Llew's Reviews

I was flipping through a Book Sense picks pamphlet when I came across the review of this book. It read,”I loved Arlene, who was funny yet dark, bargaining with God that she will not have sex, tell a lie, or return to her small hometown, just as long as God keeps anyone from finding the body she left buried in the kudzu.” Normally, this would have never piqued my interest except for that I had seen the book on my dad’s staff recommendation shelf. This didn’t exactly scream “father” read so I picked it up to flip through and ended up devouring it.

It was a hilarious incredibly light read. Not my general fare but definitely something I could recommend to customers, especially when it comes out in paperback. Also it will provide me many a giggle to come as I envision my dad reading a book with a quirky southern woman named Arlene as the protagonist. Oh Captain Squawk, how the might have fallen.

Another cheery topic for 2006! A twelve year old girl drowns in the only free river left in South Carolina. (Free meaning that federal law protects it and keeps anything being done to it.) Her body is trapped, and they can’t recover it so after five weeks her parents demand to construct a temporary dam so divers can reach the body. Only, that would be against federal law. Thus, the crux.

I never knew how fun saying, “Thus, the crux” would be.

But I digress.

The story is told through the point of a photographer who is covering the story for a paper from a larger city several hours away. However, she grew up in the area and knows everyone involved with the exception of the deceased girl’s family because they were on vacation at the time.

Rash is quite talented at capturing what it’s like to be from a place and love it so much, yet feel the need to escape it as well. Then, dealing with the reconcilation between loving it and wanting to run away from it at the same time. Not that I know anything about that. Not at all.

As time inches closer to the Christmas season I start panicking about reading books which have customer appeal so I will have plenty of new books to recommend to others. Forget about personal tastes or desires to read more literary appealing works. From here on out, it’s all about sentimental tugging at the heart strings reader appeal.

And this one made me cry like a little girl with a skinned knee.

This one makes me want to go to Florence.

And have an affair with a painter for that matter. But for now I’d be happy with just Florence.

As if there would be a book whose subtitle was the motto of my life, and I wouldn’t read it. Although I do have to say that I don’t like it as much as some other subtitles of recent books. Like “Why Do Men Have Nipples: And Other Questions You’d Only Ask Your Doctor After Your Third Martini” and “100 People Screwing Up America: (Al Franken is #37). Seriously, those are sweet.

And this book is pretty neat too. It goes into the decisions which we make intuitively. How we can’t explain why we feel a certain way, and how sometimes knowing the entire situation or having more information on a case isn’t always a good thing when it comes to our decision about it. It cites a lot of interesting studies and stories so it gave for entertaining reading, even if it wasn’t entirely of a heightened academic writing qualiity.

Snow Flower and The Secret Fan made me physically ill, and I loved every incredible moment of it.

There were several topics covered in this novel which I wasn’t very aware of. The first was footbinding which I, naturally, had heard of but wasn’t well versed in the details. My stomach is too weak for it so I have no idea how those women’s feet handle it. Although, the maxim of the women during this time period in China was that pain tempers people into who they should become, and into beauty itself.

Nu Shu, the secret written language of the women in China, is another subject which I am woefully ignorant in. The story centered on the lives of two girls who seal into a contract to be lifelong best friends in rural China. It touches on the universal trials which trouble most close relationships between women, as the characters suffer through plagues, rebellions, children, and marriage. (Although I suppose the first two are the same as the last two, heh).

In the end, it was one of the most enchanting recent novels I have read in a very long time. It is not a happy story, and consequently, there is not a happy ending. But the substance of it by far exceeds any need for it.

“All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth! No, no! I don’t want all those things inside me, thank you.” — D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman

Lately, the bookstore has been receiving incredible amounts of damaged books from publishers due to poor packing. When these books come in, we call the publisher to report the damage and have them send out replacement copies. They then tell us to donate or destroy the books. In our last VHPS shippment, ‘Specimen Days’ came in damaged, and we kindly donated it to a very underpaid overworked bookshop girl to read until the book’s more permanent home of a library could be arranged.

As in Cunningham’s ‘The Hours’, his latest novel is also told in three novellas centered around an author. Instead of Virginia Woolf, it is Walt Whitman. All are set in New York. One a ghost story during the industrial revolution, the second a detective story in modern day post 9/11, and the third a science-fiction tale in the future many years after the earth had to be evacuated due to nuclear fallout. All of the stories center around three characters named Simon, Luke/Lucas, and Catherine/Cat/Catareena. They don’t build on each other as much as one will story will reveal a fact about the first.

Though the similarities between this and The Hours are apparent, they really are not similar books. The authors in which the stories are centered around play completely different roles in each of their respective novels. Whitman verses here are used by the odd, and abnormal, the abused and half-human. His lines are said in uncontrollable bursts with the quoter not fully realizing their meaning or even really wanting to have quoted him in the first place. And although I did not really enjoy this literary device I still quite adored the book. I love Cunningham’s abaility to juxtapose different stories to advance the plot in all of the tales. Even though the three stories have the same themes and motifs, the kind of writing they were differed so drastically that it made them each enjoyable to read.

Never tell me that a reviewer left you feeling vindicated for disliking a well-liked book, and then admit that the esteemed critic was JANET MASLIN.

Well, at least don’t tell me that and not expect me to laugh heartily at you.

The Images of America series has been out for a while. They basically take old pictures of a city/county/college/regional sports events tack on extended captions and call it a book. I haven’t really been interested in too many that I’ve seen because most of them have been South Carolina oriented. However, I am a big sucker for Appalachian culture. In fact, a lot of time I think about going back to school to get a graduate degree only there’s nothing I want to do for the rest of my life. But if I could get a job in something pertaining to Appalachian folklore or culture only if I would only be able to make a very meager living at it I would drop everything for it in a heartbeat, especially if I could work with someone named “Jim Bob”.

Most of this volume contained information I already knew but photos that I quite enjoyed. I finally got to see a picture of the failed steamboat they thought would be able to run up and down the French Broad River – ha! Also, I learned that whenever a tragic calamity happened there was nothing southerners loved more than getting gussied up and posing for the camera in front of it. There were all these pictures of horrible looking train wrecks and here were all these people primly dressed smiling for their posterity. I guess it was the equivalent to my family reunions.