Teaser Tuesday: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

She took one look at Landsman’s father, hovering uncertainly in the doorway of the apartment, and correctly diagnosed him to be as unreclaimable and inaccessible as the wilderness that she had come to regard as her home. It was love at first sight.

pg. 32 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your 2 ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

The Sunday Salon: Spoilers

College certainly broadens your horizons. While the general attitude towards spoilers among my circles in high school was unadulterated fear (we looked upon the gent who spoiled Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with both dread and amazement), I have discovered people who actually enjoy being spoiled, wonder of wonders. They say that knowing the ending, or at least some of the smaller details, puts them at ease and helps them focus on the work at hand, be it a film or a book. io9 recently posted an article about how no one is as unspoiled as we once were, and, in light of meeting people who embrace spoilers heartily, I thought I’d glance back over my personal stance on spoilers. (Below the cut are some vague spoilers regarding The Lord of the Rings and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Booking Through Thursday: 2009 in Review

What were your favorite books of the year? (Books that were new to you in 2009, if not necessarily published this year.)

This year, I started The Literary Omnivore. I’ve been a voracious reader for years, and I decided book blogging would be a wonderful creative outlet for me somewhere in October, after a presentation at my school about “e-portfolios”. The book blogging community has been more than welcoming- thank you, ladies! It’s been one of the best things about this year, up there with the inauguration, Dragon*Con, and my first semester of college.

In order to answer this question, I’ve put together a top ten list of the books I read this year. I try to read widely, but I must admit- I have a predisposition for fantasy and strong female characters, which shows in this list.

Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not the greatest comic book reader. My diet consists of a comic book series about literature and keeping tabs on Harley Quinn. However, my brother owns a massive tome that I believe to be Marvel: The Characters and Their Universe. I flipped through it a lot as a wee lass, and so internalized a vague, dreamy conception of the Golden Age of comics, spanning from the late 1930s to the late 1940s–young illustrators leaning over massive draft boards, their hair falling into their face. That’s what came to me when I picked up The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as I volunteered at the library this past summer.

Teaser Tuesday: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

pg. 558 of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your 2 ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

Sunday Salon: Book Notes

When I was just a wee lass, my paternal grandmother gave me her copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I read it happily, until I got to the last few chapters. My grandmother had underlined, in pen, several passages of the novel. I was shocked that somebody would desecrate a book like that! It had been made very clear to me by my mother that writing in books was bad, ever since I scribbled in and tore up in my brother’s Asterix comic books. (There are many words to describe myself as a child–let’s just go with completely bonkers for now.)