Books: The Bookseller of Kabul
May 10, 2008 | Afghanistan,Books
I just finished reading The Bookseller of Kabul by Ã…sne Seierstad. Anyone else?
Posted by Becky @ 10:25 pm | 2 Comments
Books: The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
April 22, 2008 | Books
I just finished reading The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama. I fell in love with this story and everyone in it. Thank you, Gail, for an amazing reading experience.
Posted by Becky @ 1:43 pm | 2 Comments
Amazing travel experiences
March 31, 2008 | Books,Traveling
I can’t post photos, so how about a regular ol’ chat?
(IÂ can’t get my comments in e-mail, and I’ve been running into all kinds of suck with my blog lately. As in, my blog just quit and I lost this entire thing. But … that’s a whole other post.)
Alisa answered my question about most amazing travel experience and then asked what mine was.
Like Alisa, I don’t have just one.
1) My first trip to Norway and seeing the mountains and fjords from the plane. It took my breath away.
2) Making it to the top of a mountain. More than once.
3) Keeping in touch with people I’ve met while traveling, even though maybe the only thing we shared was coffee while waiting for the train.
4) Being pleasantly surprised to find the “reputation that preceded them” wasn’t always the case. French people who spoke English in France. (Shh! I’m not supposed to tell.) New Yorkers who took the time to give directions, some even walking out of their way to help.
5) Italy.
Posted by Becky @ 10:14 pm | 3 Comments
Books: Nineteen Minutes
Books
I just read Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult … in about 19 minutes. OK. It was more like a day and 19 minutes. Anyone else?
Books: Tales of a Female Nomad
March 28, 2008 | Books
I just finished reading Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman. Amazing.
What’s your most amazing travel experience?
Posted by Becky @ 10:25 am | 2 Comments
Revisiting Leslie Bennetts and The Feminine Mistake
March 16, 2008 | Books,Family,Work
It seems Nataly at Work It, Mom! is in a bit of a pickle. She signed up Leslie Bennetts to write a series of articles over the next 10 weeks called “10 Reasons Working Moms Should Feel Great About Themselves,” based on her book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? (now out in paperback). The first article was called, “Reason number one: Working women are happier.” Nataly is surprised by the reaction.
I won’t comment on the article. I’ll just send you to my review of The Feminine Mistake. I think that covers it.
Oh, wait. One thing. Who planted daffodils today?
Show of hands?
Posted by Becky @ 10:33 pm | 5 Comments
Books: Tales of a Female Nomad
Books
Up next:
Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman. I’ve read only 12 pages, and I like her already.
Stop looking at me like that, Steve
February 25, 2008 | Books,Stephen King
What’s it like to have a famous novelist as your neighbor? Do you hang out and drink coffee together? Do you sit there chatting and it suddenly becomes quiet, you look up and find him staring at you?
And then you say, “What are you looking at?”
And you don’t believe him when he says, “Oh, nothing.”
And then you say, “C’mon, Steve. Quit looking at me like that. Don’t be conjuring me up as some character in your next book. Especially if it has fangs and ghoul eyes.”
And then he grins.
And you get up to leave.
“Dangit. Why can’t you just have coffee like a normal person?”
OK. So maybe the folks on Casey Key don’t have coffee with Stephen King. Maybe they just wave when they see him strolling down the road reading a book. But they’re all excited about his latest book because its setting was inspired by Casey Key and … maybe … them.
What’s on page 123?
February 22, 2008 | Blogland games,Books
Magpie Musing wants to know what’s on page 123 of the first book within my reach. I’m surrounded by books. I have books on the shelves in front of me. Books in stacks on the floor beside me. Books stacked on top of the shelves. While I’m not actually reading it, the nearest book, however, is one I bought in Norway for the kids, Jostein Gaarder‘s Julemysteriet (The Christmas Mystery).
I have read two of his books Sophie’s World (Sofies verden), which was made into a movie, and The Solitaire Mystery (Kabalmysteriet). Here’s a little diversion from the main topic at hand. It’s a trailer to the movie Sofies verden, which apparently isn’t available in English yet. I guess it’s not so easy to get the Norwegian version either. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’d like to.
I saw Gaarder at some literature festival or other several years ago. I thought it was Bjørnsonfestivalen, but I still have a tote bag from then, and it has Bokbadet På Tur on it. So who knows.
Anyway. Here’s what’s on page 123 of the book that’s closest to me, Julemysteriet by Jostein Gaarder.
— Joda, svarte pappa. — Men det har jo egentlig ingen betydning hva hun het.
Den siste som sa noe før de måtte skynde seg å spise frokost, var Joakim.
— Jeg synes det har ganske stor betydning, sa han. — For ogsÃ¥ damen pÃ¥ bildet het Elisabet.
Pappa doesn’t think it matters what her name is. Joakim, on the other hand, does. He things it matters a lot because the woman in the picture is named Elisabet.Â
If you want to know what’s on page 123 of books I’m actually reading, here are a couple of passages.
In the fall of 2004, when the kidnapping started, it became very necessary not to be publicly identified on the streets as a foreigner. I wear a scarf, I wear Iraqi-style clothing. I don’t go with the whole abaya [the traditional full-body garment for Islamic women] because I don’t walk like I’m an Iraqi that’s in an abaya. — Liz Sly, Chicago Tribune
That’s from Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists who Covered it, edited by Mike Hoyt, John Palattella and the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review.
I kept a blue Magic Marker with me at all times. My favorite tags were “Lady Cupcake, Slob Killer”; “Lady Cupcake, 60’s Killer” (to denote “60’s Killer,” I’d write “60’s” and then mark a giant X over the 60’s); or “Lady Cupcake — Gangsta Ca-rip Cuzzz.” Gangstas also taught me how to make money by “working a store.”
That’s from A Piece of Cake, a memoir by Cupcake Brown, who practices law in San Francisco. I’m almost halfway through her book. I just read about her third pregnancy/second abortion. Her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage brought on by a severe beating by girls in her foster home … when she was 13. That was after turning tricks, a stint in the hospital for alcohol poisoning and running away repeatedly from the abusive foster home, where her biological father put her after her mother died when she was 11.
Even though I will eventually read about her graduating magna cum laude from college without a high-school diploma or certificate of General Educational Development and her other successes, I can’t help feeling she lives with her past as a big part of her present. And that makes sense, I guess. Most of us carry around a part of our 5-year-old, 10-year-old or 15-year-old selves, don’t we? When I was reading The Glass Castle, though, I felt the author was looking back on a much older story from a different time and place. Brown tells her story with such gusto and bravado that it seems she’s not as far away from her past. Two very different perspectives, yet the authors are about the same age. Maybe the difference is that Brown’s past is a big part of her current life because she uses “all of the years of negative experiences, coupled with the positives, to share with others how — even though it seems impossible — the hopes and dreams of anyone really can come true” to speak to others around the country.
I’d love to hear what Brown is reading, but I understand she’s incredibly busy. Oh, what the heck. I’ll tag some of my favorite authors. Let’s just see if they (or their publishers) ever check their incoming links.
If anyone else wants to play, show me what’s on your page 123.
These are the rules.
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five people.
Posted by Becky @ 2:47 pm | 3 Comments
