Banned Books Week and Your First Dirty Book October 3, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Book News, Current Read Comments, Randomness.Tags: Banned Books Week
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Well, Banned Books Week comes to a close tomorrow, after a week of celebrating our freedom to read! I saw this article in the Chicago Tribune today, and it made me smile. It asks the reader to reminisce about the first “dirty” book they read, meaning a book with a theme or scene that caught them a little off-guard. Did you try to hide the book from your parents? Did it make you blush? Was the whole sixth grade obsessed with it? I don’t remember my first “dirty” book, but I thought this article was especially fitting because I am currently listening to an audiobook in the car that has some pretty descriptive sex scenes, and it is ridiculously uncomfortable to listen to! Plus, the same narrator woman does the female voice and her male partner’s, and so it’s like some bizarre one-woman porn. Anyways, Happy Banned Books Week!
Intro: Sharp Objects April 9, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.Tags: Daniel Mendelsohn, Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects, The Lost
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All right, I failed. I stopped reading The Lost 60 pages into it. It was bad! I’m sorry. So now I’m reading Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. And the intro paragraph seems pretty perfect for me right now…
“My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly. It was May 12 but the temperature had dipped to the forties, and after four days shivering in my shirtsleeves, I grabbed cover at a tag sale rather than dig through my boxed-up winter clothes. Spring in Chicago.”
Intro paragraph of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Intro: The Lost April 8, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.Tags: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost
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“Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry. The rooms in which this happened were located, more often than not, in Miami Beach, Florida, and the people on whom I had this strange effect were, like nearly everyone in Miami Beach in the mid-nineteen-sixties, old. Like nearly everyone else in Miami Beach at that time (or so it seemed to me then), these old people were Jews — Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rendering the climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young.”
Intro paragraph to The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
Apparently I’m in a Mood… March 15, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.2 comments
Well, I noticed that the two books I’m reading are very similarly themed. And actually, their titles are similar sounding when you think about it. The first is the nonfiction piece The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who is arguing his case against the existence of a God, particularly a personal one. And the second? The Darwin Conspiracy, a fiction novel about the man that the science-minded of us revere for his description of natural selection. Entirely by accident I’m reading a book against creationism and a book about the man that definitively provided the world with the theory of evolution! So to top it all off I’m looking at a book on Amazon, completely unrelated, called The Mathematics of Love. And then I see the author… Emma Darwin. The great-great granddaughter of the famous naturalist! This is getting eerie…
Intro: The Terror February 18, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.Tags: Dan Simmons, The Terror
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“Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts. Above him- above Terror- shimmering folds of light lunge but then quickly withdraw like the colourful arms of aggressive but ultimately uncertain spectres. Ectoplasmic skeletal fingers extend toward the ship, open, prepare to grasp, and pull back.”
Intro to The Terror by Dan Simmons
Intro: Silent in the Grave January 31, 2008
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.Tags: Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Grave
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“To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.”
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn
Intro: The Poe Shadow December 13, 2007
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“I remember the day it began because I was impatient for an importatnt letter to arrive. Also, because it was meant to be the day of my engagement to Hattie Blum. And, of course, it was the day I saw him dead.”
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl
Intro: A Christmas Carol December 8, 2007
Posted by sadiejean in Current Read Comments.Tags: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
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“Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand on. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Upcoming Reviews April 25, 2009
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Well, PA school has put my behind on my review writing again. Here are some book reviews to look forward to in the upcoming weeks:
1. The Last Summer of You and Me by Ann Brashares
2. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
3. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
4. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
6. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
I would also like to point out that 4/6 of these books are written by authors named Ann/Anne or had a middle name Ann or is Suz-ANNE. Weirdo.