Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
It’s summer time, summer time, suuuummer time! We have waited so long to be able to have the window open at night with the sound of frogs to sleep by that we celebrate summer with goofy songs. "Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer..."
I realize that many people who are packing for vacation are using some kind of e-reader that fits very nicely into the beach bag so even tomes can be carried to the beach without breaking your arms. In any case, it is that time of year for us to choose what books we want when we slide down into the beach chair by the lake or pool or on the boat.
Do you want to take something brand new that everyone is talking about, something that you have been meaning to read and now have time for, or a rag-tag much loved book that you have read before and it is calling your name again?
By popular demand, beach books are supposed to be fun, light-weight, easy to lay down books, but many of us want absorbing books that also make us think. Whichever kind you like, it is fun trying to decide which one to take. Choosing a good book from the TBR pile or finding one at the library or bookstore to take with us is part of the fun of planning the vacation.
Some possibilities for my beach bag:
Non-fiction
Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
I having been looking forward to this one.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.
Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.
TIME magazine called The Black Count "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." It is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.
Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
This book is large for the beach, but I am willing to struggle a bit.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
The definitive edition of the letters—many previously unpublished—of England’s greatest comic writer.
P. G. Wodehouse wrote some of the greatest comic masterpieces of all time. So, naturally, we find the same humor and wit in his letters. He offers hilarious accounts of living in England and France, the effects of prohibition, and how to deal with publishers. He even recounts cricket matches played while in a Nazi internment camp (Wodehouse wanted to show the stiff upper lip of the British in the toughest situations).
Over the years, Wodehouse corresponded with relatives, friends, and some of the greatest figures of the twentieth century: Agatha Christie, Ira Gershwin, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The letters are arranged chronologically with intersecting sections of biography written by Sophie Ratcliffe. This is the only book you will need to understand the man behind the characters.
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin. I had heard about her and just received my first book about her in the mail.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.
The captivating subject of Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars gives her personal account of living with autism, and tells how her extraordinary gift of animal empathy has transformed her world. of photos & line drawings.
Fantasy
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is new, but it has been sitting on my TBR pile for a while. It is heavy so I would have to hoist the bag on my back to drag this one with me and yet it would not be used up too fast.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
In his critically acclaimed novel Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay told a vivid and powerful story inspired by China’s Tang Dynasty. Now, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author revisits that invented setting four centuries later with an epic of prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman battling in her own way, to find a new place for women in the world – a world inspired this time by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.
After Rome by Morgan Llywelyn
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
After more than four hundred years of Roman rule, the island its conquerors called Britannia was abandoned—left to its own devices as the Roman empire contracted in a futile effort to defend itself from the barbarian hordes encroaching upon its heart. As Britannia falls into anarchy and the city of Viroconium is left undefended, two cousins who remained behind when the imperial forces withdrew pursue very different courses in the ensuing struggle to unite the disparate tribes and factions throughout the land.
Passionate, adventurous Dinas recruits followers and dreams of kingship. Thoughtful Cadogan saves a group of citizens when Saxons invade and burn Viroconium, then becomes the reluctant founder and leader of a new community that rises in the wilderness. The two cousins could not be more different, but their parallel stories encapsulate the era of a new civilization struggling to be born.
The Blade Reforged by Kelly McCullough will be out by June 25th, the fourth of a series. I really like Aral.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
… Aral has learned that one of the few people willing to help him in his darkest days has been imprisoned by Maylien’s uncle, King Thauvik. Aral knows he can’t let an old friend die, but the alternative is to return to the life he left years ago. It was the death of Thauvik’s half brother that earned Aral the name Kingslayer, and now he is thrust into a war that will see no end until he lives up to his name…
Broken Blade
Bared Blade
Crossed Blades
I could add Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm into the bag which is also in paperback.
I still have Wool by Hugh Howey on my TBR pile, too. I have been looking at it for quite a while and it looks like a good book to read on the beach.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
In a ruined and toxic landscape, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo’s rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.
