Round-Up of 30 Day Book Meme

I thought it would be nice to have a round-up post for the 30 Day Book Meme (actually it took me 3 months to finish because I didn’t have a daily post for 30 consecutive days). If you like to recap the answer for each day in details, just click on the links. This meme [...]

[421] A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

” They think they’re might lucky that they’ve living and that it’s Christmas again. They can’t see that we live on a dirty street in a dirty house among people who aren’t much good. Johnny and the children can’t see how pitiful it is that our neighbors have to make happiness out of this filth [...]

Holiday Book-Buying

Will you be buying books for the holidays, this year? If so, for whom, and why? For gifts no, because I don’t do gifts or participate in any gift exchange. Christmas has never been a huge celebration but rather a tranquil time for me to recluse. The Great Dickens Christmas Fair might have been the [...]

Dickens’ Christmas

“Happy Christmas” is what you hear most often at the Dickens Christmkas Fair, a Bay Area tradition since 1970. This year the Great Dickens Christmas Fair returns to the San Francisco, with shops bedecked with Christmastime finery and filled with unique treasures. What renders the verisimilitude of Victorian England, on top of the theatrical experience [...]

30/30 Day Book Meme: The One Book

Day 30: Favorite book of all time Longtime readers and followers of this blog would know right away that it is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I might have challenge my readers’ patience with an overload of the book’s publicity campaign. Set in the iron curtain of a society that is Soviet Union [...]

Gratitude

What book or author are you most thankful to have discovered? Have you read everything they’ve written? Reread them? Why do you appreciate them so much? Happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. readers and friends. If you don’t live in the U.S., have a great day as well. Before I answer this week’s question, I [...]

[420] The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

” It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms [...]

29/30 Day Book Meme: Pink Sheep

Day 29: A book everyone hated but you liked Hate might be too severe of a sentiment. But I was surprised the negative feedback that A Separate Peace has garnered when the book comes up in conversations or the book blogging world. Set in a New England boarding school for boys in 1942, the novel [...]

Book Mavens

How do you decide to read a book by an author you haven’t read before? What sort of recommendations count most highly in making that decision? Book bloggers with whom I share the same reading taste always count most highly in making the decision on new authors. They have replaced the book sections on newspapers [...]

[419] A Shooting Star – Wallace Stegner

” What was the matter with her that she could not make a life out of what was the envy of every outsider? One prison for another? Most women would not think so. Both what she was born to and what she had married into were scale models of paradise, where the fortunate could enjoy [...]