Teaser Tuesday: Building a Better Nest

I do believe in living in the moment, as in being attentive, awake, grateful for what is here, today. The moment, after all, is the only place we can live.

-- Building a Better Nest: Living Lightly at Home and in the World by Evelyn Searle Hess, author of To the Woods.

After living for 15 years in a tent and trailer in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, Hess and her husband built a real house on their 20 acres. But they wanted their "better nest" to be off-grid, sustainable, and reflect the personal and community values they had developed during their years of camping life.

Building a Better Nest is available from Powell's, on kindle from Amazon, at OSU Press, or ask your local bookseller to order it!

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Jenn at A Daily Rhythm, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday: Landfall and Exit Wounds

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday! MM was created by Marcia, who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring event. Mailbox Monday has now returned to its permanent home where you can link to your MM post.

Two books came into my house last week:



Landfall by Ellen Urbani, published by Forest Avenue Press. This novel set during Hurricane Katrina just came out last week and is generating a lot of buzz. People are crazy for it.



Exit Wounds: Soldiers' Stories Life After Iraq and Afghanistan by Jim Lommasson, published by Schiffer Publishing. This is the book that grew out of a collaborative photo and oral history project about the trials of homecoming coordinated between Lommasson and returning veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. It's powerful stuff.

What Are They Reading? The View from Castle Rock

Authors tend to be readers, so it is natural for them to create characters who like to read. It is always interesting to me to read what books the characters are reading in the books I read. Even if I can't say that ten times fast.

Usually, the characters' choice of books reflects the author's tastes or, I sometimes think, what the author was reading at the time. But sometimes the character's reading material is a clue to the character's personality, or is even a part of the story.

This is an occasional blog event. If anyone wants to join in, feel free to leave a comment with a link to your related post. And feel free to use the button. If this catches on, I can pick a day and make it a weekly event.

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK BY ALICE MUNRO

Munro may convert me to a short story fan, I enjoyed this collection so much. The View from Castle Rock is a later collection of her stories, more autobiographical than most, even drawing on primary source material from some of Munro's immigrant forebearers.

One of my favorite stories is "The Hired Girl" about a teen-age girl from a small rural Canadian town who gets a job working for a family at their summer house on an island in Georgian Bay because "Mrs. Montjoy needed a country girl for the summer who was trained to do housework."

I love the story for nailing the excruciating awkwardness of first teenage jobs, especially for a bookish, unsocial girl too trapped in her own head to read the people around her. Elsa feels intellectually superior to her boss because she recognizes that the island is named for Nausicaa, a princess in Ulysses, not a character from Shakespeare as Mrs. Montjoy tells her. Elsa tries to establish their social equality from the get go by immediately announcing that, back home, they refer to the maids as hired girls, which Mrs. Montjoy simply ignores. There is a steady conflict between Elsa never admitting she is a servant and Mrs. Montjoy so absorbed with her own concerns to think of Elsa as anything but, and a temporary one at that.

Cutting across the tension in the story is Mr. Montjoy, who only shows up on weekends and spends most of them drinking and reading in the library. He is the only adult who treats Elsa more as an equal. When they first meet, he is reading Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dineson. He later gives her the book as a going away present. I hope Elsa accepted it as a sign that she would be one of the grown ups eventually.

Book Beginning: Flambé in Armagnac

THANKS FOR JOINING ME ON FRIDAYS FOR BOOK BEGINNING FUN!

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

EARLY BIRDS & SLOWPOKES: This weekly post goes up Thursday evening for those who like to get their posts up and linked early on. But feel free to add a link all week.

FACEBOOK: Rose City Reader has a Facebook page where I post about new and favorite books, book events, and other bookish tidbits, as well as link to blog posts. I'd love a "Like" on the page! You can go to the page here to Like it. I am happy to Like you back if you have a blog or professional Facebook page, so please leave a comment with a link and I will find you.

TWITTER, ETC: If you are on Twitter, Google+, or other social media, please post using the hash tag #BookBeginnings. I try to follow all Book  Beginnings participants on whatever interweb sites you are on, so please let me know if I have missed any and I will catch up.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNING



MY BOOK BEGINNING

A hot-air balloon was slipping into the clouds above a herd of wild horses. A village of rustic chalets hewn from rustic logs stood silently on a ridge against a blue sky.

-- Flambé in Armagnac by Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noel Balen. Well, that certainly sets an idyllic scene!

This is the fifth book in the "winemaker detective" series featuring amateur sleuth Benjamin Cooker. The has already been made into a TV show in France. I have dived into this cozy but I want to go back and start at the beginning of the series.

Find the winemaker detective series and several other mystery and thriller series on my new favorite timesuck, the Le French Book website.

Review: The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists, about an ex-patriot newspaper in Rome, knocked my socks off. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, like so many sophomore efforts, is a major letdown.

The heroine, Tooly Zylberberg, is a 32-year-old bookshop owner in Wales with a profound disinterest in selling any books and a befuddling lack of knowledge about the internet. The story of her adventuresome past is told through a series of flashback-and-forths between her as a 9-year old in Bangkok, a 20-year-old in New York, and present day.

My big gripe is that the secret of her past was made so mysteriously obscure that there was almost no plot to the first half of the book, lest the secret be given away. Her activities in the flashback scenes are intentionally unmoored from full explanation until the final chapters, to build up the mystery. It got pretty boring, floating around, waiting for a story to turn up.

Of course, the trouble with a big build up like that is that it has to deliver. I was disappointed. Tooly’s unorthodox childhood turned out to have a pretty banal explanation. And she wasn't even likable. She couldn't do anything for herself, including finishing school, getting a job, making any money, or being a friend. I slogged on to the end to find out what happened to her, but by then I barely cared.

OTHER REVIEWS

New York Times

If you would like your review of any Tom Rachman novel listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

This is one of the books I read for my personal 2015 TBR challenge: