has 25 followers and is following 22 people
|
|
||||
I am going to give Anna Karenina another try. I started reading it many years ago and quit.
Your review made me decide to attempt it again in 2013. Thanks.
Hello,
Dracula: Hearts of Stone (Dracula is a good guy)
We start with a shiny new pot of boiling water and add too many evil vampires, and not enough of the good biters. Toss in one suicidal Dracula; add a cup of mayhem and a dash of romance. Oh yes, and a pinch of mirth. Stir lovingly and you have a novel by A. J. Gallant. If it sounds like the recipe for you then you must read Dracula: Hearts of Stone.
Please check out my author page for excerpts:
http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/a-j-gallant.html
Unrealistic or not my writing gives me hope. But with something like 50 000 books published a month it is a little discouraging. I can just picture my book underneath that pile being crushed. I didn’t think there were that many writers out there. Must be a factory out there producing them like peanut butter cookies.
I loved your comment about the Bean Tree (hug that book) It was great. Looking forward to stealing some your shelf too. :)
lol Obsessive is "normal" to me!!
That's cool... I hadn't thought of uploading ALL of my books. I've just been throwin' up the new reviews. That would be fun to match my shelf!! Nice obsession!
I enjoyed Redemption in Indigo - it was a book club read, so a treasure to find that I might not have otherwise. Kind of exotic and fantastically matter-of-fact. Fun book and quick to read.
I will have to explore a little. So far I've just posted some reviews when I remember!! Do you add character details and stuff?
yea!! I'm terribly new and lost, but enthusiastic!! :-D
Hi Trish, I was thrilled to find you on Shelfari. I was reading reviews on a book I can't recall the name of. I browsed your shelfs, read some reviews, noticed the books we had in common and realized I had a new friend. Have a great day and I hope you have time for some reading.
Looking forward to your review of Brahmin's Dream, which I picked up recently. I am a sucker for books about India, and this one has the plus of a coming of age theme to it. Not a single review of this from Shelfer folks and only one Amazion review.
Yay! Still trying to get up to speed with Shelfari and the other book sites - I feel like after I write a review, I have to plan for an additional thirty more minutes posting it everywhere! :)
And thanks for the welcome to the site! I definitely can't wait to see the books you post as well! :)
I'll try to write more of them then. It's like shouting into the void. I hadn't tried to add many friends on here, which wasn't making the site very useful. I'm adding people to see if it's a better experience.
Ha! I never think anyone actually reads those little reviews. Thanks for letting me know. :-)
Every so often I listen to a book from the Librivox project. It's all public domain stuff, and volunteers each take a chapter, so you sometimes get a different accent every few minutes. That can be pretty fun. Much better than fake accents.
The Many Faces of Joy!
Joy is contagious; it can spread like a forest fire, whipped by a high, hot wind. Joy can be shared in a crowd or it can be savoured all alone. Joy can bellow or it can fall soft as a kitten's tread. Joy can excite or it can comfort. Joy can be sensuous or it can spring from the intellect. Joy can bewitch. Joy can be sweet or it can be zesty, euphoric, giddy. It can teach, it can heal and it can lay to rest old pain.
In a world so darkened by suffering and uncertainty, joy can brighten our heavens and make life worth living all over again.
( Author Unknown )
I was very disappointed, I really liked the book cover and the summary sounded really interesting, but ugh! not pretty!
Well said on "Walk in the Woods". "In a Sunburned Country" was also damned funny, but it didn't have that parody of the mythic journey into the self of the Appalachian Trail journey. Echoes of the "Snow Leopard" meets "Heart of Darkness", but totally deflated, with claustrophobia, blisters, and bears instead of Tibetan vistas and gurus in the bush.
You whetted me to mine Bryson some more. Just scored "Neither Here Nor There" from my county seat library (a metropolis of 4,000).
