World Book Night: who else is in?

Posted on February 4, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I got my email today! I’m going to be a book giver on World Book Night, which is April 23, 2012. I am hoping that I will get to give away my first-choice book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I feel that this is such an important, impressive book, in its subject matter (both medical and social justice), and in its highly engaging and readable narrative treatment (so friendly to nonfiction readers).

I put in my application that I wanted to give books away at Memorial Park, because it’s a space I love and sees high pedestrian traffic. But I’ve been reconsidering. It has occurred to me that the traffic there tends to be pretty affluent, and I’d rather give these books to people less likely to go buy one at the store. I may still be thinking about where to give my books away. I want to pick just the right place.

Did you sign up for World Book Night to be a giver? Did you get your email today? Which book did you choose and where will you be handing them out? Tell me!

And if you haven’t signed up yet – they’ve extended the deadline to do so! You still have until Monday, Feb. 6 (that is THIS Monday) to go here and sign up to give away 20 copies of the book of your choice (well, off their list – and don’t try for Hunger Games, it’s all full up). This is a great event, in my opinion, because it’s all about providing folks with reading material for free – with the idea that the book you put in their hands may change lives. Reading can be such an escape, an educational tool, such fun and comfort and solace, that I want others to be able to join in. Here’s a great way to help them do so.

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book beginnings on Friday: River in Ruin by Ray A. March

Posted on February 3, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Katy at A Few More Pages for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

This is the story of the Carmel River, a tiny river but apparently one that serves as a sadly typical example of what we’re doing to our rivers on a large scale. It begins:

On a summer evening between semesters at college, my friends and I gathered at Undertow Beach near the lagoon where the Carmel River enters Carmel Bay. The evening was nippy, a high fog hovered overhead, so in a tight protected valley of sand carved out long ago by an old cable-driven dredge we built a little campfire of driftwood and drank rank red wine.

Nature writers, take note: this is a great beginning. While the rest of the book promises to be well-researched nonfiction, it begins with a narrative that grounds the story and gives it significance. The author grew up in the area and remembers earlier incarnations of the river, thus showing his reader why she should care. Good stuff. Look for my review to come…

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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The Chalk Girl by Carol O’Connell

Posted on February 2, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Carol O’Connell’s Mallory returns to take on a case with nonstop twisting intrigues.


The little girl in Central Park has red hair, starry blue eyes and a dazzling smile; she reminds people of an elf or a fairy, and tells stories of blood raining out of the sky and an uncle who turned into a tree, and demands hugs from everyone she meets. The fairy tale halts abruptly, however, with the discovery of a body in a tree, hogtied and seemingly dead. And it’s not the only one. Coco, as she calls herself, presents a perplexing mystery. Where did she come from? Who does she belong to? Where did she get the strange explanations for the blood on her shirt and, most important, what kind of a witness will she make, if the NYPD ever manages to solve the homicides?

Detective Mallory, the protagonist of nine previous novels, is just back from three months of unauthorized down time and is none too stable herself; she and Coco may have more in common than meets the eye. But the case quickly grows bigger than a wandering child and a series of well-planned murders. Conspiracies and deceits connect Coco with the upper echelons of political power in the city, from high society to the DA’s office, even the police department–and Mallory’s investigation will reveal a chilly tale of torment stretching back 15 years. Unlike the spritely Coco, though, Mallory is a terrifying force to be reckoned with. Her methods are cold, merciless and conniving; her colleagues doubt she even has a heart. If nothing else, Coco’s tormenters can expect justice at Mallory’s hands.

This review originally ran in the January 20, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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two-wheeled thoughts: H.G. Wells

Posted on February 1, 2012 by pagesofjulia

two-wheeled thoughts

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.

–H.G. Wells

A classic.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Posted on January 31, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Still working on Anna Karenina (and I will be for a little while longer!). Today I had to give you this noteworthy teaser…

…she felt such terror at what she had done, that she could not face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort herself with lying assurances that everything would remain as it always had been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question…

From Part 2, chapter 23. Anybody else a little offended?

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My Life as Laura by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Posted on January 30, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson grew up in the belief that she was Laura Ingalls’s long-lost twin, or perhaps her reincarnation; she was bored and frustrated by her suburban upbringing and longed for the simplicity, beauty, and utility of the world of the Little House books. After earning an English degree and attempting to be a rock-n-roll star, she ended up waiting tables… for decades. At thirty-eight, unhappy with work and her love life and feeling like a failure, she sets out to follow in her hero’s wagon tracks across the United States, visiting the sites of the various Ingalls homes as represented in the books. My Life as Laura is the story of Ferguson’s travels, and her reflections on her own life and what lessons she can learn from Laura.

