Book Review By Laura: The Ghost Sea by Ferenc Máté

I bet most of you are like, huh? Well, I found this book for $6 at Nepenthe and loved the idea about reading of adventure on the high seas, since I live right by one. Billed as "Mystical...like The Heart of Darkness. Will take you into a lost world." And, it did. But, I didn't love it. What I did love was the distinctive voice and point of view of the narrative. Very nautical, full of rich Kwakiutl history steeped in their language and customs with a little Italian thrown in. You'd think I'd be thrilled. Where did the book not meet my expectations? Plot. And some flat characters. Needed a little more passion in the characters in my opinion and a little less passion for the particular details of sailing a ketch. I enjoyed this book because it pulled me into a world I didn’t know much about and also had a few twists and turns I didn’t expect. It’s the first book I read where the characters all die and the reader continues to follow them in their afterlife in the end [and the end doesn’t go on forever]. The ending was very provocative. If you'd like to read more about Ghost Sea, you can check out my review here.

Favorite Quote of the book: OK, I had a hard time picking just one. The book had some very poetic moments:

“The strait blew a gale right in our teeth, blew the words we uttered right back down our throats.”

“Are there fences on the sea?” he asked. “Or borders among the stars?”

Posting Guidelines

Some simple guidelines for this blog (so things can be kept orderly etc.)

#1 In your first post on this blog (which will more than likely be your 100 list) - Please in the label/tag section of your post - put your NAME only. This sets up a topic/catelogue for all your future posts. You don't have to put 100 list etc. just your name.

For eg. click on image

#2 After you post your 100booklist, you will probably post updates/progress reports and book reviews etc. If you have book review, about the book that you're discussing here, thats on another site, you can link it if you like. Its nice though to discuss your thoughts on the blog here, and then link to your review.

#3 Once you've started posting, please always stick your NAME in the label box, the *author, *nameofthebooks, and then if you like year of publication, and thoughts on the book.

For eg. click the image

#4 Remember to have fun :)

Challenge Rules

So, i thought clarification about the rules of this challenge would be useful. Remember these are just guidelines so you can play around with the challenge yourself.

So here are some guidelines:

#1 Pick approx. 100 books which you have always meant to read but haven't gotten round to yet, books you've bought that are still sitting on the book case or those 'good intentions' educate thyself books which your old teacher recommended to you ages ago. Make up the list. Then email me at emilycross09@gmail.com for an invite. Then post your list (please check out posting guidelines before you do)

#2Give yourself 25% lee way for your list, in other words if you complete 75% or more of your list, then you've definitely succeeded in this challenge!

#3 Allow five years to complete the challenge. Starting from when you post your list up here on the blog

#4 These rules are 'guidelines' if you want to read 20 books in 2 years or 2 books in 20years - please feel free. This challenge is about self-improvement, the only prize at the end of the challenge is knowing you've completed it (and made some nice friends during its progress). So feel free to mix it up if you want.

Hope this has helped, if you have any more questions/queries, email me

Toodles Emily

House Keeping Update

Ok i've the 100 list done (please check to see if your name/list is there). I may have missed one/two so let me know via comment or email - Thanks :)

Currently snowed in at home so i'm going to be working on this blog today, so if you have any bookreview blogs you want to add (you have to be FITG member) or link to your blog (members blogroll) then leave a comment here or email me.

I'm going to be posting a 'rules' post and a 'how to post' post too, i've gotten a few emails about what the challenge is all about etc. so i thought with this new template it would be handier to have links on the nav bar.

Toodles for now

Emily

Book Review by Aimee: Of Bees and Mist, by Erick Setiawan

You know those books where after you've finished them, you just sit, a little stunned and a lot awed? Yep, this is one of those books.

