Books

... Issa's Untidy Hut: Constance Brewer and Chen-ou Liu: Wednesday Haiku, #116.

Publisher: HarperTeenRelease Date: 5 June 2012Format: ARCSeries: Hereafter #2Source: ALA 2012 (Dallas)New Orleans Saint Louis Number One CemeteryA night there can change a life . . . or a death.Increasingly worried that dark spirits will carry out their threats and hurt the people she cares for most, Amelia is ready to try anything to protect them. And for his own very different reasons, Joshua has come to this cemetery at midnight to join her in a powerful ritual.Both know that once Amelia steps inside the Voodoo circle and the beautiful girl from the Conjure CafE begins the cere-mony, everything will change.Tara Hudson's enthralling sequel to "Hereafter" escalates the danger and excitement, bringing a new dimension to her already mesmerizing story of a haunted love.I fell in love with Amelia when I read Hereafter. Her story was heartbreaking and tragic, and she didn't let her afterlife (or being a ghost) get in the way of her trying to find what little happiness she could. Joshua was definitely a part of that happiness. He was the definition of Knight in Shining Armor. Also, the covers? Amazing. They are two of the most beautiful covers I have ever seen. I love them!Now, on to the juicy bits... Arise didn't completely captivate me like I thought it would. I had trouble getting back in to the story, and found myself confused a lot. I also felt like I had to read for an eternity until the content got interesting. I kept putting the book down and picking it back up trying to spark some more interest from myself, but I couldn't really get into it until after Amelia had been in New Orleans for a bit. I also felt like "the bad guy" was too obvious. He radiated creepy.I liked certain aspects of the story, like the unexpected twist to Amelia's afterlife, but overall I couldn't make myself care about the characters like I had before. I wanted to, and believe me I tried, but there was just something missing for me this time. Hopefully, book three will remedy that.

... 1975 : Tornado Outbreaks Blamed On Global Cooling | Real Science. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... The rise of the fourth branch of government - The Washington Post The obesity and corresponding ungainliness of the federal bureaucracy has been patently manifest throughout my life. Professor Turley's latter-discovery of it bears comparison to Monsieur Jordain's discovery that he was speaking prose. Professor Turley wonders if "the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s governments may be an illusion." But the president is supposed to be in control. And just because someone says he don't know nothin' doesn't mean that's true, especially when that someone is so detailed and self-referential when it comes to anything he claims to have been in charge of. It's still a good idea to start where the buck is supposed to stop, and to prefer evidence to self-serving testimony.

I'm fond of strange and amusing place names (see, for instance, this post), and there's a magnificent crop of them at Dull Flag and Tongue of Gangsta: The Laugh-out-loud Place-names of Shetland and Orkney, a Strange Maps post by Frank Jacobs (see here):These two maps, both produced by Steve Goldman, show the place names in both groups of islands that he considers strange. "I've loved place names on Orkney and Shetland since I was a kid. They are by turns surreal, beautiful, nonsensical, rude, and bizarre? There seems to be no consistency to them at all", says Goldman. ?I've done some online research to try to find their derivation, but there seems to be little out there?. Indeed, apart from Mr. Goldman?s suggestion to recycle some toponyms as band names (Whirly would be a good indie band, Brethren could be a bearded folk quartet, and Twisting Nevi a dance act, etc), there seems to be little sense to be made from Orkney/Shetland place names, except to enjoy them as mellifluous bizarrery per se. Go thither and enjoy the mellifluous bizarrery!

Although it's been quiet here on the blog over the past week, I've been busy updating the list of Historical Fiction Picks at BEA as new information came out Click on over to see the additions. There are many items marked with the -new- designation, which makes the list almost twice as long as it was before.Congratulations to the winners of two recent giveaways: Sarah Kennedy's The Altarpiece will be going to Beth M. Copies of Tony Hays' The Divine Sacrifice have gone out to Chris K. and Linda B.Thanks to all who entered!

