Archives

Reading about The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Sep10

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three who generally who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays. Many of the workers could not escape the fire because the managers and owners had locked the stairwells and emergency exits.

Here are a few fiction books that dramatize and memorialize this horrific tragedy:

For children:
Lieurance, Suzanne. The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (Historical Fiction Adventures).
Eleven-year-old Galena and her older sister, Anya, are Russian-Jewish immigrants living with their parents in a one-room tenement apartment in New York City. Six days a week the girls walk to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Each morning Galena asks to see the pictures of family members inside the gold locket Anya wears around her neck before she and her sister part to work on different floors.
Littlefield, Holly. Fire at the Triangle Factory. (A Carolrhoda On My Own book).
In 1911 New York City, Jewish Minnie and Catholic Tessa can only be friends at the factory, but this friendship pays off when the famous and tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire takes the lives of many of their coworkers and threatens theirs.

For Young adults:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses.
Sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan and her family are grateful to have finally reached America, the great land of opportunity. Their happiness is shattered when part of their family is forced to return to Ireland. Rose wants to succeed and stays in New York with her younger sister Maureen. The sisters struggle to survive and barely do so by working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Davies, Jacqueline. Lost.
Essie, 16, sews all day for pennies at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to help feed her fatherless family and now to forget her little sister’s death. Then the fire happens.
Friesner, Esther. Threads and Flames.
Raisa has just traveled alone from a small Polish shtetl all the way to New York City. She finds work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sewing bodices on the popular shirtwaists. And she falls in love. But will she survive the fire?
Haddix, Margaret Peterson. Uprising.
Ms. Haddix gives the story a human face by making it the story of three girls: Bella, an immigrant from Southern Italy, Yetta, a Russian Jewish immigrant worker, and Jane, a poor little rich girl who becomes involved in the lives of the shirtwaist factory workers in spite of her rarified existence as a society girl. Semicolon review here.
Hopkinson, Deborah. Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker, New York City 1909. (Dear America Series)
Angela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory.

For adults:
Weber, Katherine. Triangle.
Not only about the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, this adult novel is also about music. And it’s a history mystery. Recommended.

Setting: Turn of the Century, 1900-1909

Sep2

Historical fiction is a great way to learn about history. In fact, I learned a lot of my history facts from novels. I’m often moved by a fiction book to go look up the story behind the story, to see if the author got her facts right. Here are a few adult fiction titles set in or around the turn of the century—nineteenth to twentieth, that is. No, I haven’t read all of these, but I have tried to give you a link to a review written by someone who has for each book listed. If you have reviewed any of these, leave a link in the comments, and I’ll add your review to the list. Or if you have read another book set in the early 1900’s that you liked, please share.

The Tale of Hilltop Farm by Susan Wittig Albert. Author Beatrix Potter solves mysteries in this book and the ones the follow in the series when she moves to Hill Top Farm after the death of her fiance. Reviewed by Allison at On My Bookshelf.

City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. Highly recommended. A young Mennonite missionary in China meets and marries a fellow missionary and lives through the turmoil of civil war. Semicolon review here.

Anna’s Book by Barbara Vine. Mystery and suspense in early twentieth century London. Reviewed by Superfast Reader.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempts to exonerate a falsely imprisoned man named George.

Beautiful Dreamer by Joan Naper. Chicago, 1900. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

The Birth House by Ami McKay. A midwife in a Nova Scotia fishing village. Reviewed at Maw Books Blog..

Empire by Gore Vidal. Caroline Sanford runs a newspaper dynasty during the years 1898-1907–with insights into the Spanish-American War, the Hearst newspaper conglomerate, and the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, among other historical events and persons.

A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick. In 1907, a fifteen year old girl dreams of a career in photography, a dangerous job reserved for men. Reviewd by Tracy at Relz Reviewz.

Jack London: Sailor on Horseback by Irving Stone. Biographical novel about the eponymous author.

