WW: Dog Days, in #JustOneParagraph

There are actually three dogs here in front of "Two Salty Dogs"--they are Auggie, Max, and Cole, they're on Facebook, and occasionally, they blog. While I can't vouch for their salt content, I can confirm that they were pretty damp and sleepy as they basked in the warm sunshine of coastal Maine on a June morning. I suspect that they'd had some playtime out in the harbor, and we came upon them during their recovery period. If you've ever lived with a sporting dog of the Retriever variety (Labrador, Golden, Flat-coat, Curly-coat) you know they can't resist the water, because they've been bred not to. And in my observation, a tired, damp black Lab is usually a very contented black Lab.

The mascots of Two Salty Dogs Pet Oufitters, Boothbay Harbor, Maine

Today's post is a twofer, with JustOneParagraph to go with today's Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday theme, "Dog Days."

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(E)Book Talk: THE AGE OF MIRACLES, by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker (Facebook) (Twitter)
Random House (2012), Hardcover (ISBN 0812992970 / 9780812992977)
Fiction, 288 pages
Source: Purchased e-book (eISBN 9780679644385)
Reason for reading: Personal


Opening lines:
"We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it.

"We did not sense, at first, the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin.

"We were distracted, back then, by weather and war. We had no interest in the turning of the earth. Bombs continued to explode on the streets of distant countries. Hurricanes came and went. Summer ended. A new school year began. The clocks ticked as usual. Seconds beaded into minutes. Minutes grew into hours. And there was nothing to suggest that those hours too weren’t still pooling into days, each the same, fixed length known to every human being.

“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website 

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

Comments: When the gospel of empowerment and self-actualization is preached everywhere you turn, sometimes it’s hard to accept that an awful lot of what happens in life is just..life. Most of what happens around us is, like it or not, out of our control, and much of it is beyond our understanding; we just have to find ways to live with and within it. Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, The Age Of Miracles, derives much of its power as a story from the way it conveys this truth.

As if the changes of approaching adolescence weren’t already challenging and confusing enough for Julia, the physical world around her is changing in a way that makes even less sense. The earth’s rotation is perceptibly slowing; scientists can only make their best guesses as to the cause for it, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to reverse it. The length of an Earth day stretches from twenty-four hours to twenty-seven, then to thirty, then to forty, and keeps going, and the extremes of climate change become compressed within those lengthening days. Governments impose “clock time” in order to keep people and institutions functioning in much the way they always have, but there are pockets of resistance--the ”real-timers” who try to adjust their bodies, and their lives, to the new natural rhythms, and are pushed into fringe communities because of it. Julia’s mother becomes afflicted by physical ailments--”the syndrome”--as the slowing continues, and her father is increasingly, mysteriously absent.

I found The Age Of Miracles a difficult book to drop into a slot. It’s a matter-of-fact coming-of-age story, seemingly poised to attract both adult-fiction and YA reading audiences, set in an environment that’s familiar and unrecognizable at the same time...and Walker seems content to leave many of the mysteries of that environment unexplored. The “slowing” is somehow a both catalyst and a mere backdrop, and isn’t explained or developed anywhere near enough to call the novel “science fiction,” but I can see how it might be shelved there. Its protagonist/narrator is clearly several years beyond Julia’s age during the events of the story; it’s not stated just how much later it is when she relates them, but the voice is much closer to adult than child.

The Age Of Miracles got mixed responses from readers when it was published last summer, and I suspect that some of those reactions arose from frustration over the difficulty of categorizing it. I think that’s one of its biggest strengths, and one of the main sources of its appeal for me. I appreciated that Walker chose to focus the story as she did, and by telling it through such a young narrator, I think she made it clearer that it wasn’t about getting at the “why;” it was about adapting to and living with the not knowing why. This is an ambitious and unusual debut, and I’m curious to see what this author does next.

Rating: 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

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Weekend Recap, in #JustOneParagraph

On Sunday, we rested. Well, we rested a little. We went to the movies in the morning (Who goes to the movies at 10:30 AM? Oh yeah, we do). Later, during the warmth of the afternoon, I couldn't quite muster up the mental energy for reading books or writing reviews about them (I have Monday for that–a medical appointment in the morning, but no work for the day!). Instead, I played games and read blog posts on my iPad–at five PM, it held no unread posts, and it stayed that way for just over an hour (because I put down the iPad to have dinner with my family and didn't refresh it again until just before 6:30). (And by 10 PM, it was at zero again–a clean slate for Monday morning!) During the time in between, we cleared out shelves and cabinets, loaded boxes, and made stacks. The books that will be guests of honor at my giveaway party next weekend are piled all around, and the ones that will move with us are being packed away. One group is ready to travel to their new home next door, while I hope many members of the other group will be welcomed into the homes of my book-loving friends.

