The Acquisitions Department

Date:  September 27, 2010
Prepared by:  The Acquisitions Dept for A Reader's Respite
Subject:  September Acquisitions

Our blog secretary is on vacation, so we haven't gotten an Acquisitions Report out to you in quite some time.  But never fear, A Reader's Respite sent over to the temp agency for a short term replacement secretary.  We had high hopes when he showed up for work.....

Despite a British accent that at first seems endearing but later starts to grate a bit on the ol' eardrums, we thought he'd work out just fine.  But then he saw the pile of books waiting to be catalogued and shelved and we began to doubt his work ethic.....

He did perk up a tad, though, when he realized the vast majority of our incoming books were at least historical fiction set on his side of the pond.

Gallows Wedding, by Rhona Martin.  Published in 1978, this novel was the very first winner of the Historical Novel Prize in Memory of Georgette Heyer (thanks to Reading the Past for compiling a list of these winners).  Set in 1500's England, Gallows Wedding is a dark tale that explores the hysteria of witchcraft and a peasant girl's struggle with poverty, plague and ill-fated love.

Trust and Treason, by Margaret Birkhead. The 1988 winner of the Historical Novel Prize went to this novel set in 1558 England.  A family finds themselves enmeshed in intrigue that changes their fortunes forever.

A Fallen Land, by Janet Broomfield.  This novel won the Historical Novel Prize in 1989 and is set in Victorian Edinburgh.  The storyline follows the paths of two girls, one from high society and the other set in poverty and the unusual way in which their lives cross paths.

The Terioki Crossing, by Alan Fisher.  Winning the prize in 1984, this novel is set in 1916 Russia as an unlikely group sets out over the ice of the Terioki Crossing.




Is anyone sensing a pattern here?

Farewell, my friend (or how to strain a friendship)

On September 27, 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published.  According to legend, Hemingway sent a draft of the novel to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald who returned it to Hemingway with nine pages of suggested revisions.

Hemingway made a note at the bottom of the last page of Fitzgerald's suggestions.  It read,

Kiss my ass.

We *heart* Hemingway.

Stupid. Times two.

A Reader's Respite is like a bloodhound when it comes to tracking down out of print books.  If there's an obscure, older book you're looking for you can either call on us or the Federal Marshals.
 
There's a lot less paperwork involved if you chose us.

Recently we caught the scent of an old family-saga-Civil-War series written back in the 1970s by Marie de Jourlet, called The Windhaven Saga.  We gathered our book-hunting tools and went to work tracking down affordable copies of the entire 11-book series.

This is where it gets interesting.  While tracking down a readable copy of Book #7 (Defenders of Windhaven), we stumbled upon a series of articles written a few years back by Richard Connelly for the Houston Press about the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

You can imagine our surprise when we saw the following book had been banned in Texas prisons:

Yes, the very same Windhaven novels we have been searching for have been banned from prison libraries in Texas due to a rape scene.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, however, did think that this book was just fine for their inmate's reading pleasure:

But you already knew banning books was stupid, didn't you?

Mini Reviews and a Photo Journey

Summer is always a short affair in the Pacific Northwest and this year it seemed even shorter than most.  A Reader's Respite took the past week to have, well, a respite.  We escaped to The Mountain for a few days, holed ourselves up inside a cozy little cabin and read, hiked, then read some more when the mood struck Big Kid and Little Kid weren't beating each other over the head with giant sticks.

Mt. Rainier (aka The Mountain)

We thought we'd share some photographs and a handful of the books we've read the past month or so that didn't warrant a big official review.

the historical church in Elbe, Washington (population 21), at the base of Mt. Rainier

With fall comes an entirely new reading mood.  We love this.  A Reader's Respite isn't an organized reader.  By this we mean we read where the mood takes us.  Frequently one book will make reference to another which then leads us down a completely new path.  We're the flower child of bibliophiles, wandering aimlessly here and there.  (Unless it's a series.  Then our obscene OCD about reading a series in order comes into play.)