Lake of Fire by Linda Jacobs. Romance blossoms in Yellowstone National Park, June, 1900. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns. Highly recommended. Will’s grandfather elopes with a woman half his age three weeks after his wife dies in 1906, causing a scandal in their small Georgia town. Cold Sassy Tree is on my list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time.

City of Light by Lauren Belfer. 1901 in Buffalo, New York as Niagara Falls is being harnessed for electricity.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Idaho and Montana, 1903. A nineteen year old woman murders her abusive husband and then runs away from his brothers who are thirsty for revenge.

The Quickening by Michelle Hoover. American Midwest in the early 1900’s. Reviewed by Caribousmom.

Painted Ladies by Siobhan Parkinson. A community of artists in Skagen, a fishing village in the north of Denmark, live a Bohemian lifestyle while producing great works of art. Reviewed by Sarah Johnson at Reading the Past.

For more historical novels of the twentieth century, look at HistoricalNovels.info.

1906: Books and Literature

Aug17

Giosuè Carducci was an Italian poet and teacher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He was strongly anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian. One of his most famous, and controversial, poems was called “Inno a Satana” (or “Hymn to Satan”.) He died in February, 1907 after receiving the prize in December, 1906.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Winston Churchill, Coniston
2. Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore
3. Robert W. Chambers, The Fighting Chance
4. Meredith Nicholson, The House of a Thousand Candles An early mystery genre story by an Indiana author.
5. George Barr McCutcheon, Jane Cable
6. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. I read this one in high school, and I remember certain details quite well. I became a vegetarian for an entire month after reading The Jungle. Now that’s some influential muckraking literature!
7. Margaret Deland, The Awakening of Helena Ritchie
8. Rex Beach, The Spoilers
9. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
10. Ellen Glasgow, The Wheel of Life

Critically Acclaimed or Historically Significant:
William Graham Sumner, Folkways
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. I love Chesterton, and I think this book quite the best thing I’ve ever read about Charles Dickens.
Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children, The Story of the Amulet. I’ve read Nesbit’s earlier Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and I may have read The Story of the Amulet. However, I’ve never read or seen the movie version of The Railway Children, which it turns out is partly a spy novel. Anyway, Nesbit wrote over sixty boks fr children, and she was a co-founder of The Fabian Society in England.
Across the Page: Dragons Galore, Reading E. Nesbit to modern American children.
Librivox audiobooks of E. Nesbit.
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property. This one is the first volume in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, and I read it earlier this year. I never wrote anything about it because I thought I would finish the saga and then write. Also, I’m not too sure what I think. However, others think wel of it: Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 on the strength of his many novels about the Forsyte family.

Set in 1906:
Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill. Random House, 1933. Set in July, 1906.
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. A YA novel about a girl torn between her family and her future, set in 1906 in the Adirondacks. A review at One More Page.
Earthquake at Dawn by Kristiana Gregory. Semicolon review here.
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975) is set in New York City in 1906, actually from 1902-1917. A lot of peoople swear that this novel is one of the best they’ve ever read. I hated it, and only managed to read about a fourth of the book. The book (fiction) is full of actual characters from the early 1900’s: Harry Houdini, Robert Peary, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, Harry Kendall Thaw, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Countess Sophie Chotek, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Theodore Dreiser, Jacob Riis and Emiliano Zapata. But I thought it was downright nasty; I am to Ragtime as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn was to Balzac in The Music Man.

What did Teddy Read?

Aug5

“And it’s likely that no president will ever match the Rough Rider himself, who charged through multiple books in a single day and wrote more than a dozen well-regarded works, on topics ranging from the War of 1812 to the American West.” ~For Obama and past presidents, the books they read shape policies and perceptions by Trevi Troy, April 18 2010, The Washington Post

I’ve read about U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt in at least three separate books, and these are just a few of the works I’ve seen on his reading list:

Plays:
Aechylus’ Orestean trilogy.
Seven Against Thebes by Sophocles.
Hippolytus and Bacchae by Euripides.
Frogs by Aristophanes.
Shakespeare: Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II,

