Mailbox Monday
Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The June host is Burton Book Review.
From Goodreads for review:
Giving Up The Ghost
by Eric Nuzum
At once hilarious and incredibly moving, Giving Up the Ghost is a memoir of lost love and second chances, and a ghost story like no other. Eric Nuzum is afraid of the supernatural, and for good reason: As a high school oddball in Canton, Ohio, during the early 1980s, he became convinced that he was being haunted by the ghost of a little girl in a blue dress who lived in his parents’ attic.
From Little, Brown for review and giveaway:
This Bright River
by Patrick Somerville
Ben Hanson’s aimless life has bottomed out of a series of bad decisions, but a surprising offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin’s mysterious death a decade earlier. A compelling family drama and a surprising love story, rich with the dark humor and piercing intelligence that made The Cradle so beloved, This Bright River confirms Somerville’s status as one of the most talented writers at work today.
From Quirk Books for review:
The Last Policeman
by Ben H. Winters
What’s the point of solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Hank Palace, a homicide detective in Concord, New Hampshire, asks this question every day. When it first appeared, 2011L47J was just a speck, somewhere beyond Jupiter’s orbit. By mid-October it revealed itself to be seven kilometers in diameter, and on a crash course with the Earth. Now it’s March, and sometime in September, 2011L47J will slam into our planet and kill half the population immediately, and most of the rest in the miserable decades that follow.
From Doubleday for review and giveaway:
The Pigeon Pie Mystery
by Julia Stuart
With her trademark wit and charm, Julia Stuart introduces us to an outstanding cast of lovable oddballs, from the palace maze-keeper to the unconventional Lady Beatrice (who likes to dress up as a toucan—don’t ask), as she guides us through the many delightful twists and turns in this fun and quirky murder mystery. Everyone is hiding a secret of the heart, and even Alexandrina may not realize when she’s caught in a maze of love
From Penguin Audio for review:
The Chaperone
by Laura Moriarty
A captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both. Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone.
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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.
Share what you read last week and what you are currently reading.
This is Audiobook Week so I will be posting audiobook reviews that I have saved up over the past few weeks plus a few other surprises and giveaways. Check back for more Audio Goodness this week.
I’m currently taking part in the Literary Blog Hop which runs through Wednesday and I am giving away, you guessed it, an audiobook!
Finished Listening/Reading Last Week:
My review of The Age of Miracles is posted. I am also giving away a copy of the book, enter by June 30th.
Reviews for Stolen Prey and House of Velvet and Glass up later this week.
Reading/Listening This Week:
I am finishing up Beautiful Ruins which is excellent. My review will be posted on Thursday. Then on to Red Shirts, which is a Star Trek spoof. Some science fiction humor should be interesting. I’ve given up on Fifty Shades of Grey. Although I’d like to know how the book ends, the audio is just too awful to finish. I’ll be posting my thoughts on that later this week. Now on to my next audiobook, The Cove.
What Are You Reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Last week I posted about a nest of Barn Swallows that I was monitoring for Nestwatch. Ten days after I took those photos the little guys were ready to leave the nest.
As I walked toward the pavillion on Thursday, I noticed a little bird perching on the sign at the edge of the marsh. One of the nestlings had just flown from the nest.
The other two little ones were still in the nest. The parents were doing fly-bys in and around the pavillion, swooping and screeching, warning them of my presence.
Last year I watched several of the nestlings fledge and it took the parents a few hours to coax the last ones out of the nest. This time I left and let the parents do their job. When I returned on Friday morning they had all left the nest. I could see the little ones flying around over the marsh.
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Welcome to the Literary Blog Hop hosted by Judith at Leeswame’s Blog.
The event will run from June 23rd through the 27th.
Over 60 blogs will be participating and each will be offering a book or bookish items of a literary nature. Since June is Audiobook Month, I will be giving away an Audiobook CD.
The Giveaway
Your choice of the following Audiobook CDs:
Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George
or
A Good American by Alex George
Giveaway Information
- Contest is open to followers with an address in the US only.
To enter, fill out THIS FORM.- For an extra entry, tweet the giveaway.
- The deadline for entry is midnight EDT, June 27th. I will draw one random winner who will be contacted by email and will have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address.
[Contest has ended]
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The Taste Of Tomorrow
Dispatches From the Future of Food
by Josh Schonwald
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Harper
Publish Date: April 10, 2012
Format: Hardcover | 304 pages
Rating: 4 of 5
In The Taste of Tomorrow, journalist Josh Schonwald sets out on a journey to investigate the future of food. His quest takes him across the country and into farms and labs around the planet. We get an inside look at the global food production industry, the future of our food supply and what we may be eating tomorrow.
