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SUSIE MOLONIE

Witches can have anything they want. Anything. But witches need thirteen to work their will. How better to achieve this than to lure back a banished daughter and her child. By making the mother sick they get the young mother to return and bring her daughter as a sacrifice. Black humour at its best.

CHARLOTTE ROCHE

Wetlands is quite the bizarre book. It is a celebration of women’s bodies, sex and bodily functions. Having just seen The Vagina Monologues, this book seems to fit right in. The opening sentence concerns hemorrhoids: it is relatively tame. By page two, the heroine is reminiscing about anal sex. The book takes place in a hospital. Helen has cut her anus while shaving and she now needs an operation. Slowly glimpses of her dysfunctional childhood are revealed. For a book that is all about sex and bodies it is not at all sexy. Weak ending.

Worth reading if you are not easily shocked.

Check out this link:

http://www.paikeday.net/ArtVagina.htm

I found this after seeing Vaginal Monologues.

The Good Book                  David Plotz

The Birth House                   Amy McKay

Salvation Army                           Abdellah Taia

Ape House                           Sara Gruen

The Boy Next Door                  Rene Sabatini

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest         Steig Larrson

Forty Rules of Love                  Elif Shakaf

My Parents are Sex Maniacs         Robyn Harding

Tales of Wonder                           HUSTON SMITH with Jeffery Pain

April Witch                           Majgull Axelson

The Boy in the Moon                  Ian Brown

The 14^th Dali Lama                           Tetsu Sauwai

Surviving the Angel of Death         Eva Mozes Kor

Beat the Reaper                           Josh Bazell

The Grave of God’s Daughter         Brett Ellen Block

The Wayfinders                           Wade Davis

Just Kids                                    Patti Smith

Dandy in the Underworld                  Sebastian Horsley

The Goodman Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ         Phillip Pullman

Shadow Tag                                    Louise Erdrich

The Believers                           Zoe Heller

First They Killed My Father         Long Ung

Cartwheels in a Sari                  Jayanti Tamm

Self                                             Yann Martel

The Cement Garden                  Ian McEwan

The Mule                                    Juan Eslava Galan

Fishing for Bacon                           Michael Davie

Elly                                             Elly Berkovits Grosse

Breaking Lorca                           Giles Blund

Leisure Seekers                           Michael Zandoorian

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal         Micael Van Rooy

Secret Son                                    Laila Lalami

Dear Everyone                           Michael Kimball

A Year in Tibet                           Sun Shuyun

The Wall                                Peter Sis

Her Fearful Symmetry            Audrey Miffenegger

In the Heart of the Canyon      Elizabeth Hyde

RENE SABATINI

“Two days after I turned 14 the son of our neighbour set his stepmother alight”, begins this engaging novel. Set in Zimbabwae at the time of its independence, Boy is a story of inter-racial love and of the slow disintegration of the country due to corruption. Ian, the boy is white, Lindiwe, who narrates, is black. There are many contrasts, she is educated, he is not. He is a heavy drinker. Ian has an artistic eye and becomes a photographer, documenting some of the abuses that happen in his own country and in South Africa.

Boy won the Orange Prize for first novel. Well worth the read.

MAJGULL AXELSON

A strong novel, April Witch is about three sisters and their foster mom, Aunt Ella. The sister don’t know that there is actually a fourth sister born to Ella but so severely disabled she was institutionalized. Desiree is a benandante, a person who had been born wrapped in the amniotic membrane, or caul; a circumstance which (as in many other societies) was believed to bestow supernatural powers. Desiree uses her supernatural powers to enter the bodies of animal and humans to explore the world. The three foster child have all come from severely dysfunctional homes. Christina severely burned by her birth mother becomes a doctor. Margareta abandoned at birth comes a physicist  who can not finish her dissertation. Birgitta becomes a drug addict and whore.

Best book I’ve read for sometime.

PETER NOWAK

There are a lot of interesting facts and theories in this book. Most people know that the internet started in the military ARP net. But did you realize that WWII helped spurn the porn industry? ‘The war brought technological standardization to smaller film cameras” that in post war culture were used for creating sexual flics.

