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 May host is Marths’s Bookshelf.
A couple of new books arrived last week and I requested one audiobook, a new title from Mary Higgins Clark. I’ve read a few of her books but this will be the first one in audio.
A win from Luxury Reading:
Wife 22
by Melanie Gideon
An irresistible novel of a woman losing herself . . . and finding herself again . . . in the middle of her life.
“Maybe it was those extra five pounds I’d gained. Maybe it was because I was about to turn the same age my mother was when I lost her. Maybe it was because after almost twenty years of marriage my husband and I seemed to be running out of things to say to each other.”
For review from AmazonVine:
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D
by Nichole Bernier
Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth’s journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew. The more Kate reads, the more she learns the complicated truth of who Elizabeth really was, and rethinks her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind.
For review from the publisher:
The Lost Years
by Mary Higgins Clark
Biblical scholar Jonathan Lyons believes he has found the rarest of parchments—a letter that may have been written by Jesus Christ. Stolen from the Vatican Library in the 1500s, the letter was assumed to be lost forever. Within days Jonathan is found shot to death in his study. His wife, Kathleen, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is found hiding in the study closet, incoherent and clutching the murder weapon.
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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.
I didn’t read as much as I thought I would last week. I’m not too sure where the time went!
I checked out a stack of library books on landscaping and designing no-mow areas for my yard and have been pouring over those, so that accounts for some of my reading time. The books gave me a few more ideas and I should be ready to start digging soon. I’ll probably listen to a lot more audiobooks once I get going on this project.
Finished Listening/Reading Last Week:
The Art of Fielding was fantastic and was so much more than a baseball story. The audio was a pleasure to listen to.
I enjoyed Whole Latte Life and probably liked Sara Beth a little more than most of the reviewers I’ve read. My review will be posted May 21st.
Reading/Listening This Week:
I’ll be reading a little of The Secret Garden each week this month for the read-a-long hosted by Book Journey. Year of the Gadfly is for an upcoming tour and All I Did Was Shoot My Man is an unsolicited audio that, so far, is pretty good.
What Are You Reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Arrrrggggghhh!
Without notification, WordPress made the check box for follow-up comments via email ON by default. I didn’t do it and I can’t change it. This appears to be system wide for all wordpress.com users. Angry WP bloggers are filling the forum with comments and pleas to turn it OFF, but WP staff do not work on the weekends.
Whether this is a new feature (hahaha) or a bug remains to be seen. For now, uncheck the ‘notify me of follow-up comments’ box if you don’t want to receive emails.
If WordPress blogs are flooding your inbox today, this is the reason why. And yes, I know the solution: Self-hosting, self-hosting, self-hosting!
Update – May 6th
This was posted in the WordPress Support Forum in response to the many comments about the email notifications:
The reported behavior of email notification for comments is not a bug. It is a new default setting when commenting. This feature was a recent change to the way comments work on all WordPress.com blogs.
So there ya go, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Last week I posted a link to live streaming video of a Red-tailed Hawk nest atop a light pole on Cornell University’s athletic field. The eggs had just hatched and viewers could get an up-close look at the chicks and the parents.
While Red-tailed Hawks are common across North America, they are usually seen circling high above open fields or perched at the top of tall tree or telephone pole. So imagine my surprise when I came almost face-to-face with one earlier this week while out taking photos of flowers.
The hawk was on a low branch moving his head back and forth searching for a meal. In the surrounding trees were many smaller birds all chirping out warning calls. The robins were flying around him and swooping down to create a distraction. Even the little goldfinches were making a lot of noise. Most likely one of the little birds had a nest in the immediate area.
After about 10 minutes of harassment from the little birds, he flew down to the ground. I followed and was able to get within 10 feet of him for a nice series of close-ups. I’m not sure what he was looking at in the tree but he gave up after a few minutes, flew to a few more trees and then soared off to a different area of the park.
I’m not sure if this is a male or female, but based on the size of the bird, it’s probably a male. Females are about 25% bigger than males and this bird was only about 20 inches.
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.
Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
by Amy Stewart
Narrated by Coleen Marlo
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Tantor Media
Publish Date: June 15, 2011
Format: Audio, 4 hours | 30 minutes
Audio Listening Level: Easy
Rating: 4 of 5
What you don’t know about plants can kill you. Most likely they will only make you sick or uncomfortable, but deadly is a possibility. Sure, everyone knows to stay away from poison ivy and not to eat the poinsettias, but who knew there were hundreds of other plants than can be ruthless?