We begin our journey into the future of food with a theoretical look at a meal in the year 2035. In this future, a quarter pound of grass-fed, free-range, antibiotic-free char-grilled Hereford burger will set you back $60 dollars, whereas a burger from the bioreactor will only cost $10. Fake meat? Let’s hope that doesn’t happen any time soon. Now we return to the present.
A discussion of the evolution of bagged salad greens was fascinating. I can remember a time when only iceberg lettuce was available in the grocery store. My mom would grow buttercrunch and other tasty, leafy greens in her garden and I wondered why they weren’t available at the store. The reason was simple, iceberg was the only lettuce that would travel for more than a few days without rotting. The author goes behind the scenes and interviews some of the people instrumental in bringing a variety of lettuce and vegetables to our tables year round and talks about new varieties being developed.
I was not impressed with the future of meat, and there is a slight amount of ick-factor in reading about in vitro meat labs and mouse burgers. Lab meat doesn’t do much for me, and neither does the thought of eating exotic animals raised from DNA samples. I’m not much of a meat eater to begin with and those choices would send me over the edge to an all plant and fish diet!
I was surprised to learn that 90% of the fish eaten in the United States is imported. There are a lot of regulations on fish farming and the future of fish may be indoor, inland aquaculture. Several of these farms exist and the author visited one in Martinsville, Virginia, to see for himself. The search for a sustainable fish to farm has already begun, with Cobia and Barramundi top contenders. (I am not familiar with Cobia, but I have eaten Barramundi and it is one of the best tasting fish I’ve ever had. I am eagerly waiting for it to appear on the grocery shelves in the US.)
There is also some discussion of genetically modified foods and while the author doesn’t endorse it, he is not against it either. While I understand the need to economically feed a growing population, I’m not convinced that GMO is harmless and that at some point in the future we might sorry we unleashed something irreversible into our already fragile environment.
Overall the book is well-researched covering both current farming techniques and speculating on what the future will bring to our table. It’s written in a very readable and often entertaining style. At times it gets a little too detailed with more than we need or want to know. There are a lot of interesting bits of information here if you dig them out, but at times I was tempted to skim over some of the lengthy descriptions of the farms, techniques and background information.
At the end, the author also briefly discussed ‘The End of Food’, where eating a meal would be replaced by a pill. Soylent Green anyone? A meal in a pill has been talked about for decades, first envisioned by DARPA, the US government agency that brought us stealth aircraft, lasers, and APRANET, the precursor to the internet. The military appears to be the only one enthusiastic about pill food. While I can see the use of an energy bar or a supplement, it’s doubtful that pills will ever substitute for meals in the general population. Eating is a social activity, and for most people, a good meal is a pleasurable event, something to savor and enjoy.
I would recommend this book to those interested in understanding how some of our food is produced today, where it may be headed tomorrow and who enjoy reading about the research behind the story.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
I have been complaining about no rain in Chicago for three weeks and as I headed outside to work in the garden this morning … you guessed it… it’s raining.
This morning I signed up for a new social media tool, wrote a post for this weekend’s Literary Giveaway Blog Hop and am preparing for Audiobook Week.
Riffle – A New Social Media Tool for Books
Publisher’s Weekly has an article on new way to discover books using the social media tool Riffle. The intent is to work with book bloggers, booksellers, authors, and others to create a “distilled single feed” for books.
Riffle is currently invitation only. Request one HERE or click the image to the right.
Literary Giveaway Blog Hop
The fifth Literary Blog Hop hosted by Judith at Leeswammes’ Blog begins on Saturday, June 23rd and runs through Wednesday, June 27th.
Over 60 blogs are participating and will be giving away a book of literary merit (ie no romance, urban fiction or YA).
I will be offering an audiobook since June is Audiobook Month.
Audiobook Week
Next week, June 25 – 29, is Audiobook Week, hosted by Jen at Devourer of Books.
There will be all kinds of audiobook goodness going on:
– Daily reviews
– Discussion topics
– Link-ups
– Prizes
Daily discussion topics are posted for those who want to get a head start.