Novels:
The Heir of Redclyffe by
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
The Boy Hunters by Captain Reid
The Hunters’ Feast by Captain Reid.
The Scalp Hunters by Captain Reid.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
Sebastopol Sketches by Leo Tolstoy.
The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy.
With Fire and Sword (Polish: Ogniem i mieczem) by Henryk Sienkiewicz. (I want to read this classic historical novel of 17th century Poland.)
In the Sargasso Sea by Thomas Janvier.
Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott.
The Antiquary by Sir Walter Scott.
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott.
Waverly by Sir Walter Scott.
Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott. (Does anyone read Scott, other than Ivanhoe, these days?)
Stories and poems by Bret Harte.
Tom Sawyerr by Mark Twain.
Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray.
The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray.
The Adventures of Philip by William Makepeace Thackeray.
The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Charles O’Malley by Charles Lever.
Tittlebat Titmouse by Samuel Warren.
Stories by Artemus Ward.
Stories and essays by Octave Thanet (Alice French).
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
The stories of Hans Christian Anderson. (TR read these aloud to his children.)
Grimm’s fairy tales. (And these.)
Howard Pyle’s King Arthur.
Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories.
Other authors: Tarkington (Penrod?), Churchill (Richard Carvel or The Crisis?), Remington, Wister (The Virginian?), Trevelyan, Conrad (Lord Jim?),

Poetry:
The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott.
Marmion by Sir Walter Scott.
Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott.
The Flight of the Duchess by Robert Browning
The first two cantos of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Poems by Michael Drayton. (“There are only two or three I care for,” wrote TR.)
Portions of the Nibelungenleid.
Church’s Beowulf.
Morris’ translation of the Heimskringla.
Miss Hill’s Cuchulain Saga, together with The Children of Lir, The Children of Turin, The Tale of Deirdre, etc.
Other poets: Keats, Browning, Poe,Tennyson, Longfellow, Kipling, Bliss Carman, Lowell, R.L. Stevenson, Allingham,

Nonfiction:
Parts of Herodotus.
The first and seventh books of Thucydides.
All of Polybius.
A little of Plutarch.
Parts of The Politics of Aristotle.
Froissart on French history.
The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot.
Charles XII and the collapse of the Swedish empire, 1682-1719 by R. Nisbet Bain.
Essays by Macaulay.
Types of Naval Officers by A.T. Mahan.
Over the Teacups (essays) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (TR called Holmes, Jr., the son of the author, “one of the most interesting men I have ever met.”)
Abraham Lincoln: A History by John Hay and John G. Nicolay. (Hay was Roosevelt’s Secretary of State until Hay’s death in 1905. Hay was also, as a young man, Lincoln’s assistant and private secretary. Isn’t it odd to think that the same man knew both Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln?)
Two volumes of Speeches and Writings by Abraham Lincoln.
Shakespeare and Voltaire by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury. (490 pages)
Six volumes of Mahaffey’s Studies of the Greek World.
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa by David Livingstone.
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Catalogue of North American Birds by Spencer Fullerton Baird.
Review of American BIrds
North American Reptiles
Catalogue of North American Mammals
My reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer war By Benjamin Johannis Viljoen.
Birds and bees and other studies in nature by John Burroughs.
John James Audubon by John Burroughs.
Malay Sketches by Frank Swettenham.

THis list is just a sampling of TR’s reading. He is generally acknowledged, along with THomas Jefferson, to be best read of all the American presidents.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in July, 2011

Jul31

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. Semicolon review here.
Three Black Swans by Caroline B. Cooney.
Small Town Sinners by Melissa Walker.
Stolen by Lucy Christopher.

Adult Fiction
The Daughter’s Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick.
Friends and Lovers by Helen MacInnes.
Angel Sister by Ann H. Gabhart.
The Hardest Thing To Do by Penelope Wilock.Semicolon review here.
The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock.
The Wounds of God by Penelope Wilcock.
Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce.