Narada Falls

Fall usually leads us to what we like to call our curl-up-next-to-the-fireplace books.  We ease our way into it, this year wanting to start off with Scott Turrow's Innocent, a sequel to his masterful courtroom thriller, Presumed Innocent.  Because the original novel was published twenty years ago (who waits twenty years to write a sequel, for the love of Pete?), it was clear a re-read was in order.

 Stone bridges rock.  Yes, it's a great pun, too...but really, we think they rock.  This one is over Box Canyon.

So to shake things up, we listened to the original and it's new sequel on audiobook.  What did we learn?  That the original is still the best courtroom novel ever written (sorry Grisham) and the sequel was.....well....it was a sequel.  Some novels are just best left alone.

 Little Kid pretending to be sweet and cute.  In her hand she is holding a giant stick she uses to smash into an unsuspecting Big Kid every time our head is turned the other direction.

 
Harry Potter nostalgia always sets in this time of year, especially when the temperatures drop at night and the leaves start changing color. And we've promised ourselves no more re-reads.  It's over and we just have to accept that.   So despite the ridiculous back-cover comparisons to Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia, we took a chance and bought a copy of Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  It was the best magical-fantasy we've read in quite some time.  All of the great fantasy elements were there: a school for magic, a group of friends, a mystery to solve.  Sounds like it's been done before, you say?  Yes, but not when the school is a university and the protagonist is coming of age facing what every college freshman faces....sex, alcohol, drugs, relationships and finding your place and identity in this world.  It's hard enough us non-magical folk to get through that phase in life.  Can you imagine how dangerous we would have been with magic at our disposal?  If you like losing yourself in a world of magic, we'd recommend this one.

Big Kid pretending to be sweet and cute.  In his hand he is holding a giant stick he uses to smash into an unsuspecting Little Kid every time our head is turned the other direction.

Moving away from magic, we turned to a National Book Award finalist.  Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon was on so many "best of the year" lists in 2009 that it demanded to be read.  A literary thriller, the novel fairly teems with overt themes of identity as three apparent strangers find their lives intersecting in the oddest manner.  Who we are, how we see ourselves versus how other see us, and the flimsiness of identity prevail here.  It was a page-turner, no doubt about that, but in the end felt contrived as if the author was writing merely to enforce his themes.

 the Nisqually Glacier

A Reader's Respite was a big fan of Tatiana de Rosnay's novel, Sarah's Key last year.  So when we saw a copy of her new book, A Secret Kept, being offered for review via the Amazon Vine program, we jumped on it.  The theme of family secrets is revisited here as adult siblings Antoine and Melanie are forced to sort through their dysfunctional childhood memories in search of who their long-dead mother really was.  Great premise (we love dark-family-secret novels, but that's a subject for another day), but it fell short by taking just a few concepts and reiterating them over and over until it became tiresome.  Still, if you enjoyed Sarah's Key you likely won't be able to pass this one up.  Just don't expect the same impact.

1000+ year old Douglas Firs.  These trees were here while the Normans were busy conquering England.

Hope everyone out there is sliding into fall as well as we are.  May your reading grow cozier, your fireplace burn warm and your hot cocoa be topped with whipped cream.  Happy reading.

Literary Smackdown

That's right folks, it's Literary Smackdown time.  No holds barred, it's book versus book and only the strongest survive.

Did you know that Dolph Lundgren (Russian dude) speaks 5 languages and has a Master's degree in chemical engineering?  It's true. 

A couple of months back, after reading Justin Cronin's much-hyped epic The Passage, A Reader's Respite couldn't help but notice all of the comparisons readers everywhere were making between this novel and Stephen King's legendary epic, The Stand.

The problem for us was that A Reader's Respite had never actually read King's masterpiece.  (Pelt us with tomatoes if you must, but it's true.  He scared us after the clown-thing in It and we never read a word he wrote again....but you can read about that here.).