American corporate interests are a major driving force for Genetically Modified seeds and food. Greenpeace maintains that the only people who benefit from genetically modified foods are te shareholders of the large biotech companies. One scientist came up with Golden Rice which could solve one of the biggest malnutrition problems in the world: vitamin A deficency which can lead to blindness and death. GMO companies have patented not only the seeds they develop but the technology to create them

EVA MOZES KOR

A simply written but powerful book. Eva and her twin sister Miriam, along with two older sisters and her parents were living in Transylvania during the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They had an opportunity to leave the country and find safety but Eva’s mother opted to stay put, ending her family’s chances to escape before it was too late  ”We are safe here, Mother said.” At school the twins experienced continually increasing racism. “I remember watching a short film How to Kill Jews. O day a math problem read, If you had  five Jews, and you killed three Jews, how many Jews would be left?” Eva and her family were transported to Auschwitz where they were seperated from each other. Because Eva and Miriam were twins, they were selected to be a part of Mendele’s research projects as he studied the effects of some of his experiments on twin subjects.

Eva had a amazingly strong will to live and to keep her sister alive. “I will not die.” When Eva was sick from one of the Mengele’s experiments Miriam gave her food to her sister. Eva writes, “Imagine a ten year old girl stopped eating for a week to feed her sick sister. When I did not die as Mengele expected Miriam was taken to the labs and injected with man shots that made her sick. If I had died Miriam would have been rushed to the lab and killed with a shot of chloroform to her heart. Simultaneous autopsies would have compared my diseased organs to her healthy ones.”

“The place where the Nazis had kept all the clothes, shoes, and blankets they had taken from prisoners they called Canada. Perhaps because they saw the country of Canada as a place of abundance.”

The most disturbing thing about the holocaust is that there is genocide happening around the world today: Yugoslavia, Uganda, Sudan, Burma and more. We didn’t learn from WWII.

A must read.

WADE DAVIS

The essays in this wonderful collection were written for the celebrated Massy Series for CBC.  Davis looks to the San tribe who live in the Kalahari desert, as how our ancestors lived before they migrated out of Africa and spread out over the world. The Kahari is one of the most hostile environments in the world. “In English we have 31 sounds. The San have 141, a cacaphony of clicks and cadence that many linguists believe echos the very birth of our language.”

In Australia: “Knowing the extraordinary reach of the Aboriginal mind, the sublets of their thoughts and philosophy and the evocative power of their rituals it is chilling to think of this reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition, and insight that very nearly ran dry during those terrible days of death and conflagration.”

“Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is sanctioned and endorsed as appropriate development policy.” In Borneo, “Penan explicitly perceive wealth as the strength of social relations among people.”

“Canada is leading the way, not only as a model of a successful multicultural country, but a s nation-state prepared to acknowledge past mistakes and seek appropriate means of restitution in a pluralistic society. I am reminded of this every time I travel in Nunavut which is now under the administration of the Inuit people.”

Wade Davis points out that ancient peoples lived on Earth for millennia without destroying it. So why can’t we? “By their very existence, the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet.”

A wonderful book. A must read!

CHUCK HOGAN

Neal Maven has recently returned from Iraq where he was one of a group of highly trained soldiers who were killing machines. What will he do with these skill back home in Boston? Brad Royce. Royce is everything Maven wants to be: a fellow vet, charismatic and confident, principled, wealthy, and with a beautiful woman on his arm. Not just any beautiful woman, but Danielle Vetti — the most stunning girl from Maven’s high school. Literally the girl of his dreams. Neal becomes one of Royce’s “sugar bandits.” The “sugar bandits” interrupt drug sales, destroy the product (the drugs) and take the money ,and kill lots of drug dealers. Of course word gets around. The operation is not as successful as when it first started. Maven wonders why Royce isn’t on the front line risking his life with the others.

It is an interesting thriller. Hogan co-wrote Pan’s Labyrinth, a strong movie from a few years back.

It was an interesting process creating this list. I’ve never been able to compile a Best Books list until I started blogging and in doing so generate a list of all the books that I’ve read. My best reads of 2009 are:

ANDREW DAVIDSON      The Gargoyle

The Flying Troutmans      Miriam Toews

SHARI LAPENA HALF A YELLOW SUN         CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

WASTED VIGIL NADEEM ASLAM

RAGGED COMPANY                  RICHARD WAGAMESE

THE POSITION RICHARD WAGAMESE

LITTLE BEE CHRIS CLEAVER

THE BLUE NOTEBOOK JAMES A. LEVINE

BITTER EMBRACE: WHITE SOCIETY’S ASSAULT ON THE WOODLAND CREE MAGGIE SIGGINS

THE WHITE TIGER ARAVIND ADIGA

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME         ANDRE ACIMAN

SECRETS OF THE TSIL CAFÉ         THOMAS FOX AVERILL

STANLEY PARK         TIMOTHY TAYLOR

TIBET, TIBET: a personal history in a lost land         PATRICK FRENCH

CONFESSIONS OF A PAGAN NUN: A Novel         KATE HORSLEY

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO         STIEG LAWSON

GOOD TO A FAULT MARINA ENDICOUTT

MR PIP         LLYOD JONES

ANIMAL’S PEOPLE         INDRA SINHA NIKOLSKI         NICOLAS DICKER

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES HOWARD ZINN

The books are listed in no particular order. Sorry that the page is such a mess. Edublogs would not save my formating.