Nonfiction:
The Fear by Peter Godwin. Semicolon review here.
One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.
The Peacemaker by Ken Sande.
Unplanned by Abby Johnson with Cindy Lambert.

Plus some bookish links:
Minimalist posters inspired by children’s stories.
Five Vacation Spots for Book Lovers. I doubt I could afford any one of these, but it’s fun to dream.
This year’s Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing.

1903: Books and Literature

Jul27

Nobel Prize for Literature: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norwegian poet and playwright.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Augusta Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter
2. Thomas Nelson Page, Gordon Keith
3. Frank Norris, The Pit Wheat speculation and the commodities market in Chicago.
4. Alice Hegan Rice, Lovey Mary Orphan girl Lovey Mary runs away to the Cabbage Patch (see #6 below).
5. Owen Wister, The Virginian
6. Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
7. James Lane Allen, The Mettle of the Pasture Set in Kentucky and written by a Kentucky author who also wrote The Choir Invisible.
8. George Horace Lorimer, Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
9. Thomas Dixon Jr., The One Woman Dixon was a Baptist preacher turned novelist, and this novel in particular was a sermon on the evils of socialism.
10. John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come Another book with a Kentucky setting, this book takes place during the Civil War. It was made into a movie in 1961.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
Jack London, Call of the Wild
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh I have this book on my Kindle, but I haven’t started it yet. Should I?
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Erskine Childress, The Riddle of the Sands. I read this book on my Kindle not long ago, and I found it quite confusing. It does indicate the deep mistrust and rivalry that existed in the early twentieth century between the British and the Germans, both trying to build their empires at the expense of the other.

I’m surprised, not at how many of the books I haven’t read, but at how many of the best-selling authors I’ve never even heard of. I don’t know the details of how the list was compiled early in the twentieth century, but it was published in Publishers Weekly after 1912. Before that, it is unclear to me where the lists came from. And, of course, these are the best-sellers in the United States. Who knows what they were reading in other English-speaking countries?

1902: Books and Literature

Jul25

Nobel Prize for Literature: Theodore Mommsen, German historian and author of History of Rome.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Owen Wister, The Virginian. I tried but was unable to conquer. Becky read it and loved it. Maybe I need to try again.
2. Alice Caldwell Hegan, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. I have this classic on my Kindle, but I haven’t read it yet.
3. Charles Major, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
4. Emerson Hough, The Mississippi Bubble.
5. Mary Johnston, Audrey.
6. Gilbert Parker, The Right of Way.
7. A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I have read my Sherlock Holmes. I had a friend in high school who was mad about Holmes and Watson both.
8. Booth Tarkington, The Two Vanrevels. I’ve read Penrod and The Magnificent Ambersons, enjoyed them both, but not this one. Both Penrod (1914) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) are set during this time period, the first decade of the twentieth century.
9. Henry van Dyke, The Blue Flower. Short stories about the search for happiness by the author of The Other Wise Man and of the hymn lyrics Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.
10. Lucas Malet, Sir Richard Calmady.

Critically acclaimed and historically significant:
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
André Gide, The Immoralist
Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. Reading The Wings of the Dove by Elizabeth Gaffney at Salon.com.
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Ms. Potter and I share a birthday, and so I wrote about her here. Go here for even more information about Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

Fiction Set in 1902:
Zora and Me by Victoria Bond. Fictionalization of the life of author Zora Neale Hurston from age nine to age eleven. In the book Zora becomes a girl detective who tries with her friends to figure out what happened to a man who was murdered or accidentally killed in their small Florida town.
Land of Promise by Joan Lowery Nixon.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in June, 2011

Jul3

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic by Jennifer Trafton. Semicolon review here.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Semicolon review at The Point, Youth Reads
You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin. Hard-boiled teen detective solves a high school murder mystery with way too much farking and bobbing. I wanted to scream, “If you can’t clean up your language (best choice), just use the word already. Enough with the euphemisms!”
Famous by Todd Strasser. Semicolon review here.
My Life, the Theater and Other Tragedies by Allen Zadoff. Semicolon review here.
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson.
Divergent by Veronica Roth. Look for my review at The Point: Youth Reads sometime soon.
Matched by Ally Condie.
The Queen’s Daughter by Susan Coventry.
Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang.