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The Boys and Me, in #JustOneParagraph

It occurred to me, as we went out to dinner last night, that I'll soon be the only female member of my household for the first time in fifteen years…and yes, that's counting the dogs. There was even a nearly five-year period when the girls outnumbered the guys around here, although we've been at parity since we lost Gypsy in 2010. But now, as three of us get ready to move next door, our girl is preparing to move to the opposite corner of the country, and it will soon be just the boys and me again. They're not the same “boys” with whom I shared my life and home fifteen years ago; I was seven years and nearly two thousand miles away from meeting them (and no one had met the younger one, since he didn't yet exist), but as I contemplate this next stage, I have a feeling of coming back around. I hope we'll be able to add a dog back into the mix before too long, too.

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Saturday, in #JustOneParagraph

So, after doing my customary Saturday-morning runaround, I will return home today to…watch paint dry. Our front door is supposed to be painted at noon–assuming the painters saw the note–and then it has to be left open for four hours to dry, so we'll have to stay home with it. If they haven't seen the note, we may be waiting even longer to see if they actually show up to paint it at all; considering that they painted the building almost two weeks before the schedule said they were supposed to, we're not sure what to expect here. Then again, an excuse to lounge around the house on a Saturday afternoon probably isn't a bad thing.

 



 

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TLC Book Tour: THE VIRGIN CURE, by Ami McKay

The Virgin Cure: A Novel
Ami McKay (Facebook) (Twitter) (Pinterest)
Harper Perennial (July 2013), trade paper (ISBN 0061140341 / 9780061140341)
Fiction (historical), 352 pages
Source: Hardcover provided by publisher
Reason for reading: TLC Book Tour (to support the paperback edition)

Opening lines: “I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.

“My father ran off when I was three years old. He emptied the rent money out of the biscuit tin and took my mother’s only piece of silver--a tarnished sugar bowl she’d found in the rubble of a Third Avenue fire.

“‘Don’t go...’ Mama would call out in her sleep, begging and pulling at the blanket we shared as if it were the sleeve of my father’s coat. Lying next to her, I’d wish for morning and the hours when she’d go back to hating him. At least then her bitterness would be awake enough to keep her alive.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
One summer night in Lower Manhattan in 1871, twelve-year-old Moth is pulled from her bed and sold as a servant to a finely dressed woman. Knowing that her mother is so close while she is locked away in servitude, Moth bides her time until she can escape, only to find her old home deserted and her mother gone without a trace. Moth must struggle to survive alone in the murky world of the Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow freaks, and prostitutes. 

She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietress of an "Infant School," a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for "willing and clean" companions—desirable young virgins like Moth. She also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling against the powerful forces of injustice. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"—the tragic belief that deflowering a "fresh maid" can cleanse the blood and heal men afflicted with syphilis—which has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls. 

Ignored by society and unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.

Comments: I’ve had Ami McKay’s 2012 historical novel The Virgin Cure on my radar since it was originally published, so I jumped at the chance to read it for a blog tour tied to the paperback edition. The novel’s premise was simultaneously fascinating and repellent to me: it’s the story of a young girl on her own in 19th-century New York City who ends up as a prostitute-in-training...because, really, how many other options might she have, outside of the streets and the orphan trains? In addition, it sounded like it shared some elements of time and place with something else that landed on my radar around the same time, BBC America’s Civil-War-era, Lower-Manhattan-set police procedural Copper, which featured a girl in similar circumstances during its first season. And while I’ll admit that the TV show did help me to visualize Moth’s world in my mind’s eye, McKay’s story did take me to a very different place.

Moth Fenwick escapes servitude to a wealthy but very unstable woman--a position she was sold into be her own mother--and returns to the Bowery slums to discover she is now both parentless and homeless. Driven into the streets, she meets Mae, a bold and seemingly prosperous girl just a few years older. Mae lives in the house of Miss Emma Everett with four other young women--three of whom are popular and established prostitutes, while Mae and Alice are “whores-in-training”--and assures Moth there’s room for one more. The comfort and companionship of Miss Everett’s house draws Moth in, but she’s uneasy with what she’ll eventually be expected to do in order to remain there...and so is “Dr. Sadie,” the woman physician who tends to the girls, and who is all too aware of a special danger to those new to the trade. Miss Everett can obtain a high price for a girl’s first time, but if the girl is chosen to provide “the virgin cure” that’s believed to cure syphilis, she’s the one who ultimately will pay it.

