Cover Judging: Beauty and the Beast

Move aside Little Women, Regency Buck, and The 5th Horseman, it's time to get picky again! Which book cover do you prefer? I own the one at right - I bought it through the Scholastic book order in 7th grade. I think I like the middle one the best though.

If you're not familiar with Robin McKinley, she writes beautiful retellings of famous fairy tales (I reviewed Spindle's End, her version of Sleeping Beauty, last fall).

I love the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast (hello - she's a bookworm! and the Beast has the world's best library!) but McKinley's Beauty is even more lovely.

Which cover is your favorite? Anyone else fantasize about a library with shelves so high you need ladders?

The Beauty images are Amazon affiliate links.

Book Review: The Master's Muse

With The Master's Muse, Varley O'Connor has crafted a compelling novel based on the life of prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clerq--a complicated love story set in the tumultuous world of international ballet.

In 1956, "Tanny" Le Clerq was on the way to becoming one of the most famous ballerinas of all time. Married to George Balanchine, the genius choreographer who revitalized American ballet, Tanny danced across Europe that summer to rave reviews--until she collapsed in Copenhagen, and never walked again.

Polio transformed both Tanny's life and her already difficult marriage. Only 26 when the disease struck, she was Balanchine's fifth wife, more than 20 years younger than he. Tanny and Balanchine were passionate about each other, but they each had tempers to match their artistic gifts.

O'Connor follows the remaining years of their marriage, through the high points--such as when Balanchine designs physical therapy regimens for Tanny--and the low--including his affairs with ever younger ballerinas. O'Connor also depicts Tanny's desperate struggle to adapt to life in a wheelchair while still surrounded by the culture of dancing that she loves.

Through Tanny and Balanchine's story, O'Connor gives the inside scoop on more than 30 years of New York City Ballet history, and offers a true-to-life glimpse of a world full of music, love and art. Like an elegant ballet, The Master's Muse takes the reader on an artistic journey of love--an undeniably beautiful journey, despite its bittersweet ending.

This isn't the sort of book I'd normally pick up. But Shelf Awareness sent it to me, and I decided to give it a shot and review it for them. I ended up liking it quite a bit, and I learned a lot about the world of ballet, and about polio, that I hadn't known before.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 
Should I recommend this to my grandma? Up to you. My grandma probably wouldn't approve.

Do you know much about ballet?  

Around the World in 15 Mysteries

I've been listening to Tana French's books on audio. If you're not familiar with them they're wonderful Irish mysteries. Listening to them has made me think about how much I love mysteries set in other countries. You not only get an interesting crime, you get to do a bit of armchair traveling.

So I'm going to take you on a whirlwind world tour - via book reviews I've written about some of my favorite mysteries.

 

First, James Church's Inspector O series gives an intriguing peek into the secretive world of North Korea. Poor O doesn't stand much of a chance against the secretive bureaucracy. Facing similar government pressure is Captain Alexei Korolev in William Ryan's The Darkening Field . Korolev fights to investigate a murder against the tense backdrop of 1930s Soviet Russia.

 

Scandinavia is chock full of great mystery authors. Sweden's Henning Mankell has written a whole series starring the fantastic Kurt Wallander, and great standalones like The Man From Beijing which tied for my Best Fiction of 2011. Michael Ridpath's Where the Shadows Lie offers a fun mix of modern day Iceland and ancient Scandinavian legends. I also really love Arnaldur Indridason's mysteries - but strangely enough I don't seem to have ever reviewed any of them!

 

Ireland and the United Kingdom also offer lots of great mysteries. In addition to Tana French's books I recently read Dublin Dead by Gerard O'Donovan, which is a quick-paced, up-to-date look at crime (and the economy) in Ireland. Scotland has the incomparable Ian Rankin - I love both the semi-alcoholic, in-your-face Detective Inspector John Rebus and the polite, teetotaler Malcolm Fox. In England I adore Elizabeth George's series starring Scotland Yard Inspector Lynley, and you also can't go wrong with Peter Lovesey's Inspector Diamond series (which are set in Bath).

 

One of my favorite authors, Fred Vargas, has written a whole set of mysteries starring the spacey but brilliant Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. The Adamsberg books are mostly set in Paris, but some take place in the French countryside. Death at the Chateau Bremont, by M.L. Longworth, features the countryside in Provence, particularly the town of Aix-en-Provence and the small chateau nearby where a nobleman fell to his death.

 

In the warmer parts of Europe, Chief Inspector Max Camara, "a dope-smoking... proverb-quoting, flamenco-loving, Valencia-based murder detective" investigates the death of a matador in Or the Bull Kills You. Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti - a refreshingly happy married man and empathetic detective - ruminates at length about the state of his beloved Venice. And Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano is also a lot of fun, in a grumpy, profane, Sicilian sort of way. Next door in Greece (but a few millennia earlier) Nicolaos, older brother to Socrates, is trying to get his investigative career up and running.

