Category: books

  • 100 books! (a.k.a. Jana shows off her booklust)

    A meme from Alisonwonderland. The ones I’ve read are in bold:
    1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
    2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
    3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
    4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
    5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
    6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
    7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)
    8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
    9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
    10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
    11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling)
    12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
    13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
    14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
    15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
    16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
    17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
    18. The Stand (Stephen King)
    19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)
    20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
    21. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
    22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
    23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
    24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
    25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
    26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
    27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
    28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
    29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
    30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
    31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
    32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
    33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
    34. 1984 (George Orwell)
    35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
    36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
    37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
    38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
    39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
    40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
    41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
    42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
    43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
    44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
    45. Bible
    46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
    47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
    48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
    49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
    50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
    51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
    52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
    53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
    54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
    55. The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)
    56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
    57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)
    58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
    59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
    60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
    61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
    62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
    63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
    64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
    65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
    66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
    67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
    68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
    69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
    70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
    71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Helen Fielding)
    72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
    73. Shogun (James Clavell)
    74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
    75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
    76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
    77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
    78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
    79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
    80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
    81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
    82. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
    83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
    84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
    85. Emma (Jane Austen)
    86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
    87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
    88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
    89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
    90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
    91. In the Skin of a Lion (Michael Ondaatje)
    92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
    93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
    94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
    95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
    96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
    97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
    98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
    99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
    100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

    I hereby tag all of you do do the same with this list on your blog :)

  • Elephant Loves

    May I highly recommend the latest Speaking of Faith podcast with an interview with Quaker biologist Katy Payne.

    Katy is also the author of Silent Thunder. Katy was the first biologist to discover that elephants communicate with each other over long distances through sounds that humans can’t hear. Katy attributes her findings to her ability to “listen” to silence, as she learned in Silent Worship with Friends.

    Her podcast speaks of her research with whales, the environmental degredation in Africa, death, depression,and what we all can do to help preserve the biodiversity of our world. And it’s just breathtakingly beautiful.

  • literary loose ends

    For a way-better-than mine summary and discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian [warning: not for the faint of heart], see DavidK’s blog.

    For those of you who are eager to get going on the pilgrim book club, let’s start with “The Ones Who Walk From Omelas”, which you can find online here.* I hereby nominate DavidK (self-avowed LeGuin fan) to write the first post on the story, and then we can all chime in with our observations, comments, queries, and high-fives.

    Note: All book group posts can now be easily found under the sidebar category of “Book Club.”

    *Hat tip to Brooke for the link.

  • Because today we must all raise our glasses to Virginia

    From a must-listen podcast, The Writer’s Almanac (5 min of daily literary pleasure):

    It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. Her brothers all went to the best universities, and she wrote letters to them about her reading. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

    Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

    She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. She wrote to a friend, “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!” Later that summer, she wrote in her diary, “There’s no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

    Woolf’s next book was her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

  • another post about sex…

    My friend Chris Bigelow and some of his buddies published an LDS humor column, “The Sugar Beet” (like The Onion for Mormons) for several years and have combined the best of their work into The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer.

    I’ve reprinted a bit of one of their funnier articles here, some positions from the Mormon Kama Sutra:

    Retention and Reactivation
    The Stripling Warrior
    Urim and Thummim
    The PPI
    Hold to the Rod
    The Secret Combination
    Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing
    Hie to Kolob
    The Rameumptom

    To this list I would add:
    The Bishop’s Daughter
    The RM

    So I’ve been trying to come up with some similarly funny positions using Quaker terminology and I haven’t come up with much–perhaps I don’t know the lingo well enough yet. Perhaps ya’ll can chime in with some of your own ideas?

  • Bibliophilia


    My book-loving friends:

    I have a proposal for a pilgrim book group*, where we (meaning all of you interested pilgrimgirl readers out there) could select a text and have a book chat together. Similar to the Mindonfire book group, our discussion would include meetings online, in person, and via webcam.

    I would like to propose that we begin our group with two readings from Ursula LeGuin:
    1) her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
    2) her novel The Dispossessed.

    I chose these particular works because both grapple with utopian communities and the limitations of such.

    Ok, so I know it wasn’t very democratic of me to choose the first readings myself, but I hope y’all won’t hold that against me. So please chime in if you’re interested in joining in the discussion and then we’ll make some more concrete plans for structuring our analysis of LeGuin’s stories.

    *Thanks go to RyanH for being the catalyst for this group

  • violent tendencies

    [Warning: this is not one of my typically upbeat posts. Some of the quoted material from this book might even give offense to my gentler readers]

    So my friend RyanH suggested that I read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. We were talking about my fondness for HBO’s Deadwood (an awful-ly violent show, but wickedly well-written) and my penchant for all things 19th-century and West-ish. As I was looking for some good reading material over the holiday break, I picked up a copy of BM from the library and started reading.

    This book is not for the faint at heart. McCarthy’s writing is cruelly compelling. Nearly every sentence is savage. Plowing through this text was sadistic and nightmarish. I put it down several times, realizing that it was just TOO intense. An example of the way gore oozes from every page:

    They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. (44-45)

    So what to make of this book? The setting is the Southwest around 1850, when bounties were awarded for killing Indians. The story follows a group of ragtag men who go on a scalping mission, traveling throughout the dismal borderlands region in search of victims. The plotline is a loosely connected series of encounters between the bounty hunters and various groups of renegades and natives.

    This is definitely a man’s tale; women are rarely mentioned or are figured as props, as with this woman:

    In the square two of the Delawares and the outrider Webster were squatting in the dust with a weathered old woman the color of pipeclay. Dry old crone, half naked, her paps like wrinkled aubergines from under the shawl she wore. (97).

    All in all, I’m not sure of the value of this text. There is no joy, no redemption, no catharsis. Just the weary weight of so much suffering.