Hope you get to and enjoy Walk in the Woods. I just picked up at the library his one on Europe (Neither Here Nor There) and rural America (The Lost Continent). Have due date to return a book always trumps what you have on a real shelf waiting.
By coinicidence I got Olive Kitteridge as a library sale, which you are pursuing as well.
The de Waals on biology of empathy on you new addition is not to be found in libraries (as typical). Tell me if it is worth the dollars.
Kind regards
The
Wonderful hit on Bryden, as I never heard of him. My new Safari friend Rory had Ambrose's book on Crazy Horse on his Shelf, which I had only read a retrospective essay on in his last wonderful reflection on his whole career of writing (last book before he died). Matthiessen, a special author for me, also has a book on Crazy Horse I will have to track down.
Rory also had MacMurtry's book called "Books". I have read 25 of this author, a definite fave, but hadn't run across that one. He was a book dealer. Writers in that profession also include John Dunning and Louise Erdrich. Erdrich is also a special favorite who covers a lot of Native American themes. Recently I picked up a memoir/travel book of hers, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of my Ancestors. May be your thing, but I have a few unread novels of hers moving closer to the nightstand.
Pearl has a sequel to book Lust called More Book Lust. I feel her 1-2 page categories should be what discussion groups on Shelfari should be, with one or a few sentences about why selected books are good and which ones relate to others in interesting ways. I only tried one other book-on-books, Sara Nelson's "Som Many, Books, So Little Time", a journal about reading 50 books in a year. Couldn't breach it--only 2 I'd read were Disgrace and Nickle and Dimed.
Trish: Thanks for accepting me to your book world. Here are some alignments I see off the bat.
I agree with your high ratings on Thunderbolt Kid, Teacher Man, and Year of Magical Thinking. Please turn me on to more to quality non-fiction like those. I went decades only reading fiction and only in last 5 years turned to non-fiction under the influence of a former wife who was an essayist.
From your massive to-do list, Found Walk in the Woods and Sunburned County deligthful and funny and Thirteen Moons rich and rewarding. As a former neuroscientist, I will have to check out Mind Wide Open. Have "This Cold Heaven" at hand, and your review may nudge me over to it (books need such help to work their way to the nightstand). The Haddon on my to-do list, but I don't own it and libraries here in rural Maine are very limited. Your view on Larsson's Dragon Tattoo may sway me from some negative reviews by others (but movie was so good--another dark tale that uplifts).
Funny how you rate down when a book is too dark, but gave "The Road' a good thumbs up. After thriving on McCarthy's dark vision for 6 or 8 books, The Road for me crossed the line. But I was in agreement with you when my attempt last month to finish Mice and Men failed; I was also downed with little redemption by The Reader.
Ones I read from your list that I rate higher than you did (merely taste differences?): Cold Mountain, Poisonwood Bible, Cider House Rules, Secret Life of Bees, To the Lighthouse. Maybe I am not the same me that read the last one decades ago, because I did the "Waves" a few months ago and was not attaining nirvana.
Got me curious about "No Touch Monkey". For a funny travel book that elucidates a bit about Muslim world contrast with the West, you might want to try Elinor Burkett's "So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places". She charts her experience with the peoples in central Asia, Iraq, and Afganistan in post-9/11 period. Maybe a bit breezy and some of a "Perils of Pauline" cast to it (and one reviewed tarred it with ignorant, ugly-American brush), but I enjoyed the ride and got some good laughs.
Hello Trish, Did you see they made a tv movie about Pillars of the Earth. It is showing on a cable channel here, I think Starz channel?? I am almost offended, because there is no way for them to do it justice, but part of me would like to see it too! Morbid curiosity I guess.
I love how you worded what I feel now that I have a little distance from it. I have always loved the father son relationship, that was the only constant that kept them going, and me going, was their love for each other, and that is all any of us ever have in our daily struggles, is our love. I also love the though of a bright spot being the good in the people who took the boy in and the possibilities of a future. I really did appreciate the thought and emotion the book evoked, good and bad!
