Bought: Nada, yet again. I’m getting better with the self-restraint thing. Living across the street from the library instead of a bookstore helps with that. Also, I joined Bookmooch, an online website which lets you give away books you don’t want and receive books on your wish list. So Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is coming my way for free and old college books I’ll never read again are going out. The only costs are shipping… so I’m sure I won’t do a lot of it, but it is exciting. Especially with some of the “rarer” books on my list.
From the library this month I read:
Here is New York by EB White – beautiful and moving, especially since I’m hoping to move there.
What we Talk about when we talk about love by Raymond Carver – I have always loved Raymond Carver, and I was finally able to read more of his “disturbing” stories, I’ll say...especially the title story.
Love Stories for the Rest of Us – this was a nice compilation that sold me on the title. A husband and wife team of editors compiled stories that represented love in everything but a traditional “darling” fashion. Really endearing and memorable stories from what I’ve read so far. I read one about a married couple that becomes enamored with a more glamorous couple and ultimately gains back their self-respect and autonomy in the relationship, one about a little girl who observes lesbians kissing for the first time and one about a housekeeper’s daughter that falls in love with the son of her mother’s employer. I highly recommend the collection.
And from my bookshelf I read:
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt.
This has been a beautiful, if slow, read. And as I’m originally from the south, they are more familiar than exotic characters populating the chapters. It’s definitely made me want to get back to the southern story I’ve been writing off-and-on for the last few months.
Since the bookmooch proposition works best with more “rare” books – any suggestions out there from those who have a rare find favorite, that’s never going to be sitting out on any Borders front table?
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4 comments:
I actually just wrote a post on books as well.
Really enjoyed Belcanto and Midnight. EB White is a classic. Funny enough, I'm also reading a collection of Carver short stories.
I love BookMooch! Here are a few books I really liked that are available (not from me I should add):
- Laurie Graham, GONE WITH THE WINDSORS -- a fictional diary by an upper-class woman in England in the 20s who is famous with the socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson, who would later marry the heir to the throne. The diary writer is not too perceptive, so it's a very funny book.
- Sean Wilsey, OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL -- it's a memoir of a guy who grew up in San Francisco; his parents divorced at a really young age, his mother became pretty unstable and dad married a woman who hated her new stepson. I'm really not doing this justice in the explanation, it's a really captivating book.
- Margaret Atwood, LADY ORACLE -- very moody weird novel about a woman who decides to fake her own death (this happens at the beginning of the book, and then she goes into why she has decided to do it).
That's so funny--I recently reread both Here Is New York and What We Talk About....
I've been using BookMooch to fill in all the classics I've overlooked, going by Random House's Modern Library Top 100 list.
thanks for the suggestions, ellen! i'm going to start mooching...
and I think I at one time tried to read through the Modern Library Top 100 list but gave up too soon... maybe i'll take a second look.
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