A weekly meme about (mostly) books and reading. This week’s question is:
When you travel, how many books do you bring with you? Has this changed since the arrival of ebooks?
I don’t have an e-book reader so I still haul around the paper books. How many I take depends on how long I’ll be gone and how much time I’ll have to read.
If I’m traveling for work and I’m only gone a few days I’ll take the book I’m reading plus an extra one in case I finish. If I’m traveling for vacation I tend to take too many books thinking that I’ll spend many hours lounging and reading. In reality it never works that way. I spend time exploring, eating, touring and doing other vacationy things and end up reading only one or two books.
I do try and pick the lightest weight books for travel, that way more will fit in my luggage! I took five on my last trip and read two of them. I’ve also been know to buy more books while on vacation.
Thanks to Liz at Doubleday Books I have 2 copies of The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart to give away to my readers.
Read my review here.
Description from the publisher:
The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise
by Julia Stuart
Category: Humorous Fiction
Publish Date: August 2010
Pages: 320
Brimming with charm and whimsy, this exquisite novel set in the Tower of London has the transportive qualities and delightful magic of the contemporary classics Chocolat and Amélie.
Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise for the past eight years. That’s right, he is a Beefeater (they really do live there). It’s no easy job living and working in the tourist attraction in present-day London.
When Balthazar is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie within the Tower walls to house the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes are stolen, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent people running for their lives. Balthazar is in charge and things are not exactly running smoothly. Then Hebe decides to leave him and his beloved tortoise “runs” away.
Read an excerpt.
About The Author
Julia Stuart is an award-winning British journalist and the author of one previous novel, The Matchmaker of Périgord. She currently lives in Bahrain with her husband.
How to enter the Giveaway:
- Contest is open to US addresses only, no PO Boxes. Contest runs through October 24th.
- For one entry leave a comment.
- For an additional entry, follow by email or subscribe to my feed. Leave a separate comment.
- For an additional entry post on your blog, sidebar is ok, or tweet on twitter. Leave a comment with the link.
- Max 3 entries.
I will draw 2 random winners on October 24th. Be sure to leave an email address for each entry so that I can contact you if you win. Winners will have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address.
Mailbox Monday is touring through blogs. For the month of October it will be hosted by She Reads and Reads. Next month the tour moves to Knitting and Sundries where it will be hosted for the month of November.
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.
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New books in my mailbox last week:
A copy of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey for review from Doubleday:
For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dismissed these stories—waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters. They found their proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached 100 feet.
A copy of All I Ever Wanted by Kristan Higgins, a giveaway win from Reading At The Beach:
One happily-ever-after rocking chair… And no sign of any forthcoming babies to rock in ol’ Georgebury, Vermont. For Callie Grey, turning thirty means coming to grips with the fact that her boss (and five-week fling) is way overdue in his marriage proposal. And way off track, because Mark has suddenly announced his engagement to the company’s new Miss Perfect. If that isn’t bad enough, her mom decides to throw her a 3-0 birthday bash in the family funeral home.
Bad goes to worse when she stirs up a relationship with the town’s most eligible — yet not so warm and fuzzy — veterinarian, Ian McFarland, in order to flag Mark’s attention.
How To Be An American Housewife
by Margaret Dilloway
Genre: Women’s Literature
Published: August 2010 by Putnam
Rating: 4½ of 5 stars
From the very first page I was drawn into this novel by debut author Margaret Dilloway. A charming story about the relationship between a Japanese mother and her American daughter struggling to understand each other and their choices in life.
Shoko is a war bride who met and married Charlie in Japan, moved to America and raised her family in a traditional manner. Her daughter, Sue, is not so traditional. She is a divorced single parent with a career. The first half of the book is told from the point of view of Shoko. We go back and forth in time as we learn about her life in Japan as a young woman and her life with Charlie in America. Shoko is not well and she wants to go back to Japan one last time to find her estranged brother. The second half of the book is told from the point of view of Sue, Shoko’s daughter. Sue has agreed to go to Japan on behalf of her mother and find her uncle.
This is an entertaining, satisfying story; one of the best books I have read this year. It’s a story that really makes you think about cultural differences and how difficult it must have been for a young woman to leave everything she has ever known and move to a foreign country where the language and customs were completely different. Shoko did not know if she would ever go home again or see her parents again. It was also difficult for Sue to have a mother who did not fit in with all the other moms when she was a young girl. In this exquisitely written novel the reader can feel the struggles each is going through to understand and accept the other. While some readers may find it predictable as there are eventually happy endings all around, I found it to be an uplifting story.
