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Archive for June, 2008

The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

Posted in Chick Lit, Fiction, Liked it, booklove's reviews, tagged Add new tag, book reviews, books, garden spells, magic, reading, sugar queen on June 17, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Sarah Addison Allen takes chick lit and mixes it with a pinch of magic and a good dollop of whimsy to give us her second novel, The Sugar Queen. Josey Cirrini is 27 years old, unmarried, living with her mother, and she has a secret. Hidden in her bedroom is a closet filled with all [...]

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Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Posted in Book Dragon's reviews, Graphic Novels, Liked it, Nonfiction, tagged book reviews, books, graphic novel, Iran, Iran-Iraq War, Islamic Revolution, Marjane Satrapi, Mehri, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Mohsen Shakiba, reading, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Siamak Jari, Tehran on June 17, 2008 | 5 Comments »

With hopes that it doesn’t reflect poorly on my intelligence, I must admit that I always have loved graphic novels (also known as comic books by certain cretins who don’t understand the art form). Persepolis certainly falls within the description of a graphic novel and is the story of Marjane Satrapi as she grew up [...]

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BookLove on Twitter
- [@BookDragon] reviews The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart at BookLove http://wp.me/p7dvY-ak 1 week ago
- For fans of the magical books Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen - Sarah Addison Allen has a new book out - The Girl Who Chased the Moon :o) 4 weeks ago
- is excited to hear that Elizabeth Kostova author of the creepy vampire novel The Historian has a new book The Swan Thieves coming out in jan 1 month ago
- An interview with author Alex Bledsoe: http://bit.ly/UoJ9m 1 month ago
- Booklove reviews Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story by Carolyn Turgeon http://wp.me/p7dvY-ad 1 month ago
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BOOKLOVE

by Jerome Stern

I have just come from an exhibition that told me that books will be replaced by electronic libraries,
talking videos,
interactive computers,
cd-roms with thousands of volumes,
gigabytes of memory dancing on pixillated screens at which we will blearily stare into eternity.
And so, in the face of the future, I must sing the song of the book.

Nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright pictures,
fat upon my lap,
and turning glossy pages of giraffes and Gauguins,
penguins and pyramids.

I love wide atlases delineating the rise and fall of empires,
the trade routes from Kashgar to Samarkand.

I love heavy dictionaries,
their tiny pictures,
complicated columns,
minute definitions of incarnative and laniary, hagboat and fopdoodle.

I love the texture of pages,
the highgloss slickness of magazines as slippery as oiled eels,
the soft nubble of old books,
delicate india paper,
so thin my hands tremble trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves,
and the yellow cheap, coarse paper of mystery novels so gripping that I don’t care that the plane circles Atlanta forever,
because it is a full moon and I am stalking in the Arizona desert a malevolent shape-shifter.

I love the feel of ink on the paper,
the shiny varnishes,
the silky lacquers,
the satiny mattes.

I love the press of letters in thick paper,
the roughness sizzles my fingers with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags,
my hands caress the leather of old bindings crumbling like ancient gentlemen.

The books I hold for their heft,
to riff their pages,
to smell their smoky dustiness,
the rise of time in my nostrils.

I love bookstores,
a perfect madness of opportunity,
a lavish feast eaten by walking up aisles,
and as fast as my hand reaches out,
I reveal books’ intimate innards,
a doleful engraving of Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat,
a drawing of the 1914 T-head Stutz Bearcat whose owners shouted at rivals,
“There never was a car worser than the Mercer.”

I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink,
of the small jab of the hard cover corner at the edge of my diaphragm,
of the look of type,
of the flip of a page,
the sinful abandon of the turned down corner,
the reckless possessiveness of my marginal scrawl,
the cover picture—as much a part of the book as the contents itself,
like Holden Caulfield his red cap turned backwards, staring away from us,
at what we all thought we should become.

And I also love those great fat Bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,
the long graying sets of unreadable authors,
the tall books of babyhood enthusiastically crayoned,
the embossed covers of adolescence,
the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your pocket,
and the yellowing cookbooks of recipes for glace blanche dupont and Argentine mocha toast,
their stains and spots souvenirs of long evenings full of love and argument,
and the talk, like as not,
of books, books, books.

First aired as a monologue on National Public Radio. Author Jerome Stern was the director of the writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Fall in book love

Want to find time to read?

Fall in book love.

Seek out the books that fire your passions.

Follow your intellect and your heart.

Then time will find you.

Steve Leveen in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life.
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Archive for June, 2008

The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

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