His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in law, whose special knack is fixing machines. Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. The silo is about to confront what its history has only hinted about and its inhabitants have never dared to whisper. Uprising.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
This one will make me focus…
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan just arrived in the mail.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
Marie Brennan begins a thrilling new fantasy series in A Natural History of Dragons, combining adventure with the inquisitive spirit of the Victorian Age.
You, dear reader, continue at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart—no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments—even at the risk of one’s life—is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. . . .
All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth and misunderstanding into the clear light of modern science. But before she became the illustrious figure we know today, there was a bookish young woman whose passion for learning, natural history, and, yes, dragons defied the stifling conventions of her day.
Here at last, in her own words, is the true story of a pioneering spirit who risked her reputation, her prospects, and her fragile flesh and bone to satisfy her scientific curiosity; of how she sought true love and happiness despite her lamentable eccentricities; and of her thrilling expedition to the perilous mountains of Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever.
Mystery
To Fetch a Thief by Spencer Quinn
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...
In the third book in the brilliant New York Times bestselling series featuring a lovable and wise dog narrator, Chet and Bernie go under the big top to solve the most unlikely missing persons (and animals!) case ever.
There would be room in my bag for the next in the series, too…
The Dog Who Knew Too Much.
My Rag-tag favorites for the pool (Often re-read and much loved)
Mrs. Mike by the Freedmans
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Cygnet and the Firebird by Patricia McKillip
Dragondoom by Dennis L. McKiernan
The Cadfael books by Ellis Peters
The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean
Shane by Jack Schaefer
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
My choices may seem too heavy for vacation so hopefully my readers will mention their favorites.
On my wish list
A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher by Sue Halpern
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Some new books out this summer that might qualify for many readers, but are not on my list:
Robert B. Parker's Wonderland by Ace Atkins
Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls
Flora by Gail Godwin
Magician's End (Chaoswar Saga) by Raymond E. Feist
The Human Division by John Scalzi
A Book of Voyages by Patrick O'Brian
Sing along!!
Nat King Cole - Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer
http://www.youtube.com/...
"Summertime" from "Porgy and Bess"
by George Gershwin
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
http://www.youtube.com/...
...........
What will you be packing in your beach bag?
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Pop-up characters
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A MUST READ diary as bookgirl lists some of the books she may be writing about in the future so you can read them, too. A very interesting list!
Contemporary Fiction Views: Summer Reading
by bookgirl
http://www.dailykos.com/...
ebooks: what's going on in the digital format
by Susan from 29
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The Superself: Genome, Menome, and Wenome
by Robert Fuller
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Robert Fuller says:
Chapter 9 of The Rowan Tree is now posted online:
http://www.rowantreenovel.com/...
The May Goodreads Giveaway has closed, but Kossacks can still read The Rowan Tree for free on the http://www.rowantreenovel.com web site. They can subscribe to a mailing list for chapter updates if they don't want to be bothered to check the web site. That mailing list is used solely for chapter posting updates and will not lead to any spam.
UPDATE from a comment below by
nzanne:
Belly of the Beast
okay, full disclosure, it's by my honey.
Excellent storytelling historical fiction, though it's hard to believe that "historical" means 1958-1990s.
Fukushima and Chernobyl were both dwarfed by what happened in Chelyabinsk / Mayak in 1958. Radiation spewed and spewed that was never admitted to, never cleaned up, is still seriously poisoning folks today.
An all-American woman learns her son needs a marrow transplant because of lymphoma ... and then finds out that her mom had been a Russian defector from when this reactor was blowing. Niki has to return to the Belly to find a donor for her kid....
Doug Walker lived and worked in Russia building energy efficient housing there, and loves to tell tales that bring everyday 1990s Russians' lives into focus.
$2.99 on a kindle; $00 for Prime members! Give a read and PLEASE give it your honest review!
by nzanne on Wed Jun 05, 2013 at 08:32:14 PM EDT
NOTE:
plf515 has book talk on
Wednesday mornings early