8:46 a.m., 9/11/01

72. Death be not proud, though some have called thee. John Donne.

"DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. "

Dave Barry and Poetry

Here is my entry for that Dave Barry thing:

At my house, anything goes
Until one dark and stormy night
I tried to stop him with all my might
But still
the dog ate mother's toes

I could weep. The other poems are so funny and there are hundreds of them with the line - "the dog ate mother's toes."

Just finished the latest Harry Potter book. It was great! It was leaked that someone important was going to die - but she had you guessing to the very end who it would be - red herrings all over the place. I hope she is busily writing the next one!

Late Friday Five from Last Friday Because I was on Vacation

1. What were your favorite childhood stories?
Honey Bunch books - not printed anymore
Raggity Ann books
Little Lost Bobo - a reader from school


2. What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children?
All the fairy tales; and now including Harry Potter; and the books I read even though they may be "old fashioned."

3. Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything?
No - but I have collected them from Ebay

4. How old were you when you first learned to read?
5 or 6, maybe 4

5. Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read?
Pride and Prejudice

Summer Books Part 3 of 3

Tropic of Night (William Morrow) by Michael Gruber

Following her sister's murder, Jane Doe, a young anthropologist who has spent years researching African shamanism, fears for her life. So she fakes her own suicide and goes into hiding in Miami. But the ritualistic killings of pregnant women convince Doe that her ex-husband, a poet-turned-sanguinary sorcerer, is following her and becoming more powerful with each murder. At the same time, a Cuban-American police detective named Iago "Jimmy" Paz is investigating the Miami slayings, but finds that eyewitnesses don't remember much -- except that the killer looks a lot like Paz himself. An odd but engrossing first novel.

The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis & Clark & Kinneson Expeditions (Houghton Mifflin) by Howard Frank Mosher

Any American (even those millions who suffered through inferior history courses) knows about Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their 1803-05 explorations through what would become the western United States. But who's ever heard of the competing expedition mounted by True Teague Kinneson? It's taken Howard Frank Mosher (A Stranger in the Kingdom) to finally bring that adventure to the reading public, in a novel that will remind readers of George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" stories. Kinneson, we're told, was an inventor, soldier, schoolteacher and daily cannabis user from Vermont who wrote to President Thomas Jefferson, hoping to accompany the famous Corps of Discovery west from St. Louis. Though he was turned down, Kinneson was hardly turned off to the exploring idea, and with his teenage nephew, Ticonderoga, embarked for the Pacific Ocean himself. Along the way, Ti and his uncle (who sports a copper helmet and an Elizabethan codpiece) meet Daniel Boone's arousing daughter, save Lewis and Clark from cannibalistic Indians, and enjoy a wealth of other oddball misadventures. A charming counterpoint to several other novels that have been published to coincide with the Corps of Discovery bicentennial, The True Account plays history for humor.

The Wandering Hill (Simon & Schuster) by Larry McMurtry

Ever since Lonesome Dove (1985), McMurtry's western historical fiction has been wildly uneven -- from the high drama of Comanche Moon to the lesser adventure of Boone's Lick. But the man knows to tell a story, no doubt about that. And he always does it with a combination of humor and human feeling. The Wandering Hill, a follow-up to last year's Sin Killer, finds the eccentric, wealthy, argumentative and very English Berrybender family hold up for the winter of 1833 in a trading post at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. While they wait to return to the business of hunting, the Berrybenders contend with each other under conditions that are nowhere near spacious enough to accommodate their egos. Marital conflict, the loss of sanity and Indian attacks all ensue, with a strangely restless hill adding mystery to the frontier scenes. McMurtry is worth reading if only for the spirited cadence of his prose.

When She Was Electric (Polestar) by Andrea MacPherson

The first two chapters are dense and convoluted enough that you'll want to throw it in the sand, but wait it out. This debut novel by a former January Magazine contributing editor grows more elegant and eloquent with every page that passes, almost as though MacPherson gained confidence as she successfully tucked chapters under her belt. By the time she approaches mid-book, MacPherson has hit her stride and seems not to look back. Set in rural British Columbia in the middle of the last century, When She Was Electric is the story of three generations of woman: a formidable matriarch, her two very different daughters and her granddaughter, Ana, through whose voice much of the story is told. While one could argue that more editing might not have been a bad idea here -- particularly for those early segments -- it's delightful to witness the debut of an important new voice. Delightful and, of course, electric.

Windfallen (William Morrow) by Jojo Moyes

They're calling her the "heir-apparent to Maeve Binchy and Rosamunde Pilcher." Read that: a Brit with a knack for bringing out the warmth in the human condition. And while Moyes' books couldn't properly be called Aga Sagas, there's definitely the scent of dreams fulfilled and wishes realized around Windfallen. Moyes' second novel entwines the lives of two women through Arcadia, a lovely seaside house. Lottie inherits Arcadia in the middle of the 20th century. Almost 50 years later, designer Daisy Parsons arrives to convert the deserted house into a hotel. The friendship between these two women is as unpredictable as it is warming.

Wonder When You'll Miss Me (William Morrow) by Amanda Davis

The title of Amanda Davis' novel turned out to be all too prophetic: just as her debut novel was being launched last spring, Davis and her parents were killed in a small plane crash. Though it's always sad when the world loses a creative force, the timing here touched the book world completely. Davis was just 32 years old, and her debut work, Wonder When You'll Miss Me, was breathtaking, a brutally honest and completely touching look at female adolescence. Outcast Faith strikes back after a physical attack, then runs away to join the circus where she begins to heal.

Summer Books cont. part 2 of 3

Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (William Morrow) by Christopher Moore

Nathan Quinn's work as a marine biologist has produced spectacularly lackluster results over the years. Each winter Nathan and his team cruise Hawaiian waters recording the songs of the humpback whales and then attempt to translate them electronically. But all of his years of research have produced nothing much. Then, one day, Nathan sees -- and documents -- a whale with "Bite Me" written across his tail. Nathan's peaceful life promptly turns into an episode of The X Files complete with high-level conspiracies, military intrusion and a megalomaniacal underseas ruler. Christopher Moore is a crazy person. His books -- including Lamb and Practical Demonkeeping -- are well-executed works of delicious lunacy. He's not Douglas Adams but, in his more lucid moments, he's close.

The Grasshopper King (Coffee House Press) by Jordan Ellenberg

The Grasshopper King is an exceptionally silly book. It's also quite brilliant. Those two things might sound mutually exclusive but, in mathematics professor and genius Jordan Ellenberg's hands, they're simply delightful. A professor at a middling university gains international prominence, marries the dean's daughter and stops talking. To anyone. With the idea that the professor is silently contemplating some earth-shattering ideas, a language student is hired to dog his steps and become the professor's shadow -- just in case he starts talking again. The two develop a silent bond and deeper truths emerge ... eventually and quietly.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Raincoast Canada) by J.K. Rowling

In a way, it seems silly to mention this book here, because the only way you won't have heard that the latest installment in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga was launched on the first day of summer is if you've been hiding under a rock, or tuning out all the brouhaha because you really don't care. But since Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has been a bestseller ever since the book's publication was announced back in January, it seems likely that the novel will be filling out a lot of beach bags this summer. And filling out just about covers it: at well over 700 pages (the UK and Canadian editions are 766 pages, the U.S. edition is 896) Order of the Phoenix is breaking the records set by its predecessors. With all eyes watching, author Rowling doesn't disappoint. Book five in the series has all of the twists, turns and magic that Potter fans have come to expect.


The Kite Runner (Doubleday) by Khaled Hosseini

In Afghanistan in 1975, Amir watches helplessly while his friend, Hassan, is brutalized, an act that will reverberate across both of their lives for decades. In 2001, with the Taliban in full power, Amir -- now an American -- revisits his birthplace and his personal ghosts and ends up trying to rescue a boy who has been orphaned by violence. The Kite Runner is an almost impossibly beautiful book -- a compelling story, well told. It also brings us modern Afghanistan in a way we've seldom seen. Hosseini knows this turf: born in Kabul, he came to the United States with his family in 1980. A brilliant debut.

A Man to Call My Own (Atria) by Johanna Lindsey

Though the title is facile, it does scream, Take me to the beach! As a ranking historical romance maven, many of Johanna Lindsey's novels -- more than 54 million copies in 12 languages -- get read in peaceful places. The titles evoke the mood Lindsey creates: Captive Bride, Tender Rebel, Gentle Rogue and on and on and on. In A Man to Call My Own, twin New England heiresses Amanda and Marian are shipped off to live with their aunt after their father dies. The twins soon meet -- and compete for -- neighboring cowboy Chad Kinkaid of the masculine good looks and teetering testosterone. As always, Lindsey delivers an engaging, human story with her distinctive blend of romance, sensuality and humor.

People of the Owl (Forge) by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear

Four thousand years before there's a Louisiana -- or a United States to put it in -- a boy in that area called Salamander inherits his brother's two wives: women who, it turns out, have been instructed to kill him. People of the Owl is the 11th installment in Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear's First North Americans series, which they began in 1990 with People of the Wolf. Historical fictionists in the tradition of Jean Auel and James Michener, the Gears -- both of whom are archaeologists -- reconstruct their histories with equal parts technical accuracy and talented storytelling.

Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins) by Samuel Ligon

This debut novel opens with what you'd think would be the ultimate spoiler: the untimely and undignified death of the protagonist. Yet Samuel Ligon's storytelling skills provide us with a novel that is both starkly beautiful and frankly suspenseful. Perfectly rendered characters and a relentless series of plot twists make Safe in Heaven Dead an intensely satisfying read. Ligon's career is off to an auspicious start.