In Wicked Plants, Amy Stewart gives us a fascinating tour through the plant kingdom highlighting some of the most badly behaved plants on the planet. In dictionary-like style, included are both common and scientific plant name, a description of the plant plus some interesting and at times amusing stories along with warnings of the dangers of ingesting or touching it.
If you think houseplants are harmless, think again. In 2005 the Peace Lily plant caused more calls to poison control centers than any other plant. Don’t eat the Dieffenbachia or the Ficus either. Is your food safe? Not necessarily. Cashews and pistachios are part of the poison ivy family. The trees produce urishol, which causes the nasty rash. Don’t eat kidney beans raw and when a potato begins to turn green, it is producing a poison. I won’t even start on the mushroom family.
There are a lot of facts and entertaining anecdotes packed into this small book. The author offers an explanation on why spring allergies seem to be getting worse every year. Male trees. Landscapers and homeowners prefer well-behaved trees. Female trees produce messy fruit whereas male trees make small, well-behaved flowers. However, they also make pollen, which is what triggers allergies. As the number of male trees increases so does the pollen count and so do our allergies.
Bishop’s Weed growing along my fence.
For a quick, entertaining peek into the naughty plant world, the audio is an easy listen. Although it is read in a text-book like manner, the stories and anecdotes are fun to listen to. This is not the fault of the narrator but the style of the book itself. For avid gardeners, those who have a deeper interest in the plant world or want this book as a reference, the print book would be a good accompaniment to, or a better choice than, the audio.
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Source: Public Library.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Have you read The Secret Garden?
The children’s classic? A tale of a hidden garden and the children who bring it to life, by Frances Hodgson Burnett?
Somehow, I never got around to reading this book. I don’t even like to admit it because most people assume that as a lifelong gardener and nature lover, this was a book I would have devoured as a child.
Earlier this week Sheila at Book Journey posted that she would be reading Secret Garden for the first time and was amazed, no, shocked, that others commented that they never read it either. As a result, The Secret Garden Read-A-Long was born.
The Read-A-Long
The read-a-long is open to both first timers and re-reads. On May 31st there will be a Garden Party with a link-up for reviews, an online discussion and giveaways. Head over to Book Journey and join the fun. I will finally be reading The Secret Garden!
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Almost wordless: American Robin on her nest. Photo taken at Cantigny Gardens.
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More Wordless Wednesday. © 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Stay Awake: Stories
by Dan Chaon
Genre: Short Stories, Horror
Publisher: Ballantine
Publish Date: February 7, 2012
Format: Hardcover| 254 pages
Rating: 5 of 5
If you can call a collection of creepy stories beautifully written, then that is how I would describe Stay Awake by Dan Chaon. Each of these dips gracefully into sci-fi, horror and supernatural, but with a literary bent. The reader is drawn into each eerie tale, caught up in the suspense and unable to put the book down until the haunting conclusion.
This is a short volume which I read over a period of a week. A story here or there, savoring each before moving on to the next. The stories are not connected or related, yet they have a recurring theme. In each, the characters are suffering an acute loss. These are unhappy people, often in crisis. There are broken families, deaths, divorce, violence and in an eerie similarity, characters in two different stories fell off ladders and lost a finger in the accident.
There are twelve stories and most of them worked for me. There were a couple that I just didn’t get, with the endings left open to interpretation. Others were quite clear but all were haunting.
I had to read the title story, Stay Awake, twice to fully grasp what happened. A couple, after years of infertility treatment, finally have a baby only to end up with conjoined twins. Only one is viable. Shortly after their birth the husband is in a horrible car accident. Reading it a second time I picked up the subtle foreshadowing of the conclusion.
In Slowly We Open Our Eyes, one that I found particularly disturbing, the powerful moment of realization after a truck hits a deer, or does it, comes at the very end. That one stayed with me. In Bees a now happily married father who has concealed his past from his family has nightmares about the wife and child he abandoned years before. The shocking ending was reminiscent of an episode of The Twilight Zone.
These are not fun, happy stories. They will make you think. They will chase you like a bad dream. You will see shadows in dark corners. They are wonderfully written. This is a book I’ll want to read again for I’m sure I’ll see more in each story the second time through.
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Source: Review copy through Amazon Vine.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
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