Lemuria is thrilled to be a part of World Book Night this year. Read on for details about how to get involved.

From World Book Night. org

We have a goal of getting 50,000 people to go out to places in their communities on the evening of Monday, April 23, 2012, and give a book to a stranger or to people you might know but believe aren’t frequent readers.

We ask that you go to a coffee shop or hospital, church or community center, an after-work party or train home, shopping mall or local school — and give out 20 free paperbacks. 

The goal is to give books to new readers, to encourage reading, to share your passion for a great book. The entire publishing, bookstore, library, author, printing, and paper community is behind this effort with donated services and time.

The first World Book Night was held in the UK last year, and it was such a big success that it’s spreading around the world! Please volunteer to be a book giver in the U.S. Sign up now to be a book giver–the deadline has been extended to Monday, Feb 6th!

Book Givers will have gatherings, large and small, across the U.S. to get ready to give books and to celebrate afterwards. As April 23rd nears, local and major media outlets will provide coverage from WBN 2012. The video below shows highlights of the World Book Night Celebration 2011 in London:

These paperbacks are specially-produced, not-for-resale World Book Night U.S. editions, and there are 30 titles for you to choose from. See a list of the books here.

A million free books in all!

You will be notified in early February if you have been chosen to be a book giver and which of the three books we are able to provide you with. You will then choose at which local bookstore or library you’d like to pick up your box of books ahead of World Book Night. (Lemuria will be a pick-up site in Jackson.)

And afterwards, we’d love you to share your book giving experience with us, as we get ready for the next year!

Lastly, we intend to promote reading year-round, not just one night, and we especially hope that you can continue to support bookstores and libraries. In these times, they need your support more than ever.

Click here to apply to be a Book Giver on April 23, 2012.

“Fish is the only grub left that scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-grandaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat.” -a Fulton Fish Market, denizen, in Old Man Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell, 1944

And this is how Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg begins.

Think about it. When you go out to eat or shop for seafood at your vendor of choice, what are your choices? There are four fish that reign above all other ones. They are: cod, salmon, sea bass and tuna. It’s possible that if one does not know better, one could think those are the only fish that exist in the world because we are rarely offered anything else.

Monterey Bay Aquarium provides a Seafood Watch Guide you can browse to see which seafood is safe and best to eat at that time. Also available as a printable pocket guide, it can tell you which fish are your best choices, good alternatives as well as ones to avoid. After reading Four Fish, it appears we are not paying enough attention to such important things. If we aren’t careful, these four will end up on the avoid list because they will be so low in numbers.

Within this book, Greenberg also takes us on a mini history lesson. In early times, it was unnecessary to think of preserving wild food. People didn’t even think that we had the potential to harm the world. In present day, the situation is very different. We eat, live, breathe, dispose and do as we please. While we are not doing what needs to be done to preserve our oceans, we are very aware of the consequences. Hopefully, we follow the advisement of Four Fish and change our course before it’s too late.

Paul Greenberg, author of James Beard Award bestseller Four Fish  -Quinn

When I ran into Adam Johnson at the Winter Institute book conference last week, I told him that I loved The Orphan Master’s Son so much that I was willing to write – to the point of embarrassment – one blog after another. He said he could help me out by writing a guest blog. The piece that follows is a true story of Adam’s trip to North Korea. -Lisa

“We are all Korean”

Upon arriving in Pyongyang, one of our first stops was the National Museum of Korean History. It was a large museum with no one in it. To save electricity, which was quite scarce, the museum used motion sensors that turned out the lights when you left a room and flashed them on when you entered the next, so the cavernous journey was taken one flashing glimpse at a time. The first exhibit they showed me was what they claimed was an old skull fragment. It was displayed in a Plexiglas box atop a white pedestal. They informed me that the skull was 4.5 million years old and that it had been found on the shores of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. I was new to such tours, so my brain was filled with dissonance. I asked the museum docent, a middle-aged woman wearing a beautiful choson-ot, if humanity didn’t originate in Africa. “Pyongyang,” she said. I’d taken a course on human origins when I was an undergraduate, and a hazy memory came to me. I said, “So is this a skull fragment from an australopithecine?” She said, “No, Korean.” And I understood that she was a person trained to give a tour and recite prescribed information, not a scholar or curator. In North Korea, whenever evidence is lacking for something, they use a big painting or an elaborate diorama as proof. They had both on hand to explain via arrows and diagrams, how humanity had originated in Pyongyang, with the following Diaspora moving north into Asia and west into the Middle East and Europe. Finally, according to the diorama, humans populated Africa and North America. We had several minders with us, all watching my response to this new information. Finally, our tour guide concluded her lecture by informing me that the World was Korean (by which she meant North Korean) and by informing me that I was actually Korean. A friend of mine, a fellow professor on the tour with me, turned to me and said, “Did you hear, Professor Johnson? You are Korean. Do you feel suddenly Korean?”