Sheet Music (Ballantine) by M.J. Rose

Cosmopolitan called M.J. Rose's last two books sizzling summer reads. We'll get on the bandwagon with that, for at times Rose's novels seem absolutely meant for the beach -- best read during an undisturbed chunk of time, the better to enjoy the sensual prose and plot lines that are invariably present in this writer's work. In Rose's latest work, Sheet Music, sensuality is everywhere: food-related scenes that read like foreplay, the lush background of an oceanfront estate and a soundtrack of classical music that seems to permeate every corner of the novel. Journalist Justine Pagett travels to the estate of celebrity composer-conductor Sophie DeLyon to do a series of interviews for an article. However, upon her arrival, Justine finds that Sophie has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Justine herself is receiving threats intended to dissuade her from writing her piece.

Sweet Hush (Little, Brown) by Deborah Smith

An apple orchard in Georgia is the setting for Sweet Hush, the ninth novel from Deborah Smith (A Place to Call Home, On Bear Mountain, The Stone Flower Garden). Hush McGillen brings her family's apple business from the brink of disaster and turns it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. She's successful enough to send her son to Harvard, where that son meets, impregnates and marries the daughter of the president of the United States. When the star-crossed lovers flee to Sweet Hush farms to elude the Secret Service, Hush meets secret assassin Nick Jakobek who turns out to be more sexy than sinister. Sound improbable? Well ... OK. But for summer reading, this plot adds up to four stars and half a brain. What could be sweeter?

Trading Up (Hyperion) by Candace Bushnell

The author of Sex and the City and 4 Blondes seems never to venture far from her home turf: the seamy, sexy underside of some of the better-heeled portions of the Big Apple. And, when speaking of better-heeled and Candace Bushnell in the same sentence, the former is meant quite literally. As the PR material that accompanies Trading Up promises, Bushnell has "changed forever how we view New York City, female friendships, and the love of a good pair of Manolos." In Trading Up we follow the adventures of Janey Wilcox -- first met in 4 Blondes -- a "model/actress/whatever" with better (and still better) things on her mind. Trading Up is Bushnell's first full-length novel and, while entertaining, it's also somewhat empty -- as is Janey. But, never mind: expect it to be filling out more than its share of beach bags this summer.

Some of the Summer Fiction from January Magazine (Part 1 of 3)

All Over Creation (Viking) by Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki (My Year of Meats) goes from meat to potatoes with All Over Creation, a story that is as warm and engaging as it is fascinating and -- ultimately -- frightening. When she was just 15, Yumi Fuller ran away from her potato farmer father and her Japanese war bride mother: she hasn't been back in 25 years. Now her father is dying and her mother can barely tell the fridge from the alarm clock. Yumi has to come back and help them sort things out. While she was gone, her mother and father started a small business, growing, harvesting and selling heirloom seeds. Just as Yumi turns up at her childhood home in Power County, Idaho, a group of militant environmentalists called the Seeds of Resistance get wind of what Yumi's father has been trying to do, hail him as a prophet, and determine to spend some time in the great man's shadow. All Over Creation is a delicate patchwork of thoughts and ideas that Ozeki blends together to create a novel that's smart and touching, as well as terribly informative in terms of agribusiness and genetic manipulation. Read this just before tackling Margaret Atwood's latest, Oryx and Crake, and you'll never look at food in the same way again.

Candy (Back Bay Books) by Mian Mian

With her first novel newly translated into English, Mian Mian does for China what Irvine Welsh did for Scotland: it ain't pretty, but it's hard to look away. Like Trainspotting, Candy is a look at parts of a country that the travel brochures go to great lengths to cover up. Here are sex, drugs and general vice talked about with a youthful exuberance that is often raw and mostly compelling. Candy is narrated by Hong, a teenage runaway who falls in love with a musician and becomes enmeshed in a world of physical and spiritual excess. Mian, a writer as well as the only female dance party promoter in China, lives in Shanghai where, according to her Web site, "She has become a cultural icon to a generation of Chinese youth who value her authenticity and honesty in portraying the new face of Shanghai."

The Corner Garden (Penguin Canada) by Lesley Kruger

What happens when exuberant though slightly confused youth meets ancient and well-tended evil? In The Corner Garden, Lesley Kruger's third novel, youth takes the form of Jessie Barfoot, a likable 15-year-old whose single mom marries, causing Jessie confusion and upset at a crucial point in her young life. It is just at this juncture that Jessie and her mother and stepfather move into a house in a new neighborhood. There, Jessie meets Martha van Tellingen, the "witch" next door: an old Dutch woman who has been harboring a secret ever since she came to Canada six decades before. Jessie's dismayed mother can do little besides watch as her daughter slides from being a fairly directed and functional young woman to becoming a "troubled teen" -- a statistic. What Jessie's mom has no way of knowing is that her unwitting daughter is being schooled by van Tellingen in ways familiar to her from her own Nazi youth. The Corner Garden is told in three voices: through diary entries written in Jessie's energetic lilt, letters composed by the crusty van Tellingen to her late father, and diary entries from Martha's own Nazi-influenced youth. Kruger takes some interesting ideas, builds some believable characters, then has them interact in unexpected ways.


The Darkness That Comes Before (Penguin Canada) by R. Scott Bakker

Fans of the fantasy genre will want to take note of R. Scott Bakker. Though currently difficult to find outside of Bakker's native Canada, his debut novel, The Darkness That Comes Before, has all the earmarks of a classic, including a well-executed world, clearly defined characters and an obvious desire to push boundaries established by the genre's best-loved authors. The Darkness That Comes Before is the first installment in Bakker's The Prince of Nothing series and is entirely too involved to even begin to synopsize it here. Suffice it to say that this student of literature, history, philosophy and ancient languages -- currently completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Vanderbilt University -- has spared none of his considerable talent in executing the first novel in what we predict will ultimately become a series important to the genre.

The Dirty Girls Social Club (St. Martin's Press) by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

It's been called the "Latina Wating to Exhale," and not without some justification. But if we're looking for comparisons to Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's debut novel, some others hold water, as well. The Dirty Girls Social Club belongs in the ranks with the very best of contemporary chick lit. It possesses some of the cheerful lunacy of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones books as well as the stark emotional honesty found in Rebecca Wells' Ya-Ya Sisterhood series. Six young Latina women make up the Buena Sucia Social Club. They met while attending Boston University and pledged to meet "twice a year, every year, for the rest of our lives." Told in the voices of each of the women, The Dirty Girls Social Club invites comparison. And defies it. Unsurprisingly (considering the comparison company it's in) a film version is already in the works.

The Dogs of Babel (Little, Brown) by Carolyn Parkhurst

Linguist Paul Iverson is devastated when his wife, Lexy, dies in a mysterious fall, the only witness being the couple's dog, Lorelei. As time passes, the mystery surrounding Lexy's death deepens. Determined to discover what really happened that fateful day, Paul begins a series of experiments aimed at teaching his faithful canine how to communicate what she knows. The Dogs of Babel isn't really, however, an animal story. Nor are Paul's experiments aimed at inviting laughter. In many ways, The Dogs of Babel is an examination of the psychology of relationships: how we come to understand -- and misunderstand -- each other and how grief can alter everything. Parkhurst's debut novel is a winner.

Fidelity (Anchor Canada) by Michael Redhill

Michael Redhill's debut novel, Martin Sloane, caused enough of a sensation in his native Canada -- not to mention winning a very nice nod from The New York Times Book Review -- that this writer's trajectory bears a close watch. Martin Sloane won a wheelbarrow full of prizes for the poet-turned-playwright-turned-novelist in 2001. If anything, Redhill's short stories are better. Stronger. And certainly more finely honed. The 10 stories in Fidelity are startlingly spare and strikingly beautiful, with the emphasis -- as it was in Martin Sloane -- on the internal life of his characters.

More Books for Summer Reading from THE NEW YORK TIMES
(Page 5 of 7)

