Friends (the Lolcats version)

I’ve been having a hard time for the past couple of weeks, and I’m grateful to all my friends (and family) who’ve been so supportive. This Lolcats photo so perfectly illustrates how I feel that I just had to share it!

Similar covers: Sepia couples (take 2)

Some of you may remember that back in August I posted about how I had found two recent lookalike covers that matched the cover to Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy (which was first published in 1988). In that post, I also included two other books that feature similar sepia-toned images of a couple: The Wreckage by Michael Crummey and The Geography of Love: A Memoir by Glenda Burgess. Well, not only have I found another book that uses the same cover as the Marge Piercy book, but this book, Consequences by Penelope Lively, has also been published with the same cover as The Wreckage! How weird is that?

According to Amazon, Viking published the top edition of the Lively book in 2007, nearly 20 years after Fawcett put out Gone to Soldiers. The Wreckage, on the other hand, was published by Anchor Canada in 2006 while the bottom edition of Consequences was published by Lester & Orpen Dennys (another Canadian publisher) in 2008.

Library Loot (November 17)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva at A Striped Armchair and Marg at Reading Adventures that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post—feel free to steal the button—and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! Want to share your loot? Marg has the Mr. Linky this week!

Another week of graphic-novels-only loot, although I took out fewer books this time. (I still have a backlog of books I keep renewing—not because I haven’t read them yet, but rather because I haven’t reviewed them!) So here’s this past week’s loot:

First, the last two volumes of Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra et al.: Motherland (which I’ve read already but wanted to reread), and Whys and Wherefores.

Next, La fin du monde (literally, “the end of the world”) by Pierre Wazem and Tom Tirabosco, which is in French (and doesn’t appear to have been published in English). I heard about this book from Caustic Cover Critic. And last but not least the complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (also in French). I’ve already read the first half, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the story ends! Has anyone read any of Satrapi’s other books? I’m looking for further recommendations.

Crazy cat story & giveaway of Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield

Before I give you any giveaway details, I wanted to share a crazy cat story, which one of the drawings in Simon’s Cat reminded me of. As many of you know, I am owned by two cats, Thelma (in box below) and Cairo (left, reading Simon’s Cat with me; click on photos to enlarge). Years ago, I woke up one morning lying on my belly, clutching something in my hand. When I opened my eyes and looked at it, it turned out to be a dead rodent, which Cairo had kindly deposited in the bed with me. Luckily my mother was visiting, so when I screamed, she came rushing in and took care of things. (Again luckily, there was no blood to be seen anywhere.) I vaguely remembered being woken in the night by Cairo running around madly, but I’d been too groggy to pay much attention.

More recently, both Cairo and I spotted a mouse running across the kitchen floor and under the fridge. Cairo then spent the rest of the day standing guard in front of the fridge, hoping the mouse would reappear. I must admit I’m kinda glad that (a) the mouse didn’t reappear and hasn’t been seen or heard from since and (b) Cairo is now too geriatric to be chasing (and killing) mice!

OK, enough about that, on to the giveaway details!

As I mentioned last Friday, Hachette has generously offered to send copies of Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield to five of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Sunday, December 6.

For one entry, post a comment here. Please be sure to provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries without a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

Other ways to earn entries:
+1 if you comment on my review of Simon’s Cat (if you’ve already done so, that counts too)
+1 if you share a crazy cat story of your own
+1 if you are a follower or subscriber

Best of luck!

Thelma, keeping an eye on things!

Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield (a review with cat pics)

I don’t know what rock I was living under last year that I missed the Simon’s Cat YouTube phenomenon, but it was only recently that I heard about the Simon’s Cat films—two days, in fact, before Hachette put out a call for bloggers interested in reviewing the book Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield. Needless to say, I put up my hand fast, although I was a bit worried that the concept would not translate well from animated film to page. I needn’t have worried: Simon’s Cat the book is just as laugh-out-loud funny as the movies. For those of you not in the know, Simon’s cat is no ordinary cat: for one thing he has opposable thumbs and, despite being hungry much of the time, he’s not as likely to eat the mice and birds he encounters as most cats would be. My favourite parts, however, are when Simon’s cat acts most catlike, because, to paraphrase what it says on the back cover of the book, I know (and live with) a couple of cats like Simon’s, as seen in the photos below. The funniest sequence of images for me was Simon’s attempts to get his cat into a cat carrier to take him to the vet, but it would have been cruel on my part to try to reproduce that one. I also loved how Tofield used not only traditional motion lines but also extra paws (drawn more faintly) to convey his cat’s movements. Finally, I found myself totally charmed by Simon’s cat’s odd friendship with a garden gnome. There were a couple of images I didn’t really understand, but no matter, that only means I’ll have to “read” the book again some time soon. I highly recommend this one to all the cat lovers out there!

