Monday Malarkey - Arrivals, last week's posts, things I'm reading and other malarkey

Time for some malarkey and this seems like a good place to start. I need a head pot. Seriously, I do.

I just think a pot like that would look terrific on my living room shelf.  That's a museum pot made by a potter from the Mississippian culture, sometime between the years 1200-1500 A.D.  Is it cool, or what?

Only two books arrived, this week (progress on restraint!):

• This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash - from HarperCollins for review 
• These Wonderful Rumours! A Young Schoolteacher's Wartime Diaries by May Smith - purchased

Great covers on both, don't you think?  Also, note the sticker on the cover of These Wonderful Rumours.  I had no idea this year is Virago Press' 40th year. Wahoo for Virago Books and Happy Birthday to you, Virago!

Last week was a heavy posting week as I've been attempting to do some catch-up:

• October Reads in Review - 2013
• November Reads in Review - 2013
• Tuesday Twaddle - A happy holiday and some fun reading
• N0S4A2 by Joe Hill (review)
• Before I Die by Candy Chang (review)
• The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories 3 by HitRECord and Fiona Friday (review and grumpy cat pic)

Since last week's Tuesday Twaddle, I've only managed to finish one book, but it was a good one:

• The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook - This one is showing up on some "Best of 2013" lists and deservedly so, in my humble opinion.

I am currently reading:

• Jack Absolute by C. C. Humphreys - Swashbuckling fun but a bit bloody. Love the Hamlet-quoting Iroquois, Jack's friend Até.
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - Yes, I'm just finally getting around to this one.  
• Another book I don't want to confess to reading till I get a bit farther because it's non-fiction and I'm such a pokey NF reader.

So what about that Calvino?

Sigh.  I keep looking at it and thinking, "Later, later."  But, I will tell you that while I was reading If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (before I hit overload), I found that it was inspiring me in the "giving me numerous writing ideas" sense, so I do plan to finish the book and I'll definitely save it for future rereads.  You should see the number of Post-its crammed into that book.  It's quite a sight.

In other news:

Friday was exciting as my delightful and incredibly-dapper author friend Simon Van Booy did a talk at TEDxBrooklyn.  The 2013 TEDxBrooklyn program was available for live streaming, so I got to see Simon's "How to Write a Book in 18 Minutes" and frantically took notes.  Of course, Simon was brilliant, as always.  What I wrote down is not entirely complete but hopefully the talk will show up in their video section eventually. I will undoubtedly need to make some corrections and/or additions to my notes and it's worth sharing so I'll let you know if/when it shows up. In the meantime, Simon's talk has me pondering my own writing, so I'm thrilled about that.

Also, last week I got my 5th Graze box:

In case you haven't heard of it, Graze is a healthy-snack subscription service and the per-shipment price is very reasonable. If you're looking for gift ideas for a college kid, I highly recommend getting your favorite university student a Graze subscription. After I got my first box and decided it's definitely a good deal, I got a second one for Kiddo.  He loves getting a parcel in the mail every two weeks (otherwise, he only receives bills). Kiddo told me he keeps one of the individually-wrapped snacks in his backpack for times when he can't make it to the cafeteria before it closes, which happens regularly on his busiest days.  I've got a couple friend codes remaining if anyone's interested in signing up.  Just write to my gmail account.

We're finally getting started on Christmas decorating.

While I was searching for some Victorian-style garlands that I bought in an after-Christmas sale last year, I came across a box with a label that made me laugh.  The box contains breakable items (I didn't bother looking inside to see exactly what kind of breakables because it was in an awkward place and, of course, I didn't want to end up breaking everything). On the outside of the box I wrote, "I will die if this box gets smashed." The contents of this box must be very important because elsewhere on the box it says, "Seriously, it will KILL ME if you damage this one." When I'm done decorating, I'm going to have to see what's inside that box . . . carefully, of course.

Happy Monday!

©2013 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Reading update and some other nonsense

This is going to be one of those rambling posts because I'm in kind of a bummery mood. I think the heat is getting to me. We'll start with the cuteness and move on to reading. This was so wrong of me. The cats are not allowed on the piano, lest their little claws inadvertently scratch the fine wood and my mother return to haunt me, but Isabel looked so cute that I had to snap some photos before making her get down:

My mother paid for this piano by working as an Avon rep, way back in the Seventies. I used to go along with her for her orders and deliveries, now and then, and although I was small I recall my favorite of her customers was the one with the talking parrot.

