Deon's February 10 Reading List


February is a great month for curling up in a comfy chair with a good book. Here are a few you might enjoy.

Bone Worship (Paperback)

By Elizabeth Eslami
$15.95
ISBN-13: 9781605980744
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Pegasus Books, 1/2010
  Elizabeth Eslami is a fresh new voice in literature.   Bone Worship is an insightful, entertaining, poignant, funny and altogether interesting book about a family divided between two cultures.  Jasmine’s Mum is a Southern belle and her Dad is an Iranian doctor.  They raised Jasmine and her brother in Arrowhead, a small Southern town.  Jasmine went off to the University of Chicago, her father hoping she would follow in his footsteps by becoming a doctor.  As the book opens Jasmine is returning home not in the bright splendor of graduation parties and congratulations about her promising future in medicine, but instead as a young woman who failed to graduate.  It turns out she wasn’t even studying medicine with Dad’s money.  Jasmine was tackling a double major in zoology and biology, doing quite well too until that last disastrous quarter. While Jasmine is uncertain what the future might hold, her father has no similar doubts.  She is to be married; he will arrange it quite soon. This book is a lovely cornucopia of complicated family life.  Jasmine has to discover that her father really does care deeply for her and like the rest of us is just doing his best.  There are wonderful contradictions, after all her father did not follow tradition, he married a southern girl.  How this all works out in Jasmine’s life is a tour through the fault lines that occur as this family grapples with tradition, the future, and each other.  Jasmine’s search for a cultural identity is heartwarming, funny, and fabulously interesting.   It is territory Elizabeth Eslami knows well, she was raised in a small southern town with an Iranian-American household. 

The Piano Teacher (Paperback)

By Janice Y. K. Lee
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780143116530
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Penguin (Non-Classics), 11/2009
Other Editions of this Title
 The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee is stunning!  It should fuel a lively discussion. Claire led a sheltered life in England, living with her Mum and Dad.  Traveling to Hong Kong as a young bride she is taken into a society for which she possesses no map.  She is unmoored.  Claire married because that was what young women did with their lives.   Her husband is a pleasant chap, but not terribly exciting.  Claire takes a job teaching the Chen’s daughter to play the piano.  Will, the Chen’s Anglo chauffer, intrigues the young woman.  They begin a torrid affair.  Will reveals bits of his past in increments that shift her view of life. Will first arrived in Hong Kong before WWI. He fell in love with Trudy, a high spirited woman who will always own his heart.  The world was their oyster until the Japanese invaded Hong Kong.  Will was imprisoned with the rest of the Brits while Trudy did her best to live under Japanese rule. The story alternates time periods, opening piece by piece like the petals of a rose, each layer slowly revealing the past.   

The Monkey Wrench Gang (Paperback)

By Edward Abbey
$14.99
ISBN-13: 9780061129766
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Harper Perennial, 12/2006
Other Editions of this Title
 Led by the intrepid Hayduke, a motley gang wages war on the big yellow machines that have come to destroy the landscape they love.  Hilarious, outrageous, passionate, and totally full of himself, Edward Abbey was an original.  He was vehemently opposed to the construction of the Glen Canyon dam, a dam that obliterated Native petro glyphs and is now viewed by quite a few as a mistake.  Too late for all that pretty landscape, it has been drowned for a long time now.  Abbey pours all the rage and furor of his opposition to despoiling wild places into his fiction.  Edward Abbey defies definition, he is not about to fit into any neat little box.  An impassioned environmentalist, he was also known to shoot television sets and litter the desert he loved with their debris.  His fictional characters are likely to toss beer cans out the window.   Ed Abbey was one of those guys who eat up life in great big gulps.  In his fiction he lets us have a little taste of what it is like to live large.  

Secrets of Eden (Hardcover)

By Chris Bohjalian
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9780307394972
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Crown, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title
Alice Hayward looks up at Reverend Stephen Drew and says “there” after her baptism.  She will not survive the night.  Reverend Drew’s faith will die with her.  Heather’s mother was killed by her father, she knows what the Reverend might be feeling.  Heather believes her life is graced by angels; she is famous for writing about her experiences with them. She tries to be Reverend Drew’s angel.  Secrets lurk in the darkness.

Shanghai Girls (Paperback)

By Lisa See
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780812980530
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title
  Shanghai Girls by Lisa See has released in paperback. Pearl and May are happy young sisters, the world is their oyster, until their father loses the family fortune and the Japanese invade their country.  In an instant their lives change in horrible ways.  The intrepid young women make their way to the USA where they struggle to make a new life for themselves 

A Town Like Alice (Paperback)

By Nevil Shute
$15.00
ISBN-13: 9780307474001
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title

The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi (Hardcover)

By Elif Shafak
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780670021451
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Viking Adult, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title
  What does a forty year old suburban housewife have in common with a thirteenth century Sufi mystic?  Maybe everything important.  The writing is sublime, the story a magic carpet ride through the ages.   

The Scarecrow (Mass Market Paperback)

By Michael Connelly, Peter Giles
$9.99
ISBN-13: 9780446401203
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Grand Central Publishing, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title

The Postmistress (Hardcover)

By Sarah Blake
$25.95
ISBN-13: 9780399156199
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2/2010
Other Editions of this Title
  The Postmistress by Sarah Blake turns WWII on its ears.  Instead of focusing on battles, it focuses on vignettes of war’s effect on every day people.  Frankie is a hotshot reporter, working with the legendary Murrow; she sends out on the radio the stories of Europe and WWII.  Emma Trask sits with her young husband listening to Frankie’s stories, a world away. When their lives intersect the Postmistress must keep a secret.  This is a gripping and very different story of WWII and the price of war.  The characters are likable; they take you right into the story.  There are some great moments in this book  
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