Blog Hop for Book Reviews

The Crazy For Books book blog party blog hop is a weekly occurrence. You can browse through about 200 book blogs by following the link to their post. This week they are asking us to tell them about a book review we posted this week.

I wrote about Laura Lippman's new book I'd Know You Anywhere this week. It's not a Tess Monaghan story or even a murder mystery. Take a look.

Vacation Planning through Literature?

The Blue Bookcase blog hop question of the week is "What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, "Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it...," so in what location would you most like to hang out?"

I saw an episode of Antiques Roadshow from the lakes district in England. This is where Beatrix Potter lived and, as part of the show, they had a tour of her home in which they showed how she had used it as the setting for her Peter Rabbit stories. The illustrations from the original editions are quite recognizable, particularly Mr. McGregor's garden. The host of the show held up a copy of an illustration of the garden gate while standing next to Potter's garden gate.

The lake district is a green, hilly, rural place, quiet and peaceful. I would enjoy spending a week or so there. Then I'd be ready to go on a rafting tour of the Grand Canyon and visit the places described by Johns Wesley Powell in The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons.

While you're here, I would like to call your attention to my call for submissions for the Book Review Blog Carnival, which I will be hosting this coming Sunday.

What Draws You To It?

Over at Crazy for Books the question of the week is:

"Why do you read the genre that you do? What draws you to it?"

I'm not married to any one genre but lately I seem to be drawn toward non-fiction titles. I'm not sure why that is. I remember, when we were kids, my brother asking me why he should read whatever fiction title it was that I was gushing about "when it isn't even true." Maybe I'm becoming an old curmudgeon as he was a young one, although I find that there is much on the non-fiction shelves that isn't even true, also.

I think it's time for me to indulge in a nice crime novel.

What got me started?

This week's question, posed by The Blue Bookcase is

"How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?"

That's a hard question for me to answer. I read books like For Whom The Bell Tolls and even Ulysses while still in elementary school, not that I understood Joyce. My mother took us all on regular visits to the Concord, MA public library, which was, in my memory, an enormous place, chock full of every book imaginable. Nobody told me that I couldn't read anything I wanted to so I did.

My reading habits have been regressing ever since. Soon I'll be reading nothing but comic books.

Dissing Dan Brown for a Meme

I have dropped everything else while I read volume one of The Autobiography of Mark Twain. It's a big fat 700 page annotated scholarly work that somehow got filled with folksy anecdotes and irreverencies, vignettes about people like General Grant and Horace Greeley. I'm waiting for some shocking anti-religious diatribes but haven't found any yet.

In the meme-time here is the latest question from Crazy for Books.

"What very popular and hyped book in the blogosphere did you NOT enjoy and how did you feel about posting your review?"

That would have to be The Lost Symbol. I rather enjoyed reading The Davinci Code, but Dan Brown had jumped the shark in the sequel. I rather enjoyed skewering it in my review.

Another Blue Bookcase Meme

At this rate I'll never get another book read. This week The Blue Bookcase asks "What makes a contemporary novel a classic?
Discuss a book which you think fits the category of ‘modern classics’ and explain why."

Well I disagree. There are some contemporary books which are destined to become classic. The problem is in identifying which ones they are. A classic, in my opinion, is a book that has stood the test of time and is still read and still has relevance after the passage of decades or even centuries. People are not very good at predicting this and experts will disagree about which books those future classics are.

I would say that Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood is a candidate because of the universality of it's apocalyptic theme and it's use of language and character. Someone else might think not and give cogent reasons for that opinion. In 100 years we'll know.