SHADOW WITHOUT A NAME. By Ignacio Padilla. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
$22.) Four first-person narrators share the work in this somber,
sometimes sinister novel of 1916 and its portents in Europe; three
of them are chess players, lost in a maze of history and demonic
invention; the fourth seems to be the devil.
A SHIP MADE OF PAPER. By Scott Spencer. (Ecco/HarperCollins,
$24.95.) Spencer's eighth novel reprises the theme of consuming
love, this time in the form of an affair between well-adjusted
adults told from both perspectives, and asks whether that love isn't
worth the suffering it causes to those around them.
SHROUD. By John Banville. (Knopf, $25.) The protagonist of
''Shroud,'' based on Paul de Man, the posthumously disgraced star of
deconstructive criticism, dreads his exposure in his own lifetime as
the author of Nazi-era anti-Semitic journalism; the worst of it is
that he didn't really write that stuff, though he is living under
the name of the man who did.
THE SONGS OF THE KINGS. By Barry Unsworth. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
$26.) A modern retelling of Euripides' ''Iphigenia in Aulis,'' in
which seers struggle to see what god is holding up the invasion of
Troy while Odysseus, a scheming political animal, works to unite the
Greek army to preserve his chance of looting Troy and dying rich.
THAT OLD ACE IN THE HOLE. By Annie Proulx. (Scribner, $26.) Proulx's
new novel follows the destiny of Bob Dollar, abandoned at 8 on a
Denver doorstep, through the high plains of Texas and Oklahoma,
where he seeks locations for hog factories until he encounters the
real folks who live there and is caught up in their yarns and
legends.
THE TIME OF OUR SINGING. By Richard Powers. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, $27.) This dazzling, difficult novel, Powers's eighth,
follows the lives of a talented mixed (he Jewish, she black) couple
in America from about 1939 on; their sufferings are reflected in
musical and scientific developments.
THE VOICE AT 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late & New Poems. By Charles Simic.
(Harcourt, $25.) Tidy, blunt verses whose moral vision is rooted in
an appreciation of the absurd; a surrealism of a sort that is always
in position to raise existential questions about daily life.
WE PIERCE. By Andrew Huebner. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) Rooted in the
author's family history, a novel of the 1991 gulf war follows a
young Army sergeant as he gradually perfects the emotional
hollowness that allows him to live with all that he has seen and
done in Iraq, as well as with the exquisite awareness of his own
expendability.
WHAT I LOVED. By Siri Hustvedt. (Holt, $25.) A generous, engaged
philosophical novel, set in the New York art world with its vanities
and corruptions, and developing such propositions as the impress of
one personality on another, the instability of sexual identity, the
passage of the world through people's thoughts and lives.
WHEN THE WOMEN COME OUT TO DANCE: Stories. By Elmore Leonard.
(Morrow, $24.95.) All of Leonard's talents for hard-boiled fiction
-- the sadism, the sex and especially the deadpan vernacular -- are
on display in his second collection of short fiction.
A WHISTLING WOMAN. By A. S. Byatt. (Knopf, $26.) The bookish
Frederica Potter, protagonist of this fourth novel in a series that
began 25 years ago, lives by interviewing many and various savants
on television, allowing the entry of much arcane information into
the novel and unleashing the author's satirical powers in all
directions.
THE WIFE. By Meg Wolitzer. (Scribner, $23.) A light-footed,
streamlined novel that rushes in to shed new heat on old themes like
gender, writing and identity; Joan Castleman gives up her writing
career to service that of her husband, Joe, a jerk of many flavors,
and Wolitzer deploys a calm, seamless humor over the agony.
MYSTERY
HEX. By Maggie Estep. (Three Rivers, paper, $14.) Ruby Murphy, the
Coney Island drifter whose free spirit accounts for the ravishing
originality of this idiosyncratic first mystery, falls for a perfect
stranger's sob story and goes undercover as a stablehand at Belmont
Park to keep tabs on a stable groom with sexy eyes and a mysterious
past.
Continued

This is great!

END OF LINE. industrial-strength non sequiturs. now even crunchier!

"Quote of the day
Wednesday, June 18, 2003

To me, this quote encapsulates the struggle to shatter the barrier of writer's block.

y6h76rtf7708jhlk.j;lkjdfser

—K A Bedford, author of Orbital Burn

end of line."

The Orangutan Review

For small press books - really good site.

Oprah's New Book Club Pick:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

My #1 result for the SelectSmart.com selector, Which AND THEN THERE WERE NONE Character are you?, is Philip Lombard

More New York Times Books for Summer Reading
THE MONSTERS OF ST. HELENA. By Brooks Hansen. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, $24.) The island chosen for Napoleon's final exile lends its
hermetic isolation to Hansen's novel, in which a defeated,
domesticated Bonaparte plays with children and writes his memoirs
while his presence intrudes on the local haunt, a Portuguese traitor
stranded many years before.
MORENGA. By Uwe Timm. (New Directions, $25.95.) An intriguing,
impressionistic novel of colonial warfare, published in Germany in
1978 and set in Germany's former African empire, where the
suppression of the rebellious Herero tribe by a kind of
state-sponsored genocide in 1904 seems to anticipate the Holocaust.
OFFICE OF INNOCENCE. By Thomas Keneally. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
$25.) This fictional chronicle of the sentimental education of a
priest mixes elements of melodrama, murder mystery and theological
treatise, all of them swirling around an earnest young curate whose
indiscretions bring scandal to the church and a killer to his
confessional box.
ORYX AND CRAKE. By Margaret Atwood. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.)
Atwood returns to a dystopian future in this bleak novel about a man
who may be the last human remaining on postapocalyptic earth.
PATTERN RECOGNITION. By William Gibson. (Putnam, $25.95.) Gibson's
elegant, entrancing seventh novel concerns a supersmart woman, a
freelance marketing consultant who covers the globe looking for the
next big salable fad, meanwhile trying to solve the disappearance of
her father, a retired C.I.A. man, in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
THE PIECES FROM BERLIN. By Michael Pye. (Knopf, $24.) A tough,
mature, difficult but brilliantly paced novel in which a woman in
Nazi Berlin accepts Jews' valuable possessions to safeguard them,
then appropriates them and slopes off to Switzerland. Nemesis
arrives 60 years later when a woman spots and remembers a piece of
family furniture.
THE POINT OF RETURN. By Siddhartha Deb. (Ecco/HarperCollins,
$24.95.) A first novel whose hero, an Indian veterinarian and public
servant, a true believer in progress and public works, finds himself
repeatedly on the wrong side of history in the intolerant,
irrational and corrupt nation of real life.
PROPERTY. By Valerie Martin. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95.) In
and around antebellum New Orleans, this novel turns on sexual
rivalry and power struggle among a boorish planter, his enraged
wife, who hates him, and an accomplished, beautiful slave woman who
belongs to the wife but has borne a child to the husband.
THE QUALITY OF LIFE REPORT. By Meghan Daum. (Viking, $24.95.) A fine
comic first novel in which misguided fantasy betrays a young New
York television journalist, first by sending her to the Midwest,
where folks are simple and good, then by orders from New York to do
a lifestyle series on the simple, good folk.
THE ROMANTIC. By Barbara Gowdy. (Metropolitan/Holt, $24.) Obsession
knows no greater exponent than Louise, narrator and protagonist of
this adroit novel that refuses to honor the claims of adulthood.
Abandoned by her mother at 9, Louise soon falls madly in love with
another family's mother, then with that mother's adopted son, and
remains consciously faithful to her doomed love ever after.
RUMPOLE RESTS HIS CASE. By John Mortimer. (Viking, $24.95.) Horace
Rumpole, Mortimer's curmudgeonly London barrister, may have breathed
his last in this collection, in which Rumpole defends his usual
assortment of eccentric clients.
SAMARITAN. By Richard Price. (Knopf, $25.) A sprawling cast of
cinematic characters, often little people who command feeling for a
moment, then vanish, surrounds the two chief characters of this
urban North Jersey novel, in which the beating of a television
writer is investigated by an old neighborhood friend turned police
detective.
SAPPHO'S LEAP. By Erica Jong. (Norton, $24.95.) A historical fantasy
about the virtually prehistoric Greek erotic poet Sappho, a woman
much mistrusted by ancient thinkers for her uppityness and her
comprehension of sexual desire, but reimagined here as an updated
compilation of the heroines of Jong's greatest hits.
SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER: A Romance of Souls. By Matt Ruff.
(HarperCollins, $25.95.) A heavily populated novel (its two
principal characters, Andrew and Penny, suffer from multiple
personality disorder). When Andrew's personalities begin to riot, he
and they hit the dangerous road for his childhood home while Penny
does her best to keep up.
Continued

Hardcover Fiction This Week on the NEW YORK TIMES:

"1 THE DA VINCI CODE, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday, $24.95.) The murder of a curator at the Louvre leads to a trail of clues found in the work of Leonardo and to the discovery of a centuries-old secret society.
2 NAKED PREY, by John Sandford. (Putnam, $26.95.) In his new job as a troubleshooter for the governor of Minnesota, Lucas Davenport investigates the apparent lynching of a black man and a white woman.
3 THE GUARDIAN, by Nicholas Sparks. (Warner, $24.95.) While trying to choose between two suitors, a young widow realizes that her life is in danger.
4 THE FACE, by Dean Koontz. (Bantam, $26.95.) A police officer turned security chief must protect a handsome Hollywood star whose life has been threatened by a mysterious killer.
5 THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, by Lauren Weisberger. (Doubleday, $21.95.) A young woman acquires a job at a fashion magazine, along with the boss from hell.
6 THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold. (Little, Brown, $21.95.) A 14-year-old girl looks down from heaven as she describes what happens in the aftermath of her kidnapping and murder.
7 ARMAGEDDON, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. (Tyndale, $24.99.) The 11th volume of the "Left Behind" series, in which the forces of good battle the forces of evil after the rapture of the saved.
8 THE SINISTER PIG, by Tony Hillerman. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police and his retired mentor, Joe Leaphorn, investigate the murder of an undercover agent.
9 THE SECOND TIME AROUND, by Mary Higgins Clark. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) After the head of a medical research company goes missing, a magazine columnist finds herself the target of a sinister cabal.
10 DEAD RINGER, by Lisa Scottoline. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) A Philadelphia lawyer searches for a woman who is impersonating her and for a murderer."

Duh!! She doesn't know about cites? Also, heading said she apologized - but then later in the article, it says she doesn't apologize. Harvard? Can you hear this?

Valedictorian apologizes for failing to attribute in columns
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Associated Press Writer
June 4, 2003, 7:33 PM EDT

"CHERRY HILL, N.J. -- A high school student who won a lawsuit to be named sole valedictorian has admitted she did not properly attribute information in three articles and two essays she wrote for the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill.

Blair L. Hornstine, 18, explained her actions in a column published in the newspaper Tuesday, but she did not apologize.

"I am not a professional journalist. I was a 17-year-old with no experience in writing newspaper articles," she wrote. "Upon reflection, I am now cognizant that proper citation allows scholars of the future to constantly re-evaluate and re-examine academic works."

Hornstine borrowed liberally from several sources, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions and President Clinton, the newspaper said. One essay contained whole paragraphs nearly identical to a Clinton proclamation.

One essay in question, published in March on nuclear tensions in North Korea, was named best essay of the month by the Courier-Post.