The Virgin Cure is told through Moth’s first-person narration, and I loved the voice that McKay gave her--it didn’t feel anachronistic to me, but it was modern enough in style that my reading just sailed along. And I loved the character Moth had, too--observant, determined, and resourceful, but never to a degree that strained credibility. I also appreciated that many of the other characters displayed shadings and dimensions that the supporting cast in a first-person narrative doesn’t always receive; for me, the richness of the novel came primarily from the characters themselves, and less from the setting and plot. However, on that note, the book is strewn with framing devices--newspaper clippings pertinent to plot developments, snippets and quotes from publications and pamphlets of the time, and entries from Dr. Sadie’s journals--that enhance its effectiveness as a document of its time and place, although I’m not clear how much of this material is culled from actual historical documents. (That said, Dr. Sadie is based on a real person--McKay’s own great-great-grandmother, who worked with the pioneering women physicians Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, McKay mentions that her original inspiration for The Virgin Cure was her ancestor’s story, but she clearly ended up shifting direction.)

The Virgin Cure goes to some dark places, but I went along with it quite willingly. It’s one of the most fully-absorbing, fully-realized works of fiction I’ve read this year, and I say that as a reader who isn’t a great fan of historical fiction as a sub-genre. That said, virtually spending a few days in the world of nearly 150 years ago can serve as a good reminder that some things in the world really have gotten better...and that for many, especially women and the poor, a return to the “good old days” wouldn’t be good at all.

Rating: 4 of 5

Other stops on this TLC Book Tour

Tuesday, July 2nd: Life in the Thumb

Wednesday, July 3rd: BoundByWords

Saturday, July 6th: Doing Dewey

Tuesday, July 9th: Becca’s Byline

Wednesday, July 10th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, July 11th: Kritters Ramblings

Monday, July 15th: A Reader of Fictions

Tuesday, July 16th: BookNAround

Wednesday, July 17th: Melissa Firman

Thursday, July 18th: West Metro Mommy

Monday, July 22nd: Peppermint PhD

Thursday, July 25th: From L.A. to LA

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Waiting For...#JustOneParagraph

He wasn't the first or last to say it, but he did say it with music, and Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part. It's hard when you've been assured that you've done all you can do and that the outcome will probably be what you want and expect–you just don't know when to expect it. It'll come when it comes...and when it does, it won't even be the end. You're waiting for the thing that will start everything else. While you 're waiting, you can start on some of the everything-else, but there's only so far you can go with it before you have to set it aside…and wait. It's the hardest part.

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#WW: Beached/Reading, with #JustOneParagraph

This week's Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday prompt is "Beach Reading." Since I rarely go to the beach at all, and I do most of my reading indoors, I'm mixing things up a little...

On a related note, I'm in the process of "beaching" a whole lot of books--in the "beached whale" sense. I'm winnowing the "to be read" collection of books that are probably not to be read after all, and clearing out the ones that didn't make it to the keeper shelf after I did read them. If you're in the Greater Los Angeles Area and up for some free books, you're invited to my Big Book Purge Giveaway on August 4...but you'll have to come and get the books yourself! Details are on Facebook.

An InLinkz Link-up

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Books on the Move, in #JustOneParagraph

Earlier today, I declared my serious intentions to get a bunch of books out of my house by creating an event on Facebook. I'm repeating myself here, but you can find more details there.

I'm clearing my shelves of books I'll only read once--and books I'll probably never read at all. FREE for the taking--paperbacks, hardcovers, and galleys in a variety of genres and styles (mostly for adult readers, but there may be a few kids' books in the mix). This is not an online or virtual giveaway. If you can come and get 'em, you can leave with as many books as you can carry! Please contact me for the address and directions if you'd like to come and take some books off my hands (and shelves! and tables! and floor!). And please feel free to bring a friend!

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(Audio)Book Talk: THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB, by Lily Koppel

The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Lily Koppel (Twitter) (Facebook)
Audiobook read by Orlagh Cassidy (IMDb) (Facebook) (Twitter)
Grand Central Publishing (June 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 1455503258 / 9781455503254)
Nonfiction (history/biography), 288 pages
Source: purchased audiobook (Hachette Audio, 2013, ISBN 9781619696464; Audible ASIN B00CS9KH0O)
Reason for reading: Personal


Opening lines (Author’s Note):

“To be an astronaut wife meant tea with Jackie Kennedy, high-society galas, and instant celebrity. It meant smiling perfectly after a makeover by Life magazine, balancing an extravagantly lacquered rocket-style hairdo, and teetering in high heels at the crux of the space age.

“The astronaut wives were ordinary housewives, most all of them military wives living in drab housing on Navy and Air Force bases. When their husbands, the best test pilots in the country, were chosen to man America’s audacious adventure to beat the Russians in the space race, they suddenly found themselves very much in the public eye.

“As her husband trained for every possible aspect of spaceflight, each woman had to prepare for the day when she would have to face the television cameras, when the world would be scrutinizing her hair, her complexion, her outfit, her figure, her poise, her parenting skills, her diction, her charm, and most of all, her patriotism.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons. 

Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK's favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other's children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon. 

As their celebrity rose-and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives-they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. The Astronaut Wives Club tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history. 

