Sunday Salon: Books Read in August, 2013

Sep8

Children’s and YA Fiction:
Imperfect Spiral by Debbie Levy, reviewed at Semicolon.
I also read and reviewed several picture books set in Korea as a part of my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool. Someone asked if I had an ETA for PBAW (don’t you like the acronyms?), but I’m sad to say that I’ve been working on it sporadically for a good while now, and I’m not much closer to finished than I was last year at this time. If a bunch of you asked me to “pretty please finish” so that you could purchase Picture Book Around the World, I might get motivated to actually buckle down and get it to the (self) publishing stage.

Adult Fiction:
The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin, reviewed at Semicolon.
A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert, reviewed at Semicolon.
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.

Nonfiction:
Prayers of the Bible by Susan Hunt.

I can’t say I read a lot of books this month, but what I read was pretty good. I’m still thinking about a review of Wally Lamb’s Columbine shooting novel, The Hour I First Believed.

Saturday Review of Books: September 7, 2013

Sep6

“The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” ~John Steinbeck

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

20. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (She Got Up Off the Couch)
21. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Fables Volume 5)
22. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Unremarkable Heart and Other Stories)
23. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Contentment by Swenson)
24. Escape from Camp 14
25. A letter to my childhood self…
26. Ms. Yingling (Zombie Baseball Beatdown)
27. Book Chase (Son of a Gun)
28. Lena Anne (The Infinite Moment of Us)
29. GReads (Wild Cards)
30. Kara (Three Decades of Fertility)
31. Janette Fuller (Custer’s Last Battle)
32. Picky Girl (Winter at Death’s Hotel)
33. Glynn (Forbidden Room)
34. Joseph R. @ Zombie Parents Guide (Lumen Fidei by Pope Francis)
35. Joseph R. @ Zombie Parents Guide (Locke and Key Vol 3)
36. Benjie @ Book ’em Benj-O (Theodore Boone: The Activist)
37. Anna @Don’t Forget the Avocados (Two Juv Fantasies)
38. Brenda (Destiny Rewritten by Kathryn Fitzmaurice)

39. Beckie@ByTheBook (Red Dawn Rising)
40. Beckie@ByTheBook (Unlimited)
41. Beckie@ByTheBook (Memory’s Door)
42. Beckie@ByTheBook (Off The Record)
43. Beckie@ByTheBook (Presumed Guilty)
44. Becky (Rookwood)
45. Harvee@Book Dilettante
46. Reading World (The Lady and the Poet)
47. Reading World (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
48. Thoughts of Joy (The Tragedy Paper)
49. Thoughts of Joy (E is for Evidence)
50. Girl Detective (I Am Not Sidney Poitier)
51. Girl Detective (The Immortalization Commission)
52. Colleen@Books in the City (A Walk in the Woods)
53. Colleen@Books in the City (In the Land of the Living)
54. Sally @ Classic Children’s Books (The Secret Garden)
55. Beth@Weavings (Mollie Peer)
56. Anna @ Diary of an Eccentric (Spies and Prejudice)

Poetry Friday: To Autumn by John Keats

Sep6

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

What lovely descriptive lines:
“season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
“thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”
“barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day”
“the small gnats mourn among the river sallows”

Could you even begin to describe a season, or a day, or a mood so vividly and beautifully? I couldn’t, which is why John Keats is the poet and I am me, a humble admirer of Keats’ craft.

Listen to Robert Pinsky read To Autumn.

For more poetry on this Friday or any day, see Poetry Friday at Author Amok.

Imperfect Spiral by Debbie Levy

Sep5

The marketing blurb on the back of this YA novel says “for fans of Jodi Piccoult”, but since I’ve been underwhelmed by the Jodi Piccoult novels I’ve tried, that’s not much of a recommendation. I would say that Imperfect Spiral is much better than a lot of YA novels and transcends the “problem novel” genre.

Danielle Samuelson spent her summer babysitting five year old Humphrey Danker. Humphrey is precocious, persistent, and perhaps slightly “perculiar”, as he likes to pronounce the word. He has an imagination that stretches from aliens called Thrumbles of the planet Thrumble-Boo all the way to throwing the perfect spiral with a pint-sized football. That is, Humphrey imagines throwing the perfect spiral, but he never actually does it because he is killed as our story begins in a tragic car accident.