As it turned out, we were in good company.  Both Jill (A Rhapsody in Books) and Ti (Book Chatter) had either a) never read the book, or b) read it long enough ago that it had been lost to the brain-chasm that eats up minor book details like, say, the plot.

So it was that we formed The Fellowship of The Stand.  (Okay, so it was really just a discussion thread on GoodReads, but we're going for the dramatic here, so back off.)  We chose the uncut version which basically just means that it included every random thought King has ever had and that his original editor wisely left on the cutting room floor.  1141 pages.  Yet we persevered.  We triumphed.  Around the halfway point, Jen thought we all needed our own t-shirt:

The verdict?  The similarities between The Passage and The Stand were indeed remarkable.  Both novels feature a post-apocalyptic world that is the result of a government medical experiment gone bad.  Both focus on the few groups that survive.  And both use the setting of Las Vegas for some very, very bad juju going down.

But really, that's where the similarities end.  The Passage is a thriller and adventure story.  The protagonists seek to survive and avoid the so-called virals trying to make a meal of them.  Who are the "bad guys"?  Anyone infected with the virus....former friends, family members, or co-workers.  The virus is non-discriminatory.  The thrill of the story (the first in a planned trilogy, by the way) is how the non-infected survive.  Very tense.  Very page-turn-inducing.

The Stand, however, features over-arching themes that go far beyond a storyline of basic survival.  King's missive places survivors into one of two camps:  you're either a "good guy," drawn to gather with other good guys in Boulder, Colorado or you're a "bad guy," heading off to join the evil cadre who have settled in Las Vegas and plot to destroy all other survivors.  The reader immediately knows that these groups represent something.  But what? 

Religion?  Human nature? It's possible.  The leaders of each group of survivors are specifically aligned with God and Satan, respectively.  We found it fascinating that members of each group didn't migrate from one group to the other.  They were immediately and firmly entrenched as either a "good guy" or a "bad guy."  King's exploration of each character's background prior to the Apocalypse was key.  But is a person born with good or badness within them or are they the product of their environment? 

Simply put, King's novel is an epic saga about good versus evil, the choices mankind makes, and what that says about our intrinsic character.

So ends The Fellowship of the Stand and the only question that remains is: who wins the Smackdown?

A Reader's Respite read these novels a mere three months ago.  Today, we could give you a bare-bones plot sketch of The Passage.  But we could discuss with you for hours the meaning of the themes buried within The Stand.  We think King delivered a knock-out punch.

Post Script:  Don't miss out on Rhapsody in Books Weblog and Book Chatter's thoughts!

Book Light or Art?

Dear Santa,

If you bring us a Takeshi Ishiguro Book of Light for Christmas we promise we'll be good for the rest of the year and never, ever ask for anything again.  Ever.

Really.

Pleeeeeeeeeease?

Warmest Regards (and hope the toy-making is going along swimmingly),

A Reader's Respite

Is it safe to come out?

A Reader's Respite has been in hiding for the past week or so.  With Book Blogger Appreciation Week inundating blog-world, we thought we'd do you the huge favor of not contributing to your over-flowing feed reader this past week.  So go ahead and appreciate that.  You're welcome.  (Do we get an award for that?)

It appears that a good time was had by all and since that is the entire purpose of BBAW, we can safely declare 2010 a success.  Congratulations to all the winners this year!

And if you subject yourself to the random and bitchy musings left on Facebook by A Reader's Respite, you'll know that there was another compelling reason for our absence.....

Yes, we decided to allow a mad scientist the opportunity to shoot laser beams directly into our eyeballs just for kicks and giggles.

Okay, so it wasn't a scientist, it was really a board-certified opthamologist and he wasn't really mad (just a tad cranky).  And it wasn't just any old laser beams, it was LASIK surgery.  And he transformed our vision from this:

into this:

Technically speaking, the mad opthamologist gave us 20/15 vision, but we won't quibble over details.  Anyhoo, we have needed this past week to recuperate from having our eyeballs lasered into.  Recovery has included no television (not a problem), no computer usage (tad bit of a problem), and no reading.  (GASP!)

