Bookshelf envy...

Don't you just want to curl up in this perfect little corner with a good book and let the world outside slip by? I love the picture window, and the view, and, of course, all the lovely bookshelves. To be in this peaceful corner with all my favorite books around me, watching it snow, or rain, or shine outside...sounds a bit like heaven. Don't you agree?

A Bookish Pair...

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love to his last...these two books just seem to go together. Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler are both worth checking out.

Before he fell in love with Zelda, F. Scott Fitzgerald fell in love with Ginevra; he was attending Princeton, she was a high school girl at Westover. Their courtship was brief and consisted of a few visits, a few kisses, and a lot of passionate letters. When Ginevra broke up with him, Scott told her, "No one will ever love you as much as I do."  Was he right? Caroline Preston has written a fictionalized account of Ginevra's life, from 1916 when she first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, through the Roaring Twenties, to Scott's death in 1940. It's an interesting and well-written novel, and a fun mix of reality and fiction.

Can you think of any literary couple more fascinating than Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald? Therese Anne Fowler's excellent fictional novel captures the era of the flappers and Scott's and Zelda's tempestuous and passionate love affair. Money poured through their fingers as fast as champagne from a bottle; they lived always in the moment...soul mates to the bitter end. Fowler took a lot of her material from their letters to each other, which added a nice authenticity to her narrative. If you've never read anything about Zelda or Scott Fitzgerald, this book is a great introduction to their roller-coaster lives.

Happy Reading!

Once upon a summer...

Memorial Day always signals the start of summer for me, even though it's technically still spring, and school isn't out yet, and summer vacation hasn't officially begun. Today just feels like summer. Which has me thinking about what I want to do (and read!) this summer...so many delicious possibilities....

With no money in the bank for an exotic vacation or far-flung adventure this summer, I'll be staying closer to home. But that's okay. Utah has a lot of beautiful hiking trails and I can't wait to put some miles on my new hiking shoes. (Lake Blanche here I come!) I think it'd be fun to do some zip-lining this summer, and I also hope to spot a few more new birds when I'm out bird watching, maybe even an owl, or a turkey vulture, or a woodpecker, or two.

And my summer reading plans? I'm not sure yet. I have a list of book titles gleaned from my favorite bookish blogs over the last year that I really want to read--a list that seems to grow longer each day. Then there's that stack of books sitting on my shelf, some that I've had for years and years, just waiting to be read. And I kind of want to check out Game of Thrones and Tana French's latest book, as well as a couple of non-fiction books about 1914 and the start of World War I. So many books...I'm not sure which to choose first. But it's a nice problem to have.

What about you?  Got any fun summer plans?

I hope so!

Happy Summering!

Fifth Classic of 2014...

"...these foolish books have turned her brain!"

In The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox pokes fun of romance books and the effect they have on malleable young girls if read too often and taken too seriously. So it is with her main character, Arabella. The daughter of a Marquis, Arabella is young, beautiful, and lively; she has a quick wit and a kind heart. There's just one problem:

From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading, which extremely delighted the marquis; he permitted her therefore the use of his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances, and what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad translations....Her ideas, from the manner of her life, and the objects around her, had taken a romantic turn; and supposing romances were real pictures of life, from them she drew all her notions and expectations. By them she was taught to believe, that love was the ruling principle of the world; that every other passion was subordinate to this; and that it caused all the happiness and miseries of life.

While this novel is subtitled "The Adventures of Arabella", it should be subtitled "The Follies of Arabella". She is always imagining passion in the young men she meets, always fearing she's about to be 'carried off' by a scorned lover, and always taking offense where none was meant or given. For every situation she encounters, she has some crazy example taken from a bad romance novel which she then quotes from...extensively. It's funny, at first, then a little tedious. But overall, this novel made me laugh. Even the chapter headings are amusing. Like this one: Contains several incidents, in which the reader is expected to be extremely interested. I did feel bad for Mr. Granville, the young man who wants to marry Arabella, but who can't quite live up to her foolish rules and unrealistic romantic notions. Why he sticks it out through all her whimsical follies I'll never know. But then, I stuck it out to the very end, too. (All 423 pages!) And I'm glad I did.

First published in 1752, The Female Quixote seems like a precursor to Jane Austen's satirical Northanger Abbey, another favorite read. There were several things I enjoyed about this novel--for one thing, it's full of some awesome vocabulary. I mean, when did we stop using words like questionless and ravishers in everyday conversation? Some of my other favorites: dolorous, foibles, languishings, vexacious, haply, raillery, and quintescence. If you like books written in this time period, lightheared (if a little long-winded) novels that poke fun and don't take themselves too seriously, and books with some delightfully funny characters, I think you'll like this one, too.

Happy Reading!

Why Kings Confess...

Why Kings Confess by C.S. Harris is the latest Sebastian St. Cyr mystery; it takes place in Regency England in January 1813. A Frenchman, Dr. Damian Pelletan, is murdered, his heart ripped out. As Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, investigates, he discovers that not only does Pelletan have ties to a secret peace delegation sent to England by Napolean, but he also has ties to the exiled royal House of Bourbon, including Marie-Therese, the daughter of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and her dead brother, the "Lost Dauphin". Pelletan's sister, Alexandrie Sauvage, is also living in England, as is the Frenchwoman he once loved--a woman now married to a ruthless English aristocrat. What secrets will Devlin dig up in the course of his investigation? And who will be the next to die?

I have my own confession to make, I don't read these books for the mystery as much as I read them for the characters. Especially Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. He's such a compelling character--"thirty years old, tall and lean, with a vaguely menacing bearing that reminded one of the time he'd spent as a cavalry officer." He has golden eyes that see in the dark and a passion for making sure that murder victims who would otherwise be forgotten get justice. He's the kind of character a girl can crush on.

If you've never read a Sebastian St. Cyr mystery before, I suggest you start with the first in the series,  What Angels Fear, although I read the third book, Where Serpents Sleep first myself. They're all great reads. I love this series and these characters. And my bookish bonus with Why Kings Confess is that it fills another category for me in the What's in a Name Reading Challenge. Category filled with this book: Read a book with a position of royalty in the title. My current Reading Challenge status: 4 books read; 1 book to go.

Happy Reading!

Some YA Fun...

Violet Wings by Victoria Hanley                                                                                         

First Line: Back when I was nine, my parents went missing.

My Thoughts: This is a light-hearted YA novel about fairies and genies, rules and magic, Earth and Feyland. In Hanley's world, each fairy or genie has a level of magic from lowest red to highest violet. (The girls are fairies; the boys are genies.) Zaria Tourmaline, who at 14 has just come into her magic, is a violet fairy, which is rare. She has a lot to learn about spells and portals, true friends, hidden enemies, and breaking all the rules. I liked that Hanley veered away from the traditional view of the Fae and instead created her own version of fairies; in her world, the fairies are more like the ones I used to imagine as a child. Hanely did a good job of creating her characters, and I thought this book was a lot of fun to read. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel: Indigo Magic. I hope it's a good as this one.

Added bonus: This book  fills another square on my YA Bingo Card--the square where you need to read a book with a color in its title. Lucky, huh?

Happy Reading!

Happy Birthday, L. Frank Baum!

L. Frank Baum created the amazing, fantastic, and wonderful world of Oz...a world I loved as a child. I collected all fourteen Oz books and happily read them over and over, especially my three favorites: Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, and Glinda of Oz. Such great reads! I was enchanted by Baum's unique and fun characters: Billina, the talking hen, the Woozy, the Nome King, Tik-Tok, the wind-up mechanical man, Polychrome, the Rainbow King's daughter, Glinda the Sorceress, and of course, Princess Ozma and Dorothy. But most of all, I loved Oz itself. Who wouldn't love a place where books grow on trees, inanimate objects come to life, animals talk, and magic exists? I always wanted to go there--see the Emerald City and Glinda's palace, take a stroll down the yellow brick road, pick a 3-course nut for lunch, visit Miss Cuttenclip and her town of paper dolls as well as the puzzle-piece people of Fuddlecumjig, spin on the Merry-Go-Round Mounts, and hang out with Dorothy and Toto and all their friends.

The Oz books fueled my imagination growing up; rereading his books now is like revisiting childhood. Ray Bradbury once described Oz as a place "where the young stay young and the old grow young forever--these books are for readers of all ages." I couldn't agree more. So, here's to L. Frank Baum and the wonderful world of Oz that he created!

Happy Reading!