Category Archives: Meme

Teaser Tuesdays: Funny in Farsi, by Firoozeh Dumas

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

In 1977, the Shah and his wife were scheduled to come to America to meet the newly elected president, Jimmy Carter. Very few Iranians lifed in America then, and those of us who did were invited to go to Washington, D.C., to welcome the Shah. The Iranian government would cover all expenses.

My father accepted the invitation. My brothers reacted with a few choice words.
— from Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, p. 111, by Firoozeh Dumas

Booking Through Thursday: The Best?

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Each week, Booking Through Thursday asks a book related question. This week, the question is:

What were your favorite books from 2008?

I don’t usually do lists of favorites, because my taste in books changes so often, and I read so quickly, that sometimes, I don’t even remember to list or review.

But since you asked, here are a few:

  • The Eight, by Katherine Neville: I’ve loved this book for two decades. I remember working at the campus candy store at USF, and reading about it in the pink pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, and then picking it up at Printer’s Ink on the way home from school, and reading it on the train. It remains a favorite, to this day.
  • The Fire, by Katherine Neville: I loved this as much because Neville’s leading men are always so intriguing as because I’d waited twenty years for her to produce a sequel to The Eight.
  • Home from the Vinyl Cafe, by Stuart McLean: A collection short stories about a man who owns a record store, and his wife. Funny, contemporary, and full of Canadian flavor.
  • The Seduction of the Crimson Rose, by Lauren Willig: The most recent (to date) of the series that began with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a series that is an homage to The Scarlet Pimpernel but with a feminist sensibility.
  • The Southern Vampire Mysteries, by Charlaine Harris: I began reading this just before Halloween, and read the most recent just before Christmas. The series True Blood was not the first time I’d heard of them – many friends had recommended them – but it certainly helped make the decision.

Teaser Tuesdays: Life After Genius, by M. Ann Jacoby

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

“You wrote some kind of paper, didn’t you? Gave a big presentation in front of a bunch of important people. Your mother can’t stop talking about it. How proud she is of you. How much smarter you are than all the other bridge players’ sons.” The woman laughs as if she has just told a joke, then grasps hold of Mead’s wrist. “Do you mind?” she says. “I’ve never touched a genius before.”
— from Life After Genius, p. 122, by M. Ann Jacoby

Teaser Tuesdays: Belladonna, by Anne Bishop

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

As she turned away from the mirror, she was drawn to the watercolor that hung on the wall next to her bed. Titled Moonlight Lover, the view was of the break in the trees near Sebastian’s cottage, where a person could stand and see the moon shining over the lake. The dark-haired woman in the painting wore a gown that was as romantic as it was impractical, and looked as substantial as moonbeams. Standing behind her, with his arms wrapped protectively around her, was the lover. His face was shadowed, teasing the imagination to find the details, but the body suggested a virile man in his prime.
~Belladonna, by Anne Bishop. Page 61.

Teaser Tuesday: The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane Ackerman

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

But spring floated outside the small rupture in time the war had gouged. For people attuned to nature and the changing seasons, especially for farmers or animal-keepers, the war snagged time on barbed wire, forced them to live by mere chronicity, instead of real time, the time of wheat, wolf, and otter.
— The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman. Page 223.

Booking Through Thursday: Honesty

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I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book just because I got a free copy of it. However, some authors seem to feel that if they send you a copy of their book for free, you should give it a positive review.

Do you think reviewers are obligated to put up a good review of a book, even if they don’t like it? Have we come to a point where reviewers *need* to put up disclaimers to (hopefully) save themselves from being harassed by unhappy authors who get negative reviews?
– BTT, 20 November 2008

I review books here in my own blog, and also for the e-zine All Things Girl, where we post reviews in the blog, and in the actual zine. We try to always find something positive to say, but it we really dislike something, or felt a work was flawed, we’ll say so.

Here at Bibliotica (which was founded in 2004, but I recently purged the archives), I don’t do lengthy reviews, but if I dislike something, I’m not shy about it. Of course authors and publishers prefer positive reviews, but as readers, and many times as writers ourselves, we do them a disservice if we don’t give fair, honest reviews.

For more answers to this question, visit Booking Through Thursday

Teaser Tuesdays: Immoveable Feast, by John Baxter

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Teaser Tuesday asks readers to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

There are always two possible strategies in preparing a meal for the French.

One was novelty. I could present the family with something so exotic that sheer strangeness would keep them interested. I’d done this a few times when I first cooked in France. At various times, dinner guests had been treated to Indian curries, Thai shrimp salad, and Mexican chicken with bitter chocolate mole sauce. We had once – not an experience to be repeated – even taken them to an Australian restaurant that served kangaroo.
— Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, by John Baxter. Page 60.

Booking Through Thursday: Gold Medal Reading

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From Booking Through Thursday:

First:

* Do you or have you ever read books about the Olympics? About sports in general?
* Fictional ones? Or non-fiction? Or both?

And, Second:

* Do you consider yourself a sports fan?
* Because, of course, if you’re a rabid fan and read about sports constantly, there’s a logic there; if you hate sports and never read anything sports-related, that, too … but you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a good sports story.
* (Or a good sports movie, for that matter. Feel free to expand this into a discussion about “Friday Night Lights” or “The Natural” or whatever…)

I vaguely remember reading books about the first modern Olympics, but I think it may have been a movie as well.

The only sports I really follow are horse racing, figure skating and (very casually) hockey, so unless Dick Francis novels, and that one Sara Paretsky novel about the hockey player named Boom-Boom, count, I haven’t read anything about sports, either.

I do love a good skating movie, though. Like the original The Cutting Edge.

Booking through Thursday: What Do You Do?

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Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

While I don’t own cats, I have enough friends who do to know that being alone without a book is somewhat akin to feline friends being locked in a house without a scratching post or cat tree…not a pleasant situation.

Since I have my wallet, I’d probably hit the airport bookstore and see what was on the best-seller list, or indulge in a few girly magazines of the sort I generally only read at the salon, because it makes them special, and they seem to GO with the salon.

Failing that, I’d look around for a stray newspaper or cast-off book – airports are popular drop points for Book Crossing, after all.

(And yes, I know, yet again, I’m participating on Sunday. Guess I’m not much of a joiner these days, is all.)

Listing

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Six years ago, I had Lasik surgery on my eyes, and went from not being able to see the big E at the top of the chart to 20:20 vision, though it wasn’t instant – it takes time for eyes to settle.

People always ask what having the surgery impacted the most, and they generally expect grand answers like, “I can scuba dive without a special mask,” but the reality is, it’s the little things that you really notice, things like being able to see to shave your legs in the shower, or put on make-up, being able to read the numbers on the alarm clock when you wake in the middle of the night, and being able to read in bed without fear of rolling over on your glasses, or forgetting to remove your contacts and harming your eyes. (Ditto falling asleep on planes)

It is with this in mind that I present the following meme, in honor of the first 48 hours after surgery, in which I was forbidden to read anything at all.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as unread by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers