BOOK 'EM

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

WEEK #17
Monday, 04/23/07 to Sunday, 04/29/07

ISBN-10: 0156030209
ISBN-13: 9780156030205

Life of Pi has been on my list of books to read for several years.  Published in September 2001, the novel won the prestigious Man Booker Prize the following year.  With 400+ pages and such a unique storyline - 16-year-old boy stuck in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger for for 227 days - I couldn't help but be curious!  I mean, how could someone write 400+ pages on that (and keep it interesting)?!  Finding out was a pleasant surprise.

BACK COVER:

When sixteen-year-old Pi Patel finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only a menacing 450-pound Bengal tiger for company, he quickly realizes that the only way he will survive is if he makes sure the tiger is more afraid of him than he is of it.  Finding strength within himself, he draws upon all of his knowledge and cunning, battles for food and shelter, overcomes storms and disasters, and, in the end, makes a peace of sorts with both tiger and ocean.

With more than one million copies in print, Life of Pi has become a modern classic, combining grand storytelling with a profound exploration of ageless themes: faith and truth, fact and fiction, man versus nature, and innocence and experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of Canadian parents.  After studying philosophy at university, he worked variously as a diswasher, tree planter, and security guard.  Then he began to write.  When he's not living somewhere else, he lives in Montreal.

To be honest, I liked the book - but it didn't grab me like I had hoped, given all the rave reviews:

AMAZON.COM REVIEW:

Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion."

An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. - Brad Thomas Parsons

Parts of the book did grab me, no doubt - like this observation regarding fear:

I must say a word about fear.  it is life's only true opponent.  Only fear can defeat life.  It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know.  It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy.  It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.  It begins in your mind, always.  One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy.  Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.  Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out.  But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier.  Doubt does away with it with little trouble.  You become anxious.  Reason comes to do battle for you. 

Your are reassured.  Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology.  But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low.  You feel yourself weakening, wavering.  Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on.  Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake.  Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, whild your jaw begins to gallop on the spot.  Your ears go deaf.  Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing.  Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much.  And so with the rest of your body.  Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart.  Only your eyes work well.  They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions.  You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust.  There, you've defeated yourself.  Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words.  For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when brought face to face with mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.  So you must fight hard to express it.  You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.  Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

Have you ever heard fear described more accurately or more powerfully than that?  It was so true, to me, that I actually felt it in my stomach.  That's talent: to describe in such a stark, true, way-deep-down way the things that all of us feel but often lack the words to express.  WOW! 

Life of Pi is WAY more - WAY deeper - than just just a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger.  Actually, the further I get into this review, the more I find myself liking the book.  I was frustrated by the way the story ended, though.  In fact, it's bothered me every since I closed the book on the last page.  Maybe I was grabbed and I don't know it, yet.  Some books sneak up on you like that.  I guess you'll just have to read it and decide for yourself.

2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards Announced

WEEK #16
Monday, 04/16/07 to Sunday, 04/22/07

I'm departing a bit from my usual book-a-week pattern this week to share the 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards:

On March 29, 2007, the American Booksellers Association announced the winners of the 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, recognizing those titles independent booksellers most enjoyed handselling during the past year, as voted by the owners and staff of ABA member bookstores.

This year's winners are:

ADULT FICTION:
Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara Gruen




ADULT NONFICTION:
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
by Nora Ephron




CHILDREN'S LITERATURE:
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak




CHILDREN'S ILLUSTRATED:
Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship
by Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff, and
Dr. Paul Kahumbu; photos by Peter Greste

"Yet again, this year's group of winners perfectly represents the kind of unique and thought-provoking titles handsold in independent bookstores around the country," said ABA CEO Avin Mark Domnitz.

