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Archive for April, 2009

Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

Posted in Book Dragon's reviews, Fiction, Loved it, tagged alcoholism, book reviews, books, children of alcoholics, coming-of-age, Katie Ivene, North Carolina Writers, reading, Virginia Kate Carey on April 20, 2009 | 6 Comments »

Virginia Kate Carey has come home to West Virginia to release her mother’s ashes to the wind, but the feral Katie Ivene will not be laid to rest so gently. Powerful as a hurricane roaring through the lives of her husband and three children, Katie Ivene left an alcoholic trail of emotional devastation in her path, [...]

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A.D. 62: Pompeii by Rebecca East

Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, It Was OK, booklove's reviews, tagged book reviews, books, Fiction, Pompeii, reading, Roman Empire, time travel, Vesuvius on April 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »

It’s no secret that I like time travel themes (see my reviews of Mary Modern and The Mirror). This one sends bookish Harvard grad Miranda back to the first century Roman empire, and lands her in the ocean near the doomed city of Pompeii. Caught in a fishing net, she is soon sold to a wealthy slave owner, Marcus [...]

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In the Forests of Serre by Patricia A. McKillip

Posted in Book Dragon's reviews, Fantasy, Fiction, Loved it, tagged book reviews, books, Euan, Fantasy, Gyre, Patricia A. McKillip, Ronan, Serre, Sidonie, Unciel on April 1, 2009 | 7 Comments »

When I was twelve-years-old (yes, my Wild Things, I was not hatched old; it only seems that way) I was browsing the stacks at the Reidsville Public Library and found a slim paperback book entitled The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip. It was my first fantasy, and that novel led me to Peter [...]

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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 April, 2009

Tender Graces by Kathryn Magendie

A.D. 62: Pompeii by Rebecca East

In the Forests of Serre by Patricia A. McKillip

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