Adult FIction:
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson.
The Ambition by Lee Strobel. Semicolon review here.
The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen. Semicolon review here.
City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. Semicolon review here.
The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead. CLIFFHANGER warning: Do not read this book unless you are prepared to wait however long it takes to have published however many books Mr. Lawhead is planning to write to complete this series. The story is quite unfinished in this first volume. I find this year-long wait between parts of a story annoying and unacceptable, even though I admire Mr. Lawhead as a writer.
The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne.

Nonfiction:
The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers.
Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell. Semicolon review here.
The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood by Mark Kurzem. Semicolon review here.
Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff. Semicolon review here.
Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me: A Memoir . . . of Sorts by Ian Cron. Semicolon review here.
American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu. Semicolon review here.
The World Is Bigger Now: An Americna Journalist’s Release from Captivity in North Korea by Euna Lee with Lisa Dickey.

1900: Books and Literature

Jun7

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold. Available in reprint edition from Vision Forum.
2. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage Virago reprint available.
3. Robert Grant, Unleavened Bread. Semicolon review and thoughts here.
4. James Lane Allen, The Reign of Law, a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields.
5. Irving Bacheller, Eben Holden, a Tale of the North Country.
6. Paul Leicester Ford, Janice Meredith, a Story of the American Revolution. Semicolon review here.
7. Charles Frederic Goss, The Redemption of David Corson. Available online.
8. Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel
9. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower, the love story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, and happening in the reign of … Henry VIII..
10. Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes.
All ten of these books are available to download and read as ebooks at Project Gutenberg.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual
Clarence Stedman, An American Anthology
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Semicolon review here.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by the George M. Hill Co. in Chicago on May 17, 1900. Download the ebook at Project Gutenberg. An unabridged dramatic audio performance of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz directed and narrated by Karen M. Chan with the Wired for Books Players and featuring Nicoletta Mazzocca as Dorothy.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
John Dewey, The School and Society

It’s interesting that all of the bestsellers, as far as I can tell, were historical fiction. Genres go in and out of style, don’t they? Nowadays the fiction bestseller list would be mostly thrillers and mysteries, I would guess.

Picture Books Set Around 1900, the turn of the century I’ve read a few of these picture books:
The Edwardian wordless books by John Goodall are fun to explore.
Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot by Alice and Martin Provenson won a Caldecott Award. It’s the story of one of the pioneers of flight, Frenchman Louis Bleriot who flew his plane across the English Channel in 1909.
My Great-Aunt Arizona by Gloria Houston is a lovely depiction of a school teacher in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Children’s and YA Fiction Set in 1900:
Brooklyn Rose by Ann Rinaldi.
Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. (1899) Semicolon review here.

In this post, Edwardian, Turn of the Century and the Great War I comment on a few books and TV series that depict the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century ambiance and culture, especially in England.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in May 2011

Jun5

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
Boyfriends, Burritos, and an Ocean of Trouble by Nancy Rue. (Real Life series) I’m intereseted enough in this series that I went to the library and got the first one, and I’d like to get my hands on the third book in the series, which has been nominated for the INSPY’s in the Young Adult Literature category.
Taking Off by Jenny Moss. Semicolon review here.

Adult Fiction:
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Semicolon review here.
The Belfry by May Sinclair.
The Informationist by Taylor Stevens.
The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon. Semicolon review here.

Nonfiction:
Glimmers of Hope: Memoir of a VSO in Zambia by Mark Burke. Semicolon review here.
Manic by Terri Cheney.
Evening in the Palace of Reason: J.S. Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines. Semicolon review here.
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs.
We Die Alone by David Howarth. Semicolon review here.
Can I See Your I.D.? True Stories of False Identities by Chris Barton.
Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me by Ian Cron.