Reading update:

I woke up at 5AM on Saturday morning (not by choice -- I'd already stayed up rather a bit later than I should have) and finished reading Simon Van Booy's book, Everything Beautiful Began After. Be patient with me. It's so compelling and such a great story that even though I had the urge to mark practically every other line, I was too immersed to bother. So, I'm going to reread it -- probably next week -- before I review.

But, a few words about Everything Beautiful Began After: It seems to be a love triangle, at first, and it begins a little slowly. Apart from the beauty of his writing, you may even be tempted to think it's not going to be anything special. And, then Simon yanks the rug out from you and turns the story on its head. Suddenly, what you thought was a love triangle becomes a story of grief and hope. It's almost a tapestry -- about love and death and friendship, the fleeting nature of life and how much every single moment counts. Everything Beautiful Began After is awe-inspiring, uplifting, authentic, hopeful, beautiful. It's everything I hoped Simon's first novel would be. Prepare to have your heart broken and then put back together with sparkles and rainbows. Everything Beautiful Began After is a book you simply must read.

Onward . . .

After I closed Simon's book, I gave myself a day to ponder and then decided there was absolutely no way any book could hold a candle to EBBA, so I chose something so completely opposite and fast-paced that I wouldn't end up constantly comparing. My next read was a YA sci-fi, Gone by Michael Grant. In Gone, there are disappearing adults, a strange dome-like enclosure over town, talking coyotes and other strange animal mutations, kids with special powers. It's a little bit Stephen King, a little bit William Golding. The way the children react to the absence of adults hints at Lord of the Flies and, of course, you can't help thinking about King's Under the Dome, although I haven't yet gotten around to reading Under the Dome and, therefore, can't compare.

I finished Gone, last night, and I have a copy of the next book in the series but obligations will keep me from reading it for a while. Instead, I've moved on to a tour book, Face to Face with God by Jim Maxim, and Shadow of a Quarter Moon by Eileen Clymer Schwhab. I'll add both to my sidebar in a bit.

Just walked in the door:

Hunting Unicorns by Bella Pollen - I loved The Summer of the Bear so much that I promptly ordered another of her books. I won't get to it for a while, but that's only if I behave myself. It's very tempting.

My sidebar has just continued to become more intimidating, so I'm going to attempt to start tackling reviews in whatever manner I can, this week. Hopefully, my exercise class won't hit me quite as hard as it did last week, but I will tell you this . . . Two of the girls in my class just finished "Boot Camp," another exercise regime that's known to be quite tough. They told me the class we're attending,"The Next Level," is harder. Goodness.

Might as well end with a photo from our vacation. This picture was taken on our trip west to Exmoor:

We had the option of paying a couple pounds to take a scenic byway or taking a free road. We chose the scenic byway. At times you could see thousand-foot plummets to the sea, at other times it appeared that Robin Hood was likely to come bounding out of the forest. Definitely a detour worth taking, but not for the faint of heart.

©2011 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other thanBookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Emailbookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

By Andrew Shaffer

Copyright 2011

HarperPerennial - history/biography/philosophy

208 pages

Andrew Shaffer's blog

Hume wrote that women want dominion over men and men want dominion over women. He found both sexes at fault in this eternal power struggle, but it was man who started it: "If we did not abuse our authority [over women], they would never think it worthwhile to dispute it."

--p. 99 from the chapter about David Hume in Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

Philosophy has never been a topic that even remotely interested me . . . that is, till Simon Van Booy got his hands on it and wrote his own philosophy series, which I absolutely loved. So, it's entirely Simon's fault that I decided to read Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love.

Sadly, the book doesn't come close to measuring up to Simon's work. However, it's a nice diversion. Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love is introduced by the author, who explains that philosophers are naturally neurotic, overly critical, and condescending. The rest of the book contains short bios of 37 philosophers -- some of whom shared some natural crossover with others of their generation (Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the most obviously connected). The bios are followed by a "timeline" that places them in historical order and a selected bibliography.