Simon’s cat and Cairo on computer/printer

Thelma and Simon’s cat in suitcase

Simon’s cat and Cairo warming up next to heater

For other reviews of this book, visit these blogs:
Book Critiques
booktumbling.com
Chick with Books (with giveaway!)
Cindy’s Love of Books
Drey’s Library
Marta’s Meanderings
Socrates’ Book Reviews
Starting Fresh
Wendi’s Book Corner

Hachette has generously agreed to sponsor a giveaway of five copies of this book on my blog! Come back on Monday for all the details.

Similar covers: Old-fashioned women

When I first came across The Beth Book by Sarah Grand months ago, I knew I recognized the image on the cover, but it took me forever to figure out its lookalike is Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn G. Heilbrun, a book I used to own (I can’t find it at the moment). Although the cover for A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf doesn’t feature the exact same image, they look pretty similar, don’t you think?

Can anyone identify the paintings used on these covers?

Edited to add: Thanks to Tiina, who blogs at A Book Blog of One’s Own, for identifying the painting on the cover of the Woolf book as Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse by Gwen John. A quick search revealed another book with the other painting on its cover, Gwen John: An Interior Life by Cecily Langdale and David Fraser Jenkins (see above), which confirms that the same artist painted both paintings, as Kathy suspected. (This painting is called The Student.) Coincidentally, back in March of this year, I featured Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster in a Friday Finds post: this book is a story about the painting A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris by Gwen John. Now I’m even more curious to read this book!

Apologies for mislabelling part 2 as part 1

Some of you may have noticed that part 1 of my sister Brogan’s guest post on the rules and gifts of reading seemingly appeared in your readers twice. This is because I sleepily copied and pasted the title for part 2 last night and forgot to change that one little number. Sorry about that!

What is the nature of reading, what are its “rules” and its gifts? – Part 2 (Guest post by Brogan)

This is part 2 of a guest post by my sister Brogan, who has contributed reviews to this blog in the past as well as last week’s Teaser Tuesday post. Read part 1 first!

What happens, then, when you project a book onto the path ahead of yourself and it really isn’t what you expected?

I’ve experienced this twist in expectation as both neutral and negative. The Perpetual Ending by Kristen den Hartog and Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott (read review) were both books that I read with particular expectations, and then halfway through I thought: “Oh. Wait a minute. That’s not what this book is about.” And I could then let the books be what they were, and let myself be open to what they were offering.

With Good Things I Wish You by A. Manette Ansay, I anticipated a totally other journey than what the book was about, and when I finished it I was actually annoyed because I had thought it was promising one thing (a romantic journey) and it gave me another (an intense exploration of non-affection and selfishness in love relationships).

When the agreement is broken in this way, whose fault is it? My expectations are my responsibility; a book cannot possibly please everyone… but at the same time, there are some books that will displease readers in similar ways, so it’s not just accident or personal taste.

How fragile is that promise then, how tender the line between writer and reader! How amazing when the accident happens in the other direction: When I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, I had no idea what to expect at all—I don’t even know if I had read the book jacket—and I thought the story was enchanting (if a little uneven).

Or how strange when you find yourself reading a book at breakneck speed, and then finish it and decide you didn’t even like it.

I think, in the end, the mystery is intact. I will continue to stumble upon books, like some, dislike others, and sometimes, by astonishing good luck and to my great surprise and satisfaction, find some of those gems that make me remember why I read in the first place.