I pat my arms and sides. “Yes,” I said, “I feel a little more Korean.”

He said, “You look a little more Korean.”

I rubbed my cheek and chin. “Yes,” I said, “I believe I’m a little more Korean.”

Our tour guide and minders all nodded, with some gravity, at my dawning realization.

So the lesson I learned in the National Museum of Korean History was that there was no irony in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

*      *     *

Adam Johnson is Associate Professor of English with emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. A Whiting Writers’ Award winner, his fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, Paris Review, Tin House and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. 

Join us Friday at 5:00 for a signing with a reading to follow at 5:30.

Click here for more details about The Orphan Master’s Son.

For all you avid book readers who made a New Year’s resolution to read more challenging novels, here is the answer: Lemuria’s book club which meets at noon on the first Thursday of each month. So, next Thursday, February 2, we will meet at our dot.com building, just outside of Broadstreet Bakery’s north side door, just across the parking lot.

We will be discussing Irishman Joseph O’Connor’s novel Ghost Light. This thought provoking novel opens in the early 1900s in Dublin. The reader meets W. B. Yeats who is writing a play with inspiration from popular playwright John Synge, a “real” playwright who was the author of Playboy of the Western World and Tinker’s Wedding. Synge becomes romantically involved with Molly Allgood, who is a much younger strong willed, talented actress who often stars in his plays. Their love affair is played out in the novel so very beautifully. (Author Joseph O’Connor grew up in Dublin “watching” the house on the hill where playwright John Synge wrote his plays.)

The reader is then propelled forward to 1950s London where Molly reflects on her lost love John Synge who died an early death. Through a series of flashbacks, the reader gets to experience Molly’s tumultuous life during and after Synge’s death. Her love memories, which float from Dublin to London to New York,  keep her alive even though her depleted life becomes horribly sad. Still, the power of the love story grows as the reader turns each page, becoming more and more involved in this novel.

As the author of Redemption Falls, and the world wide sensation Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor and his incredible talent as a writer rank at the top of my most admired present day authors. I heard him read at Lemuria  from Redemption Falls in 2007, and  I also heard him read last year from Ghost Light. His readings were both mesmerizing and energizing. It would be hard to find another author who reads his own work with such passion and love. The Irish accent does not hurt either!

Come join us when we discuss Ghost Light next Thursday. If you want more information about our book club, please email me at: nan@lemuriabooks.com.  Click here to see a full listing of everything our book club has read since 2007. Come join us for challenging discussions each month.

See a listing of all of Joseph O’Connor’s books here.

Enjoy a guest post by Joseph O’Connor here.

-Nan

It’s that time of year when we start noticing the wildflowers pop up in unexpected places. I grabbed Wildflowers of Mississippi as my guide and found the one I saw this morning: Crimson Clover. This wildflower is a familiar sight as it beautifully carpets our fields and roadsides in early spring.

Wildflowers of Mississippi by Stephen L. Timme catalogs over 500 wildflowers with their scientific and common names, brief descriptions and their geographical distribution for amateur and professional botanists. Best of all, beautiful photographs accompany each listing. Timme notes how the Native Americans depended on plants for food, shelter and medicine. The explorers of North America who followed were also impressed with the abundance of wildflowers.

Today, states all across America have organizations centered around the preservation and cultivation of wildflowers. The Mississippi Native Plant Society was formed in 1980 to encourage a respectful attitude toward wildflowers by leading field trips throughout the state. Until Wildflowers of Mississippi was first published in 1989, Mississippi was the only state that did not have a wildflower guide available to the public.

Click here to learn more about The Mississippi Native Plant Society.