She dons a “prairie dress” (which mostly makes her miserable, but occasionally helps her get into the spirit of things) and drives her Camry west. Laura’s home sites sometimes feature the preserved original structure, sometimes a replica or a monument to the location; sometimes tours are available; but they seem to always feature a gift shop. Ferguson’s most adventurous moments involve interacting with hotel and gift shop staff while wearing her period costume; but these conversations are generally perfunctory. She spaces out during tours, but reads a few books purchased in the gift shops and learns more about the object of her admiration – like the disturbing news that there is some question as to Laura’s authorship of the books, and the level of her daughter Rose’s involvement. Ferguson discovers that, while she’s a first-class expert on Laura the character of the books, she really didn’t know Laura the (arguable) author of the books very well.

Nothing much happens in this book. If you’re looking for adventure, experience, the trying of new things (or any attempt to live the Ingalls’ nineteenth century lifestyle), look elsewhere. Rather, what action there is is inward-looking, as Ferguson contemplates and picks apart her own past through the lens of Laura’s experiences. At the end she has made some personal growth and undertaken to write a book (ta-da!). The changes she makes to her life are modest, but she’s honest about what she’s able to take on.

This book has its strengths, humility and honesty being chief among them. But I was disappointed with the action component, and had expected more brave and outgoing feats than registering for a hotel room in an odd dress and subsisting on junk food. It didn’t feel like Ferguson’s boundaries were expanded much, even in a cross-country solo road trip. Perhaps the greatest downfall of the book was Ferguson’s success in convincing me of her own weakness and tendency towards failure. I feel badly writing that, but it was my reaction; I don’t mean to be unkind, but she had me talked into the thesis of her underachievement. Also, I have to note her repeated reference to the Amish driving around in their minivans. In nonfiction especially, that kind of sloppy error really stands out to me. [The Amish don’t drive cars.]

In conclusion, this book has a mild feel-good effect, and there are certainly some positive reviews out there. Ferguson is always brutally honest about her own weaknesses, and I respect her for it. But its lack of action and growth, and a few sloppy details, left me decidedly lukewarm.

I received a copy of this book from the author and I’m only sorry I didn’t have a more positive reaction to it.

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Fire on the Mountain by Edward Abbey

Posted on January 29, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Oh my. I have difficulty beginning this review. I found this book very moving and beautiful. I’m glad to have found such joy in Edward Abbey this time around; I was disappointed in Black Sun, but I knew he had this in him.

Abbey tells us that this story was “inspired by an event that took place in our country not many years ago” but is fictional in its particulars. Billy Vogelin Starr has just arrived in southern New Mexico to spend another summer with his grandfather, on the ranch that has been in Grandfather’s family since the beginning. Billy is twelve, and he loves the land, the terrain, the work, the ranch, and his grandfather very much; they move something deep inside him. He only gets to be a cowboy for three months a year, but he takes this time seriously. He’s also very excited to see his friend Lee again; Lee is handsome, charismatic, a real cowboy, his grandfather’s best friend, and Billy’s hero. This year things are different, however; the United States government intends to take the Box V ranch away. The story is, they need it for national security. We’re fighting the Soviets, at least in theory and in spirit, and the land is needed for rocket testing (thus explaining the cover image, if you can see it that clearly). Grandfather’s response is that his land is not for sale. He was born here; his daddy died here, and he’ll die here, too. If he has to do battle to retain his right to his land, he’s willing. And of course, Billy wants to be right by Grandfather’s side.

A short book at under 200 pages, Fire on the Mountain is incredibly powerful. In few words – just like a cowboy – Abbey teaches his reader about old men like John Vogelin, whose tie to the land and to an older way of life is stubborn. The descriptions of the natural phenomena of Southern New Mexico are awesome, and I challenge you to resist respecting Grandfather’s final stand. Not for nothing is Abbey called (by Larry McMurtry) “the Thoreau of the American West.” This is a coming-of-age story for Billy Vogelin Starr, whose twelfth summer sees drama that will change his world forever; it’s also a lovely evocation of the beauty and power of nature, and the story of the classic, iconoclastic, Western loner resisting a world of change. An incredibly powerful and touching book, beautifully written, irresistible, exhibiting the greatness that I expect from Edward Abbey. More, please.

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Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George

Posted on January 28, 2012 by pagesofjulia

The latest gruesome, yet touching, mystery starring Inspector Thomas Lynley and his friends.