And it’s all Danielle’s fault. Or is it? This book is about assumptions and the judgments we all make about ourselves and about one another. Danielle thinks Humphrey’s parents, especially his father, might be somewhat overbearing and expecting too much out of Humphrey. Danielle’s parents think her brother Adrian, who dropped out of high school, should shape up and live up to his abilities. Danielle believes that she should have prevented the accident that killed Humphrey. The neighbors think that the illegal, undocumented immigrant family who ran into Humphrey should be held responsible. No one knows exactly what Humphrey’s parents think about the death of their only child. Everyone in the story makes judgments and finds fault when the guilty party is mostly just an imperfect world.

I am fascinated by how people survive after a horrendous tragedy changes their life, especially a tragedy in which the person in question is at fault or might have to accept some blame for the tragedy. I’m also amazed and saddened at how we as a culture and society need to find someone or something to blame for every single tragic event that occurs. If a car malfunctions, it must be the fault of the manufacturer or of the last mechanic to work on that car or of the owner for not being more careful in its maintenance. It can’t be just an accident. If I fall and break my head open, it must be the fault of the people who made the surface I’m walking on or my fault for walking recklessly or your fault for distracting me from walking. Someone must take responsibility. Something must change so that no one, anywhere, ever will fall and break their head open ever again. Laws must be passed and named after me. Rules must be formulated for safe walking. Walking must be regulated or outlawed or only done where there are no possible distractions or safety hazards.

We are obsessed with blame and with making everything completely safe and risk-free. But sometimes there are just accidents. Maybe, in hindsight, those accidents could be prevented, but at what cost to our freedom and our sense of adventure and our joy? I believe that as we have become a post-Christian culture with a belief that this life is all there is, we have become so concerned about preserving life that we have boxed ourselves, and especially our children, into tiny, circumscribed lives that have no room for risk and creativity and untrammeled joy.

And yet, if my daughter died because I let her walk to the grocery store by herself, how would I live with myself afterwards? I don’t know, but I like the way Ms. Levy’s Imperfect Spiral asks the questions that I ask myself about this tension between guilt, responsibility, imperfection, and freedom.

Definitely recommended for 2013 Cybils nominations in the category YA Fiction.

The Rest of the Story: Eric Liddell

Sep4

The late Paul Harvey had a feature on the radio called “The Rest of the Story” in which he would tell familiar stories of well-known people and events or commonplace tales of ordinary people–and then tell “the rest of the story”, the part that not many people know or the part that gives the true story an ironic twist. I’ve been reading a lot of unusual stories myself lately, and I decided to share a few of them with you here at Semicolon.

Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell is featured in the movie Chariots of Fire. If you’ve never seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

In the movie and real life, Eric Liddell refused to run in a qualifying heat scheduled on Sunday because he believed in keeping the Sabbath holy. He had to withdraw from the 100 meter race, his best event. Liddell began to train for the 400 meter race instead, and he ran the race in the Olympics and won. Eric Liddell broke the existing Olympic and world records in the 400 meter race with a time of 47.6 seconds. After the Olympics and his graduation from Edinburgh University, Liddell continued to run in track and field events, but he always refused to compete on Sunday, citing his desire to please God above all else.

In 1925, Eric Liddell returned to China where he had been born and where his parents were missionaries. He served as a missionary there until 1941 when he was captured and interned by the Japanese who were invading China during World War II. It was there in the internment camp that “the rest of the story” of Eric Liddell’s allegiance to God’s principles above all else took place.

Sunday Salon: September

Sep1

It’s the beginning of the –brrr months, as my husband calls them, our favorite season of the year. We’ve started school, had our disasters and reluctant bouts with self-discipline, and now it’s time to settle in, learn, and enjoy the autumn. Autumn is a lovely word, by the way, “from Old French, autumpne, or directly from the Latin, autumnus.”

I’ve done several autumnal series of posts about food over the years of this blog:

Apples: Fact, Fiction, Poetry and Recipe.

Pecans, the Nut of the Gods.

Autumn and Pumpkins

Potatoes: a Positively Ponderous Post.

You might enjoy reading about these autumn-ish foods as we head into September.

Then, there are the books of September.
Due out in September, 2013:
The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde. 09/03/2013 The Chronicles of Kazam, Book Two, sequel to The Last Dragonslayer.
Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. 09/10/2013
Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch. 09/12/2013
United We Spy by Ally Carter. 09/17/2013
The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs. 09/30/2013

