Teaser Tuesdays (March 31)

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

My first teaser:

“‘I suppose,’ says Jeremy, ‘what I don’t like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowing worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine’” (p. 72).

This is from Coventry by Helen Humphreys.


My second teaser:


“I don’t like being watched. I like to think I’m like an animal at night that nobody sees. But everything leaves a mark” (p. 85).

This is from “You Come, Too, A-Ron” by Harry Mazer in Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers edited by Judy Blume

Some thoughts on rereading Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott

I have a friend who says rereading books is like revisiting old friends. She doesn’t own very many books, but most of the ones she does own are books she’s read and reread over and over again, until she can practically recite them. Until recently, this made no sense to me. I read to be entertained, to learn, to visit new places, to get inside other people’s lives and heads, to escape, and most of all to find out what happens next—familiarity is the last thing I want when I’m reading. The only time I reread books is when I loved them, but read them so many years ago that I only have a vague recollection of what happened. (I’ve reread The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and more recently Chocolat by Joanne Harris, to name only a few, and loved each of them all over again.) I also occasionally “reread” books that I didn’t finish the first time around when I think I may just have picked them up at the wrong time, such as The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, which I couldn’t get into the first time I tried reading it but really enjoyed the second time around.

However, I recently found myself in a reading slump—in great part because I’ve been in a reviewing slump, and the more I read, the more behind I get on reviews. I had pretty much stopped reading altogether to avoid adding to my to-be-reviewed pile, but not reading feels a bit like an amputation (a case of the cure being worse than the disease). I had picked up Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott (read my review) and was rifling through it to find words for the Wondrous Words Wednesday meme, when I decided to start it over from the beginning and got caught up in the story again. And this time, the familiarity was reassuring: I was feeling out of sorts, unsettled, scattered, and re-entering a known story was a bit like eating comfort food—a return to the known. The place was familiar, I knew the characters and what they were going to do, how the story was going to end. I could relax and enjoy the journey, noticing things I hadn’t noticed before, deepening my attachment to my favourite characters.

Endicott’s writing style reminded me again of those long takes you sometimes see in movies where the camera follows one character and then another in one long uninterrupted shot. Similarly, Endicott often shifts from the point of view of one character to another without any cuts other than paragraph breaks. Since there are no visual cues to guide you, this can be a bit confusing at first, but once I got used to her style, I enjoyed sliding from one character’s viewpoint to that of another, experiencing the same scene from different perspectives. Here, for example, is Clary’s impression of Fern, followed by Dolly’s (I’ve cut out some dialogue to make the excerpt shorter):

“To Clary it seemed that Fern was still in pretty rough shape. Her thin skin looked raw, and she wouldn’t make eye contact. Shame destroys us, Clary thought, and led her to the bathroom. . . .

Dolly took one look at Fern and loved her. Her hair was the palest apricot colour. It glowed. And she looked so sad. Fern’s back slanted in a long S, her pelvis titled and swung, her legs were long and thin in her tight jeans, and she had a closed, secret shell all around her. Her face looked as if she washed it all the time” (pp. 125-126).

Marina Endicott recently won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award for Canada and the Caribbean region for Good to a Fault.

Read Alexis’s thoughts on re-reading this book at Roughing It in the Books.

Do you reread books? When? Why?

Mailbox Monday (March 30)

It’s a bit late to be announcing that I got In the Woods by Tana French since I already mentioned the book in my Tuesday Teaser post nearly a week ago, but it was the only new addition to my shelves this past week. I was very happy to find a copy at my local second-hand bookstore. (I also bought the sixth book in the Ladies’ Detective Agency series, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, but when I got home I realized I already had it. Argh! Luckily it only cost me a dollar!)

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

Friday Finds (March 27)

What great books have you added to your wish list this week? Share your Friday Finds at Should Be Reading.


A friend lent me the November 2008 issue of The Writer magazine, which is all about writing memoir, and I was especially interested in an article by Catherine McCall, the author of Lifeguarding: A Memoir of Secrets, Swimming and the South. Her book is described thus: “There are two parents, three children and five ghosts in the McCall family.” Now doesn’t that sound intriguing? I couldn’t find any blog reviews of this book, but Beth Kephart has this to say about it: “There is, in every well-examined life, a turning point—a time when propriety yields to honesty and fear gives way to courage. This is Catherine McCall’s story, beautifully told, tenderly recollected.”

