Today’s teaser is from Soul Enchilada by David Macinnis Gill, p. 241.

We all shook hands and said thanks. I didn’t mind her kicking us to the curb. There wasn’t nothing else to say, and it was time for me to suck it up and take care of business. In junior English, we read this book about a mean-assed old lady who made this neighbor boy come over and read to her every day. Turned out, she was addicted to morphine, and she was using the reading to help kick the drug. She didn’t want to pass on in debt to anybody or anything. That’s exactly how I felt. I didn’t want to end my life beholden to anybody. But I didn’t want to give up trying, either. If I could only find somebody, anybody who could stand up to Beals the way that Old Scratch did.

I’m almost done with this one, so I can mostly write a review. Soul Enchilada is kind of like girl-from-the-hood meats Christopher Moore. Eighteen-year-old Bug has to save her soul, which was hocked for a Cadillac by her no-good grandfather. Good use of dialogue – you can really hear the different characters speak. A bit of word play. Overall, a cute book, but I won’t count it as a favorite.

From Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb, p. 187

“No, I didn’t know. Really?” My stomach twisted. In a shadowy corner of my mind, memories of my night with Felix peeked through – his lips on mine, his fingers. Ugh. What had I been thinking? Kelsey called him the Boy Whose Fingers Have Gone Where No Fingers Have Gone Before. It was disturbing on a staggering number of levels that my father’s best man would be someone I’d made out with and, even worse, would soon be related to. I’d never told Alex nor my father what we’d done; I hoped if I stopped thinking about it, it would just go away. After all, Felix seemed to have the same attitude. The couple of times we’d seen each other since, he’d ignore me. He was probably just as embarrassed as I was.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s quote is from One Night of Madness by Stokes McMillan. This self-published book tells about a crime that took place in my home county in Mississippi in the 1950s. A real-live To Kill a Mockingbird in a way – just reversed. In this crime, the victims were African American and the perpetrators Caucasian. Having grown up the granddaughter of one of the Circuit Court judges (a position my father now holds), I recognize many names in this story (including my father’s, who is listed in the acknowledgments). However close to my heart, I am reading this book through the eyes of a librarian, though, and I must say, so far I am very much enjoying it!

As the cold air hit her bare arms and legs, Verlene jumped to the floor and charged past Leon. She ran to her traditional place of refuge when frightened as a little girl — her mother’s bed; crawling over Mary Ella, Nell, and James, she scampered to the spot of the mattress at the room’s corner.

p. 148

I went to my library’s website and went to our downloadable media page. First off, I was very pleased to see that it is actually mobile-device friendly! I searched for a book to download, easily added it to my card and checked it out. When I clicked download, it opened the Overdrive Media Console app and added it to my library. It was that easy! There was one more step that wasn’t perfectly clear, but I figured it out easily enough. It doesn’t automatically download the parts of the book, but I was prompted when I clicked on the title to download all or part of the book.

There are mobile apps for Android and Blackberry, too, and I can’t wait to share this information with my coworkers. Not everyone has these devices, but it will be such a convenience for those that do!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s quote should be my last from The Autobiography of Henry VIII, as I am less than 100 pages from finishing this tome. I apologize for my absence lately. Work has been so insanely busy that I honestly forget which day it is. There has been a change, though, and I think I might get my sanity back, if the past two days are any indication. Hopefully this will also mean more blogging.

We became husband and wife at four in the long summer afternoon at Oatlands, a royal manor house in Weybridge, about fifteen miles from London. The ceremony was entirely private, in contrast to that gaudy mistake with Anne of Cleves.

p. 678

This particular marriage was number 5, to Catherine Howard, by the way.

However, like last time, I *do* have some time to cheer!

So here’s a big R-E-A-D!!! Hope everyone’s having fun! And maybe, just maybe, I can join the reading in the fall!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s quote comes, again,  from The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George. I’m sure this trend will continue for the next few weeks, since this is such a tome! It’s good, though! I’m posting this quote for the pleasure of my husband, the astronomer, and am adding in a extra sentence.

Now I waited impatiently for More upon the flat roof directly over the royal apartments, which I had fitted up for my observatory. I had an astrolabe, a torquetum, and a solar quadrant mounted there, and a table for my charts and books. This roof afforded an exceptionally unobstructed view of the sky, as the Palace was on high ground far above all the surrounding trees, and the diffuse, distracting lights of London were five miles upstream.

p. 120

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s quote comes from The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George.

