Notes from a bibliophile

"People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?" Oh, how true! This is almost a love letter to the bookselling profession. There are so many things that only a bookseller or librarian will appreciate. The story itself is a bit maudlin, though. A curmudgeonly bookseller whose wife has recently died is approached by the new publishers rep pushing a book written by an old man whose wife has recently died. Later he finds someone has abandoned a child in his bookstore. This is the beginning of a life. It has a few twists I did not foresee, and that is always pleasant. There's a sort of Tuesdays with Morrie kind of feel to it, but it is still really enjoyable. One last quote that is oh-so-true: "The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.&

I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this. I want to start with a quote from the book: "Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on and on over the horizon of being, back to the tohu-bohu before the waters parted." I love this quote. It's lovely and seems to encompass the whole world. I love the thought that we inherit a past from our ancestors. Plus it's a great intro into what this book is about. To say an antagonism existed between Moullot's grandparents would be an understatement. They met right before the beginning of World War II. Being Jewish, they fled south from the occupied north of France before escaping to Switzerland. The story of their escape is really harrowing. In truth they spent very little time together. At one point they separated - the why of it is never really re

Yesterday I tried to listen to the audiobook of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. I love audiobooks for so many reasons. First, I spend a lot of time in a tiny room doing mind-numbingly tedious work. Having something - anything - to make the time pass is absolutely necessary. Second, it makes reading longer books much easier. I've never read any Eco, although The Name of the Rose has been on my to-read list forever. Something about him seems intimidating, like Tolstoy ( War and Peace has conquered me numerous times). I thought this would be an easier way around my fear. I couldn't get past what must have been the first dozen or so pages. It was just a litany of racial stereotypes of different European nationalities. It was just too "talky" - nothing happening, just haranguing the Jews, the Germans, the French, the Italians, until I finally gave up. Perhaps this is just one of those books that you have to give your absolute full attention to. Either have it going

This is the sequel to The 5th Wave . In this series, an alien society has decided to take over the earth. As this novel states repeatedly, they could have just hurled a rock at us, like the asteroid that took out most of life on the planet eons ago, and wiped us out like that. Instead, they kill us by killing our humanity. A plague takes out most people, turning them into delirious shells who don't recognize their own families. The survivors are forced to leave their loved ones in order to save themselves, a quality we generally lack. A few aliens have been "downloaded" into particular humans, only to be activated in their teens to who they really are. These few become killing machines, attempting to wipe out the real humans. So now, in a world where humans are becoming scarcer by the second, the human facing you could be the author of your demise. They kill our trust in the familiar, which is fed by our need for society. We want desperately to be around others but can yo

I missed the whole Goosebumps phase. This is the first thing I've ever read by RL Stine. It's an odd little book, too. A writer is faced with writing his second book. His agent is pushing for a sequel, but he wants to branch out on his own. But things spiral quickly into bizarre tangents and it has a pretty interesting little twist at the end. My only complaint is that the grammarian in me was annoyed by all the sentence fragments, but the reader in me understands that it increases the urgency in the atmosphere of the story. But, dude, subjects, please!