Warren Faulk, a lawyer who consulted with Hornstine after she was told her writings were not properly attributed, said she was not given a copy of the ethics standards the Courier-Post claims she violated.

However, Courier-Post executive editor Derek Osenenko said Hornstine had signed a work agreement with the newspaper that said she would only submit original work.

Courier-Post spokesman Carl Lovern Jr., said the newspaper learned of the problems with Hornstine's writing when a reporter read the articles as part of research for a story about the teenager.

The paper told Hornstine that it would consider running a column in which she explained her actions. Her letter was published in the weekly teen section, Static _ the same place the articles in question were published.

The newspaper also ran an editors note listing the pieces in which she did not attribute her sources.

"After very careful analysis in this case, we believe key information in these articles and essays needed such attribution," Courier-Post executive editor Derek Osenenko said Wednesday.

Lovern said Hornstine's writings came before she sued the Moorestown public school district in federal court last month to prevent two other students from being named valedictorian along with her.

Hornstine, who completed many of her courses over the last two years with tutors because of an immune deficiency, argued that she should be the only valedictorian because she has the highest grades.

The school district argued that the shared honors were fair because Hornstine took many classes at home did not take courses required by non-disabled students, such as gym.

Hornstine prevailed in that lawsuit. A $2.7 million lawsuit against the school district is still pending in state court for punitive damages, legal fees and costs.

The lawsuits have not done much for Hornstine's popularity in the town. Her family has told police they have received death threats and their home has been vandalized.

She also faces controversy at Harvard University, where she has been accepted and intends to enroll next fall. She has been a frequent target of critical columns in The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.

Nearly 1,400 people _ some of whom say they are associated with the university _ have signed an online petition asking Harvard to rescind its offer to admit Hornstine.

Harvard admissions officials did not respond to a message left Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Hornstine's father, state Superior Court Judge Louis F. Hornstine, said Wednesday that his daughter was out of town. He declined to comment.

Edwin J. Jacobs Jr., the lawyer representing Blair Hornstine in her case against the school district, said there's nothing to the lack of attribution in her newspaper pieces.

"It was a whole lot of nothing. She wrote some fluff pieces for a kid-chat column," he said. He said his client explained her mistakes in Tuesday's paper and there's nothing more to it.

"We have more important things to deal with," he said."


Notice I put the story in quotes - because I didn't write it!

From the New York Times:

Books for Summer Reading

"THE INQUISITORS' MANUAL. By António Lobo Antunes. (Grove, $25.)
Portugal's long fascist regime haunts this novel as it anatomizes a
society permeated by meanness and arrogance; the fall of the regime
happens over and over from the viewpoints of many characters, each
of them complementing or contradicting the rest.
JENNIFER GOVERNMENT. By Max Barry. (Doubleday, $19.95.) In this
clever satirical novel set in the near future, corporations are so
mighty that people take their names from their employers. Jennifer
Government is the agent assigned by a reduced institution to pursue
a marketing ploy that kills people to sell shoes.
KILL TWO BIRDS AND GET STONED. By Kinky Friedman. (Morrow, $24.95.)
The Kinkster is back -- in spirit if not in name -- in this
multilayered novel about a self-involved writer in crisis trying to
develop a new project while cavorting with crazy strangers.
THE KING IN THE TREE: Three Novellas. By Steven Millhauser. (Knopf,
$23.) Stories whose characters are endangered by imagination as it
fosters creative bitterness, illicit love, romantic triangles and
jealousy in locations from a modern marriage to the legendary court
of Cornwall, where Tristan and Ysolt destroy their lives and those
of others.
THE LIGHT OF DAY. By Graham Swift. (Knopf, $24.) Told in a
police-blotter argot so spare it reads like a sort of gumshoe haiku,
this moody novel about severed connections might be summarized thus:
Woman kills husband. / Private eye falls hard for her: / Two lives
held in check.
LITTLE INFAMIES: Stories. By Panos Karnezis. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, $24.) Love, loss and skulduggery not long after World War II
in a kind of Greek Brigadoon, an impoverished village, full of
gothic and mythical elements, that is bound to vanish when
consumerism and modern media arrive.
LOOT: And Other Stories. By Nadine Gordimer. (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, $23.) Death and the complicated burden of loss are the
dominant themes of this structurally diverse collection, Gordimer's
first since 1991, the year she won the Nobel Prize.
MAKING THINGS BETTER. By Anita Brookner. (Random House, $23.95.)
Brookner's protagonist, Julius Herz, has been left stranded by the
deaths in his family; now he can think of nothing to do in his life
or with it. He courts a woman he knows to be selfish and unable to
love, and on Brookner's austere scale of passivity this may be
counted as a kind of victory; but she is far too honest to say.
THE MARRIAGE OF THE SEA. By Jane Alison. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
$24.) An intricate, elegant novel that ponders the connections among
love, illusion and fidelity in the permutations of eight central
characters behaving in two romantic and romanticized cities, New
Orleans and Venice.
THE MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins,
$25.95.) Erdrich's latest novel revisits the fictional town of
Argus, N.D., and the familiar themes of love, death and redemption,
but shifts the focus from the town's Indians to its German, Polish
and Scandinavian citizens.
A MEMORY OF WAR. By Frederick Busch. (Norton, $25.95.) Ambitious to
deal with large themes, Busch has written a novel whose characters
are plagued by World War II's aftershocks 40 years later; the chief
victim is a Manhattan psychologist whose new patient, a scholar
specializing in Holocaust denial, claims to be his half brother.
MIDDLE EARTH. By Henri Cole. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.)
Self-portrait poems in this collection survey the shape of a life
from a great, forgiving distance; closer up, the poems reflect on
their own voices and ambiguities of gender. At book's end, the
Christian ideal of self-abnegation is fused with the inner-life
urgencies of sexuality.
THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK. By Steven Sherrill. (Picador
USA, paper, $14.) A tender first novel that spans two weeks in the
life of the Minotaur, thousands of years after the Theseus caper,
living in a North Carolina trailer park and cooking at a steakhouse,
awkward with humans but no longer devouring virgins.
MONKEY HUNTING. By Cristina García. (Knopf, $23.) A withdrawn,
melancholy novel set in Havana's Barrio Chino and concerned with how
the biggest Chinatown in Latin America came to be and then to pass
away with Castro's restrictions on private property; by a
Cuban-American writer who is a natural student of families scattered
around the earth."
Continued

Books for Summer ReadingJune 1, 2003
Continued from the New York Times

"DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE. By ZZ Packer. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A
first collection of short stories about characters who are apt to be
struggling, under thick layers of stereotype, to make their presence
felt in the world as black women, often engaged with old-time
religion and hemmed in by passivity learned early in segregated
daily life.
DROP CITY. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) This novel's
late-blooming hippies in a Northern California commune, sensing that
the end is near (or maybe even behind them), migrate to Alaska,
where they encounter some tough real isolates who wonder aloud about
the virtues of face paint and LSD.
THE FALL. By Simon Mawer. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) Mountaineering as
a metaphor for life still clings to its perch in this fine novel
that extends back through half a century and two families of
climbers, souls ruled by passions for the mountains and for each
other, producing a tangle of erotic connections and a great deal of
physical precision in dangerous attitudes.
FEATHERSTONE. By Kirsty Gunn. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Exploring the
effects of rural flight on those left behind, Gunn creates a small
town that is eerily alive and full of old-fashioned people and
old-fashioned epiphanies, though every small-town clichŽ applies,
including a promiscuous barmaid and a village idiot.
A FEW SHORT NOTES ON TROPICAL BUTTERFLIES: Stories. By John Murray.
(HarperCollins, $24.95.) Stories by a doctor whose understated
authorial presence and gift for description are strong enough to
sustain an occasionally underconstructed narrative.
THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR. By Le Thi Diem Thuy. (Knopf,
$18.) The father of the anonymous narrator is the ''gangster'' of
the title; he may have been a black-market operator long ago before
escaping to America with his daughter. The story itself is a tale of
persecution, tragedy and gritty determination, told with a poetic
sensibility and a sharp eye for the matter of everyday life.
GETTING MOTHER'S BODY. By Suzan-Lori Parks. (Random House, $23.95.)
This first novel by the Pulitzer-winning African-American playwright
takes a cheerful tack across deep Faulknerian waters, relating the
fortunes of the survivors of a woman who was buried (as people
think) in some very expensive jewelry.
GILLIGAN'S WAKE. By Tom Carson. (Picador, $25.) A loopy, exuberant
novel-type prose event that sees 20th-century America through the
lives of the castaways on ''Gilligan's Island.'' The originals are
augmented by culturally significant characters, from Amelia Earhart
and Holden Caulfield to Richard Nixon and Maggie the Cat.
GOOD FAITH. By Jane Smiley. (Knopf, $26.) Joe Stratford, narrator
and protagonist of this subtly polemical novel (it is against
greed), rests reasonably content with his life as a real estate
agent. It doesn't last; the prospect of big money opens before him,
and a former I.R.S. agent, now some kind of wise guy, enmeshes him
in unblessed doings.
GREAT NECK. By Jay Cantor. (Knopf, $27.95.) Cantor's ambition in his
immense (703 pages), teeming new novel is to capture the American
scene of the late 1960's and bring it to life through six
characters, all privileged Long Island teenagers, who are bound
together by a Klan murder in Mississippi and by the antiwar
movement.
THE GURU OF LOVE. By Samrat Upadhyay. (Houghton Mifflin, $23.) A
terse, understated first novel, concerned with universal
middle-class anxieties and set in Katmandu, Nepal, where its
protagonist, Ramchandra, worries all the time about money and
worries even more about his adulterous love affair, which his wife
knows all about.
THE HAZARDS OF GOOD BREEDING. By Jessica Shattuck. (Norton, $23.95.)
An astute first novel whose blue-blooded inhabitants have occupied
the same house in Concord, Mass., for 254 years (with one temporary
exception). The appearance of social stasis that comforts them
proves, however, to be an illusion.
HEAVEN'S EDGE. By Romesh Gunesekera. (Grove, $24.) A fictional
reworking of the myth of Eden, its dignity enlarged by its awareness
that there is no recovery; it takes place in a nameless tropical
landscape that much resembles the author's native country, Sri
Lanka.
THE HILLS AT HOME. By Nancy Clark. (Pantheon, $25.) Clark's funny,
intelligent first novel reveals a special and particular kind of
life, that of an extended old New England family in their
200-year-old clapboard homestead, where they survive miracles of
inconvenience, eat tuna wiggle or fish sticks and express invincible
opinions about everything."