WILL EISNER

NAME tells the story of the Arnheim family, German Jews who immigrated to America in the mid-1800s, through four generations of wealth, death, disaster, and marital strife. Eisner’s expressive characters show the reader the lives of immigrant families who suffer from “the uncertain feeling of being Jewish in a Christian world,” to quote Eisner. One thing that I found interesting was the racism of the German Jews against the Jews from Russia and Poland. It is also the story of cutthroat business deals and class. The characters are all one-dimensional, and there isn’t much nuance in the story. It is melodramatic with sudden heart attacks and a no-good, alcoholic younger son.

Not the greatest graphic novel but with Eisner being the father of the graphic novel I wanted to give it a try.

EDITORS OF HUFFINGTON POST

Wikopedia defines Huffington post:

The Huffington Post (often referred to as HuffPost) is an American liberal news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti, featuring various news sources and columnists.^[2] The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement, world news, and comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs and original content. In four years, it has become an influential media brand — “The Internet Newspaper.” The Huffington Post was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and liberal alternative to conservative news aggregators like the Drudge Report.^[3]

In 2008, the site launched its first local version, HuffPost Chicago; HuffPost New York launched in June, 2009, and HuffPo Denver launched on Sept 15, 2009.^[4] The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month.”

H-Post has garnered multiple awards for blogging and news.

The GUIDE talks most specifically about political commentary, which isn’t the type of blogging that I do. With chapters such as Finding Your Voice and How the Blogosphere is  Remaking the Media it does have wise suggestions.

It is a great book to skim if you blog. And it is funny. I laughted out loud several times. I learned that the wavy letters that you have to type to make a comment are called CAPTCHAs. That stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

I found this in A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook a blog that I’ve been following. I thought it was an interesting way to look at one’s reading over the past year to see how diverse it has been. I know I want diversity in my life.

California dreamin’ photos from our summer in the city of the fallen angels 

 Children’s Author Nikki Tate was touring schools and libraries in Saskatchewan for Canada Book Week. Nikki’s day job is working the children’s department in an independent bookstore in Victoria. Her book Trouble on Tarragon Island was banned in a school library in Kindersley Sk because it contains the work bazoongasfor a woman’s breasts. We roared with laughter. The librarian felt that the book would lead students to be disrespectful to seniors. An interesting concern but instead of reading it with students and addressing her concerns with the youth she banned the book. Of course when the publisher heard, he made press releases. Banning is always good for sales. He sent Nikki a box of books for this tour so she could give away free books at the mall in Kindersley. This story did make a four-line blurb in Mclean’s magazine the week that she was here. What most people don’t know is that Nikki had all ready started Banned on Tarragon Island. She had planned it to be about a book about a gay character. As we were discussing this at the dinner table, Liam said that the banning could be about anything, even vandalism. Then the librarian could think that the book could lead to students doing vandalism. Nikki was so impressed with the idea that she asked Liam if she could steal his idea. She wanted to concentrate on the banned issue not to confuse it with discussion of gay issues. I think Liam was thrilled.  Nikki was a terrific guest. Out going and a great storyteller she fit right in with the family. She lives north of Victoria on Squamish peninsula with a menagerie of animals and her father. Where she finds time to write she didn’t say. A real passion is doing performance art story telling of Arthurian tales. Bev found this out the next day at lunch while I was a work. She and Micah got along like a prairie fire on a windy day. She spoke his language: books. Recommending young adult books is her job. She even spent an hour doing video games with Micah. What an angel. I get nauseous just looking at the screen.  Here is the address of Nikki Tate’s blog:http://nikkitate.blogspot.com/and her webpagehttp://www.stablemates.net/ 

We created this blog to share with family and friends our love of books. If you would like to join this group please email brian.bassingt@lskysd.ca . If you choose to not join you are still able to write comments. Comments are moderated by the blog administration so inappropriate comments will not be displayed.

Brian