Comments: The combination of the Independence Day holiday and my ongoing Mad Men withdrawal made for ideal timing to read The Astronaut Wives Club,  Lily Koppel’s profile of the women who stood beside--and waited back on Earth for--the men of NASA during the decade-plus period of America’s full-tilt running of the Space Race. I read it on audio, and was so caught up in that I considered breaking my “audiobooks only during the commute” rule to keep listening--thanks to the holiday and a work-from-home day, I only had two commuting days the week I started it--but I held off, because I really didn’t want this one to end as soon as it did (and it probably would have gone even faster in print, so I’m glad I listened to it instead.)

The seven experienced pilots plucked from various branches of the military for NASA’s Mercury Project--one of whom would become the first American to fly into space--were hailed as pioneers and heroes, and celebrity quickly followed. Their wives got a taste of celebrity, too: each of them had her own assigned Life magazine reporter, and they conducted their own front-lawn press conferences while their husbands were in flight. The astronauts’ story has been told, but other than what was reported at the time--which was heavily controlled and stage-managed by NASA--the wives’ hasn’t been well-known. Koppel, who was able to interview quite a few of the wives for the book, brings them to the forefront and places them in the context of a period of rapid cultural and technological change. While their husbands’ work practically defined the promise of the future, their family lives in suburban Houston were freeze-framed in the 1950s.

It was understood within the NASA community that an astronaut’s career would suffer if his family didn’t fit the perfect mold--happy children and loyal, supportive wife waiting back at home--and the pressure to at least look the part was great. The perks that accompanied celebrity were appealing, but the demands and distractions that also came with it were less so. The strain of maintaining a perfect home for an often-absent spouse--although an astronaut husband would only be in space for a short time, most of his work was done in Cape Canaveral, Florida--was high. And all of this was overshadowed by the literal life-and-death nature of the job; by the time the Apollo program ended in the early 1970s, more than a half-dozen astronaut wives were widows. The only person who could truly understand what it was like to be an astronaut’s wife was another astronaut’s wife...and while many of these women have been friends for decades, some of those relationships couldn’t truly open up and deepen until they were out from under the demands of all that maintenance.

Koppel may be more interested in exploring the bonds between the wives, and the conditions that forged them, than in deep biographical details about the individual women themselves. I found that a bit frustrating at times, but it’s a good approach, because there are just so many women that equal, even treatment of each of them probably would have been less satisfying overall; the book would have either been too sketchy or too unwieldy. The Mercury Seven wives are prominent throughout the book, but as NASA expands into the Gemini and Apollo missions on its progress to the moon, the cast expands too; nine new astronauts (and wives) are brought in for Gemini, fourteen more are added for the early stages of Apollo, and so on. The program becomes more crowded and chaotic, and the later arrivals don’t get much individual attention in the book--but as these things go, they probably got less attention from the public at the time, too (especially after the moon was finally reached), so this treatment’s probably not out of place. The increasing sense of chaos mirrors that of the decade itself, and the book does a good job of connecting the personal stories to the larger societal one without turning its subjects into symbols--the personal stories don’t get lost.

The audio version of The Astronaut Wives Club is read by Orlagh Cassidy. I didn’t love some of her voice characterizations, particularly her attempts to replicate some of the better-known ones, but she otherwise conveyed the personal, intimate sense of the narrative well. The audio lacks any author’s notes or acknowledgements; for that reason, I’d be curious to see a print copy, because I wonder if the choices to feature some wives and not others (outside of the Mercury group, that is) were based on whether Koppel was able to talk with them while working on the book. And in any form, I really would have liked the book to be longer--it’s a fast and fascinating read, but I still want to know more about these women! I’m glad that Lily Koppel has brought out the story of the astronaut wives; they had a unique perspective on very significant recent history, and it deserves to be shared and heard. I hope that someday, we’ll get to hear even more.

Rating: Book, 4 of 5; Audio, 3.75 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

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Eating My Words, in #JustOneParagraph

One might think that getting people to do what they need to do to make sure they get paid for their work on an accurate and timely basis would be fairly easy. One would, in some cases, be wrong. Two years after switching to web-based time sheets that our employees can access anytime and anywhere they can get online, we still have staff who can't manage to get their forty hours a week accurately entered, approved, and submitted by a standing biweekly deadline. When we made this change, I declared that I was done sending out reminder emails before every payroll...but sometimes words were made to be eaten, and I chomped on some of my own today. In doing so, I hope I sent out a memo that answers more questions than it raises!

Just One Paragraph, #1 of 30

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Sunday Salon: Here and Now, July 20

Time: Sunday morning, early daylight hours


Place: My side of the bed

Eating and drinking: Nothing just yet. Breakfast soon, though…and later, lots of goodies at my nephew's 10th birthday party! (My sister and brother-in-law put together a buffet fit for the grown-ups, but the from-scratch, custom-decorated cake is sure to be enjoyed by one and all!)