I was (again) in Indigo this week and came across two similarly titled but very different novels: The Sister by Paola Kaufmann and Blood Sisters by Barbara and Stephanie Keating. The Sister (originally published in Spanish as La hermana) is a novel about Emily Dickinson as seen through the eyes of her sister Lavinia and is based on authentic letters, journals and other documents from the Dickinson family. I love fictionalized accounts of authors’ lives, so this one is definitely on my wish list now!

I don’t normally read books written by two authors, but Blood Sisters, written by actual sisters Barbara and Stephanie, sounds very good. The story of three girls growing up in Kenya, this book is based on the authors’ experiences. It’s also the first in a trilogy (followed up by A Durable Fire; the third book is yet to come).

Similar Covers: A Bevy of Skirts...

A couple of months ago, Alea at Pop Culture Junkie posted a lookalike post about the similar compositions of the covers for Deadly Little Secret by Laurie Faria Stolarz, Be With You by Takuji Ichikawa and You Know Where to Find Me by Rachel Cohn. Then, several weeks ago, I found another cover using the same image as Deadly Little Secret, which I emailed to Alea so she could update her post (this was The First Desire by Nancy Reisman). And then I found another one (Delivering Doctor Amelia by Dan Shapiro). At this point I emailed Alea again and asked her if she’d mind if I wrote my own post about these covers (which she obviously didn’t). And then I found another very similar cover (Seek the Living by Ashley Warlick). And then another (The Windmill by Stephanie Gertler)...

The interesting thing is that these covers are for quite different genres: Delivering Doctor Amelia is nonfiction; Deadly Little Secret is a paranormal YA romance, The First Desire is historical fiction, The Windmill is contemporary fiction and Seek the Living is literary fiction. (Genre classification is according to Amazon.) Which cover works the best, in your opinion? (I think my favourites are the last two, actually.) Has anyone else spotted similar covers?

Edited to add:
Less than 20 minutes after this post went live, I found a sixth cover that matches the second set: Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher, which I inserted above. According to Amazon, this novel is also contemporary fiction.

Edited again to add:
I found three more, which I inserted in the second row above: A Village Affair by Joanna Trollope, La cruz de San Andrés by Camilo José Cela and the Japanese translation of The Proposing Tree: A Love Story by James F. Twyman.

Wondrous Words Wednesday (March 25)

Kathy at Bermudaonion’s Weblog hosts this weekly meme in which she asks us to share new words we’ve come across in our reading. I’ve just finished reading Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, so all these words are from that book:

Sectional – “She drifts into the darkened living room and sits back down on the sectional” (p. 279).

A sectional is “a piece of furniture, such as a couch, composed of sections which can be used separately.”* I gathered this from the context, but hadn’t heard the term before.

Introit – “‘Thanks for being here,’ he says. It seems like a harmless enough introit.” (p. 390).

An introit is “a psalm or antiphon sung or said while the priest approaches the altar for the Eucharist, or a choral response used at the start of a worship service.” (I’ve got to wonder if the author is using this word correctly here.)

Peritoneum, mediastinal – “It is not just her muscles that release, but tendons, sinews, cartilage, whatever attaches bone to bone, organ to peritoneum, heart to mediastinal space” (p. 483).

The peritoneum is “the serous membrane lining the cavity of the abdomen,” which is the kind of definition that makes me go huh? (In case, like me, you also need a definition of serous, it means “of or like or producing serum; watery.”) Mediastinal is an adjective referring to the mediastinum, a “membranous middle septum, especially between the lungs.”

Zaftig – “She is absenting herself from the University of Nebraska campus, the responsibilities of summer school teaching, the daily sight of the bronze zaftig women in the sculpture garden” (pp. 492-493).

Zaftig means “plump, having a full, rounded figure.” I’m sure I’ve seen this word before, but I must confessed I didn’t know what it means!

Lingula – “One part of the sky’s canvas has an undulating, edged appearance, like drifted snow or sand dunes; another part has the look of human organs lit from within: balloon-shaped and placental, having a veined appearance, or like marble, or like the oxygenated lingulae of the lungs” (p. 510).

This word is not in my dictionary, but Dictionary.com defines it as “a tongue-shaped organ, process or tissue.”

What new words have you discovered lately? Share your Wondrous Words.

*Unless otherwise noted, all definitions are from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2004).