The wedding banquet following the ceremony was splendid. Enormous tables ran down the entire length of the Hall at Westminster, heavy with gold plate and extravagant dishes–three-tiered castles, pheasants, gilded swans, replicas of lakes–all created by the King’s clever pastry artists.

p. 47

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s quote comes from a bound galley of Drake’s Bay by T.A. Roberts.  Since my page numbers don’t correspond with Goodreads, I’m sure they differ from the published edition.

I drove Molly downtown and waited while she found a cab. By the time I got back to the boat it was dark, and I had a peaceful moment contemplating Drake, portholes aglow and the sounds of Corelli drifting up the companionway.

Drake’s Bay by T.A. Roberts, p. 54, bound galley

I received The Swan Thieves from Library Thing Early Reviewers. I was very much looking forward to this book, as I really enjoyed The Historians. There were some similarities between the two books, but for the most part they were very different. The main similarities were the inclusion of letters as a form of storytelling and the jump from the present to the past.

It’s been a month since I finished the book, and I am having a hard time remembering what I wanted to say. More than anything, The Swan Thieves is a character study of Robert Oliver, an artist who tried to attack a painting in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, who has been institutionalized and will not speak. It is narrated by Robert’s psychiatrist, who goes to great lengths to figure out Robert’s “story” and why he felt the need to attack a work of art. The book is not at all plot driven, and it can be a bit slow at times. It took me over 2 weeks to read and there were times when I wanted to abandon it.

Kostova’s writing is fantastic, and the characters really come to life. I felt bad for the women in Robert’s life and for Robert, as well.

Overall, I’m not really sure how I felt about this book. I wasn’t sorry I read it; in fact, I’m glad I read it. It just left me with kind of a “hmmm.”

I read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead because it is on our short list of books to nominate for the Dublin Literary Award and was strongly recommended by a coworker.

While billed as a novel, Sag Harbor reads more like a series of essays about a middle class African American boy’s experiences during summers (particularly the summer of (I believe) 1985) in Sag Harbor, NY.

Whitehead’s characterization and ability create a sense of place is incredible. However, nothing ever really happens. Sure, there are incidents around which each chapter centers, but plot is non-existent. This kept me from thoroughly enjoying the book.

First of all, I am sad that I am just now writing a review of The Help, which I finished over a week and a half ago. It really deserves a post of its own, but I’m afraid I’ll never get to it. I may have to revisit it in a separate post at some point.

I was born in 1972, 55 miles away from Jackson, MS, where The Help is set. I KNOW these characters. I have read reviews that say they are caricatures. No they are not. That is not to say that everyone living in MS in the time period was like this (or was like this 10-15 years later, the time period I am familiar with), but the society from which these ladies (I specifically mean the white ladies) came was filled with people like this. I suspect it still is, to an extent. I’ve also read reviews that say the dialect was wrong or asked why the black women’s narratives were written in dialect while the white women’s weren’t. Maybe those people were prickled by it, or maybe they couldn’t make the words on the page do what Stockett had intended. For me, I could HEAR those women. I could hear the difference between Aibileen and Minny. And there absolutely was a dialect written for the white women. I could hear THOSE women, too. Especially the difference between Celia (who came from poor, white trash) and the society women.

This book swooped in and took me right back to my childhood. Our family didn’t have “help” (it wasn’t as common in the 70s/80s as it was a decade before) but my grandparents had had domestic help, for sure. There’s a story behind that one, my claim to “fame,” if you will. I used to be very proud of this link to a certain very famous woman who was born in my town in MS, but over the years I’ve realized that isn’t necessarily something to shout from the rooftops. My best friend’s family did have help. The book made me wonder about how she felt. How she was treated.

The Help ranks in the top 2 or 3 books I’ve ever read, and I have become an evangelist for it. If you haven’t read this one, do it. You won’t be sorry!

On to lighter things. Lights, Camera, Amalee is the 2nd book by singer-songwriter Dar Williams. This one picks up the year after the first book, Amalee. I didn’t like this one as well as the first one, but it was still enjoyable.

After inheriting a huge champagne bottle of coins from a grandmother Amalee only met once, on her deathbed, she decides  to make a documentary film about endangered species. It’s one of those books that mixes science in with fiction, makes you learn things without being preachy. In the book, Amalee also deals with her feelings about having never known her mother (the daughter of the grandmother who left her the coins) and also her first crush. Cute book.