So how did we spend our time (besides cheating on the computer thing here and there....shhh, don't tell my mad doctor)?

Audiobooks.  We knew we'd have to download about a bazillion of them in order to make it through.  We remembered a recommendation written a couple of weeks ago by Reader for Life which extolled the virtues of Danish author Christian Moerk's novel, Darling Jim, and this was #1 on our list.

Audiobooks are really, if the truth be known, two reviews rolled into one.  At one end of the spectrum is a review of the actual content of the book itself....plot, characterization, dialogue, etc.  At the other end is a review of the presentation, or the narrator. 

A Reader's Respite has always found it amusing that while a good novel cannot recover from a bad narrator, a bad novel can certainly be redeemed by a good narrator.  Darling Jim is blessed with both a good story with good narration. Two narrators, actually. 

Stephen Hoye, a prolific audiobook narrator whose credits include Flags of Our Fathers and The Book of Air and Shadows reads the main of the story here, in which an Irish postal worker accidentally discovers the diary of a notorious murderess who was later herself murdered under horrific circumstances.

Stephen Hoye, winner of 13 Earphones Awards and 2 Audie Awards

The narrator chosen to read the discovered diaries - for more are discovered throughout the novel - was Justine Eyre, who has lent her lilting voice to The Historian and most recently to Dracula, My Love.  Eyre won an Earphones Award (her second!) for her performance in Darling Jim.

Justine Eyre

A Reader's Respite thought Eyre's voice one of the most beautiful, enchanting ever piped over the airwaves, making us feel as if we were sitting in a small pub in Ireland, listening to a local tell us the story.  Hoye's narration was a tad more dramatic (you can go here to listen to a sample of his narration in Darling Jim), with a tendency to draw out the last syllable of each sentence, but compelling nonetheless. 

All nuances of narration aside, author Moerk is simply a damned good story teller.  This tale of gothic suspense, set in a small Irish town, requires the reader to suspend disbelief, as do all good yarns.  And an old-fashioned story is what this is, keeping you on the edge of your seat just dying (no pun intended) to find out what happens next. 

If you're looking for a good creepy gothic-ish tale complete with a handsome, dastardly stranger who mysteriously appears in town only to insidiously destroy an entire family, all wrapped up with a special twist, you'll likely enjoy reading (or listening) to Darling Jim this Halloween.


Title:  Darling Jim
Author:  Christian Moerk
Narrators:  Stephen Hoye and Justine Eyre
Unabridged Audiobook, 10 hours 31 Minutes
ISBN:  978-1400111985
Source:  Purchased from Audible
Grade:  A

An Arthurian Education

A Reader's Respite's Official Guide to Arthurian Interpretations that are totally worth your time.....

now this is what we call cover art

Le Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory.  Completed in 1470 this compilation of Arthurian tales is pretty much definitive.  Unless you are a purist, we recommend you skip the original Middle English version.  There's only so much

"So torne we vnto sir Lamorak that rode toward Arthurs courte / and sire Tristrams wyf and Kehydyus took a vessel and sailed in to Bretayne vnto kynge Howel where he was welcome"

one can take without wanting to throw oneself on an actual sword to end the agony.

The Constitutional Peasant

Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Okay, so it's not a book.  Get over it.  It's a legend in it's own right and if you've never seen it, you are depriving yourself of the unique experience of laughing so hard that you pee your pants.  Grab and pair of diapers and rent it.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.  Drawing heavily from Malory's definitive text, The Once and Future King was once required reading for all high school students.  There's a reason for that.

Walt Disney's The Sword and the Stone.  Scoff if you will, but ol' Walt introduced many-a-generation to the legend of Arthur.  And he gave us Mim.  We seriously love Mim.

 

The queen of Camelot herself, Mary Stewart

Mary Stewart's Arthurian Saga.  Written in the 1970s, Mary Stewart thrilled Camelot fans with her quintet of books.  The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment and The Wicked Day are all still widely available in used bookstores.