 

Over in the Western Hemisphere, Argentinian Police Superintendent Venancio "Perro" Lascano got gunned down by corrupt fellow officers, and has to work from outside the establishment to find justice. And in Jamaica, curious bartender Shadrack Myers is pretty sure that something shady is happening in Largo Bay.

This is just a small sampling of the international mysteries I love; I didn't even mentioned Stella Rimington, Jacqueline Winspear, Anne Holt, Deanna Raybourn, or C.S. Harris! The list is endless, I'm sure I left out even more really good ones.

Do you like international mysteries? 

Have you read any great ones that I didn't mention?

Book images are affiliate links.

P.S. I picked the giveaway winner (with a little help from random.org)! Was it you?

LeBron James and Summer Reading

See, everyone's reading The Hunger Games!

• I found that picture of LeBron James via Shelf Awareness. So great!
• Thanks to Nicole for posting about the Governor's Summer Reading Program on the Quirky Bookworm Facebook page. If you live in Arizona, you can sign your kids up to read 5 books and get a free admission to the Arizona Science Center.
• Barnes and Noble has a Summer Reading program too - if your kids read 8 books and take in a completed reading journal, they can get a free book!
• And, don't forget about the Quirky Bookworm Summer Reading Club! If you haven't left a comment on that post yet - do so quickly. The giveaway for When Maidens Mourn and Drop Dead Healthy ends tonight.

Reading in Bed

Photo found here.

I think a lot of people read before bed to make themselves sleepy. The problem is for me (and perhaps for some of you other book addicts?) is that if I start reading just before bed, I can't go to sleep. Instead, I stay up reading and reading and reading, and am inevitably tired and cranky the next morning.

For a lot of years I just didn't read before bed - I watched movies, or got online. But since Eleanor came on the scene and my reading options got much more limited, I've rediscovered reading in bed.

I have to be very careful about what books I choose though. Too vivid? I get nightmares. (Hello Hogwarts dreams). Too boring? I fall asleep early, wasting precious book time. Too interesting? I stay up late reading, wasting precious sleep time. It's a tricky balance.

 

But if I pick correctly I generally end up having 3 or 4 evenings a week where I can enjoy a book before bed. I've found the best option to be narrative nonfiction. Craig Taylor's Londoners is a perfect example - interesting essays, but short chapters, so I could read a handful before dozing off. I also read City of Scoundrels over the course of several evenings. My current bedtime reading is Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. It has rather long chapters - so I usually only manage one a night, which is why I've been reading it for almost a month now.

Part of me wants to sit and read a big chunk of Blue Latitudes some afternoon, just because I don't like taking so long to read a book. But the other part of me has realized that it's pretty perfect bedtime reading, and I might as well enjoy it! Plus I keep having dreams about tropical islands, which is much better than Hogwarts.

Do you read before bed? Do you get nightmares easily?

The book images are Amazon affiliate links.

City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (Review)

On July 19, 1919, a blimp burst into flames and fell from the skies over Chicago, destroying a bank. Three days later, a young girl was sensationally murdered and a transit strike began that would cripple the city for days. But these three stories paled before the terrifying race riots that broke out July 27 when white bathers threw rocks at black swimmers nearing "their" beach, killing a black teenager. The violence rapidly escalated, and in the next week hundreds of people of both races were killed or injured.

Facing down all these calamities was mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson. A cowboy who had turned to politics, Thompson was a controversial, larger-than-life character. Newspapers accused him of graft and corruption, but the working class loved him. Both sides agreed that he had surprising political savvy, and he proved it by holding Chicago together during these crises and then transforming it into the city it is today.

Although Gary Krist's City of Scoundrels is nonfiction, it reads like a novel, with an hour-by-hour accounting of how each disaster unfolded. Krist ably bares the complicated, corrupt politics of Illinois, showing how city and state officials scrambled to deal with each problem and turn it to their own political advantage. Set against the backdrop of Prohibition, the ending of World War I and the great influenza epidemic, City of Scoundrels gives a vivid glimpse at 12 horrifying days in an already difficult era. The lives of Chicagoans, both famous and not, would never be the same again.

I really, really enjoyed City of Scoundrels. It was a fast read - and actually made me want to visit Chicago someday, which is funny because Noel's been saying for years that we should go, and I've always said, "Eh, Chicago... there are so many cooler places!" I liked the book so much that I think I'm going to buy it for my father-in-law for Father's Day (here's hoping he doesn't see this post)!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Should I recommend this to my grandma? Absolutely, especially if she's from Chicago.
I originally wrote this review for Shelf Awareness. The cover image is an affiliate link.

Have YOU been to Chicago?