Judging a book by its cover....

After growing tired of answering her daughter's question: "Momma what's this book about?" a mother asks her daughter to guess based on the covers of several popular and classic works:

  

"It looks like a book for kids. I think it’s about a donkey and a pig that do not like each other and they both live on a farm for animals. The same farm. It looks like it would be a funny book with a good really nice ending."

Read the full article and more of her book reviews here

Photographing Elderly Animals

For anyone who has known and loved an aging animal this is a beautiful and very moving project: via The Centered Librarian

Books I want to Read...

Being a Librarian has some great perks.  Here are a few of the books I have read about or heard about that look like they might be good:

FICTION:

 
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Book Description (From Amazon):
Luminous, haunting, unforgettable, The Age of Miracles is a stunning fiction debut by a superb new writer, a story about coming of age during extraordinary times, about people going on with their lives in an era of profound uncertainty. On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world.



Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Possession by As Byatt and The Biographer's Tale as well as The Children's Book are currently on my "to be read soon" shelf.


Book Description (From Amazon):
Booker Prize winner Dame Antonia Byatt breathes life into the Ragnorak myth, the story of the end of the gods in Norse mythology. Ragnarok retells the finale of Norse mythology. A story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves: what more relevant myth could any modern writer choose? Just as Wagner used this dramatic and catastrophic struggle for the climax of his Ring Cycle, so AS Byatt now reinvents it in all its intensity and glory. As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods - a book of ancient Norse myths - and her inner and outer worlds are transformed.War, natural disaster, reckless gods and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that AS Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark.

NONFICTION:


The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life by Dinty W. Moore

I am a sucker for books on writing. My favorite is, of course, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. And while I may have given up on my dream of going to Naropa University and getting my MFA in creative writing at the The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics while studying Zen Buddhism... I haven't given up on the idea of eventually publishing my writing (or the possibility of getting my MFA somewhere closer..). This book appealed to me because it approaches writing from the perspective of  Buddhist teachings such as mindfulness, clinging attachment, and creativity. It also includes advice from some of my favorite writers including Rilke and Faulkner.



Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes by Janice Cole
As a psuedo-vegetarian (I eat fish) I don't eat chicken but I do eat a lot of eggs. This book offers 125 egg recipes in addition to chicken raising and homesteading advice.  I like that it is broken up by season too so you can incorporate what is fresh and available in the garden. We are definitely planning to get more chickens this spring/summer (once we have completely Sammy proofed their living space) and I will be collecting recipes to try out for the inevitable over abundance of eggs!



 I am also looking at this book which seems to have some really interesting and unique recipes as well:
 The Good Egg: More than 200 Fresh Approaches from Breakfast to Desserts by Marie Simmons








CURRENTLY READING:

 
Prague: a Novel by Arthur Phillips

 Book Description (From Amazon):
In Prague, Arthur Phillips's sparkling, Kundera-flavored debut, five young Americans converge in Budapest in the early 1990s. Most are there by chance, like businessman Charles Gabor, whose parents were Hungarian. But one of them, John Price, has the more novelistic motivation of lost love. He is following his older brother, Scott, intent on achieving an intimacy that Scott, a language teacher and health enthusiast, is just as intently trying to escape. The romantic hero of this unsentimental novel, John Price lives like an expatriate of the 1920s. He longs for experience (and more or less stumbles into a writing job for an English language paper), but even more so for the great, obliterating love that takes the form of the perky assistant Emily Oliver. Mark Payton, a scholar of nostalgia whose insights are touched with mysticism, seems often to speak for the author, even in his barely repressed desire for John Price. For who would not love the good and unaffected, in the confusion, opportunism, and irony that characterize fin-de-siècle Europe? Phillips's five seekers are like mirrors that reflect Budapest at different angles, and that imperfectly--but wonderfully--point toward the unattainable city: the glittering, distant Prague.



Note: I have become an Amazon Associate, which enables me to use Amazon's images and link to their reviews with permission. However, all opinions and the selection of titles are mine.

Books I want to read: January

Being a Librarian has some great perks.  Here are a few of the books I have read about or heard about that look like they might be good:

Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung

 Book Description (from Amazon):
"On the night Janie waits for her sister, Hannah, to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's stories, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.
Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.
Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another."

Memoirs of a Eurasian by Vivian Yang
From the author of Shanghai Girls comes this new novel:

Book Description (from Amazon):
"In Shanghai’s French Concession in 1944, a young Russian fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution from his homeland falls in love with a local teenager. She dies giving birth to a girl without his knowledge, and he is expelled from China along with most other Westerners following the Communist takeover in 1949. The daughter grows up to be a piano instructor and becomes an unwed mother herself in 1962. Her daughter Mo Mo, whose father remains a mystery to all but her reticent mother, is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious. But she is a rare Eurasian in a politically radical and culturally homogenous society. We enter her bleak yet fascinating world cloaked to the West where Eurasian appearances are a double-edged sword, cherished and fetishized simultaneously. As the plot of this evocative novel twists and turns through the lost glorious days of the old Shanghai, the Sino-Soviet ideological split of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, the economic reform that ensued in China, the bubble years in the 1980s Japan, and the 20th century Russian and Chinese immigration, a captivating story of one girl’s courageous journey of overcoming extraordinary racial and socio-political circumstances unfolds …"


Note: I have become an Amazon Associate, which enables me to use Amazon's images and link to their reviews with permission. However, all opinions and the selection of titles are mine.