Of Bees and Mist, despite its front cover commentary and its back cover blurb, is less a story of fairytale and more a psychological exploration of family curses. Meridia is trapped in a household where magic dominates - the mist arrives to carry her father from her mother every day, though Meridia knows not where or to who it leads. When finally a Prince Charming comes along for Meridia, she falls deeply. Her parents, offering little passion for the occasion, but a sizable dowry, release Meridia into the strong and capable arms of her future husband's family. But Meridia soon despairs when she learns her marriage is not an escape from the mist that haunted her childhood, but rather a trading of that mist, for a swarm of unforgiving, ever-droning bees.

This is super-duper fiction - generous with the magical realism, slightly more generous with home truths. From the beginning you'll be happy with the quality of the writing, but it won't be until pages 100-150 that you'll settle further into the corner of your couch, and allow the fierce droning of the bees and the sweetly-perfumed tendrils of the oncoming mist to completely transport you. The setting is exotic but you can't pin it down to a particular culture - the people and places could be from anywhere and any time. But the careful mix of the old and the new keep the place from becoming neither too boringly familiar nor too aesthetically alien.

Similarly, this book could have easily drowned itself in overly lyrical language, but the sentences are, for the most part, surprisingly self-assured. Any minor irritations I had in word choice or length of scene were soothed by the superior quality of the overall work.

So, what about the characters? Brilliantly emotive. In the cultural family hierarchy, it is the men who are the expected head of the household, but there is no doubt that the women of this story are the warrior goddesses exhibiting true strength, determined to win against their opponents, manipulative and selfless in equal measure, the possessors of the greatest love that turns to the darkest hate.

Give me the woman who hasn't balked at a mother-in-law's particular 'suggestion' on how to clean her house, treat her man, raise her children- even if only in the most secret corners of her honest mind - and I won't give her this book to read. She doesn't deserve it - her life is already perfect! But if you've ever been interested how family members can undermine and overpower and twist and turn other family members for their own devices....it's a tasty pot of strong personalities indeed.

And as for the central personality - despite her flaws and miscalculations, a reader's empathy for Meridia never wavers - she is a heroine carrying herself with a clever mind and an elegant dignity all through her big mistakes and her little victories. I'm so amazed at the attention the author gives to the inner workings of the female mind in this story. Meridia is a fascinating character in and of herself, but then again, so is her chillingly-distant mother Ravenna, as is the grotesquely cruel Eva, Meridia's mother-in-law intent on bringing Meridia to her knees. Eva's weapon of choice? Words. In the form of bees. Boasting in the corridors, manipulative whispers and untrue gossip hung on the end of well-intentioned ears, must-be-kept secrets sent buzzing through the corridors and spilling out onto the streets. Wowsers.

I could go on for a fair bit more about this book, exploring its colourful themes and its epic quality... but I think perhaps it might be nicer for the reader to go fossicking and discover Of Bees and Mist's strange beauty all for themselves. Maybe then someone can answer the burning question: i.e. why hasn't this won a literary award yet?!

Though not for absolutely everyone, lovers of magic realism in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez will appreciate the book's 'exotic' quality, and those who enjoy the 'real-life' drama of spitting words and malicious acts of women protecting their territory will also tear through this family saga. Either way it's a safe bet you've never read a novel quite like this before...

Such a spunky yet elegant, commanding read - I am most suitably impressed, and kind of crushing on your writing right now, Mr Setiawan. Hope you don't mind.

Received: For Review.

Other Opinions:

Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World
SFGate.com
blogcritics
the celebrity cafe
The Washington Post Book Review
I'm Booking It
Literary Lotus
Book Chatter
Words on Words by Maggie Stiefvater
Huntington News

[Please let me know if you have reviewed this book so I can add it to the list above!]

Linda Frear's 100 Books List

Thanks to Emily for the invite to post here. It is such a cool idea to have a place where we can peek at other's lists, track progress and comment on the books we read. I'm much better with public accountability, too.


Here is my list of books. Criteria for choosing? Mostly books I hear about and think omg, I should have (can’t believe I’ve never) read that. Bonus–some of these books are already on my current TBR pile. I've crossed off books I completed after I started. I have until April 2014 as my end date. I figure that's lots of time, the zombie apocalypse should have occurred by then.

1. Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
3. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
4. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
6. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
7. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
8. Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald
9. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
10. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
11. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
12. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
13. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (I can’t believe I put this on my list)
14. Anna Kerenina, Leo Tolstoy
15. The Book of Negros, Lawrence Hill
16. The Memory Keepers Daughter, Kim Edwards
17. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
18. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemmingway
20. On the Road, Jack Jack Kerouac
21. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
22. Ulysses, James Joyce
23. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
24. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
25. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
26. The Odyssey, Homer
27. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
28. Beloved, Toni Morrison
29. Don Quixote, Miguel D Cervantes
30. Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
31. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
32. The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank
33. The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
34. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
35. The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
36. Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
37. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
38. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Phillip K. Dick
39. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (may have read it when young, but can’t remember)
40. Let the Right One In, John A Lindqvist
41. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
42. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
43. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
44. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
45. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
46. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
47. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
48. Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
50. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
51. The English Patient, Michael Michael Ondaatje
52. The Winter of Our Discontent, Susa Shillinglaw
53. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
54. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
55. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
56. Haunting of Hill House, Laura Miller
57. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
58. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
59. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
60. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
61. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
62. The Stranger, Albert Camus
63. Atonement, Ian McEwan
64. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
65. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
66. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
67. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg
68. Possession, A.S. Byatt
69. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
70. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
71. The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
72. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
73. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
74. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
75. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
76. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
77. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
78. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
79. I, Robot, Isaac Asimov
80. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
81. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
82. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
83. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
84. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
85. The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells
86. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
87. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll
88. The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
90. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
91. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
92. Unless, Carol Shields
93. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
94. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
95. The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker
96. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
97. The World According to Garp, John Irving
98. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
99. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
100. Night and Day, Virginia Woolf

Laura Elliott's List

When I grew up, I thought my dad was James Bond. He worked as a hydroelectric engineer in far away places with strange names. Places most people wouldn't travel, like jungles with headhunters. Which explains my fascination with travel and storytelling. However, for reasons much too long to go into here [speed reading classes, math and science ruling my high school life, etc] I didn't read as a child. I only discovered reading, especially reading aloud, when I had my own children. [Do check out The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease from your local library, changed my life once upon a time...] Long story short, I have many gaps to fill! In compiling my list, three things were very important too me. Although I wanted to focus on "the classics," as I have much catching up to do in my reading, it was also important to me to read from different time periods hoping to include current titles in the YA genre, the type of stories I write. I also wanted to balance my list in terms of male and female authors. This was hard to do. There are so many more male authors. My list includes 40 female and 60 male authors. And lastly, I wanted to read as much magical realism as I could because I found out this year that I write these types of stories and hadn't "realized" this before. So, here's my list. I'm so excited. It took me so long to compile my list that I actually finished a book, The Ghost Sea, while writing it!

Adams, Douglas, A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy [1979]
Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, [1868]
Allende, Isabelle, The House Of The Spirits [1982]
Angel Asturias, Miguel, El Señor Presidente [1946]

Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [1900]
Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan [1904]
Bloom, Judy, Then Again Maybe I Won’t [1971]
Bradley, Marion Zimmer, The Mists of Avalon [1982]
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre [1847]
Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange [1956]
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden [1911]

Camus, Albert, The Stranger [1942]
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With A Thousand Faces [1949]
Carpentier, Alejo, The Kingdom of the World [1949]
Carver, Raymond, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? [1976]
Cather, Willa Sibert, My Anotonia [1918]
Checkov, Anton, Collected Stories [1882-1904]
Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep [1939]
Clifford, Mary Louis and Clifford, J. Candace, Women Who Kept The Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers [1993]
Coelho, Paulo, The Alchemist, [1988]
Collins, Suzanne, The Hunger Games [2008]

