It’s Friday! It’s Meme Time!
March 12th, 2010 § 7 Comments
after all the talk about memes and their usefulness to us as bloggers/readers, here i am, rather ironically, back with my friday memes. 
but, there’s a common theme here… great finds of the week, either in bloggish or bookish goodness.
First Rate Friday
what was your favorite post this week? spread the blogging love and share your favorite find(s) of the week!
this week, there was a lot of really great discussions going on around the blogosphere, including here at the little reader. i really enjoyed all of the great responses on my post – Are Memes a Waste of Time – and wanted to highlight two other discussions that i enjoyed:
Take a Break – Do You Really NEED That Book? (Boof’s Bookshelf) will appeal to the Bookaholic in all of us.
How We Read – Assumptions and Expectations (Savidge Reads) is a very thoughtful post about our personal experience, reading habits and how that impacts how we read.
First Rate Fridays is a new meme hosted at He Followed Me Home.
Friday Finds
this was a terrible amazing week for my TBR pile! i found a gold mine of books that i’d never heard of while browsing around at Savidge Reads and just couldn’t help myself.
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
Is it poetry? Is it a novel in verse? A fable? A myth? However you define Carson’s distinctive and wildly inventive new work, it is riveting reading. At the center of the narrative is a winged red monster named Geryon; throughout, we see him struggling with his family, falling for the indifferent Herakles, and discovering photography as a means of comfort and escape. Wistful yet whimsical, offhand yet intense, funky yet erudite (Carson, a classics professor at McGill, grounds this work in ancient Greek myth), this is a reading experience like no other.
Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan
In Jordan’s prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband’s Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family’s struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura’s brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
Skin Lane
by Neil Bartlett
At forty-seven, Mr. F’s working life on London’s Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision, and routine. So when he starts to have recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dreams are disturbing-Mr. F can’t think of where they have come from. After all, he’s an ordinary middle-aged man.
As London’s backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F’s nightmares become an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his restless nights lead him-and the reader-deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire, and shame.
Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, this is Neil Bartlett’s fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.
The Girl With the Glass Feet
by Ali Shaw
Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.
Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass?
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
In 1925, Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands died looking for it. Over time many scientists came to view the Amazon as a deathtrap that could never support a complex society. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son & his son’s best friend, determined to prove that this ancient civilization, dubbed Z, existed. Then he & his expedition vanished. Fawcett’s fate & the tantalizing clues he left behind became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists & adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party & the lost city. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest & the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, drawn into the jungle’s green hell. His quest for the truth & his discoveries about Fawcett’s fate & Z, form the heart of this narrative.
Wow, you had some fantastic finds! A lot of which were new to me, like Skin Lane and the Autobiography of Red. Thanks!
Here are my finds: Not-Really-Southern Vamp Chick
Lots of great finds! Mine are at The Crowded Leaf.
Mudbound is an amazing book!
that’s what i keep hearing! and the more i hear it, the more i want to read it.
What a terrific bunch of books on your list! Have a great week
aww i love your picture!
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