Thousand Words by Jennifer BrownRelease Date: May 21, 2013Publisher: Little Brown Books For Young ReadersAge Group: Young Adult Pages: 288 Summary: Ashleigh's boyfriend, Kaleb, is about to leave for college, and Ashleigh is worried that he'll forget about her while he's away. So at a legendary end-of-summer pool party, Ashleigh's friends suggest she text him a picture of herself -- sans swimsuit -- to take with him. Before she can talk herself out of it, Ashleigh strides off to the bathroom, snaps a photo in the full-length mirror, and hits "send." But when Kaleb and Ashleigh go through a bad breakup, Kaleb takes revenge by forwarding the text to his baseball team. Soon the photo has gone viral, attracting the attention of the school board, the local police, and the media. As her friends and family try to distance themselves from the scandal, Ashleigh feels completely alone -- until she meets Mack while serving her court-ordered community service. Not only does Mack offer a fresh chance at friendship, but he's the one person in town who received the text of Ashleigh's photo -- and didn't look. Acclaimed author Jennifer Brown brings readers a gripping novel about honesty and betrayal, redemption and friendship, attraction and integrity, as Ashleigh finds that while a picture may be worth a thousand words . . . it doesn't always tell the whole story.My Thoughts: I was so excited to read this one! I love Brown’s books and am always excited to see her release more!We are introduced to Ashleigh who is in high school. She likes to run, has a great mom and dad, and has an amazing boyfriend named Kaleb. She has a best friend, and a group of friends that make everything fun. Her life is pretty good.One day at a party, a pool party, she decides she wants to send Kaleb a picture so he won’t forget her. He’s going off to college real soon. Yes, it is that kind of picture. So she gets over her nerves, and snaps away and sends it via text message. Full frontal, naked. Of course he’s thrilled about it. Until he actually goes off to college and realizes he’s just not into the way things are anymore and wants a change. In the process he really hurts her, things are said, and he ends up forwarding the picture on. Many many people see it. Ashleigh is in a lot of trouble. Not just with her friends and the general public, but with her parents and the police as well. Everyone is mean to her. Everyone harasses her. Her parents are upset with her. Her parents jobs are on the line. Her whole life goes from great to horrible in a matter of seconds really. She gets sentenced to community service and we see what she has to go through. We get to experience what that is like. She also meets a few new people there, one of which is Mack. Mack was such a wonderful character and I loved learning more about him and his past. For me, he was the bright light in this dark tunnel. I loved the interactions between Ashleigh and Mack. I loved this book so hard! It was such a serious topic and crazy but it was explained perfectly. This is real life, it could actually happened and has many times.Brown always takes these serious subjects and expands on them and really makes you take a deeper look and really think about it.I have to say this is probably my favorite book up to date by Brown. But all of her books are awesome.Overall: AMAZING! Loved it! Even though at times it was hard for Ashleigh, I enjoyed reading her story and what she had to overcome. Great story. Cover: I really like it too. It would draw me in at the bookstore. Enough to pick it up and take it home with me to read. What I'd Give It:

This week, Washingtonian published an ambitious investigation titled “Children Are Dying,” in which Alexandra Robbins, a former editorial assistant at this magazine, describes a baby named Atticus. Eleven weeks old and born about three months premature, he resides in the neonatal intensive-care unit at a Washington-area hospital, “one of the most prominent in the country” (though unnamed by Washingtonian, perhaps for legal reasons), yet the feeding solution passing through his I.V. lacks several nutrients that are critical to proper development. “Atticus’s hospital,” Robbins writes, “is low on intravenous calcium, zinc, lipids (fat), protein, magnesium, multivitamins, and sodium phosphate; it’s completely out of copper, selenium, chromium, potassium phosphate, vitamin A, and potassium acetate.” His hospital is one of many experiencing a nutrient shortage that Robbins, citing several experts, calls “a public-health crisis and a national emergency.”...read more

... Anecdotal Evidence: `The Author in His Descent to Posterity'.

Having a two-year-old is like having a blender that you don't have the top for. Attribution Jerry Seinfeld