Reading: I'm the last stop on the TLC Book Tour for Ami McKay's The Virgin Cure this Friday and am close to 2/3 done as of right now–I'm planning to get back to it when I'm done writing this post. On the iPad, I've finally returned to The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, and I hope to finish that one this week as well. And I've been reading lots of updates from San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, but today's the last day for that!

Listening: It's been a catch-up-on-podcasts week, with the good news that one of my favorites will soon be returning:

Via @PreviouslyTV “The Extra Hot Great Podcast Is Returning!” http://feedly.com/k/12Sl6OU

I'd like to start a new audiobook this week, but haven't decided on what it will be just yet. Suggestions? Anything good that you've read by ear recently?

Blogging: I'm thinking I might try this, starting tomorrow:

“I know I haven’t been showing up here regularly either to record the moments, my process, the glimpses into my life as it happens, and it’s something that I want very much to do this summer. Yet like everyone, I have excuses. Many of them very apropos: I’m writing elsewhere online; I’m working on a fiction piece; I’m drafting the outline of a book; the heatwave makes it hard to concentrate for very long; the kids are under foot; my work days are filled to saturation. None really hold water.

So I’m putting myself up to the challenge (and you too!) to blog a paragraph every day for 30 days. For me, it will be the last 30 days in this house. Next month on the 20th we move. Then school will start soon after, and new routines will emerge. But until then, 30 days. 30 posts. 1 paragraph.”

It sounds kind of like NaBloPoMo, but free-form–and may be just what I need to find my way back into the blogging groove. And I have a similar reason for wanting to do it at this particular time…

Pondering/Planning: A closing date. We are almost at the end of an escrow roller coaster ride, and if it all ends well, we'll also be moving next month…next door. (Yes, really.) I'm afraid to say too much more about it before things are all signed, sealed, and delivered, though…so, for now, I won't. But…

Promoting: The Big Book Purge Giveaway! (The possibility of moving was the original impetus for this, but it's happening regardless.) This is an off-line event and I'll provide more details soon, but the gist of it is this: If you can be at my house two weeks from today–Sunday, August 4-between 11 AM and 3 PM, you can leave with all the books you can carry.

Avoiding/Anticipating: Packing and purging. Lots of both.

Gratuitous Photo of the Week, via the Sunday comics:

How's your weekend going?

 

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Thoughts on Thursday: Time and Tasks and Sites and Books

There are things I used to do here that I don’t seem to do any more, for various reasons, although the “various” seems boils down to “time,” or lack of it, in one way or another.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked here about current events in the world outside social media and blogging (you know, the one where issues are real--where blogging and social media are just some of the tools we use to discuss those issues, and not the subject of the discussion). In fact, on checking to see when I last tagged a post with "news traffic and weather", I discovered that I haven’t used that tag since the end of 2012. I’m a little alarmed by this, although I don’t suppose I should be. I did make the choice to scale back my posting earlier this year, and that included deliberately limiting my range of topics as well. I’ve been reacting to books and popular culture, posting pictures and talking about travels--and although I set the limits myself, they’re starting to feel...well, limiting. I’m gradually reclaiming some of my time for blogging, and eventually, I’d like to get back to using some of that time to talk about the world outside our books and Facebooks. And events out there certainly provide plenty to talk about, don’t they? I’ve been pretty good on the Reading this year--and will always self-identify here as a book blogger--but now that I have time to notice, I’m missing the ‘Riting and the Randomness.

I don’t do link roundups very often any more either, mostly because I share them on social media instead. Those links all get collected on my Rebelmouse page, if you’d like to follow that. (And maybe you’d like to get one of your own while you’re at it? If nothing else, it gives you an easy place to see everything you’ve shared, everywhere!)

It’s so easy for these things to get lost in the Twitter stream, isn’t it? And it’s not just links we might be missing. The new site BookVibe collects all the tweets where someone you follow has mentioned a book title--you can catch up on what your favorite readers are reading and talking about, and find new books to add to your wish list! Recommendation engines may be good for some people, but I’m more likely to follow up on the books I hear about via personal opinions and suggestions--I’ve already hooked my Twitter account up to BookVibe (thanks to the Book Riot Podcast for letting me know it exists).

Of course, once you find out about these books, and acquire these books, there’s the question of where to put these books--a matter of space more than time. Some of my offline time is currently being spent on book space; I have a major purge in progress, which should make a good dent in the population of TBR Purgatory--I’m trying to be really honest with myself about whether a book is really not going “to be read” after all. (And truthfully, some of the decisions aren’t that hard to make; the bigger chore will be actually pulling all of those books back out of my LibraryThing catalog.) I’m not entirely sure yet where they’ll all end up once they’re off my shelves. I may ship some off as donations to Better World Books. Some galleys may be listed on The ARCycling Program (thanks to the Book Bloggers Google+ Community for letting me know that exists!). I hope to find personal takers for many of them. And we want to get some new bookcases soon, so what’s left will end up with a nicer--and roomier, at least at first!--home.

