Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult was chosen as a filler when it took longer to set up our voting than we expected.

It's that time of the month again. My book club met today and we discussed Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

Richard Mayhew is a young businessman with a good heart and a dull job. When he stops one day to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk, his life is forever altered, for he finds himself propelled into an alternate reality that exists in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations below the city. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

It seems like I've been waiting forever to finalize and post this list, but the wheels of democracy turn slowly...

In any case, it looks like we have a nice variety of books on the schedule and I'm looking forward to discussing them.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
To be discussed: February 27, 2008

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
To be discussed: March 26, 2008

Room with a View by E.M. Forster
To be discussed: April 23, 2008

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
To be discussed: May 28, 2008

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Last month's book club selection was Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. I actually didn't finish the book in time for our discussion on Wednesday (I only finished yesterday), but I was rereading and remembered enough that I wasn't going to worry about spoilers.

We had a full and lively discussion on the book, hitting on topics like
- who is the blind assassin referred to in the title
- how would we have reacted to the book if we were older and had lived through more of the time period described in the book
- who was responsible for Laura's death and way
- the fairy tale aspects of the book (this came from one of those sets of discussion questions put out by publishers and we completely disagreed with the question-author about the story being at all fairy tale-like)

I recently read Jodi Picoult's most recent novel, Nineteen Minutes.

Note: This blog post does not contain any spoilers, but it also doesn't include my full reaction to the book. If you'd like to read it all, check out my BookCrossing journal entry.

I was looking forward to this month's book club discussion. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair was on the agenda and I knew that most of my book club members hadn't been exposed to Fforde or Thursday Next before. The Eyre Affair is the first book in one of my favorite series and I was wondering how everyone would react to Fforde.

My initial reaction to The Eyre Affair:
"I'd heard great things about this series and I was not disappointed. I loved the literary references, the crazy 'history,' and the all-round zaniness of the book. Not to mention the dodos!" (journal entry 10).

Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

I picked up Truth and Beauty and Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face around the same time after hearing that they were both fantastic books and should be read together. I read Autobiography of a Face in February (see this post), but only just got around to reading Truth and Beauty this month.

I had my mail held while I was away in Chicago last week.
Today, when the mail was delivered, I had the most wonderful little mound of parcels some of which included books (of course).

I received two BookCrossing books:

• Among the Belivers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul
• What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin

Today may be Google's 9th birthday, but September 27th was mine long before.

I haven't received all my presents yet, but I have gotten a few books so far.

• Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: Or Why Can't Anybody Spell? by Vivian Cook
• Firestorm by Rachel Caine, the fifth book in the Weather Warden series (now I have a great excuse to buy books 2-4)
• Piratica by Tanith Lee

50. The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen by Mitali Perkins
49. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
48. A Mortal Glamour by Chelsea Quinn Yarbo
47. River Secrets by Shannon Hale
46. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
45. Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith
44. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Sally Lockhart Trilogy by Philip Pullman
I recently read Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart trilogy: The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, and The Tiger in the Well. The Tin Princess is a related title; I have it on Mt. TBR. Set in Victorian England, the books tell the story of Sally and her various adventures as an independent woman. Chock full of mystery, they offer murder, kidnapping, and an occasionally happy interlude.

Two more birthday books arrived in the mail yesterday:

- Go to Sleep, Russell the Sheep by Rob Scotton
I happened across this book by accident and put it on my wishlist because it was just too cute.

- Domiknitrix: Whip Your Knitting Into Shape by Jennifer Stafford
Very cool book. There's a hat in here that I really want to knit.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth.

Needing a book to read this evening, I plucked Speak off my BookCrossing bookcase (yes, I have a bookcase dedicated to BookCrossing books) almost at random. But, oh am I glad I did. What a wonderful, compelling book. After reading it, I can assure you that Speak deserves any award that it has received.

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos... do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–-if any-–do you have in your library?

I can't say exactly how many since I don't have all my books cataloged in LibraryThing yet.

Let's see... I have style guides, Struck & White and Chicago (yes, I bought the new edition as soon as it came out) as well as APA (required for grad school) and MLA.

I've been really hard to please lately, so I guess that's why I'm so backlogged with my real reviews. So, here's my critical look at some of the books I've read recently.

Glass Houses by Rachel Caine

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga seems to be getting a good deal of press lately. I was introduced to the books by a friend before I'd heard any of the hype.

I read New Moon and Eclipse just this week, though I'd read Twilight in September.

Twilight has a very different feeling than the other books in the series so far. Maybe that's because Meyer didn't set out to write a series. In any case, when I read Twilight I liked the relationship between Bella and Edward, its slow build-up and all the difficulties inherent in it, but wasn't crazy about the violent, action-packed ending of the book. I had no strong feelings about the series, but I knew I'd read the other books when my friend got around to loaning them to me.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

Heather/errantdreams tagged me for a meme today. I'll answer some of the questions, but I'm also going to create a few of my own to keep the meme on topic for the blog.

