down on the bayou

But the man who caught my eye was the short one. He seemed wrapped too tight for his own body, the same way a meth addict seems to boil in his own juices. His mouth was like a horizontal keyhole, the corner of his lip exposing his teeth, as though he were starting to grin. He listened intently to every word in the conversation, waiting for the green light to flash, his eyes flickering with anticipation.”

Detective Dave Robicheaux is at it again in James Lee Burke’s fifteenth installment of the Robicheaux series, Pegasus Descending. My mom Carol, a crime fiction fiend, is burning through all fifteen books right now and is my “guest” reviewer and book suggester today. She loves books that take her someplace else, in this case, into the southern
Louisiana culture of the Cajun French people via the flawed but fundamentally ethical character, Detective Robicheaux. Burke, two time winner of the Edgar Award, continues the saga of Robicheaux in his latest novel, an “unforgettable roller coaster of passion, surprise, and regret.”

to oprah from bookbabie

gatsby.jpg

In my recent web wanderings I stumbled across BookFinder.com,a great site to go to when you are looking for that certain book and you don’t want to just Google it and get a million useless hits. Is there a book you remember reading as child with your mom before bed that you’d like to track down? Or maybe you need a gift for, let’s say your good friend Oprah. I found a nice first edition, signed copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby for only $55,000. It was owned by Warren Baxter who starred in the silent movie version of the film in 1926, hence the high price, but hey, the divine Ms. O is worth every penny! Interesting site for the bookishly inclined.

anatomy of grief

The Year of Magical Thinking

An adaptation of Joan Didion’s touching memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, will open on Broadway March 29th starring Vanessa Redgrave for a limited twenty-four-week run.

That I was only beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me. Until now, I had only been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.  ~Joan Didion

what not to read

cat-book.jpg

Library Thing is a fun website where you can catalog your books, get suggestions based on what you like, or get unsuggestions on what NOT to read based on your entry, you can also join or create book groups to share and discuss your favorite book genre with. It’s easy breezy to use and free unless you want to catalog more than 200 books (my mom has 1,000 books on her excel file!) but it only costs 25 bucks for a lifetime membership and the ability to enter as many books as you want. You can even access your book catalog by cell phone while you’re book shopping (well some people can, I can’t even retrieve my cell phone messages). So check it out, it’s a great place for individuals or bookclubs to track their books and find new authors to try out!

Cat Reading print by Helga Sermat

spirits

I read this book about ten years ago after my cousin’s husband (a literature professor) told me about it, and I can still picture scenes from it in my mind (which is a big deal for me, my memory is totally shot, and not from all the drugs I (never) did as a teenager!).

Isabel Allende has written many books, but The House of the Spirits is still my favorite. There is something for everyone in this book, politics, murder, mystery, and romance and even though it was written in 1986, the writing and subject matter are timeless.

writer’s words

“My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.”

That is a quote from Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture, My Father’s Suitcase, that I read in The New Yorker last week. Check it out…