You know, considering the size of that task, I may not be reclaiming all that much blogging time just yet, after all.

Where do you find your books, and what do you do when you find you've got just too many of them?

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Wordless Wednesday:Coming Clean

 The official wording of our Wordless Wednesday theme for this week is "Spruce Up," and if I'm being honest, I have to admit it did provide part of the inspiration for the housecleaning tear I went on this past Sunday. And since I am being honest, I'll also admit that the top left-hand corner of this collage shows what the mop picked up from my tile floors. I humbly request that you not judge me...

My iPhone photos, edited with Snapseed and collaged with Diptic; text applied with TitleFx

An InLinkz Link-up

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TLC Book Tour: THE EXILES, by Allison Lynn

The Exiles: A Novel
Allison Lynn (Twitter)
Little A / New Harvest (July 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 054410210X / 9780544102101)
Fiction, 336 pages
Source: ARC from publisher
Reason for reading: TLC Book Tour

Opening lines: “Nate Bedecker stumbled as he stepped out of the Jeep. He briefly, embarrassingly (though no one was looking--he’d checked with a quick sweep of his eyes) tripped over the reedy patch of grass that bulged above the Newport curb. Three hours of driving and he’d forgotten how to use his legs. It was like old age, being thirty-eight. His muscles had no staying power anymore; the first steps he took after rising from bed each morning were a chore, his knees cracking and his ankles turning. Should he be worried?”

Book description, via Bookish.com (publisher partner site):
A couple escaping the opulent lifestyle of Manhattan’s Upper East Side move to Newport, Rhode Island, only to be confronted by the trappings of the life they tried to leave behind. 

Nate, a midlevel Wall Streeter, and his longtime girlfriend Emily are effectively evicted from New York City when they find they can no longer afford their apartment. An out presents itself in the form of a job offer for Nate in Newport—complete with a bucolic, small, and comparatively affordable new house. Eager to start fresh, they flee city life with their worldly goods packed tightly in their Jeep Cherokee. Yet within minutes of arriving in Rhode Island, their car and belongings are stolen, and they're left with nothing but the keys to an empty house and their bawling 10-month-old son. 

Over the three-day weekend that follows, as Emily and Nate watch their meager pile of cash dwindle and tensions increase, the secrets they kept from each other in the city emerge, threatening to destroy their hope for a shared future.

Comments: I seem to have a bit of a thing for New England this summer, and Allison Lynn’s novel The Exiles kept my head there just a bit longer. The story is set in Rhode Island, one of the two states in the region that I didn’t visit on our trip last month, and takes place during the Columbus Day holiday weekend rather than in the summer (yes, the Northeast still seems to observe that one), but picking this book up just a few days after returning from nearly two weeks traveling around the area felt strangely comfortable.

“Comfortable,” however, is not a word that readily applies to Nate and Emily’s current situation. They’ve just arrived in Newport, Rhode Island after a day on the road from New York City with a fully-packed Jeep and their ten-month-old baby boy. Parenthood has forced them to recognize that they can’t keep up with the New York lifestyle any more, and Nate’s new job is offering them the chance to exile themselves to a fresh start. But when their car is stolen during the short time it takes to meet with their real-estate agent and get the keys to their new home, on the eve of a holiday weekend, that new start faces a serious setback. And while they’ve lost all the possessions they brought with them, the couple still has some baggage. Emily is struggling with the potential consequences of acting on a rash impulse two nights before their departure from New York, while Nate can barely even think about the potential consequences of a family history he needs to explore more deeply--a history he hasn’t yet shared with Emily, but which influenced the decision to move to Rhode Island in the first place. Unable to access their bank accounts due to the long weekend and left with, literally, not much more than the clothes on their backs, they’re displaced, disoriented, and anything but comfortable.

Alternating chapters between Nate’s and Emily’s perspectives, Lynn effectively portrays the tensions between the couple during a brief period in which a situation that’s stressful enough on its own--a long-distance move--is made more so by crime, dishonesty, and a lack of openness with each other. I didn’t doubt their commitment to one another--they’re unmarried by choice--and to their son, but the strain was clear from the beginning, and the more I learned about each of them, the more I hoped they’d get themselves sorted out. The author establishes the stakes for her characters through a compressed timeframe, an unfamiliar place, and information that the reader learns before they do, and succeeds in building drama from (mostly) recognizable human behavior--sprinkled with some coincidence and just about the right amount of plot contrivance. The Exiles hits a lot of my sweet spots for contemporary domestic fiction, and although I’m not sure it’s a novel that will still resonate for me by the end of this year, it was an absorbing summer read.