Continued tomorrow

Books for Summer ReadingJune 1, 2003
From the NYTimes.com

FICTION & POETRY
ABANDON: A Romance. By Pico Iyer. (Knopf, $24.) A graceful novel
whose hero, an English graduate student of Sufi mystical poetry who
hopes to uncover that within himself which passeth show, heads first
for California and later for Iran, where he and the woman he is
traveling with improve their understanding of mystical poetry and of
themselves.
ALL OVER CREATION. By Ruth Ozeki. (Viking, $24.95.) A sophisticated
novel in which dread and hope coexist and the end of nature is
envisioned through the impact of genetically modified crops on a
family and the many players who descend on their Idaho potato farm.
ANY HUMAN HEART. By William Boyd. (Knopf, $24.95.) A novel whose
hero, a minor British writer and art dealer (and secret agent),
becomes a sort of stoic Everyman for the 20th century, meeting
almost everyone (Ian Fleming, Picasso, Hemingway, the Duke of
Windsor, Virginia Woolf) and traveling to almost everywhere; he has
many successes in life, each one closely attended by yet another
fall.
BAY OF SOULS. By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A highly
concentrated (for this author), wholly unnerving novel whose hero,
an unhappy professor of English specializing in literary
''vitalism,'' becomes desperately involved with an exotically
attractive woman who thinks she has lost her soul and hopes to
retrieve it in a voodoo rite.
THE BOOK OF SALT. By Monique Truong. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A
lush, fascinating, expansive first novel about exile, concerning a
gay Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
in Paris; he Frenchifies their apple pie while observing with an
aching heart how much better adapted to expatriation they are than
he is.
A BOX OF MATCHES. By Nicholson Baker. (Random House, $19.95.) Baker
employs his specialty as a novelist, the exhibition of life where no
life seems to be, to explore the consciousness of a man who rises
early, lights a fire and sits around in a mindful state every
morning till his matches are all spent.
CLARA. By Janice Galloway. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) The virtuoso
pianist Clara Schumann (wife of the composer Robert, mother of
eight) left 47 volumes of diaries. Undaunted, Galloway imagines a
way into Clara's life in this novel whose up-to-date concerns don't
obstruct its heroine's passionate voice.
THE COFFEE TRADER. By David Liss. (Random House, $24.95.) A
historical novel and an economically detailed romance of capitalism,
in which a young Jew in 17th-century Amsterdam seeks to evade
censure from the Jewish authorities and to build a personal fortune
by exploiting the rising popularity of coffee, which he intends to
buy cheap and sell dear.
THE COMMISSARIAT OF ENLIGHTENMENT. By Ken Kalfus.
(Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.95.) Nobody listens to anyone else or looks
anyone in the eye in this novel by an author interested in the force
of ideas and the power of images over life; the first half of the
book is full of people whose concern is taking some personal
advantage from the impending death of Tolstoy.
COSMOPOLIS. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $25.) An all-day (and
book-length) chauffeured trip across midtown Manhattan exposes
DeLillo's cool, New Economy protagonist to an assortment of
characters in this critique of hypercapitalism.
CRABWALK. By Günter Grass. (Harcourt, $25.) Grass's lifelong
analysis of Germany's past and present centers, in this new novel,
on a refugee ship sunk by a Russian submarine with the loss of 9,000
lives; the story is told through three generations of a family, all
marked, one way or another, by the ship's fate.
THE CUTTING ROOM. By Louise Welsh. (Canongate, $24.) This
accomplished first novel's hard-bitten hero is a Glasgow auction
house employee who must assess the belongings of a newly dead man, a
task that leads him into the city's darkest corners of commercial
sex and criminal glamour.
THE DEEP: And Other Stories. By Mary Swan. (Random House, $23.95.)
The first book by a promising Canadian writer who devises and
explores different forms with interesting results; the 68-page story
at the heart of this volume probes World War I by seeing what it
does to a 26-year-old pair of twin sisters who have volunteered to
work in France.
DOMINO. By Ross King. (Walker, $26.) This intricate novel is a
meditation on appearance and reality in 18th-century Europe;
everybody is dressed up as something else in a narrative that
follows a murderer who wants to be a society portraitist and a
Venetian castrato pursuing a career in England.


Continued tomorrow.

Learning Victorian England through Dickens and Cartoons of the time:
History Trail - Victorian Britain

From the Read Ireland Newsletter:

Read Ireland Book News - Issue 238
----------------------------------

Shackleton: The Polar Journeys by Ernest Shackleton
(Hardback; 35.00 Euro / 42.50 USD / 26.50 UK; 660 pages, with photos and maps)

This book combines Heart of the Antarctic and South, Ernest Shackleton's personal accounts of his polar expeditions.

Heart of the Antarctic is the story of his polar expedition of 1907-1909, part of his never-ending quest to reach the South Pole. On this, his first expedition in sole charge, he came agonisingly close to achieving his dream. Appalling weather conditions, however, together with the necessity of reaching his shop before it had to flee the advancing pack-ice, forced him to abandon his goal in a breathtaking race against time. With photographs taken on the expedition by Douglas Mawson, and numerous maps and diagrams, this is a fascinating record of all time. The is the only complete edition available.

South is Shackleton's account of a journey that began in August 1914 with high hopes of a first exploration and ended two years later in a desperate struggle for survival, after the expedition's ship, the Endurance, was first trapped in sea-ice, then crushed. Shackleton, with a handful of his party, braved the fury of the South Atlantic as they made their desperate 800-mile journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia aboard the James Caird. This small boat - just over 20 feet long - was pitted against the fury of the southern ocean. The survival of the entire expedition was hinged on this last gamble.

Sir Ernest Shackleton was one of the greatest and most colourful explorers of his time. Born in County Kildare in 1874, he was educated in London and apprenticed in the Merchant Navy before becoming a junior officer under Captain Robert Scott, on Discovery, between 1901 and 1904. From this point on, his life was devoted to polar exploration, and raising funds for his projects. He died in South Georgia in 1922 while on his fourth Antarctic expedition.

My Life on the Road by Nan Joyce
(Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 7.00 UK; 120 pages)

Irish travellers have been on the road for hundreds of years, earning a living as tinsmiths, musicians, carpenters, and horse and scrap dealers. In this moving story of her life, Nan Joyce tells of idyllic days camped in the countryside, of fireside storytelling, happy days at school in England, horse fairs and marriage customs. But Nan's family, like so many other travellers, were often treated as outcasts without rights. She remembers evictions from traditional campsites in the middle of winter and having to beg to survive. After her father died her mother was imprisoned for a year for stealing scrap to provide for the family. Nan and her brothers and sisters were left to fend for themselves. This vivid memoir is laced with humour, charity and love of life. In an afterword, the author tells of her life since this classic autobiography was first published in 1985.

--------------------------------------------------

The Stolen Child: A Memoir by Joe Dunne
(Paperback; 12.95 Euro / 15.00 USD / 8.00 UK; 220 pages)

The happiness of Joe Dunne's early life was blights when neighbours complained to the local Sisters of Charity that his young, widowed mother was misbehaving - allowing herself to be courted, and throwing parties in their North Strand home. The response of the Church and state was swift. In 1928, at the age of five, Joe was ordered to be detained in the care of the state until his sixteenth birthday. Separated from his mother and sister, he grew up in industrial schools in Kilkenny and Dublin - a fact that he kept secret from his colleagues in the Post Office for almost fifty years. In this book, he tells his story with honesty, humour, and courage, describing how he suffered the trauma of a lonely, institutionalised upbringing, learning to make the most of the few pleasures that came his way. This book is a moving, brave account of a childhood endured with grace and faith.

Yum! Some Summer Books from the Houston Chronicle:

May 23, 2003, 3:59PM

Summer books
From Harry Potter to James Patterson to presidential politics, there's something for every reading taste
By FRITZ LANHAM
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

This summer one book will be the proverbial elephant in the parlor, impossible to ignore. We're talking, of course, about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in J.K. Rowling's series of novels about the intrepid boy-wizard. It arrives in bookstores June 21.
[but] . . .

Harry Potter won't be the only book published this summer. It will only seem that way. A glance at the fiction lists turns up familiar names, especially in the mystery and thriller genres: James Patterson, Walter Mosley, Minette Walters, Dean Koontz, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich.

Larry McMurtry delivers the second installment of his proposed four-part saga of the Berrybender clan, an English family struggling to make its way in the wild and woolly American West of the 1830s. Tom Robbins, another writer with a loyal following, has a new novel.

Two prolific literary novelists, Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, have books. The latter's is another futuristic novel that should appeal to fans of The Handmaid's Tale.

Among the odder offerings is a novel about the battle of Gettysburg penned by Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. "An action-packed and painstakingly researched masterwork," the publisher assures. For some reason, Gettysburg is a hot topic this summer. Newt's effort is one of at least five books on the battle — three nonfiction, the other a mystery.