Helen Hollick's The Pendragon's Banner Trilogy.  Hollick's hunky, yet very-bad-boy Arthur is a must-read for fans of the legend.  This is a fairly recent release here in the U.S. and one of our favorites.

The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Focusing on the women of Arthurian legend, The Mists of Avalon has garnered an almost cult-like following since it's publication in 1982.  Bradley later collaborated with author Diana L. Paxson and wrote an entire series on the women of Avalon, but none surpass the original.

Twilight of Avalon (planned) Trilogy, by Anna Elliott.  Rounding out a superb field, author Anna Elliott deserves to be included for her portrayal of Trystan and Isolde and their role in Arthurian literature.  Elliott leaves behind the sappy romance in favor of a strong plot, complex characters and an all-around engrossing story.  We fell in love with Twilight of Avalon, the first of the trilogy, and the second installment, Dark Moon of Avalon, hits bookstores today.  Trust us, it's pretty fabulous.

DH Lawrence

Happy Birthday, DH.  You would have been 115 years old today.  Had you not died of tuberculosis back in 1930, that is.  (Sorry about that, by the way....that had to have sucked big time.)

Anyhoo, A Reader's Respite must admit that we've never been the biggest fan of your novels.  We tried.  Really, we did.  Your penchant for travel (some would call it self-imposed exile) and wanderlust always appealed to us.  The fact that you actually traded your manuscript of Sons and Lovers for property near Taos, New Mexico with the intent to set up a Utopian community really appealed to our commie, hippie-loving roots.  Sadly, despite multiple attempts, we've never made it past page 50.

handsome young whipper-snapper, wasn't he?

It's not that you were an untalented writer.  Clearly, anyone who could write Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover had a bit o' the author in him (and more than a bit o' the repressed homosexuality).  It's just that as much as we appreciated the themes of your work, the actual execution left us a tad glassy eyed.

Regardless of our inability to appreciate your actual novels, we do appreciate you, Mr. Lawrence.  You took an unpopular antiwar stance during WWI, wrote about homosexuality in a time when even thinking about it was taboo, and were even briefly arrested for being a spy (how very James Bond of you!).

So happy birthday, DH.  You're still remembered fondly and really, what more could a person ask for?

Quick, grab a pen and paper....

We'll wait till you've got something to write with.


*drumming fingers*


Got it?  Okay, now write this down:

The novel is called The Human Bobby and it's written by Gabe Rotter.

This is the one book A Reader's Respite wants you to read because....WOW.  Just wow.  Wow. 


Bobby Flopowski has it all.  He pulled himself up out of his poor Brooklyn childhood and became a successful, wealthy pediatrician in Los Angeles.  He marries well and for love.  They have a child.  They have it all. 

Until one fateful day, everything changes.

And Bobby ends up with nothing.  No job, no house, no wife and no child.  How does this happen?

We can't tell you more than that.  There may be twists, there may not.  A Reader's Respite doesn't want to spoil the stunning effect of reading this novel.  What we can tell you is that we idly opened the book to the first page, mistakenly thinking this was just another literary fiction novel.  Literally we did not put the book down until we turned the last page two hours later.  Despite a passel of toddlers beating on each other with trucks and dolls.  Despite Mr. RR yakking at us (we don't know about what).  Despite a refrigerator repair man dismantling our broken fridge.

Just read it.

We'll wait here patiently until you return here and tell us, "WOW!"




The Small Print

Title:  The Human Bobby
Author:  Gabe Rotter
Genre:  Literary Fiction with a big dose of Psychological Drama
289 pages
ISBN:  978-1-4391-6811-0
Source:  Newman PR
Grade:  A+

Side Note to Megan:  This is one big serving of humble pie.  This book will most assuredly rank high up in our Year's Best of the Best.  ;)

Streaming Books

Spanish installation artist Alicia Martin creates stunning works using old, recycled books.  A Reader's Respite is still trying to decide:

Is it art or sacrilege?