Rating: 3.75 / 5

Other stops on this TLC Book Tour

Monday, July 8th: A Bookish Way of Life

Tuesday, July 9th: Life, Love, & Books

Thursday, July 11th: Fiction Addict

Monday, July 15th: Jenn’s Bookshelves

Monday, July 15th: Lit and Life

Wednesday, July 17th: Book Club Classics!

Thursday, July 18th: BookNAround

Friday, July 19th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Monday, July 22nd: Dolce Bellezza

Tuesday, July 23rd: The Blog of Litwits

Wednesday, July 24th: The Best Books Ever

Thursday, July 25th: A Bookish Affair

Friday, July 26th: Read Lately

Monday, July 29th: WV Stitcher

Tuesday, July 30th: Books a la Mode – Author guest post

Wednesday, July 31st: Tiffany’s Bookshelf

Thursday, August 1st: Regular Rumination

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Sunday Salon--the Appreciation Day Edition!

Two years ago this week, it was decreed by Stephen Thompson and his fellow podcast overlords at NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour that in honor of their show's anniversary, July 16, the Sunday nearest to that date was to be designated as “Appreciation Day”:

“What made the most sense for our anniversary was an episode focusing on various forms of appreciation, seeing as how PCHH is already built largely around the people and stuff making us happy on any given day. I proposed — and hereby propose again — the creation of a new holiday I'm calling "Appreciation Day," on which each and every world citizen takes the time to say the nicest possible thing to each of the treasured people who surround us.

"The idea isn't to fish for compliments, or to damn the little-liked with faint praise, or to fall back on the joke-cracking that's etched into each individual strand of our DNA; it's to simply say the nicest thing you can truthfully say to each person you know. It's a perfect project to carry out on social media such as Twitter, where the 140-character limit — combined with the username of the person you're praising and the hashtag #appreciationday — enforces the kind of concise sincerity that can be crafted quickly. After all, you've got a lot of people to praise on our makeshift holiday, and we want you to get to all of them.”

Check your calendar. Today’s the Sunday closest to July 16, so go forth and appreciate! I’ll get us started with a couple of appreciative shout-outs of my own, along the lines of the regular PCHH wrap-up feature, “What’s Making Us Happy This Week.”

A Good Reading (Half) Year. I’ve given more than half the books I’ve read so far this year four stars or better on Goodreads, and am right on track with my 2013 Reading Challenge goal, to boot.

And yet, in this same year. I’ve had two two-star reads and my first official DNF since starting this blog more than six years ago...but I appreciate those too. (There’s something to be said for knowing what you like...and for giving something that you really didn’t think you’d like a chance to change your mind, even if it didn’t succeed.) It’s been an especially good year with audiobooks, so in addition to the authors, I’ve got to give some appreciation to some fine narrators too--although in a few cases, they’re the same people. And since I have to find these books--or find out about them, at least--somehow, I appreciate all that Shelf Awareness, She Reads, TLC Book Tours, BlogHer, and my fellow book bloggers do to enable this little addiction of mine.

A Vacation Rejuvenation. The “vacation” part of my summer happened early, but it’s been great to come back from it and still be mostly caught up on things work-wise! Coming back to a repainted, refurnished, and rearranged office seems to be helping me stay on track, too, and I’m very appreciative of the people at my office who made all that happen while I was away.

And thanks to them--the office people, not the book people--here’s my Gratuitous Photo of the Week:

My office, my photos (collaged with Diptic)

One more thing I’m appreciating--a quiet weekend that’s too hot for doing much other than some reading, maybe some writing, and some hanging around the house! I'm starting on The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay for a TLC Book Tour date in two weeks, and have returned to The Age Of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker on the iPad--I started it a while back, but then put it on hold. Now that I'm back to it, I think it may go quickly. I'm in between audiobooks at the moment.

And how's your weekend going?

Posted with Blogsy

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Setting the Scene(ry): New England, June 2013

I grew up on the Southern New England coast, and I remember the "triple-H"--hazy, hot, and humid--summers there. (I suppose they were good preparation for my family's move to Florida when I was almost thirteen--the Sunshine State wasn't as "hazy," but its summers were even more hot and humid...and felt like they lasted about three times longer.) What I didn't remember so well were the softness of the hills, the shore breeze, and the varied, lush greens across the land--probably because I'd never known anything different up to that point, and so I didn't know that they should make an impression.

Aside from a few brief trips to Boston, I've spent very little time in New England since my early teens, and I never did complete the circuit; although the region is comprised of six very small states, I'd only been to five of them. Checking the last one--Maine--off my list has been a goal of mine for a long time. I did that during our visit to New England last month, but since we really didn't explore much beyond the state's southeast corner, I'm eager to go back. But I'd like to spend more time in that corner, too, and see more spots like the area around Portland Head Light at Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth. I took these photos myself, but with such beautiful and iconic subjects, it's hard not to get pictures that almost seem too perfect to be real.

