and now for something swanky...

we'll just have to see how swanky this one is...

three junes

so, i loved this book! julia glass won a national book award for this novel, made even more special i would imagine, as it was her debut novel. it tells the story of a family, viewed at different times by different narrators through generations. it starts with the father telling his story, his life before and after marriage, before and after kids, his oldest son takes over in the middle of the book and the final part is written by a young woman who ultimately has a connection with both. this book jumps from a current time frame to the past, but i personally love a book that does that...keeps it interesting...giving you small morsels of information, enough to peak your curiosity but maybe not enough to understand fully the significance...makes you want to delve deeper, learn who these people are, why they've made the decisions that they have...this book also brought me to tears at one point and i think that that's a mark of an amazing writer, one who brings you to tears, who sucks you into the story to the point that you've forgotten everything around you and all you know is what's happening on the page...actually it's more like i'm in the room with mal and fenno and i'm listening to what they are saying more than reading...i will say it did have a slightly lackluster ending, it wasn't so much of an "i don't really want this to end" so much as a "really, that's it? it's over?" kind of an end...but i won't hold that against her...this is the second of glass's books that i've read, the first being the whole world over...it's been a few years, but i remember liking that one as well, and after looking at some of the reviews on amazon, i was reminded that one of the characters of three junes, fenno, is also in the whole world over....perhaps i'll have to give that one another read one of these days...

while perusing my bookshelf...

i'm not the kind of reader that feels the need to get their books signed for potential future monetary gain, i'm the kind of reader that likes to have their books signed because that means that the author has actually handled said book. while they may have taken years to author their work, it doesn't mean that they had anything to do with that specific one...i think that reading is a very intimate act...one's eyes caress every word, page after page, line after line...i like the idea then, that maybe, even for just a moment, the writer who penned whatever story i might spend days or weeks lost in, actually held my precious book in their hand, put pen to paper, and as a final note, placed their name in ink.....


...these were my first ever signed books.

the interpretation of murder

i finished this yesterday and i thought it was quite a good read. it's an historical novel based on the premise that although it is known that sigmund freud traveled to the united states, with carl jung i believe in 1909, it's not known what took place during his short stay that gave him such a distaste for the country for all of his remaining years. "freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the united states. he called americans "savages" and blamed his sojourn there for physical ailments that afflicted him well before 1909"...so jed rubenfeld has created his interpretation of the events that include murder, some swankiness and other sundry events...
i enjoy historical novels, and even though rubenfeld has taken some artistic license, he states in the author's note that he really took pains to keep much of the story accurate to history. moving a building here...adding a murder there...all add up to a rollicking good read! i highly recommend this one...

three junes

just started this afternoon, "three junes" by julia glass...only on page 24 but so far so good...i am definitely interested...

and so we begin...

i've been a reader for the majority of my life. always a book in hand, bag or if traveling, several in my suitcase. (one never knows what one will be in the mood to read when one is otherwise away from their precious bookcase...) this little blog will be my attempt to comment (critique is too harsh a word for what i plan to do) on what i am currently reading, what i've read in the past and probably what i hope to read in the future. here written down for posterity...for future generations to read...blah, blah, blah...
first things first...if anyone is actually reading this, they will undoubtedly have noticed that i prefer not to capitalize...laziness i guess, or perhaps the idea that no one letter is more important than another...why just capitalize the one in the front and not all the others...oh right, then it's just like yelling....
secondly, i like to do this a lot...
....this too...
and thirdly, i am not officially licensed to do this kind of work...let's call it a love for reading, hope no one gets in a huff over anything i've written or uploaded and just enjoy it shall we? (we again being an assumption that someone, somewhere may be perusing this blog having gotten lost on their way to a real review...hee)