What I loved about Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love:

Very light, funny and entertaining, Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, is the perfect book for a brain break. It's neither taxing nor complex; and, it's packed with quotes that will make you shake your head in disbelief (or exclaim aloud . . . I probably uttered the words "good grief" a few times). Plus, the book is definitely a fun way to dip your toes in the waters of philosophy without feeling as if you're on the verge of drowning.

What I disliked about Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love:

The same characteristics that make the book entertaining also make it a likely candidate for the use of the word "fluff". And, "not deep" could also be equated to "shallow". In other words, Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love is entertaining, but you won't come out of the reading with any great new understanding and I wouldn't go around quoting the book in order to look smart in a room full of professors. The author makes liberal use of footnotes to insert his brand of humor. I found at least one of those footnotes offensive, but most were just silly.

Here's an example of a passage, followed by the related footnote (following the asterisk). The reference is to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Werther:

Copycat suicides racked up across the continent. "For as it requires but a little match to blow up an immense mine, so the explosion which followed my publication was mighty," Goethe wrote. Authorities in Italy, Germany and Denmark banned the book in an attempt to keep it from completely infecting a generation of disaffected youth. Eventually, the subculture of suffering that the book had spawned fell out of fashion, just like any other fad.*

* Only to be revived (minus the suicides) by the English rock group The Cure in the early 1980s.

--p. 88

The bottom line:

Entertaining, but not overly enlightening, a great book to grab if you're looking for a little lightweight reading that will make you feel like you have been blessed beyond belief in your love life -- even if your significant other is a fat slob, snoring in front of the television.

No, I'm not referring to my husband: He's at the grocery store. Just thought you ought to know. And, I do appreciate him.

In other news: Bookfool has been experiencing a bout of insomnia and hasn't felt much like blogging, although she (oh, no -- referring to yourself in 3rd person is a bad sign of something, isn't it?) did manage to finish three books, this weekend . . . which also means she didn't accomplish much else, but let's just not go there.

Today: Bookfool spent an hour or two loading shelves at the homeless shelter store with lovely donated books. They look terrific!! Almost all of the books we're currently displaying appear to be remainders and I'm a little concerned. The shelter is asking for donations (in other words, "set your own price") and they have received between 10 cents and $1.00 for purchases, thus far. Considering the fact that the books are mostly pristine -- some very nice hardbacks among them -- I think there needs to be a specific price attached to those books, don't you? What do you think is reasonable to ask for them? We'll also have used books and I think they can go for less but 10 cents to haul off a newish book that sat in the back of a warehouse for a while is just crazy. That's not going to benefit the shelter at all. They'll be lucky to pay the rent.

Things I forgot to remember: I keep forgetting to photograph "books in" and, well, this is weird . . . It's probably not going to happen, now, unless someone says, "Oh, please, please won't you take pictures of at least some of them, dear Bookfool?" Because I am unique in my personal style of organization. I bring in my books, log them in and then sort in a way that's much like sprinkling the entire earth with a few buckets of rainwater. Some, I'll put on my TBR shelf by release date, some end up beside the bed (if I look at a title and think, "Want to read NOW!", it goes straight to the bedside pile) and the rest -- swap books, books from friends and drawing wins -- just kind of wander around, settling where they will.

So, then Monday rolls around and it seems like everyone in the galaxy is posting about what arrived in the mailbox. And, mine are in 5 different rooms. Well, usually 3, but you never know. I could write you a list of everything that's arrived since before Christmas, but you have to promise not to gasp and tell me I'm the greediest and most evil book collector on the planet.

So far, this week, I've only received one book: The Butt Book by Artie Bennett, illustrated by Mike Lester. I expect my book intake will drop off severely, now that I've decided to take a break from ARCs, although I have a few swap books on the way.

At this very moment: My cats are eating out of the same bowl. I was running out of dry kitty food, so I poured all of it into the one bowl. I didn't know both kitties would show up as soon as the vittles hit plastic.

Apart from Isabel's sudden and inexplicable urge to climb the piano repeatedly, the cats seem to be behaving pretty well, this week. Wahoo for that.

There. I do believe I've covered every subject but the weather. It was sunny and lovely, today, at approximately 48 degrees. You're free to go, now. Congratulations for making it this far!

©2011 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.