Teaser Tuesdays (March 24)

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

My teaser:

“All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands. I had no room for left-field theories about escaped exotic pets or leftover elk or the Loch Ness Monster or whatever the hell Cassie had in mind” (pp. 312-313).

This is from In the Woods by Tana French.

Mailbox Monday (March 23)

This was a much better week for scoring books that the past three! First off, I received Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers edited by Judy Blume, which I won from Aerin at In Search of Giants. Then I got together with my local blogger group yesterday (Cindy of Cindy’s Love of Books, Donna of BookBound and Tina of Bookshipper) and received the following books:

The Next Big Thing by Johanna Edwards
Letters Between Us by Linda Rader Overman
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
No Great Mischief by Alister MacLeod
The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

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

Friday Finds (March 20)

What great books have you added to your wish list this week? Share your Friday Finds at Should Be Reading.

I missed out on posting my Friday Finds last week because I was sick, so this week is a double-whammy.

I was in Indigo last week and came across two books that looked particularly interesting: Two Rivers by T. Greenwood (an author I hadn’t heard of before) and The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl (whose earlier book I Could Tell You Stories I absolutely loved). So the first thing I did when I got home (of course) was look up blog reviews of these books. Reading Is My Superpower has this to say about Two Rivers: “[It] just about slew me, in the best possible way.” (Read the rest of her review.) Donna at Story Circle Book Reviews says this about The Florist’s Daughter: “My attitude as I started reading The Florist’s Daughter, was that I’d need to be convinced that the media hype [Hampl] and her publisher had accomplished was actually valid. It is.” (Read the rest of her review.)

I first saw Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster mentioned on the Random House website. Margaret at BooksPlease starts her review of the book by saying: “I expect a book by Margaret Forster to be good and this one is no exception.”

The Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah is a thriller, which is not my genre of choice (as you may recall from this review), but it does sound like a good one. I came across the book while I was browsing an online bookseller’s site and then found a guest review of it on Vulpes Libris. The reviewer says: “Sophie Hannah’s mind must be something of a modern marvel: she plots with such incredible intricacy and foresight that when the ends all tied themselves together so neatly, I gasped with the cleverness of it all.” Just because I didn’t like one thriller doesn’t mean I won’t like any of them, right?

I couldn’t find any bloggers’ reviews of The Sisters Antipodes, a memoir by Jane Alison that is being released this month. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt calls it “a unique window on the intimate devastations of family betrayal, in equal measure unsettling and engrossing.”

Finally, I keep coming across The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (originally published in French as L’élégance du hérisson). Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles has this to say about it: “One of the things that makes [this novel] so interesting, I think, is that it combines passages of abstract thought with a focus on the physical world and sections that capture the comedy of bodily life.” (Read the rest of her review.) I’m curious, but I really feel like I should read it in its original French...

Booking Through Thursday: The Worst of the Best

This week’s question is: “What’s the worst ‘best’ book you’ve ever read—the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?”

It’s hard to narrow this down to just one, so I’ve picked three (or five really, since three are part of a series):

The His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman: This series was recommended to me by my sister, but I just didn’t get the appeal. I actually read the first two books and then quit halfway through the middle of the last book. I found the main characters unsympathetic and unappealing; and the whole god-and-angels thing in the third book bored me.

The Fox by D. H. Lawrence: I read this book years and years ago, but I remember hating it intensely (although that didn’t stop me from reading it in its entirety). The story struck me as way too obvious in its symbolism and, quite frankly, sickeningly misogynistic. I’m pretty sure I’ve read another Lawrence novel, though I don’t remember which one. In any case, I’m not likely to read any others!



Testimony by Anita Shreve: I’m not sure this book strictly qualifies as either a “worst” book or a “best” book, but it is an example of a recent book I reviewed that (almost) everybody seemed to love except me, and I can’t quite figure out why... I was especially disappointed in this book because Shreve is a favourite author of mine.


Has anyone else read these books and either loved them or hated them too?

Read other answers to this week’s Booking Through Thursday question.

Lookalikes of Lookalikes 2

Remember how a couple of weeks ago I posted about lookalikes of lookalikes and one of the books I featured was Something Borrowed by Martina Reilly? Well, I’ve found a copycat cover of that book on my own shelves: The Professors’ Wives’ Club by Joanne Rendell. Although the arms are different, it’s definitely the same dress and shoes!

I also found another similar cover: Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb.

Note that I’ve updated last week’s Blue Butterfly Covers post.

Edited to add: Check out my UPDATE comment for more info on the first two covers mentioned here.

