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Personal Picks

  • Patti Callahan Henry: Coming Up for Air

    Patti Callahan Henry: Coming Up for Air
    This author recently moved to Birmingham, and she’s already made lots of friends. It wasn’t hard; her bestselling books preceded her. Besides, she’s a really fun and intriguing person. Her newest book, set on the Alabama coast, is about marriage and motherhood and one woman’s desire to become the person she really wants to be. Ellie Calvin has her hands full already when her controlling mother dies and she runs into her ex-boyfriend at the funeral. The old boyfriend is making a documentary on Ellie’s late mother and has questions only Ellie can answer—with the help of a long-forgotten diary. (*****)

  • Hillary Jordan: When She Woke

    Hillary Jordan: When She Woke
    Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound (winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for fiction), was an international literary hit. That one was set firmly in the rich soil of a Mississippi Delta farm in the mid 1940s. When She Woke, on the other hand, is futuristic and quite chilling. Here’s an America that we won’t recognize completely but might well be able to imagine. The book begins: “When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.” Hannah Payne wakes up in a bare room wearing only a paper gown. She has been turned into a “chrome.” Chromes are criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to reflect their crimes. Murderers are red. There are hints of The Scarlet Letter here in this nightmare world where politics and religion come together in a mighty scary way. (*****)

  • Susan Haltom: One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place

    Susan Haltom: One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place
    Oh, this is a lovely book with great photos of the famous writer and her family and neighbors. But the real gems are the colorful photographs of the garden Welty tended with her mother. Chestina Welty designed their modest garden and taught her daughter well. Welty, of course, is known for weaving Southern flora into her writing; much of her knowledge came from time spent in her own garden. Near the end of her life Welty still resided in her family home, but the garden had become neglected. Co-author Susan Haltom is a garden designer, and she offered to help preserve the garden and spent a decade doing that. This beautiful book, organized by seasons and decades, contains previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty’s private correspondence about her garden. (*****)

What's on my nightstand...

  • Susan Rebecca White: A Soft Place to Land: A Novel

    Susan Rebecca White: A Soft Place to Land: A Novel
    This is a book about sisterhood and the often-complicated love that go along with it. When their parents die in an airplane accident, 13-year-old Ruthie and 16-year-old Julia are sent away from their Atlanta home to live separately in distant parts of the country—in drastically different cultures. The story spans nearly two decades and follows the sisters from this familiar Southern home to bohemian San Francisco, a Virginia mountain town, the campus of Berkley and the lofts in Brooklyn. Once close, the sisters grow up and apart and their relationship becomes complicated by anger, resentment and jealousy. But then another shocking accident changes their lives once again. White is the author of the critically acclaimed Bound South, in which she writes lovingly and insightfully about Atlanta, where she was born and raised.

  • Frances Mayes: Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life

    Frances Mayes: Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life
    Celebrated travel writer and bestselling author Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany) is back and continuing her decades-long love affair with Tuscany’s people, art, cuisine and lifestyle. This is a deeply personal account of her present-day life in Tuscany, detailing the changes she has experienced since the success of her first two books and her reflections on the unchanging beauty and simple pleasure of Italian life.

  • Robin Lane Fox: Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer (Vintage)

    Robin Lane Fox: Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer (Vintage)
    The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousands of years. But where did these stories come from? How did they spread around the world? Fox draws upon the latest archaeological evidence, his own travels and his vast knowledge of the ancient world to answer these questions. He explores how the Mediterranean seafarers of 8th-century B.C. Greece encountered volcanic mountains, vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones and more and then weaved them into their legends of gods, monsters and heroes.

  • David Ebershoff: The 19th Wife: A Novel

    David Ebershoff: The 19th Wife: A Novel
    My bookgroup is reading this one right now. This book combines historical fiction with a murder mystery, and my bookgroup is reading this one right now. One story line, set in 1875, involves Ann Eliza Young, who has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Ann Eliza begins a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.
 A second story is the tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.
Both narrative intertwine to create a larger story of love and faith.

For book groups . . .

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February 23, 2012

Comments

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That's cool! I wish I could be there.

Michel

. I tried to help a mom who I knew was following Babywise, and she just lcuodn't understand that her body made milk very well, if she would feed her baby when it was hungry and dump the schedule. Every time she went back to encouraging her baby to nurse, her milk would return in full force. As soon as she began to follow the schedule again, down it went. She was a slave to a schedule for herself, her baby, and separate ones for each of the older children. It just wasn't practical, and she refused to believe that she lcuodn't do the impossible, and that her milk didn't build up if she waited longer so the baby would get a really good feeding. After all, the book said so. Since she was following the religious version, she also had to believe that if she followed the baby and not the book that she wasn't being a good Christian mother. I never read the follow-up book, Your Pretoddler, which was to be folowed from age 4 months. So I never found out what the feeding schedule went to after that. It was alread down to four feeds a day.

Sergej

Ms Bloomwood,I thank you for your comments and I agree in what your sainyg but I think the situation I was trying to portray is a little different then what you are talking about.I totally agree with the fact that we don't want to hurt other peoples feelings so we make lame excuses, but in all your points 1 -5, it sounds like the stage of the relationship you are talking about it is in the dating stage or very early stages of a relationship where you are still not sure about each other and just getting to know one another or the commitment is not fully there. What I was talking about is when your way past that and have been together for at least a couple of months and you have sound foundation to your relationship. It’s almost like you’ve built a routine with each other. This is why I call it D D. Distant and Different can only happen when the normal routine is broken for some reason after you’ve been with them and had an amazing time that would give you no reason to think that anything is wrong. Basically when someone is acting not like themselves towards you. You can’t have D D with someone if you haven’t been with this person long enough to establish a routine between the both of you. Example: calling each other every night, just to say good night to each other. This dosen’t happen in the early dating stages or much much later in a relationship but there is that window in between these two stages when everything is BLISS PERFECT in your world and relationship with each other – I think they call this Cloud 9.One other thing I’d like to mention in your point 2 is “WHY DO NICE GUYS FINISH LAST” and why do all most girls always go and fall for the BAD GUY !!! What’s up with that !!! Maybe we can talk about that next …….

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