one reason: Women should not and cannot be chemists, according to all the men who run things. Despite all the obstacles, Zott is a chemist. And Zott does not want to marry or have children, but somehow she falls in love anyway and a child appears anyway. And her lack of a wedding ring and the child she bears only serve to go against her even further with those who run things.
It's a book of extremes, and the humor can be sharp and painful and grim, but the reader can't help but adore Zott and her made-in-her-mother's-image daughter along with their dog who knows hundreds of words and her Catholic neighbor who would do anything for a divorce and a minister who isn't sure about God...
I took away a few points for the sitcom ending but the truth is that I wouldn't have been happy with any other last chapter.
You might want to read this book. It is probably one of my favorite reads of the year.
What I would have given to have read this story when I was a little girl! Prudence Wright became a leader during the American Revolution long before women like Prudence were free to take action and to have rights as we do today. Wright led a group of women to follow her lead in stepping away from British goods and using only American goods. She also led them, in an amazing show of bravery, to capture a spy. What a heroic story!