Portland, Maine was the third stop on our trip. We arrived after three days in Lincoln, New Hampshire, "basecamp of the White Mountains," and took the scenic route through the White Mountains National Forest to get there, stopping for a little while at Rocky Gorge. The Forest Service officially identifies this spot as a "scenic area," and although there's not much else to do there besides hike around and view the scenery, "scenic" it most certainly is. We'd have stayed longer to take it in even more if we hadn't been on our way out of the state, but it's another place I'd love to visit again.

I've been living in the partially converted desert of Southern California for eleven years now, and its stark mountains, dry heat, and the varied, dusty browns across the land have helped me learn to appreciate the more conventional beauties of my original homeland in the opposite corner of my country.

My photos, edited with Snapseed and collaged with Diptic

Text applied with TitleFX

Posted with Blogsy

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(Not Quite) Wordless Wednesday: Adventure in the Sunshine

There's a pretty slim chance you'd get me to do this, but ziplining was one of the activities that the rest of the family really wanted to try during our vacation. Unfortunately, we were on Loon Mountain in New Hampshire at exactly the wrong, between-seasons time--the summer activities wouldn't be open on weekdays until the week after our visit. But we drove by this place on Route 1 in Maine a few days later, and stopped off with just in time for Tall Paul and Spencer to be the last liners of the day!

Ziplining at Monkey C Monkey Do, Route 1, Wicasset, Maine, June 2013

"Monkey C Monkey Do is Maine's first high-flying family adventure park with zip lines! Navigate through nearly 50 obstacles from 12 to 50 feet in the air then zoom along one of the SIX zip lines or our GIANT SWING and do it all over again! Our uniquely designed course offers multiple levels of difficulty, so no matter where your 'comfort level' lies, you are sure to have an experience you won't soon forget!"

An InLinkz Link-up

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She Reads Book Club: THE FIREBIRD, by Susanna Kearsley

The Firebird
Susanna Kearsley (Facebook) (Twitter)
Sourcebooks Landmark (2013), Paperback original (ISBN 140227663X / 9781402276637)
Fiction, 544 pages
Source: Publisher
Reason for Reading: She Reads Book Club selection

Opening lines:

“He sent his mind in search of me that morning.

“I was on the Tube, a half a minute out of Holland Park and in that muzzy not-awake-yet state that always bridged the time between my breakfast cup of coffee and the one that I’d have shortly at my desk. I nearly didn’t notice when his thoughts touched mine. It was a rare thing these days; rarer still that I would let him in, but my own thoughts were drifting and I knew that his were, too. In fact, from what I saw of where he was—the angle of the ceiling and the dimly shadowed walls—I guessed that he was likely still in bed, just waking up himself.

“I didn’t need to push him out. Already he was drawing back, apologizing. Sorry. Not a spoken word, but still I heard the faint regretful tone of his familiar voice. And then he wasn’t there.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
Two Women.
One Mysterious Relic.
Separated By Centuries. 

Nicola Marter was born with a gift so rare and dangerous, she kept it buried deep. When she encounters a desperate woman trying to sell a small wooden carving called "The Firebird," claiming it belonged to Russia's Empress Catherine, it's a problem. There's no proof. 

But Nicola's held the object. She knows the woman is telling the truth.

Comments: There have been times that I've pushed up against a posting deadline for a blog tour or online discussion, and written a review before I finished reading the book. There have been a few times--not many!--when I didn't get around to reading the book at all, and posted a "feature" instead. I think this may be the first time I've posted about a book that I have chosen not to finish.

One of the (great) things about book clubs is that they can provide opportunities to read in genres that we might not explore on our own. Susanna Kearsley's novel The Firebird is the July selection for the She Reads Book Club; it's a blend of historical mystery and contemporary fiction with strong elements of romance and a seasoning of paranormal. The leads in the present-day story, Nicola and Rob, are telepaths, and they are trying to discover the true provenance of an artifact--a carving called "The Firebird," based on Russian folklore--by psychically tracing the women of the family who possessed it back through nearly three centuries, via their intense mental connection.

The Firebird is, in all honesty, a book I doubt I would have picked up on my own. I gave it about 150 pages before I set it aside, and I think that was a fair shot for a novel that I reasonably suspected would turn out to be "not my thing" in the end. I wasn't uninterested in the dynamic between Nicola and Rob, but I couldn't get into the story they were trying to uncover--their expositional "conversations" about historical context didn't help--and, eventually, I just didn't feel the desire to stick with the whole thing for nearly 400 pages more. I appreciated the opportunity to give it a try, though. Readers whose "thing" it is will probably appreciate The Firebird much more, and you can find their thoughts via She Reads’ July book introduction post.

Rating: DNF

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