Publishers tend to frontload their summer releases, so most of the titles below will have arrived by early July.

Now for the details, starting with fiction.
· · ·

James Patterson is one. If Lake House (Little, Brown, $26.95) doesn't top the New York Times chart at some point, I'll eat my Octavio Dotel T-shirt. A sequel to When the Wind Blows, the novel revisits the six children who escaped a nasty government experiment. They face a new peril that threatens the whole of humanity.

Dean Koontz is another. The title character of The Face (Bantam, $26.95) is a Hollywood star of dazzling good looks. Some twisted soul is out to get him. Facing down the baddie is ex-cop Ethan Truman.

Janet Evanovich has broken from the pack of female mystery writers. Her last one, Hard Eight, was a No. 1 best seller. To the Nines (St. Martin's, $25.95), which finds bounty hunter Stephanie Plum tangling with the mob in Las Vegas, may well duplicate. Evanovich's novels are funny, energetic escapism.

Count on harder-boiled fare from Lee Child, whose Persuader ($24.95) has ex-Army cop Jack Reacher going undercover to investigate the disappearance of a federal agent, and from John Sandford, whose Naked Prey (Putnam, $26.95) centers on the apparent lynching of an interracial couple in the woods of northern Minnesota.

Catherine Coulter's Blindside (Putnam, $25.95), featuring married FBI agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich, should show up in the hands of poolside loungers. The pair investigates the kidnapping of a former FBI agent's 6-year-old son. A charismatic evangelist and his enigmatic wife figure in the plot.
· · ·
In literary fiction, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, $26) is a "what-if" tale about a post-apocalyptic world. The main character, Snowman, who survives an appalling worldwide calamity, is surrounded by not-quite-humans and dangerous neoanimals created by genetic engineering. The publisher calls the novel "a cautionary tale for the 21st century." Two A-list British novelists, both winners of the Booker Prize, have offerings. In The Light of Day (Knopf, $24), Graham Swift makes a nod to the detective genre, exploring the life of an ex-policeman turned private investigator and his relationship with a former client. Penelope Lively's 13th novel, The Photography (Viking, $24.95), begins with a man opening an envelope and discovering a photo of his late wife hand-in-hand with another man.

Norman Rush, winner of the National Book Award for Mating, seems to favor one-word titles. Mortals (Knopf, $26.95), set in 1990s Botswana, details the misadventures of three expatriate Americans — a CIA agent posing as a teacher, his disaffected wife and a doctor on a personal mission to lift the yoke of Christian belief from Africa. From Christina Garcia, a National Book Award finalist (Dreaming in Cuban), comes Monkey Hunting (Knopf, $23), the saga of a Chinese-Cuban family. It's set partly in Havana, the locale also for King Bongo (Knopf, $25) by Thomas Sanchez (best-known for his Key West novel Mile Zero). A bomb destroys a Havana nightclub on New Year's Eve 1957, and the title character goes in search of the culprits and of his sister, Cuba's most exotic showgirl.

A trailer behind a gas station in West Texas is the starting point for Getting Mother's Body (Random House, $23.95) by Suzan-Lori Parks, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. A young African-American woman, unmarried and pregnant, embarks on a quest for the cache of jewels rumored to be buried with her mother in Arizona.

It's Parks' first novel. Other debuts this summer include Ellen Ullman's The Bug (Doubleday, $23.95), about a demonic computer software bug and the havoc it wreaks. The author has worked as a software engineer for 20 years and is the author of the memoir Close to the Machine

Perhaps the most improbable debut arrives from pro wrestler-turned-author Mick Foley (Foley Is Good). The main character in Tietam Brown (Knopf, $23.95) is a teen-ager who arrives at Conestoga High School after seven years in reform school and finds himself pursued by the homecoming queen, a born-again Christian. Zany and deeply moving is how the publisher describes the story.

Zany might also apply to Tim Sandlin's Honey Don't (Putnam, $24.95), set in the near future and dealing, among other things, with a goatish president dying in flagrante, a Mafia bagman, a coke-snorting vice president and a free-spirited Texas woman named Honey.

Sandlin's publisher links his name with those of Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and Tom Robbins, the last of whom has a new novel himself. Robbins' Villa Incognito (Bantam, $27.50) is already on the best-seller list. Three Americans missing in action after the Vietnam War launch the whirligig plot.

Ten Little Indians (Grove, $24) is Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories about contemporary Native American life. Alexie is known for his unsparing yet often comic treatment of his characters' plights.

Not only is Joyce Carol Oates the most prolific literary novelist in the country, but she also never seems to step in the same river twice. Her latest, The Tattooed Girl (Ecco, $25.95), has a reclusive writer known for his Holocaust novel hiring as an assistant a near-illiterate young woman, who turns out to be a violent anti-Semite.

At 448 pages, The Paris Review Book (Picador, $25) is among the heftier literary titles of the season. For 50 years the Paris Review has published the finest writers in the world — Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, to name just a few. To commemorate its arrival at the half-century mark, its editors have put together this anthology of fiction, poetry, essays and interviews.

· · ·
For frothier fun, turn to The Devil Wears Prada (Doubleday, $21.95), Lauren Weisberger's comic novel about a small-town product who lands the job a million girls would die for as assistant to the high-powered, high-maintenance editor of a Vogue-like fashion magazine. It's already a best seller.

Young women, big city -- a natural for fiction. Candace Bushnell is best-known for Sex and the City, her 1996 collection of newspaper columns that inspired the HBO series. Trading Up (Hyperion, $24.95) is her comedy of manners centered on lingerie model Janey Wilcox.

The award for most intriguing title of the season goes to Aliza Valdes-Rodriguez for The Dirty Girls Social Club (St. Martin's, $24.95), about the lives and loves of six ambitious Latina twentysomethings.

Summer brings new novels from Eric Jerome Dickey, whose The Other Woman (Dutton, $23.95) deals with a woman confronted with her husband's infidelity; Johanna Lindsey, whose A Man to Call My Own (Atria, $25) features twins sent to live on a sprawling Texas ranch after the death of their father; and Danielle Steel, whose Johnny Angel (Delacorte, $19.95) is about a family nearly shattered by the death of a teen-age son.

If historical fiction is to your taste, there's American Empire: The Victorious Opposition (Ballantine, $27.95), the third and final volume in Harry Turtledove's alternative history of the United States. The time is the 1930s; fascists control the Confederacy. War with the United States looms.

Also in the category of alternative history is Newt Gingrich's Gettysburg (St. Martin's, $24.95), which explores how the Civil War would have unfolded had Robert E. Lee won the pivotal battle.

Larry McMurtry's The Wandering Hill

For more selections: Houston Chronicle Summer Books

Read Ireland Web Site Home Page: http://www.readireland.com

Read Ireland - THE Source for Irish Books on the Internet!

I have just ordered the following books from the library:

East Lynne /, Wood, Henry, 1814-1887.
Sixpence House : lost in a town of books /, Collins, Paul, 1969-
Death of a village : a Hamish Macbeth mystery /, Beaton, M. C.
Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts : using the power of pleasure to have your way with the world /, Thomashauer, Regena.
The dive from Clausen's pier /, Packer, Ann, 1959
The golden compass /, Pullman, Philip, 1946-
The jester : a novel /, Patterson, James, 1947-

Just a little light reading!

BBC's poll from readers of the top 100 books:

BBCi - The Big Read - Top 100 Books

Web site which lists web sites showing best books, etc.:

Lists of Bests : All Book Lists

Literature - What Makes a Good Story?

Great site on the short story with working example:

Exhibits Collection -- Literature

Inside the book business:

Bookwire

Bestsellers The January Magazine Online Bestseller List is reflective of book sales of international online booksellers.
This list was compiled for the week of May 12, 2003.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
by J.K. Rowling

The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown

The South Beach Diet
by Arthur Agatston

The Sinister Pig
by Tony Hillerman

Dreaming War
by Gore Vidal

Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution
by Robert C. Atkins

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd

No Second Chance
by Harlan Coben

Leap of Faith
by Queen Noor Al-Hussein of Jordan

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (adult edition)
by J.K. Rowling

Holy Fools
by Joanne Harris

River Cafe Cookbook Easy
by Rose Gray & Ruth Rogers

Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code
by Eoin Colfer

Black Dahlia Avenger
by Lauren Weisberger Steve Hodel

Reefer Madness
by Eric Schlosser

Naked Prey
by John Sandford

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel

The #1 Ladies' Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith

The Purpose-Driven Life
by Rick Warren

Krakatoa
by Simon Winchester

New Book - The Teammates by David Halberstam.

Sounds great! But then I like baseball.

They had, the four of them -- Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky -- played together on the Red Sox teams of the 1940s; Williams and Doerr went back even further: They were teenagers together on the San Diego Padres, a minor league team in the mid-'30s, and played with Boston in the late '30s. All four were men of a certain generation, born right at the end of World War One within 31 months of each other -- DiMaggio in 1917, Doerr and Williams in 1918, and Pesky in 1919. Doerr's middle name, in fact, was Pershing, after John "Black Jack" Pershing, the American general who had led the American troops in Europe in the Great War. On occasion, Doerr had been called Pershing by his teammates in the old days.

Lulu : Marketplace for a World of Digital Content Professor? Trainer? Photographer? Musician?
If you're a budding author, musician, freelance photographer or illustrator, upload and sell your work on Lulu without paying a cent. Offering customizable storefronts, ISBNs for books, quarterly royalty payments, and free photo and file storage, Lulu gives content creators complete control over their own work

May 10 Today in Literature:

TODAY: "Have you heard about the Toad?"