  • Bible Study

    As part of John’s Mind on Fire book group, I’m posting a brief summary/reaction to the Introduction of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus

    First of all, this Intro is a journey narrative so I feel particularly drawn to it. Ehrman recalls his changing faith in Christianity—from an apathetic Episcopal (his natal faith) to an evangelical Christian during his teen years. As his desire for a greater understanding of the New Testament brought him to Moody Bible College and later to Princeton Theological Seminary, he was plagued with the same, seemingly unanswerable, question:

    “How does it help us to say that the Bible is inerrant the word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God correctly inspired, but only the words copied by scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes incorrectly?”(7).

    His answer to this question is hinted at in the Intro, as we know that Ehrman no longer believes in the Bible as an infallible book, rather he believes that it is a human book, written to meet specific human needs. Thus, _Misquoting Jesus_ is his attempt to explain for a lay audience “how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so.” That all sounds very interesting. But what I’m looking forward to is the answer(s) to why the scribes changed the Bible. In my mind, that is the more compelling question and I’m curious to see how Ehrman will tackle it.

  • for she who suffers

    From a recent Women for Women flyer:

    ~80% of all refugees and displaced persons globally are women and children

    ~Rape is used as a tool of genocide and weapon of war: 20K Bosnian women raped during the Balkan War; 500K Rwandese women raped during the ’94 genocide; 100K+ of Congolese women raped in the DRC war

    ~70% of the world’s 1.3 billion poor are women

    ~90% of today’s war casualties are civilians, 75% of whom are women and children.

    These are each shocking statistics. As I sit here reading through each one and trying to wrap my head around the suffering contained in these few lines I am completely humbled by my own good fortune, and at the same time I am ANGRY that this is my world, our world, in which this is happening.

    On the advice of TanyaSue, last week I read Nectar in a Sieveand I thought a lot about the protagonist, Rukmani, and the vicissitudes of economic uncertainty in India that routinely left her and her children with only a handful of rice to eat each day. She watched family members die from malnutrition as she struggled to eke out a quiet life under intolerably harsh circumstances.

    This book made me question: at what price do I enjoy this warm apartment that I sit in as I type on my laptop, pantry cupboards full, nearly every modern convenience at my fingertips. What right do I have to live in such privilege?

    Awhile back I read of a young man about my age who decided to live as simply as possible, that he could give more of his money to those that suffer. He had only two sets of clothing. He slept on a mat on the floor with a thin blanket. He gave away all of his possessions except for those necessary in his nonprofit work.

    What do you think? Are you tempted to abandon your comforts for the sake of another?

  • clothes. clothes. clothes…

    Where do you draw the line between wearing clothes that are functional and comfortable, and those that might flatter your figure better or be more fashionable?

    I picked up a copy of Adena Halpern’s Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown from the library yesterday, thinking that it might be an interesting rumination on the subject of clothes. Well, it was an interesting book if one wants to learn about the many designer outfits of the author, and how her well-heeled boyfriends have responded to her fashion choices. But not enlightening to me.

    I’m sort of a fashion scrooge, I think.

    Well, really, I love beautiful clothes. I enjoy looking through catalogs and fantasizing about owning cashmere sweaters, dresses of velvet and satin, or the perfect pair of butt-flattering jeans. And even though I do regularly spend money on clothes, I do so quite begrudgingly and with loads of guilt. The guilt doesn’t so much come from the money that I spend (although that can certainly be a factor). Rather the guilt comes from buying a commodity that, deep-down, I see as superficial, even worthless. Because I know that my body rarely needs new clothing. I have a closet and a chest of drawers full of items that I can wear for warmth and protection. So the guilt of from knowing that any clothing that I purchase is solely for my vanity. I do not NEED new clothes. So why do I keep buying them?

    And I also know that clothing manufacturers routinely exploit women in developing countries, that many cloth fibers are grown in ways that pollute our environment, and that the modest amount of money I spend on clothes each month could easily support a family in Africa.

    So, taking all of that into account, what’s a girl to do? Blow off fashion and continue wearing (and re-wearing) older clothes? Only buy from environmentally-responsible companies? Buy clothes with impunity, knowing that one’s choices are hardly a fraction of a drop in the bucket compared to worldwide consumption?

  • criticism

    Yesterday I found myself in two different settings where the LDS Church was criticized.

    The first was a graduate seminar. We were discussing Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale. Both the professor and several class members questioned Ulrich’s objectivity as a historian because of her Mormonism. There were critical comments about polygamy, patriarchy, and Mormon racism. Because of recent changes in my own religious identity, I found it difficult to speak up and defend the LDS Church. However, I did describe my unabashed admiration for Laurel and her work, but I didn’t address the critique of Mormonism.

    Late yesterday evening I was at my AROOM book group when several of the women were bashing LDS patriarchy. For whatever reason, this really hurt my feelings. I wanted to tell those who were speaking to stop. But I didn’t. In hindsight I feel like I should have said something, but I’m not even sure what that something is/was.

    Oddly, now that I’m out of the Mo church I find myself reluctant to criticize it. Not that I don’t see its faults, but I’m so happy to finally be able to let go of the anger I felt as a Mormon, that it’s hard for me to find myself in the midst of the criticism and not feel dragged down by it–as if it is disrupting my current joy.

  • obsessive-compulsive

    A quiz from John:

    What Kind of Reader Are You?

    Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm

    You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.
    Dedicated Reader

    Literate Good Citizen

    Book Snob

    Non-Reader

    Fad Reader

    What Kind of Reader Are You?
    Create Your Own Quiz

    So this description is only partially correct. Other people’s grammar mistakes don’t make me crazy. what makes me crazy is when my students don’t even bother to spellcheck their papers. Sheesh.