What is the nature of reading, what are its “rules” and its gifts? – Part 1 (Guest post by Brogan)

This is part 1 of a guest post by my sister Brogan, who has contributed reviews to this blog in the past as well as last week’s Teaser Tuesday post.

Since I started writing book reviews, I’ve been thinking about books: what makes one choose a book, what makes a book work, and just what is this business of reading all about anyway? I feel that reading a book is about entering into an agreement with the writer. The writer extends a promise, a lure, and the reader agrees: I will enter into your fantasy. I will follow the roads you take me down; I will let you determine what happens next. And in exchange, the writer gets the reader’s time and attention.

This has nothing to do with the actual monetary exchange for the book, because many books are borrowed, some are bought without being read, some are chucked halfway through. The agreement then is more about the art of the book than its commerce, the why of the author writing it in the first place, the tender wavering of nerve cells rearranging themselves as a reader is impacted by what they’ve read.

This agreement is entered into on often seemingly tenuous grounds: someone reads a book jacket flap, someone is drawn to the cover of a book or its title. Sometimes the reader chooses based on a blurb or a review, or a friend saying a book is fabulous.

Being someone who has 50 books out on my library card at any one time, I know just how important the selection of a book is (those are, after all, just the ones I bring home!)—and yet I still think there is something deeply mysterious and elusive about finding a good book. It’s an incredible feat of chance when the meeting of reader and text hits that note of harmony.

To declare the biases on my side of the agreement: I am not one who is easily pleased. Where some people might like 90% of the books they read and love 50% of them, I probably like 50% of the books I read and love about 5% of them. But that love, when it is there, is an experience so intense that it is in the realm of alchemy—it’s the magic of a response, of an interrelationship between two things, self and text, and in that sense it is even intimate, between self and writer.

The other part of my bias is that I also write, which means that I sometimes confuse where someone else is taking a story and where I would take it. Not that I relinquish control with difficulty: once, when my sister told me she rewrote the endings of books if they really didn’t work for her, I was both horrified and amazed at this possibility. It is quite unusual for me to feel that I can do that, after the fact. Although I do have to say that since this suggestion was made, it has happened to me on occasion that I’ve said to myself that X didn’t happen and Y did at the end of such-and-such a story—or in one exceptional, but very clear case (The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life by Camilla Gibb), I allowed the whole thing except for the very last page, which I arrogantly treated in my mind as an editorial error—I willfully pretended to myself that the last page did not exist and was just not part of the story.

But I think I may have been unclear with this last declaration, in saying that I’m a writer. It isn’t that I’m constantly considering how I would mould the text. It’s that when I read the description on a book jacket, I’m immediately heady with the expectation of how I will feel as I read the story.

There’s that great story by Ron Evans (a Canadian Chippewa storyteller)* about how electricity is first brought to an African village, and a westerner is there to witness the arrival of the first community television set. Everything stops in the village for about two weeks because everyone is watching TV. Then life goes back to its usual pace. The puzzled westerner asks why no one is watching the TV anymore. “Oh, we don’t need it, we have the storyteller,” someone tells him. “But don’t you think the TV knows more stories than your storyteller?” “Oh, yes. The TV knows lots of stories. But the storyteller knows us.”

I think that is the same magic of a very good book: as a reader, you feel known. You feel that in some way the story is either about you or for you. This reminds me of an E.M. Forster quote I saw on the wall of a big-box book store: “I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

What happens, then, when you project a book onto the path ahead of yourself and it really isn’t what you expected?

Read part 2 of this post!

*This story was created by Ron Evans in 1982 in the context of storytelling revival.

Mailbox Monday (November 9)

I received a box in the mail this week, which contained two hardcover copies of the same book: In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld, sent to me by Unbridled Books. Why two copies? Well, it seems that very few people participated in the scavenger hunts organized for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, because I won a prize for both the Literary Scavenger Hunt and the Spiritual Scavenger Hunt. (I tried to pass on the second prize to someone else but there was apparently no one else to give it to.) While I’m a bit sad that so few people did the scavenger hunts (I thought they were a great idea), I’m happy to have an extra copy of this book to eventually give to one of you. I like to do giveaways in conjunction with reviews, though, so you’re going to have to wait a little while for it...

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Marcia’s blog, The Printed Page.