Four 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Books in each category were also chosen by ABA member booksellers. They are:

ADULT FICTION HONOR BOOKS:

*The Brief History of the Dead: A Novel*
by Kevin Brockmeier
*The Inheritance of Loss*
by Kiran Desai
*The Road*
by Cormac McCarthy
*Suite Francaise*
by Irene Nemirovsky


ADULT NONFICTION HONOR BOOKS:

*The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir *
by Bill Bryson
*Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War*
by Nathaniel Philbrick
*Thunderstruck*
by Erik Larson
*The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story
of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl*
by Timothy Egan


CHILDREN'S LITERATURE HONOR BOOKS:

*The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing:
Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party*
by M.T. Anderson
*Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference!*
by Lynne Truss; illustrated by Bonnie Timmons
*New Moon*
by Stephanie Meyer
*Peter and the Shadow Thieves*
by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson


CHILDREN'S ILLUSTRATED HONOR BOOKS:

*Fancy Nancy*
by Jane O'Connor; illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser
*Flotsam*
by David Wiesner
*Library Lion*
by Michelle Knudsen; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes
*Pirateology: The Pirate Hunter's Companion*
by Captain William Lubber; edited by Dugald A. Steer

The Book Sense Book of the Year winners and honor books were selected by booksellers from titles most often nominated for the Book Sense Picks lists in 2006. Booksellers were also able to write in titles on the ballot. Only books published in 2006 were eligible.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

BOOK #15
Monday, 04/09/07 to Sunday, 04/15/07

ISBN-10: 076791936X
ISBN-13: 9780767919364

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, my mom's choice for our April Book Club, is a "vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s."  Although I liked the book just fine - and agree that it is utterly hilarious - I didn't quite get it - at least not the way that members of "the greatest generation" will.  Still, it gave me a better frame of reference for the time and place that my parents grew up in:

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s.  No country had ever known such prosperity.  When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn't existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage, and practically no competition.  All that American companies had to do was stop making tanks and battleships and start making Buicks and Frigidaires - and boy did they.

By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three-quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners, and gas or electric stoves - things that most of the rest of the world could still only fantasize about.  Americans owned 80 percent of the world's electrical goods, controlled two-thirds of the world's productive capacity, produced more that 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent its oil, and 66 percent of its steel.  The 5 percent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 percent combined.

Remarkably, almost all this wealth was American made.  Of the 7.5 million new cars sold in America in 1954, for instance, 99.93 percent were made in America by Americans.  We became the richest country in the world without needing the rest of the world.

What a extraordinary contrast with the America of today.  Most people who lived during the 1950s look back nostalgically, saying it really was the best time ever.  It certainly makes me wonder.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

The Thunderbolt Kid was born in the 1950s when six-year-old Bryson found a mysterious, scratchy green sweater with a satiny thunderbolt across the chest. The jersey bestowed magic powers on the wearer–X-ray vision and the power to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people.

These are the memoirs of that Kid, whose earthly parents were not really half bad–a loving mother who didn't cook and was pathologically forgetful, but shared her love of movies with her youngest child, and a dad who was the greatest baseball writer that ever lived and took his son to dugouts and into clubhouses where he met such famous players as Stan Musial and Willie Mays.

Simpler times are conveyed with exaggerated humor; the author recalls the middle of the last century in the middle of the country (Des Moines, IA), when cigarettes were good for you, waxy candies were considered delicious, and kids were taught to read with Dick and Jane. Students of the decade's popular culture will marvel at the insular innocence described, even as the world moved toward nuclear weapons and civil unrest. Bryson describes country fairs and fantastic ploys to maneuver into the tent to see the lady stripper, playing hookey, paper routes, church suppers, and more. His reminiscences will entertain a wide audience. – Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bill Bryson's bestselling books include A Walk in the Woods, I'm A Stranger Here Myself, In A Sunburned Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, and A Short History of Nearly Everything, which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize.  Bryson lives in England with his wife and children.

You can find more information on Bryson and his books at his website: www.billbrysonbooks.com.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is our April Book Club pick.  You can buy it at Eldora's Books, Etc. for 20% off and, if you like, join us for Book Club on Tuesday, April 24th at 6:30pm.  For more information, CLICK HERE to see the Book Club flyer on Eldora's website.

New Garden Book By Better Homes & Gardens

BOOK #14
Monday, 04/02/07 to Sunday, 04/08/07

ISBN-10: 0696221446
ISBN-13: 9780696221446

I have been all about my yard, the past few days: planning my garden, raking away leaves, digging out flower beds, buying bulbs and seed.  It's been cold but sunshiny, the perfect weather - in my opinion - for all  the preparation that needs to be done, this time of year.  Of course, since I'm a book person, I grabbed a few guides to help me along the way:

New Garden Book is a comprehensive, thorough & easy-to-use reference book.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative gardening reference book available.

Each chapter is produced by horticultural experts of national authority.

Easy-to-follow instructions for landscaping with trees, shrubs, flowers, lawns, and roses.