Elizabeth George’s long-awaited 18th installment in the Inspector Thomas Lynley mystery series sees our Tommy back at New Scotland Yard, having returned from wandering the English countryside mourning his murdered wife. His new illicit relationship with a superior officer is interrupted by a mysterious secret assignment–to look into a drowning that has already been ruled accidental. A powerful patriarch (like Lynley, a peer of the realm) requests further investigation into his own family–most obviously, the recovering drug addict prodigal son. But as Lynley, with the assistance of the reliable Deborah and Simon St. James, delves deeper into this family’s history and entanglements, he uncovers myriad lies, betrayals, deceptive identities and plenty of cause for scandal.

Fans of the series will rejoice in rejoining Lynley, the St. Jameses and Sergeant Barbara Havers, who unwillingly undergoes a makeover in this book. George also delivers the fully wrought, sympathetic, very human minor characters her readers have come to expect. Longtime fans may find Deborah’s increasingly obsessive distress over her failure to conceive beginning to wear thin; the subject becomes a full-fledged plot thread here. But George’s strengths–character development, plot twists and shocking tragedy–continue to shine.

While Believing the Lie can stand alone, series readers will find a deeper appreciation of the complex relationships at play. Look out for a serious cliffhanger at the end, which will leave George’s fans panting for the next Lynley episode.

This review originally ran in the January 13, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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book beginnings on Friday: My Life as Laura by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Posted on January 27, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Katy at A Few More Pages for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

Today I’m giving you the beginning of My Life as Laura, a memoir of Kelly Kathleen Ferguson’s journey in the footsteps of Laura Ingalls Wilder as given in her Little House books. She begins:

I admit that the origin of the dress mandate was fuzzy at best. All I can say is the instant I decided to retrace the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I knew I would wear a Laura dress.

And thus we meet the dress and begin the journey. I’ll keep you posted!

What are you reading this weekend?

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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Posted on January 26, 2012 by pagesofjulia

A Room of One’s Own is a compilation and expansion of two papers Virginia Woolf presented in response to the prompt, “Women and Fiction.” It’s an essay of just over 100 pages, in my edition, in which she meditates on the subject, does a little research, and muses as to what we can expect from women in the world of fiction, what we’ve gotten from them in the past, and why. The final conclusion drawn, which forms the title, is that if a woman has five hundred a year and a room of her own she can be another Shakespeare. She points out that these requirements are symbolic: “five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate… a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.” She acknowledges that her demands are rather materialistic, and defends them by pointing out that resources are required for great art, that all our greatest artists and poets have been (almost entirely) men of means.

She makes some interesting arguments about the differences between men and women, and claims that women shouldn’t try to write like men; we are different, she says, and shouldn’t try to be the same. I guess this is a liberating argument in some ways, and I certainly agree that women shouldn’t try to be men; but in some ways this argument strikes me in a separate-but-equal fashion. I don’t necessarily appreciate having the “innate” differences harped upon, between sexes or ethnic groups or any of it. Part of celebrating diversity is about recognizing the diversity of the different groups, meaning their innate differences, yes, but part of tolerance and acceptance of diversity is about acknowledging our basic sameness too, right? It actually reminded me a little bit of VS Naipaul’s extraordinary and controversial remarks about female writers last year. Some of the response to his ignorant statement that women writers are always inferior to men came in the form of quizzes where, given a short excerpt of writing, the quiz-taker was to guess the writer’s sex. We all got a lot of them wrong, proving that a good writer is not necessarily a “woman writer” or a “man writer” but just a writer, which is a position I tend to agree with. (Same goes for poor writers, too, of course.) It’s odd to me that she also spends a certain amount of time exhorting women not to react to men’s exclusion or prejudice, but to write, as it were, in a vacuum, to not let the “opposition” color their work – either by apologizing or aggressing. Also a strong point, but seemingly a little at odds with her “women are different” point, perhaps. I got a little muddled here.

All in all I did not have the reaction to A Room of One’s Own that I expected to. I wholeheartedly applaud her basic sentiments, and I respect her for being the female writer in the face of male disapproval that she was. But some of her arguments got a little bit questionable to me; I suspect they may be a little dated. The course of the essay, too, was a touch rambling for my taste. As a persuasive essay it was a little more poetic and meandering than I was expecting. Is this slightly genre-bending? Maybe I came at it from a strange angle. At any rate, I respect it, I enjoyed it somewhat, and I congratulate Woolf; but I was not enraptured.

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