On this day in 1907 Kenneth Grahame wrote the first of a series
of letters to his son, Alastair, describing the Toad, Rat, Mole
and Badger adventures which became "The Wind in the Willows."
Grahame had been inventing such bedtime stories for several
years; putting them on paper at this point was occasioned by his
being separated from Alastair on his seventh birthday.

When Grahame offered "The Wind in the Willows" to his
publisher he described it as a book "of life, sunshine,
running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides,
free of problems, clear of the clash of sex, of life as
it might fairly be supposed to be regarded by some of the
wise, small things 'that glide in grasses and rubble of
woody wreck.'"

From Today in Literature:

TODAY: Twain's "Life on the Mississippi"

On this day in 1883 Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" was
published. Much of the book had first appeared as a popular
magazine series years earlier; Twain saw an opportunity not only
for a profitable book but, after twenty-one years away, to
revisit the world of his youth - to do research, and "to see the
river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be
left." Twain's autobiography describes the misadventure by which
his career as a river-boat pilot began in the mid-1850s.

Penguin Classics UK

They have a poll for who is the sexiest hero in classic literature:

Who is the sexiest hero in classic literature?

Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights
Mr Darcy
Pride and Prejudice
Mr Rochester
Jane Eyre
Prince Andrei
War and Peace
Hamlet
Eugene Onegin

So far, Mr. Darcy is winning. Eugene Onegin with the least - but I cannot imagine him as being the most sexiest at all.

This or that Tuesay - Media today

1. TV or radio? TV
2. On the radio: talk or music station? Music - 99.5 the Wolf
3. Actual books or books-on-tape (or e-books)? Actual books - must have paper.
4. Actual newspaper, or web version? actual - Dallas News; Web - NY Times
5. Wall Street Journal or National Enquirer? Neither
6. TV news...news channel such as CNN, or your local broadcast news? CNN; after 10 - local for weather
7. A movie you've been looking forward to seeing gets bad reviews all around. See it anyway, or pass? See it anyway - e.g. Gods and Generals
8. See movies when they first come out, or wait a few weeks for the lines at the theater to get shorter? Wait
9. TV: cable, satellite dish, or just plain old antenna? Satellite
10. Thought-provoking question of the week: If you had to choose only one form of media to come into your home, which would you choose...print (newspapers, magazines) or electronic (TV, internet)? Why? Print

Subject: support Victorian London

From the owner: I will keep very brief. Basically www.victorianlondon.org is, in a small way, not
really paying for itself. It doesn't cost much, having said that, maybe £200
pa, (excluding my time and buying books for scanning etc!), and I will be
maintaining and adding to it regardless - so no worries on that score.
However, if you think its a worthwhile resource, you can actually support it
at no cost to yourself, if you use Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, as I am on
Amazon's referrals scheme. This means, in effect, that you can buy any book
on Amazon and I get 15% of the price, if you use a particular hyperlink
code.

I'll say no more. As I say, the site will continue regardless - but if
anyone uses Amazon and would like to do this, let me know.

This is a very good site. Look into it.

Also from Wicked Company:

For those interested in monthly newsletter on writing tips feel free
to subscribe at URL: Virtual Writing Coach

From the Yahoo Groups Wicked Mystery:

The following books were reviewed during the month of April for Murder and
Mayhem Bookclub, visit our site on Murder and Mayhem Bookclub.

Please visit the reviews page:

Capital Offense by Kathleen Antrim - Reviewed by Roberta Austen
Seeds of Evil by Carlton Smith - Reviewed by Andrea Thompson
The Deadly Space Between by Patricia Duncker - Reviewed by Andrea Thompson
A Season for the Dead by David Hewson - Reviewed by Andrea Thompson
Manhattan Conspiracy: Blood on the Apple - Reviewed by Barbara Wright
Dead Aim by Iris Johansen - Reviewed by Andrea Thompson

Beware the Solitary Drinker by Cornelius Lehane - Reviewed by Luke Croll

See the Monkey : A Tale of Two Evils by John F Nienstedt - Reviewed by Roberta
Austen

A Penny for Your Thoughts by Mindy Starns Clark – Reviewed by Kathy Thomason
Murder.com by Betty Sullivan La Pierre – Reviewed by Kathy Thomason

Eyes of Betrayal by Patricia A Rasey - Reviewed by Barbara Wright

Dissolution by C.J.Sansom - Reviewed by Andrea Thompson

Killer Instinct by Zoe Sharp – Reviewed by Luke Croll

Last Step by Kathleen Walls – Reviewed by Kathy Thomason

New Mystery Website:

Noir Originals

It includes an ezine featuring reviews, author interviews, articles, essays, etc., and an author showcase area for writers of noir(ish) fiction.

Review of IF YOU ONLY KNEW HOW MUCH I SMELL YOU - by Roy Blount

The poetry in this book not written by a person per se, but by a dog -- and maybe sometimes a dog's poetry does not rhyme – but at least it comes from his heart. Roy Blount, Jr., the author behind the dogs' poetry, even explains as much in the introduction. This book is about dogs and their poetry.

Because of this, the book becomes even more enjoyable. The reader can look at the magnificent photos and read the poetry that that dog wrote for it. The dog's poetry is a "canine measure of somewhere between ordered and free," which shows the inner workings of all dogs. As in the poem, "Good Stick," you know exactly how the dog feels about his stick because – the dog itself wrote the poem. Dogs converse on baths, expensive shoes, treats – everything that is important to them. But the title of the book sums it up perfectly. Who wouldn't look at their dog (who may or may not have done something naughty) and find him replying, "If Only You Knew How Much I Smell You."

This is a great book for any dog lover.

From the Victorian Digest - the silent Victorian women writers:

"Subject: Silent Voices

Now available through Praeger (www.praeger.com: 0-313-32462-X) and
Amazon.com:
Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers, ed.
Brenda Ayres.

Contents: Miriam Burstein's "'Not the Superiority of
Belief, But Superiority of True Devotion': Grace Aguilar's Histories of
the Spirit," Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros' "The Victorian Heroine Goes
A-Governessing," Lucy Sussex's "The Detective Maidservant: Catherine
Crowe's Susan Hopley," Mary Lenard's "Deathbeds and Didacticism: Charlotte
Elizabeth Tonna and Victorian," Sueann Schatz's "Class Counts: The
Domestic-Professional Writer, the Working Poor and Middle-Class Values in
The Years That the Locust Hath Eaten and The Story of a Modern Woman,"
LeeAnne Richardson's "On the Face of the Waters: Flora Annie Steel and the
Politics of Feminist Imperialism," Helen Debenham's "Re-reading the
Domestic Novel: Anne Thackeray's The Story of Elizabeth," Jennifer Stolpa's
"'I am not Esther': Biblical Heroines and Sarah Grand's Challenge to
Institutional Christianity in The Heavenly Twins," Robyn Chandler's "Dinah
Mulock Craik: Sacrifice and the Fairy-order," and Brenda Ayres' "Marie
Corelli: 'The Story of One Forgotten'."

A new book about one of my favorite authors reviewed in the:

Washington Post
Reviewed by Edwin M. Yoder Jr.
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page BW10


SHELBY FOOTE
A Writer's Life
By C. Stuart Chapman
Univ. Press of Mississippi. 317 pp. $30

"A sympathetic grasp of the South in all its variety, as well as a sense of the limitations of present-mindedness, should be a prerequisite for writing about a figure like Shelby Foote. Analysis has its place, but when you're dealing with a great storyteller, the key is integer vitae: wholeness, of life and art."

Additional Information about:

Another Site from Yahoo! Groups : mostlyfiction

Newsletter for MostlyFiction.com, a site that features book recommendations and book reviews, free chapter excerpts and a chance to win the latest books in monthly raffles. Selected novels range from very recently published to all time favorites. Bookshelves include Contemporary Fiction, Latin American, The Wild West, Around the World, Detective Series, Mystery/Suspense, Spy/Thriller, Science Fiction and Humorous Fiction.

Also some True Adventure! Author bibliographies are listed in chronological order and each includes brief biographies as well as links to other reviews and related tid-bits. This is good site for students and book clubs or anyone who loves to read a wide range of fiction.

Please visit this Mostly Fiction

From the Book and Writing Group at Yahoo Groups:

Hey everyone, my new monthly column, Cold Case Investigations is now up at
Readers Room, here's the addy:

Readers Room / Cold Case

Every month I'll profile a different unsolve homicide, one that hasn't
received much media attention. Feel free to check it out.

Tim Miller
WITHOUT A TRACE--(Flying Dolphin Press May/June 2003)2002 Dorothy Parker
Award Honorable Mention

Ultimate Reading Site:

Constant Reader

Review of Second Chance by James Patterson
I never thought James Patterson could write in a woman's voice, but he done so with Second Chance and succeeded. Second Chance is the second book in his series, Women's Murder Club. There is a big difference between this series and the Alex Cross series, but with Patterson's mastery of writing it, he has created another great series in its own right.
Lindsay Boxer is back, albeit somewhat bitter and disillusioned, but with the onset of what looks to be a new serial murder spree, she is ready, along with the rest of her cohorts, to find out who is murdering African Americans with contacts to her own police department.
The chapters are short but pithy, each leaving you with a desire to read the next, and the next, and so on.

"Cats, books, life is good!"

from The Reading Cove at Yahoo Groups.

And all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.

- Bladerunner.

Another Literature quiz:


You're Fiction!


What type of literature are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Two new great new lit. sites:

The Republic of Pemberley - everything about Jane Austen and her works, plus some.

Pepys' Diary - Samuel Pepys' Diary online.