Dahl, Roald, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory [1964]
Dana, Richard Henry Jr., Two Years Before The Mast [1840]
Dicamillo, Kate, The Tale of Despereaux [2004]
De Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote [1605]
de Andrade, Mário, Macunaíma [1928]
Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol [1843]
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield [1850]
Dumas, Alexandre, The Three Musketeers [1844]
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov [1880]
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892]

Eliot, George, Middlemarch [1972]

Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying [1930]
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby [1925]
Foster Wallace, David Infinite Jest [1996]
Frank, Anne, The Diary of Anne Frank [1947]
Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, A Humble Romance and Other Stories [1887]

García Márquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude [1967]

Haddawy, Husain [translator]; Mahdi Muhsin [editor], The Arabian Nights [9th Century]
Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 [1961]
Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom The Bell Tolls [1940]
Hinton, S.E. , The Outsiders [1977]
Huxley, Aldus, Brave New World [1932]

Irving, Washington, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories [1917]

Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House [1959]

Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis [1915]
Kerouac, Jack, On The Road [1957]
Kipling, Rudyard, Just So Stories [1902]
Kingsolver, Barbara, Animal Dreams [1991]
Kostova, Elizabeth, The Historian [2005]
Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]

Lawrence, D.H. , Lady Chatterley's Lover [1928]
Lee, Harper, To Kill A Mockingbird [1960]
Lessing, Doris, The Golden Notebook [1962]
Lia Block, Francesca, Weetzie Bat [2004]
Lisle, Janet Taylor, Afternoon of the Elves [1991]
Loos, Anita, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1925]

Máté, Ferenc, Ghost Sea [2006]
McCullers, Carson, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [1940]
Meyer, Stephanie, Eclipse [2007]
Meyer, Stephanie, Breaking Dawn [2008]
Miller, Henry, Tropic of Cancer [1934]
Milton, John, Paradise Lost [1667]
Morrison, Toni, Beloved [1987]
Muir, John, Meditations of John Muir [1900]
Munro, Alice, Friend of My Youth [1990]

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita [1955]
Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveler’s Wife [2003]

O’Conner, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find [1955]

Paterson, Katherine, Bridge to Terabithia [2005]
Patchett, Ann, Bel Canto [2001]
Picoult, Jodi, Keeping Faith [1999]
Plath, Sylvia [Victoria Lucas], The Bell Jar [1963]
Poe, Edgar Allen, The Cask of Amontillado [1846]
Prose, Francine, Reading Like A Writer [2006]
Proulx, Annie E., The Shipping News [1993]

Quinlin, Michael P. [Editor], Classic Irish Stories [2005]

Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Paramo [1955]

Sagan, Francoise, A Certain Smile [1956]
Stalcup, Ann, On The Homefront: Growing Up in Wartime England [1998]
Shakespeare, William [retold by Bruce Coville] Hamlet [1600]
Silko, Leslie Marmon, The Almanac of the Dead [1992]
Sparks, Nicholas, The Last Song [2009]
Stein, Gertrude, Three Lives [1909]
Steinbeck, John, Grapes of Wrath [1939]
Steinbeck, John, Of Mice and Men [1937]
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island [1883]
Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]
Stoker, Bram, Dracula [1897]

Tan, Amy, The Joy Luck Club [1989]
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace [1869]
Twain, Mark, Tom Sawyer [1876]
Twain, Mark, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County [1867]

Updike, John, Rabbit, Run [1960]
Urquhart, Jane, Away [1993]
Uslar-Pietri, Arturo, Las Lanzas Coloradas [1931]

Wells, H.G., The War of the Worlds [1898]
Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest [1895]
Wroblewski, David, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle [2008]

Young, William Paul, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity [2007]

I just can't wait to read these books. It's so exciting to have a plan to finally read the books I've always wanted to read. I've been enjoying the reviews here and look forward to reading your thoughts on the books on your lists. Well, time to go put a pot of water on and get to it...