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The Age of Miracles
by Karen Walker Thompson
Genre: Science Fiction, YA
Publisher: Random House
Publish Date: June 26, 2012
Format: Hardcover | 288 pages
Rating: 4 of 5
We take for granted that the sun will rise each morning heralding the beginning of a new day. But what if it didn’t? What if the rotation of the earth began to slow? Days and nights would grow longer and longer. Our innate sense of time, cued by the sun, the moon, and the stars would no longer correspond to the 24 hour clock. The circadian rhythm of the planet would be thrown into disarray causing chaos. Could the planet and the life inhabiting it survive such conditions?
In The Age of Miracles, Julia and her family awake one morning to an announcement that just such an event has occurred. There had been a change, a slowing of the earth’s rotation, and it would continue slow down. Soon the governments of the world declared that all business would be run on 24-hour clock time regardless of whether it was day or night; but their decree of order could not stop the pending environmental disasters that were to come.
Julia narrates the story in the past tense and we experience the changes unfolding from her point of view as she looks back at that first year. While I consider this a science fiction novel because of the premise, it is not, as the description might imply, a dystopian novel. It is really more of coming of age story. There is not a lot of action, adventure, or heavy scientific or techie explanations. No one knows why the rotation is slowing so the technical aspects of how or why are not discussed. Instead, a large part of the book focuses on the angst of adolescence, boyfriends, girlfriends, parties, school, and so on, with the added difficulty of surviving in a changing and ever more hostile environment.
Through Julia’s eyes we watch the earth grow hotter and learn the ramifications of a suddenly warmer planet. Vegetation and wildlife begin to die off, power consumption surges and radiation levels in the atmosphere increase as the magnetic field deteriorates. Not everyone could cope with the changes. Some got sick. Some chose to go off of Clock Time and instead live with Real Time, attempting to adapt to the ever lengthening days.
I rarely say that a book could have been a little longer, but in The Age of Miracles there were a lot of interesting, relevant, topics that were touched upon but never fully explored. Perhaps that was the author’s intent. To make us think and discuss.
Overall this was a thought-provoking, enjoyable book that, while I felt was aimed at young adults, could be enjoyed by all ages.
About the Author
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and is an editor of fiction and non-fiction at Simon & Schuster. The Age of Miracles is her first book.
For more information about Karen and The Age of Miracles, please visit the book’s website and Facebook page.
Click HERE for the tour schedule.
A Giveaway
The publisher has generously offered a copy of The Age of Miracles to give away to one of my readers. If you would like to be entered in the drawing, fill out the form below by June 30th. I will choose one winner using random.org who will be notified by email and will have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address, US/Canada only.
[Contest has ended]
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Summerland
by Elin Hilderbrand
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books, Little Brown
Publish Date: June 26, 2012
Format: Hardcover | 400 pages
Rating: 5 of 5
For parents of teenagers, a phone ringing in the middle of the night can be a terrifying sound. When it’s a call from the police saying there has been an accident, a parent’s worst nightmare is realized.
On a June evening following a Nantucket High graduation party, a Jeep driven by Penny Alistair crashed on Cisco Beach traveling at speeds in excess of 80 mph. Penny was killed and the three other students in the vehicle were injured. Penny’s brother, Hobby, is in a coma, and her boyfriend, Jake, and another friend, Demeter, were shaken up but unhurt.
What happened that night on the beach? The Jeep belonged to Penny’s boyfriend, Jake, but she grabbed the keys and insisted on driving. What caused her to crash? Penny was upset by something she heard that evening, but the entire story is far more complex than one conversation.
The story unfolds from multiple points of view alternating between the teens in the vehicle the night of the crash and their parents. The narrative is multi-layered with richly developed characters with depth and feeling. We see that life in a small community is not immune to the problems of the big city as each character reveals secrets, both past and present. Gradually their stories become woven together and answers emerge.
Elin Hilderbrand not only grants us varying points of view but also provides it from both the teens and the adults providing a unique perspective on some very timely and relevant subjects. Alcoholism, depression, infidelity, loneliness and grief are problems that affect people of all ages. Although this was an emotional read covering many heavy topics, they were handled in an uplifting, positive manner.
The writing is fluid and the story moves at a fast pace. While the subject matter was a little heavier than the typical summer read, overall it was enjoyable, a book I found difficult to put down and is highly recommended.
The Giveaway
The publisher has generously offered three finished, hardcover copies of Summerland for giveaway.
- Contest is open to those with an address in the US or Canada, one winner per household.
- To enter, fill out the form below.
- The deadline for entry is Wednesday, June 27th. Winners will be chosen by random.org. They will be contacted by email and have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address, no PO Boxes.
[Contest has ended]
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Under My Apple Tree 