What are five places where you have lived?
In order: Ossining, NY; Uelsen, Germany; Chicago, IL; Athens, Greece; Ann Arbor, Michigan

What are five jobs you have had?
Babysitter, Lifeguard, Shoe salesperson, Intern, Archivist

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)

- Work on a Digital Library Collection proposal
- Pick out some finding aids for Isadore to encode tomorrow
- Read Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
- Research Louis Kahn
- Work on the J.J. catalog

Five books I've most recently completed:
- The Bride Stripped Bare, Anonymous
- The Illustrated Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte/Dame Darcy
- Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

I received a lovely bunch of books over the past few days. In fact, I feel like I'm swimming in knitting books - not that that's a bad thing ;)

Some wishlist books for Christmas:

• Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson (I've been trying to collect all the books in The Myths series);
• The Best of Interweave Knits: Our Favorite Designs from the First Ten Years (I think I'm going to use some of my Christmas money to get a subscription to Interweave Knits);

100. The China Garden by Liz Berry
99. The Seer and the Sword by Victoria Henley
98. Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa by Matthew Fort
97. Johnny Voodoo by Dakota Lane
96. The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josphine B. by Sandra Gulland
95. Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier
94. Scatterlings of Africa by Peter Davies

It's probably quite obvious that I haven't been getting a lot of serious (read: assigned) reading done lately. I've been a bit of an escapist and I've been drowning myself in quick, untaxing reads many of them series books. So here's a look at what I've been reading lately.

Maggie Sefton's Knitting Mysteries.
So far I've read the first three: Knit One, Kill Two, Needled to Death, and A Deadly Yarn. The fourth book in the series, A Killer Stitch, is next on my list (I'm going to start it right after I publish this post).

It's the end of November, I can hardly believe it. Where has this year gone?

Like I mentioned yesterday, my book club met on Wednesday. This time we discussed The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, a book inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem of the same title. Of course, I left my copy of the book at work so I don't have it with me to reference as I write this post (but, c'est la vie).

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks' debut novel (she has since written March and People of the Book) follows two years in the life of a small English village (Eyam, Derbyshire). When an infected bolt of cloth carries the "seeds" of plague to Eyam in 1665, a visionary young minister convinces the villagers to quarantine themselves. In an effort to stop the spread of the contagion, the villagers sacrifice themselves and as the death toll begins to mount mistrust rears its ugly head.

The novel's narrator is a young widow named Anna Frith, one of the plague survivors. Anna is sympathetic and relatable despite the 300+ year time difference between readers and herself. Year of Wonders is the story of her village and its trials, but it is also the tale of her own self-awakening.

What new books are you looking forward to most in 2008? Something new being published this year? Something you got as a gift for the holidays? Anything in particular that you're planning to read in 2008 that you're looking forward to? A classic, or maybe a best-seller from 2007 that you're waiting to appear in paperback?

Hmm... this is a hard one. I haven't really thought too much about what I'll be reading in 2008. I'm sure I'll read quite a few (my goal is to read 175), but I usually play it by ear (excepting review assignments, of course, which I try to read sooner rather than later; things went to pot in the second half of this year, but I'm getting back on track now).

The Illustrated Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë’s sweeping Victorian romance is reborn through the striking illustrations of the inimitable Dame Darcy.

This month my book club will be discussing Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. What a perfect excuse to read The Illustrated Jane Eyre, which I've had on Mt. TBR since September 2006, and that's exactly what I did this weekend.

First of all, I should say that I'm pretty sure I'd never read Jane Eyre before. I thought I had, way back in high school, but now I think I'd only read Wuthering Heights (by younger sister Emily).

My friend Breeni of Breeni Books tagged me for the What are you reading? meme.

I'm supposed to -
Turn to page 123 of the nearest book, go to the fifth sentence and post the next three! Then tag five more people.

I'll cheat and do this for the two books that I'm most actively reading at the moment and not tag five people.

First - Tobacco particulate thickens the air.
A shelf of books: Auden, Veblen, Spengler, Steinbeck, Dos Passos. Tropic of Cancer, out in plain view, it must have been smuggled.That's from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which I am reading in preparation for our book club discussion on Wednesday.

The second of my Book of the Month posts for our student services blog went up yesterday. Fiction next month, Nonfiction again in May (both TBD at this point). I need to have an every-other rule so that I don't focus too much on fiction.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Subtitled "The Fates of Human Societies", Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1998. Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, sums up the 480-page book with the following sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among the peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (25).

What's your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody "knows" those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, "Huh? Never heard of it?"