The author was inspired by the life of her own mother who spent her youth in WWII era Japan and recorded many of her stories on tape, several of which were incorporated into the novel. One of the features of the book that I enjoyed is that each chapter begins with a quotation from a fictitious book entitled How To Be An American Housewife. The inspiration for this was from a book that the author’s father gave her mother explaining how to keep house “the American way”.
From chapter six, some of the book’s advice:
“You must pay particular attention to raising daughters in the Japanese tradition. With American daughters, there are more ways to get into trouble, as she will want to be American. Teach her to resist this urge if you want to avoid the shame of having a daughter who runs with the fast American crowd.” – From the Chapter “American Family Habits.“
Highly recommended.
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Source: Review Copy provided by LibraryThing.
Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Participation is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs.
This is one of my favorite recipes for the grill. I use my grill most of the year, except when it’s buried by snow. This meal is easy to prepare and clean up is quick, which makes it a winner for me. Plus, I still have fresh rosemary growing right outside my door.
Ingredients
- 2 pounds boneless chicken breasts
- ½ cup dry white wine
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 4 garlic cloves
- 4 teaspoons fresh rosemary
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground pepper
Preparation
Rinse chicken and pat dry. Chop into small pieces, about one to two inches square. Place chicken in a ziploc baggie.
Finely chop garlic and rosemary and add to chicken along with salt, pepper, wine and olive oil. Shake bag and mix well. Let marinate in refrigerator for about an hour.
Put chicken on skewers and grill for about 10 minutes until cooked through turning several times.
Grilled Chicken Kabobs with Rosemary and Garlic
(Originally posted on my garden/nature blog, LadyMin’s Garden).
The Book Blogger Hop, a weekly event hosted by Jen at Crazy For Books, is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and share our love of the written word!
Post about the Hop on your blog. Spread the word about the book party! The Hop lasts Friday through Monday. If you don’t have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun! Each week there is a new discussion question for your post. This week’s question is:
“How do you spread the word about your blog?”
I originally started this blog to have a place to put my book reviews. I had joined LibraryThing and goodreads but I also wanted my own site. I noticed other book lovers were doing the same thing. Somewhere along the way I learned about Book Blogs. After I joined that group I found out about the many forms of networking.
One of the best ways to network is to visit, read and comment on other blogs. I find that if I leave a comment or question on a post that I am genuinely interested in, most bloggers will return the visit. I don’t always comment because sometimes I don’t have anything relevant to say; but if I like the blog I’ll be back. Another way was to join Book Blogs and network with other bloggers and join in on blogger events. Book Blogs is also a place for me to obtain ARCs from publishers, sign up host to giveaways, and link up my reviews. I also promote my reviews and giveaways on twitter and I participate in a few weekly memes.
I read about one book a week and post several times a week. I try to post consistently so that readers will return for new content and eventually traffic to the blog will build.
What great books did you hear about/discover this past week? Share your FRIDAY FINDS! This weekly event is hosted by Should Be Reading.
A new novel by Fay Weldon caught my eye. If you’ve never read one of her books and you’re looking for something a little out of the ordinary, give her a try.
Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon
As a preface, Weldon writes: “Two years after I was born, my mother had a miscarriage. Had she not, I would have grown up with a younger sister. This is the sister’s story, set in an alternative universe which closely mirrors our own.” A sobering thought, since this is a darkly dystopian portrait of 2013 England, a country where the downhill slide began with “The Shock in 2008, and after that the Crunch, and the Crisis, and the phoney Recovery, like the phoney war–and then the Squeeze and Inflation and now the Bite….”
A weekly meme about (mostly) books and reading. This week’s question is:
If you read series, do you ever find a series “jumping the shark?” How do you feel about that? And, do you keep reading anyway?
There are a few series that I follow. If I like the characters they become comfortable and are like friends, so I want to find out what is happening in their world. There may be an occasional bad book in the series and I look at that the same way as a TV show will occasionally have a stinker episode. It’s only when the character changes in ways that I don’t like that I would say it’s “jump the shark” time and so far I haven’t encountered that. I have heard that about the Scarpetta series but I’ve only read the earlier ones, which I liked, so I can’t comment.
One of my all time favorite series is Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder urban noir crime novels. Another one I really like is John Sanford’s techno-suspense Kidd novels. I haven’t seen a new one in this series in years though. And, I’ve recently discovered The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher; fantasy, magic and wizardry. I could go on, Orson Scott Card’s The Tales of Alvin Maker is another favorite, but I guess I’ve answered the question: I keep reading!
Under My Apple Tree 