It is officially summer and most people has begun their vacations or at least started planning their vacations. I myself arrived home from Chicago only yesterday after spending four days in the windy city. Before leaving for my trip, I read just about every travel guide that we have at the store, trying to find just the right one to take with me. The day that I was supposed to leave, I had it narrowed down to pocket sized guides and I finally decided on the KNOPF MAPGUIDES. This guide separates the city into separate sections and gives down to earth directions to the places it recommends, such as “by the Jimmy John’s on Michigan Ave.” Each section only takes up two pages side by side, but then opens up into a map of the area so you only have to look at sections of the city at a time, not a whole map. At the front it shows you where the sections are in relation to each other, and at the back is a map of the mass transit system. Also, the whole guide is printed on pretty thick paper, perfect for toting around and extensive use. If you’re looking for an authentic experience in the city you are visiting, this guide is definitely the one to choose. It doesn’t bog you down with too much information. On my trip to Chicago, my friend Kelly and I stayed with a Chicagoian who lives in Hyde Park and every place that he recommended was in the Knopf Guide. So on the days that we wandered the city on our own, I knew I was in good hands with the Knopf Mapguide.

Another great book that I read before my trip was Tough Times, Great Travels by Peter Greenberg. This book is also great because it is to the point and tells you exactly how to find great deals and hidden bargains. I always find those travel books that are inches thick with tissue-like Bible paper quite daunting and never read enough to learn what I actually picked the book up to learn, so these pocket sized guides are just perfect for me. Come in and check them out: they might be perfect for you too!

Until next time,

Emily

this is the beginning of a series of blogs that will consist of a few of my favorite authors’ favorite reads.

here goes…

part one: a.m. homes

check out a.m. homes’ books by clicking on this sentence

who’s afraid of virgina woolf by edward albee

bullet park by john cheever

disturbing the peace by richard yates

a severed head by iris murdoch

the loved one by evelyn waugh

flat stanley by jeff brown

crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky

lolita by vladimir nabokov

by Zita

Over 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of getting to know Mary Ward. From being a bookseller and getting readers for her first collection of short stories, Tongues of Flame, our friendship developed. Tongues of Flame won the Pen/Hemingway Award for Fiction.

Fanning the Spark: A Memoir is eloquent, incisive and reflects her immeasurable delight derived from writing and reading. She relates the importance of reading books and getting the meaning behind the writer’s words. Fanning expresses the diligent effort of understanding rightful writing. First a reader, then a writer. Qualities deeply understood by this great short story writer are beautifully and precisely reflected in her memoir.

Mary Ward expresses clearly the difficulties of being in one lifetime a good writer and a good person. The constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty and day-to-day living. This is a story of the competing demands of art and life.

Reading Mary Ward’s expression of her love of community and place often caused me to reflect on Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginning, while her later speeches and essays remind me of Eye of the Story. For fans of Ms. Welty’s nonfiction, Fanning the Spark is the perfect fit.

A beautiful lady, Mary Ward, has once more given her readers wide wisdom for understanding the living of life in fullness.

Below, from the jacket: She lives in the village of Hamburg, between Marion and Marion Junction, Alabama, in the same house where she was born and raised.

My favorite mystery for 2008 is Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. It is set in Russia while Stalin was in power and there is no crime.  Leo Demidov, a war hero and MGB officer, is a big believer in his country and its laws but when a killer does strike he is torn between being obedient to the State or investigating the murders and being demoted and exiled.  He knows a killer is on the loose so he takes a chance and does the right thing with only his wife by his side.  Well, Smith’s new book is out. 

The Secret Speech picks up bascially where Child 44 left off.  It is 1956 and the new Khrushchev regime has leaked a “secret speech” that basically tells all of Stalins notorius crimes.  Demidov has left his MGB days behind and started a homicide department but his former colleagues fearful of reprisals of thier past victims begin to take thier own lives.  Demidov now has to face the fact that many of the people he arrested and sent to the gulags were innocent and want revenge.  It becomes clear that the suicides are not what they appear to be when Fraera, the wife of a priest that Demidov sent to prison, targets him and his family.  She kidnaps Zoya, his adopted daughter, and threatens to kill her if he doesn’t free her husband from prison. Tom Rob Smith again gives us a novel full of action and as in Child 44 successfully personalizes the tragic and brutal life of many Russians during this time period.

In All the Living, a new debut novel by C. E. Morgan, a very young woman, orphaned at age three, moves in with her grief stricken, farmer lover on his deceased parents’ Kentucky tobacco farm.  Horribly extreme weather conditions mimic the tumultuous erotically charged relationship, which is challenged by the lures of a grass roots preacher who lets Aloma, a budding classical music pianist, practice her tunes on the church’s piano.  Events such as witnessing and assisting in the birth of a calf, fending off the extreme heat, harvesting the scorched tobacco, and dealing on a daily basis with a man obsessed with making a go of this ever challenging farm all propel the reader onto a roller coaster read well worth the time.  Whether to stay in the relationship or flee…that is the question Aloma tosses around in her mind throughout this small, but powerful novel.  Even the cover sets the stage!

-Nan