Chapters feature more plants than previous editions, with detailed selection guides and hardiness zone maps.

Includes the latest trends in water gardens, outdoor rooms, container gardens, regional gardening, and lot planning.

Tips and advice give new homeowners and new gardening hobbyists great-looking yards.

I particularly like the reference section on different plants - complete with photos, common & proper names, and all kinds of little details.

   

Then I went to Month-By-Month Gardening In Tennessee & Kentucky: What to Do Each Month to Have a Beautiful Garden All Year Long by Judy Lowe

ISBN-10: 1930604890
ISBN-13: 9781930604896

This book provided more specific information on our region: planting zone, soil types, particular plants that do well in our climate - and I really liked the month-by-month thing, because I'm never quite sure what to do when.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Written by Judy Lowe, a leading gardening expert in the states of Tennessee and Kentucky, the proven monthly format has helped gardeners experience more success and enjoyment from their gardens.

Includes the major gardening categories, from annuals and perennials to trees and shrubs, including lawns and vegetables.

The trend in gardening books is toward regional titles, and book retailers are well aware of this. The Month-by-Month series provides credible information on maintaining plants throughout the year in a specific region. These books contain monthly advice on what to do in the garden and when to do it, and contain several plant categories ranging from annuals to vines.

Gardening is now the favorite leisure pastime in America. Homeowners are realizing the health benefits derived from gardening, and the resulting increase in their home's property value.

Since this is the first springtime in my new home, I am excited about planting and landscaping, this year.  I hope these books will help me transform my poor little yard into the colorful visions I have in my head.  Here's hoping your gardening endeavors are successful, as well! 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

BOOK #13
Monday, 03/26/07 to Sunday, 04/01/07

ISBN-10: 0307387895
ISBN-13: 9780307387899

The Road  was announced as the latest Oprah Book Club pick, this week.  And, of course, it zoomed right to the top of all the bestseller charts.  I wanted to read the book, not so much because it is an Oprah pick, but because Cormac McCarthy is widely regarded as on of the best writers in the U.S. today... and those in the know are calling The Road McCarthy's masterpiece.

The Road  is essentially the chronicle of a few weeks of a father and son's journey across the dead post-apocalyptic wasteland of America.  McCarthy's stark. minimalist prose - his trademark - is entirely fitting with the sparsness of the nuclear wasteland in this story.  The first few paragraphs, beautiful and bleak, had me hooked:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

And it just gets better.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

OTHER REVIEWS:

"His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Vivid, eloquent . . . The Road is the most readable of [McCarthy's] works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization." —The New York Times Book Review

"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal." — Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. . . . Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear. The Road offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be." —The New York Times

"No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption. . . . [McCarthy] has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most." — The Boston Globe

"There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull . . . making [The Road] easily one of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter. . . . Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive. . . . The Road is a deeply imagined work and harrowing no matter what your politics." — Bookforum

"We find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences. . . . Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book." — Rocky Mountain News

"A dark book that glows with the intensity of [McCarthy's] huge gift for language. . . . Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness." — Chicago Tribune

"The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written." — The Christian Science Monitor

"The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real." — Time

"The Road is the logical culmination of everything [McCarthy]'s written." — Newsweek

"It's hard to think of [an apocalypse tale] as beautifully, hauntingly constructed as this one. McCarthy possesses a massive, Biblical vocabulary and he unleashes it in this book with painterly effect. . . . The Road takes him to a whole new level. . . . It will grip even the coldest human heart." — The Star-Ledger (Newark)

"McCarthy is a gutsy, powerful storyteller. . . . The writing throughout is magnificent." — Chicago Sun-Times

"Devastating. . . . McCarthy has never seemed more at home, more eloquent, than in the sere, postapocalyptic ash land of The Road. . . . Extraordinarily lovely and sad. . . . [A] masterpiece." —Entertainment Weekly

"His most compelling, moving and accessible novel since All the Pretty Horses. . . . McCarthy brilliantly captures the knife edge that fugitives in a hostile world stand on. . . . Amid this Godot-like bleakness, McCarthy shares something vital and enduring about the boy's spirit, his father's love and the nature of bravery itself." — USA Today

If you'd like to know more, you can CLICK HERE to visit Cormac McCarthy's website, or CLICK HERE to see all of The Road stuff on Oprah.com.