September Events and Books:
September, 1914. During World War I, after the Battle of the Marne, both sides reach a stalemate in northern France, and the armies face each other from trenches along a front that eventually stretches from the North Sea to the Swiss border with France. Reading about World War I.
In September 2009, Abby Johnson was called into an exam room at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas to help with an ultrasound-guided abortion. What she saw in the ultrasound picture changed her mind about abortion, about the pro-life movement, and ultimately about her own relationship with a loving God. Read more in Abby’s book, Unplanned.
September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland declare their neutrality. Later in September U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt announces that the U.S. will also remain neutral in the war. Mila 18 by Leon Uris tells the story of the Jewish people of Warsaw, Poland as they fought and hid from the Nazis who were determined to exterminate them.
September 7, 1977. The U.S. signs a treaty with Panama agreeing to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama at the end of the 20th century.
September 8, 1492. The Voyages of Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta begin. Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card includes both history (Christopher Columbus, native Central American cultures, and slavery) and futuristic/dystopian/utopian elements.
September 8, 1900: A deadly hurricane destroys much of the property on Galveston Island, Texas and kills between 6000 and 12000 people. The Galveston hurricane of 1900 is the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States. Reading through a hurricane at Semicolon.
September 16, 1975. Papua New Guinea gains its independence from Australia. Peace Child by Don Richardson is a wonderful missionary story set in Papua New Guinea.
September 28, 1961. A military coup in Damascus, Syria effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria. Mitali Perkins recommends a couple of books set in Syria, in light of the present crisis in that war-torn country.

Birthdays and Books:
Jim Arnosky, writer of nature and art books for children, was born September 1, 1946.
Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, whose historical fiction book I, Juan de Pareja, won the Newbery Medal in 1966, was born September 2, 1904 in Bakersfield, California. Also born on September 2nd: Poet Eugene Field and children’s humorist Lucretia Hale.
Aliki Liacouras Brandenberg was born September 3, 1929.
Children’s author Joan Aiken was born on September 4, 1924 in Sussex, England.
Lost Horizon author James Hilton was born on September 9, 1900.
Short story master O’Henry was born September 11, 1862.
On September 13th, Carol Kendall (1937), children’s fantasy writer, Else Holmelund Minarik (1920), author of the Little Bear easy readers, Roald Dahl (1916), humorist, and Mildred Taylor (1943), historical fiction writer and Newbery medalist, were all born, greatly adding to the breadth and joy of children’s literature.
Essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson was born September 18, 1709.
September 19th is the birthday of Arthur Rackham, illustrator, b.1867, William Golding, novelist, b.1911, Rachel Field, childrenâ€™s author.
Poet T.S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888.
September 29th is the birthday of Elizabeth Gaskell, novelist, b.1810.

A Reading List for September 24, National Punctuation Day.

Autumn is my favorite season.

Saturday Review of Books: August 31, 2013

Aug30

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generationsâ€“–such is a pleasure beyond compare.” ~Yosida Kenko

1. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Miss Julia Renews Her Vows)
2. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Drops of God Vol. 2)
3. Beth@Weavings (The Adventures of Tintin Vol. 1)
4. Alex in Leeds (Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther)
5. Hope (Complete Surrender – Biography of Eric Liddell)
6. Glynn (Seamus Heaney)
7. Beckie @ ByTheBook (To Honor And Trust)
8. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Wishing on Willows)
9. Beckie @ ByTheBook (The Hero’s Lot)
10. Beckie @ ByTheBook (A Cast of Stones)
11. Annie Kate (The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good)
12. Annie Kate (A Simple Change)
13. Annie Kate (Whispers on the Dock)
14. jama’s alphabet soup (Allergies, Away!)
15. jama’s alphabet soup (Pizza in Pienza)
16. Thoughts of Joy (Rodzina)
17. Thoughts of Joy (How to Be a Good Wife)

18. Thoughts of Joy (The Good House)
19. Becky (Captives)
20. Becky (Undaunted)
21. Becky (How To Make Friends and Monsters)
22. Becky (On Distant Shores)
23. Becky (2 You Wouldn’t Want To Be Nonfiction PB)
24. Becky (The Tollgate)
25. Becky (The Boy on the Bridge)
26. Becky (Paradox)
27. Becky (Solstice)
28. Becky (Mary Poppins Comes Back)
29. Girl Detective (The Cat Ate my Gymsuit)
30. Girl Detective (The Glass Castle)
31. Girl Detective (This Boy’s Life)
32. Girl Detective (The Karamazov Brothers)
33. Guiltless Reading (However Long the Night)
34. Guiltless Reading (And the Soft Wind Blows by Lance Umenhofer)

The Trip Back Home by Janet S. Wong

Aug26

Picture Book Around the World: Reading Through Korea I’m working hard on my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool, my preschool read aloud curriculum for homeschooling your preschooler or kindergartner. This week at Semicolon, we’re going to continue to visit Korea through the medium of a treasure trove of picture books featuring that country and its children.