Wondrous Words Wednesday (March 18)

Kathy at Bermudaonion’s Weblog hosts this weekly meme in which she asks us to share new words we’ve come across in our reading. I’ve just finished reading Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, so all my words are from that book:

Soubrettish – “Some look saucy and soubrettish” (p. 115).

A soubrette is“a pert maidservant or similar female character in a play, ballet or musical comedy, or an actress taking this part.”* Soubrettish is therefore someone who is acting like a soubrette, someone pert or vivacious.

Rogue – “If it’s any comfort, I know about detasseling and roguing corn” (p. 136).

To rogue is to “remove inferior or defective plants or seedlings from a crop.”

Catafalque – “No one would suspect that, in the next room, a dead man is lying draped in his coffin on a catafalque . . .” (p. 146).

A catafalque is “a decorated wooden framework for supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state.”

Fricative – “She loves them all, even the ones whose voices are less melodious: birds who sound like the unoiled hinges of porch screen doors, birds whose voices are metallic and fricative, like the ratchets the Labenz boys use to tighten car parts at the Texaco” (p. 168).

Fricative means “(of a consonant sound) produced by the friction of the airstream through a narrow opening in the mouth.”

Holochroal – “She opens the dictionary at random, sets her finger on the page, and finds ‘holochroal: having compound eyes with the visual area covered by an continuous cornea—used esp. of certain trilobites’” (p. 190).

OK, so this one is cheating a bit, considering the word is defined in the book, which is lucky since it isn’t in my dictionary!

Zwieback – “On the flip side, she hasn’t bitten anything, not even a zwieback” (p. 270).

A zwieback is “a sweet rich egg bread, sliced and baked again until crisp.” Of all the words I’ve defined in WWW posts, this is the only one where context gave me nothing to go on and I really had no idea what this could mean!

What new words have you discovered lately? Share your Wondrous Words.

*All definitions are from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2004).

Teaser Tuesdays (March 17)

Should Be Reading hosts the Teaser Tuesdays weekly event.

My modified rules are as follows:

Grab your current read. Pick two or three “teaser” sentences more or less at random from the book, anywhere on the page. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your teaser from… that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given! (Please avoid spoilers!) (Read the official Teaser Tuesday rules.)

My teaser:

“The week she turned one, Maia spoke her first English words: ‘boot’ and ‘up.’ I like to think that the coupling foretells something about her character: feet firmly on the ground, but arms stretched to the sky, the better to catch her dreams” (pp. 148-149).

This is from “At Lingyin Si” in Pathologies: A Life in Essays by Susan Olding.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson (a review)

I don’t read short stories very often, mostly because I feel like just as I’m getting to know the characters, the story ends. As a result, I tend to only read short stories in anthologies (a great way to try out new authors without committing to a whole book) or in collections written by authors I particularly enjoy. The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson falls into the second category: I was first introduced to Wilson via his fantastic Hugo-nominated novel Darwinia, which won an Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association in 1999. As I had been feeling a certain “reading restlessness” recently (which meant I was having trouble concentrating long enough to commit to reading a full-length book), this seemed like the perfect time to try out this collection of nine short stories.

Although most of the stories in this book are set in Toronto (and the same bookshop is featured in several of them), they are not linked in a traditional sense. That is to say, they may all begin in a recognizable Toronto, but the deeper you venture into each story, the stranger things get—and each story is unique in its strangeness. Wilson slips easily from metaphor (such as mental illness as a separate city) to science fiction (in which it is literally possible to get lost in a parallel city) as well as from accepted scientific knowledge to plausible extrapolation. Many of his stories are grounded in science, but elements of mysticism and horror are also present in these stories.

It’s hard to pick favourites in this collection: all of these stories are dark, deliciously creepy and deeply satisfying. The only one I liked less, in fact, was the first one, “The Fields of Abraham,” the only story not set in contemporary Toronto (it takes place in 1911) and the only one to feature a plot that felt somewhat familiar (it is also the harshest story). I highly recommend this collection, which turned out to be the perfect cure for my reading restlessness!

For other takes on this book, check out these reviews:
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint • January Magazine • Steven Silver’s Reviews • The Groovy Age of Horror • The Horror!?

Mailbox Monday (March 16)

Again only one book appeared in my mailbox this week:

Secret Language by Monica Wood, which I won from Katrina at Stone SouP (thanks Katrina!)

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