Great new crime novel from Stephen Booth - reviewed in the current January magazine.

. . .Stephen Booth's first novel, Black Dog, reached bookstores only two years ago, and he's already racked up a Barry Award win, a Macallan Gold Dagger nomination from Britain's Crime Writers' Association and enough approbatory buzz on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure that he won't be able to enjoy any extended holidays away from his computer for years to come.


Blood on the Tongue proves the sagacity of [a] career change. Like its predecessors, this absorbing new work follows an odd police couple -- the congenitally empathetic Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, his attractive yet designedly severe superior -- based in the East Midlands town of Edendale. With winter closing hard over their scenic region, and with many officers of "E" Division out of commission as a result, Cooper, Fry and their curious colleagues are especially taxed in trying to solve a medley of knotty puzzles: the freezing deaths of a man found on a roadside and an abused woman curled up on nearby Irontongue Hill, as well as the very cold case of a Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber that crashed into Irontongue back in 1945, killing everyone on board except for the pilot, who reportedly walked away from the wreckage ... and was never heard from again. Cooper finds himself drawn to the World War II tragedy, in large part because of Alison Morrisey, a beguiling young Canadian and the granddaughter of that missing pilot, who's come to Derbyshire determined to clear her ancestor's name. Fry is frustrated in her efforts to concentrate Cooper's attention on the modern crimes; but as it becomes evident that these various mysteries are linked, she and Cooper both search for proof that deceptions from the past have led to death in the present.

If it is anything like Black Dog, it should be great.

SimonSays.com sent me a list of these new current books. I think the Song Reader sounds the best.

IRISH GIRLS ABOUT TOWN
By Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes and Cathy Kelly

THE MAN I SHOULD HAVE MARRIED
By Pamela Redmond Satran

GETTING OVER JACK WAGNER
By Elise Juska

THE SONG READER
By Lisa Tucker

Book of the Week:

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed





This book is definitely the definitive answer the Jack the Ripper murder mystery. Cornwell provides enough secondary evidence to convict Jack the Ripper even in this day and age. Too bad, they didn't have her back then. Great book.

From the New York Times:
For the last couple of months, Amazon.com's Web pages have randomly sprouted hilariously easy sets of multiple-choice questions that spotlight the breadth of Amazon's offerings. For example: "How many men's hats and accessories can you find in our Apparel & Accessories Store?" Your choices:
(a) Over 200.
(b) One — and it has rhinestones.
(c) Amazon.com has an Apparel Store?

Each time you get an answer right, Amazon credits your account with a nickel.

The idea of paying you to look at its message is a winner. Sure, TV ads or radio sponsors are, in effect, paying you to look at their messages, too, but somehow getting the payment in cash is an exciting twist.

But there's a much greater significance to Amazon's "win a nickel" promotion: It's so witty, and so cleverly presented, you actually want to participate. Amazon doesn't try to conceal the fact that it's trying to sell you on its message. In fact, the grinning transparency of that effort is what makes it so much fun.

Memo to TV executives who worry about the ad-skipping functions of boxes like TiVo and ReplayTV: If the ads are clever enough, people won't skip over


Oh dear, I bet I buy more books!

I just found by accident a web site wherein the readers do the review. Sort of like Amazon. It is:

Footle

They say on the web site:

We're an index of book, film, web and music reviews written by our users. The idea is simple; you read a book, you come here and write a review. Other people are doing the same, and through super-duper community cooperation and lots of clicking we can work out what's hot and what's not.


I am going to look more in it - for sure.

A very interesting article on Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Little House on the Prairie was in the current issue of Common Place. She discusses seeing the book as a child versus seeing it as an adult.

I just received in the mail, the book:





It really looks good, and I am looking forward to reading it. Review will be later.

I am going to start a book of the week. Either my own choice or that of Ed or Quida. I'll decide by Friday and post it. Read on.

New Irish Fiction from "Read Ireland":

Missing by Mary Stanley
(Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 8.50 UK)

John and Elizabeth Dunville believe they have the ideal family. Their three daughters - beautiful, vivacious Baby; clever, industrious Becky; and lively, if mischievous Brona - attend Dublin's most prestigious convent school, and all have bright futures. But denial and deception go hand in hand, and one night, one of the girls slips out into the winter fog, and doesn't come home … This is a perceptive and poignant novel exploring the ramifications of loss and abandonment with compassion and a wry wit.

Great Service for the Soldiers Overseas:


BOOKS FOR SOLDIERS

I read an early copy of this book. It is great. I rate it a 9.


WILLEM'S FIELD, by Melinda Haynes

Simon Says the following:

Melinda Haynes' debut, MOTHER OF PEARL, was an Oprah Book Club selection, and her latest is a loving, original portrait of small-town life. Willem Fremont returns to his hometown to change his life...and ends up a part of the odd, unsettled lives he finds there. Imaginative and moving.

I just entered a Raffle on Mostly Fiction for Michael Connelly's book:



Here's hoping.

From Today in Literature:

On this day in 1861, George Eliot's "Silas Marner" was published.
Though generally viewed as one of Eliot's minor works, it was as
popular among readers when it came out as her earlier "Adam Bede"
and "The Mill on the Floss."; the book has also attracted
attention for the parallel found between the old weaver's life of
misery and redemption and Eliot's own. From chapter one:

It was fifteen years since Silas Marner had first come
to Raveloe; he was then simply a pallid young man, with
prominent, short-sighted brown eyes, whose appearance
would have had nothing strange for people of average
culture and experience, but for the villagers near
whom he had come to settle it had mysterious
peculiarities. . . .

To read the full article, please visit:
Today in Literature

From Read Ireland Book Review - some gothic, some mystery,
some romance - all in Ireland:

The Parts by Keith Ridgway
(Trade Paperback; 18.50 Euro / 21.00 USD / 15.00 UK;
Faber, 455 pages)

In her mansion in the Dublin Mountains, Delly Roche, widow of pharmaceuticals millionaire Daniel Gilmore, is getting ready for death. Keeping her company are her companions of many years, Kitty Flood and the discreetly insane Dr. George Addison-Blake. Why is Delly so keen to die? What exactly is in the letter discovered by Kitty? What is Dr. George doing in the shed by the overgrown
tennis court? And does any of it have anything to do with the conspiracy theories hinted at on Joe Kavanagh's radio show? Down in the city, Barry Joe's producer, is getting caught up in something and he's not quite sure what. Meanwhile Joe is trying desperately to lose his foothold on life and is succeeding only in annoying his neighbours. And all the time, conducting business down
by the river, doing his best to keep out of this, is Kez.
-----------------

The Day of the Dead by John Creed
(Trade Paperback; 18.50 Euro / 21.00 USD / 15.00 UK; Faber, 245 pages)

The newest Jack Valentine thriller, a deadly chase stretching from one end of New York to Mexico and culminating in incandescent conflict in the searing and pitiless uplands of central Mexico. Jack Valentine thinks he is finished with the covert life but the covert life is not finished with him. The assignment seems straightforward. An old friend's daughter, Alva Casagrande, has been sucked into what looks like a minor league Manhattan heroin vortex and Jack is persuaded to go there to pull her out. Simple enough, until the old friend is fighting for his life courtesy of a kilo of Semtex in the wheel arch of his car. Two days later Jack is in New York calling on old friendships and provoking ancient hatreds. He realises that the little girl's Mexican partner is as wealthy and hard-wired as they come and also that his friend's daughter carries a punch herself. The agenda is drugs on a large scale and Jack is fixed for a descent into hell.

-----------------------------------------

The Sirius Crossing by John Creed
(Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 8.50 UK; Faber, 250 pages)

This book is a tense, gripping and intelligent thriller - the first in the Jack Valentine series - from one of Ireland's finest writers. Jack Valentine has been in the intelligence game too long and it is starting to show, but he accepts one more mission. He always does. It seems like a simple task but it throws up deadly questions and he doesn't know the answers. What were American Special Forces doing in Ireland twenty-five years ago and why does it matter now? What is the thread, which leads from a deserted mountainside to the offices of the White House? Valentine no longer knows which threatens him most - the dark alliance of men who want to kill him or his own dangerous cynicism.

-----------------------------------------
Rosemary by Margaret Kaine
(Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 8.50 UK; Poolbeg, 479 pages)

For three women - Rosemary, her mother Beth and grandmother Rose - a single phone call ends years of heartbreak and regret. For Rosemary, alone and determined to find her roots, it is the end of a search begun when she first held her birth certificate, staring in bewilderment at the heading: Certified Copy of Entry from Adopted Children's Register. But the end of one journey is the beginning of another - one that brings both romance and the nightmare truth about her conception. Rosemary has sprung from tough soil: the clay of North Staffordshire where her ancestors have worked in The Potteries for generations. Yet will she have the strength to endure what she is about to discover?

Why Do Fools Fall in Love? By Louise Marley
(Paperback; 11.00 Euro / 12.50 USD / 8.50 UK; Poolbeg, 453 pages)

When Shelby Roberts is forced to resign from the police, her new job - three weeks on location in a 5-star hotel looking after dangerously hunky actor Luke McFadden - doesn't look so bad at all. Well, just how much trouble can one actor get into? But spoilt Luke is outraged at being lumbered with a bodyguard. Outrage soon turns to intrigue and before long Luke is crazy about Shelby. But has he left it too late? Shelby fancies mean and moody director Ross Whitnes, but Luke's co-star Courtney has her own plans for him. When Luke's ex-fiancee Paige comes back on the scene, and a stalker makes his presence felt, passions continue to rise long after the cameras stop rolling.

To order books from the Read Ireland Book Review - send an email to our order department at: ri-orders@readireland.ie. Please be sure to include your mailing address and credit card details.