This picture book about a child and her mother visiting the mother’s home in rural Korea gives a good feel for the ambience of farm life in South Korea, maybe a a decade or two back from now. The narrator and her mother give gifts to the family and accept gifts from their family as a framework for this story of exploration of Korean culture and customs.

The illustrations by Chinese artist Bo Jia are lovely, colorful and exciting. Story and pictures work well together, and the entire package gives children (and adults) a little slice of Korean family life.

I was reminded of childhood visits to my grandmothers’ homes, even though we didn’t have to go all the way to South Korea to visit them. And I felt a little nostalgic for those family times, reunions, and get-togethers. I’m probably painting the past with rosy colors, but it seems as if people had more time for family and visits and just sitting and talking when I was a child. Nowadays it’s my children who are too often too busy to spend time with their grandmother, even though she lives in a little apartment just behind our house.

Oh, well, it’s a good book for a unit on Korea or grandparents or family life—or just for reading together, snuggled up on the couch.

Saturday Review of Books: August 24, 2013

Aug23

“That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit.” ~Amos Bronson Alcott

1. Semicolon (The Aviator’s Wife)
2. Semicolon (A Wilder Rose)
3. Semicolon (My Cat Copies Me)
4. Cynthia (All Our Pretty Songs)
5. the Ink Slinger (Orthodoxy)
6. Susanne~LivingToTell (Wounds)
7. Thoughts of Joy (Just What Kind of Mother Are You?)
8. Thoughts of Joy (A Conspiracy of Faith)
9. Thoughts of Joy (Back of Beyond)
10. Barbara H. (Gulp!)
11. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Mouse with the Question Mark Tail)
12. Lars Walker (Viking Warfare)
13. Hope (Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson)
14. Catherine (On a Beam of Light)
15. Megan at Redeemed Reader (tea picture books)
16. Zoe (Oliver and the Seawigs)
17. Charlotte (The Giver)

18. Abby the Librarian (Golden Boy)
19. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Long Winter)
20. Carol – False Dawn by Edith Wharton
21. Glynn (Metaphysical Dog: Poems)
22. Glynn (Four Shorts)
23. Lazygal (Foreign Gods, Inc.)
24. Lazygal (The Gallery of Vanishing Husbands)
25. Lazygal (Lost River)
26. Lazygal (The Devil’s Edge)
27. Lazygal (Dead and Buried)
28. Reading World (Mystic River)
29. Reading World (Bitter Greens)
30. GReads (Sugar Daddy)
31. Eustacia Tan (Identity Theft)
32. Dani at A Work in Progress (A Grave Talent)
33. Faith (Photographing the Adirondacks
34. Lesley (Under the Dome)

35. Joyful Reader (The Black Moth)
36. Becky (Counting by 7s)
37. Becky (Unthinkable)
38. Becky (Helen Lester Picture Books)
39. Becky (Black Dudley Murder)
40. Becky (You Wouldn’t Want To Be Picture Books/Nonfiction)
41. Becky (Now We Are Six)
42. Beckie @ ByTheBook (What The Bayou Saw)
43. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Sleeping in Eden)
44. Beckie @ ByTheBook (This Means Love)
45. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Not This Time)
46. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Unwritten)
47. Brenda (The School for Good and Evil)
48. Anna @ Diary of an Eccentric (If You Could Be Mine)
49. Anna @ Diary of an Eccentric (The Satyr’s Curse)
50. Swampowl (Stranger With My Face)

My Cat Copies Me by Yoon-duck Kwon

Aug22

Picture Book Around the World: Reading Through Korea I’m working hard on my Picture Book Around the World sequel to Picture Book Preschool, my preschool read aloud curriculum for homeschooling your preschooler or kindergartner. This week at Semicolon, we’re continuing to visit Korea through the medium of a treasure trove of picture books featuring that country and its children.

The unnamed narrator of this simple story is a little Korean girl who has a pet cat. As girl and cat play together, the cat copies the girl’s actions: hiding in the closet, chasing after insects, sitting quietly together. Then the girl decides to copy her cat and gain strength and inspiration from the independence and fearlessness of her cat.

That’s about it. There’s not much of a plot, and the story ends where it begins, girl and cat together. The illustrations, by author Yoon-duck Kwon, are colorful and engaging, but rather odd in places, at least to Western eyes. In most of the illustration girl and cat stand together about the same size, which seems a little off. And in one picture the girl looks out from inside the cat’s eye. I don’t know exactly what that’s supposed to mean.

However, this gentle tale of a girl and her cat might appeal to cat lovers and pet adventurers as they identify with the girl and her pet. I just hope nobody tries to copy the girl on the front of the book as she copies her cat and crawls on top of a bookshelf full of books!