Christmas Wishlists

Image credit: Here

Having looked at Books on the Nightstand's awesome Christmas gift list last night I decided I would post my top five wishlist books and ask you all to do the same. It's just a bit of fun and in no way designed to be taken as a hint for any friends or family who may be reading this!

5. The forest of hands and teeth by Carrie Ryan
4. The possibility of everything by Hope Edelman
3. The sweetness at the bottom of the pie by Alan Bradley
2. The year of the flood: A novel by Margaret Atwood
1. White is for witching by Helen Oyeyemi

How about you guys? Which books are the top of your wishlist? Have you read any of the ones I want?

Look forward to hearing from you!

Best Blog Awards

This cool award button is from: Tales from our crib

So December has hit like a freight train and I've been completely snowed under by a sudden onslaught of things to do! As if Christmas wasn't enough I have also recently taken on an editing project which I'm really excited about but it's taking up a lot of time and mental energy. Hence the severe lack of posting lately. But! I was revitalised, honoured and oh so chuffed when I saw that Caroline from Caroline By Line had awarded me a Best Blog award! Talk about a shot of encouragement right when you needed it! The timing couldn't have been better and has gotten me back on the laptop tapping away. 


So, to pass on the love that Caroline has shared with me, I want to post my Best Blog Awards. 


The recipients are:
1. Greg at The New Dork Review of Books
2. Brizmus at Brizmus Blogs Books
3. Amanda at The Zen Leaf
4. Alessandra at Out of Blue
5. Helen at Helen Loves Books


Winners, please select five further winners and so the chain of love can continue!!

Giveaway Winner

Image credit: Here

And the winner is.... *drumroll*

Alessandra!! 

Congratulations! You're my first ever prize winner.

I have sent you an email, Alessandra - you have 48 hours to get back to me with your postal address.

Note: I used the awesome Contest Winner Picker to find my winner. Check it out!

The Sign for Drowning: Review

The Sign for Drowning

By Rachel Stolzman

Published by Trumpeter Books

Published 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59030-720-5

This book was sent to me as a review copy by the author who also sent me a signed copy to use as a giveaway (which is only open until midnight Monday 30th November so get your entries in now, people!!)

This book is a visceral and very real look at the life of a woman whose life has been defined by the loss of her baby sister, Megan, through accidental drowning when she was 8 years old. Anna has, since that day, been lost in a world of uncertainly and grief, ever searching for someone or something to anchor her in the world. After meeting Adrea, a deaf child who was abandoned by her teenaged parents, in her centre for deaf children, Anna's life seems to take on a new meaning but grief still looms large, refusing to leave her family in peace.

I really enjoyed this novel - the narrative is beautifully written, reflecting Stolzman's poetic background, but without being overly lyrical - I'm a fan of a well-written sentence or a beautiful image but I hate being beaten over the head with a metaphor. It's a fine line and one that Sign balances brilliantly. For example, one of my favourite sentences was this stunner:

"She saw herself, a baby mermaid, hair streaming back, a last oxygen bubble escaping from her mouth. There were monsoon rains with every turn of her neck. Earthquakes broke fault lines with each kick of her legs. Every thrashing of her arms brought forest fires somewhere. Opening her mouth caused volcanoes to erupt. 

In this way, she left us."  (Page 62)

Another thing I really appreciated about this book was that Anna's character was so well-realised. The link between her sister's drowning and her fascination with sign language - a key aspect of her character -  is not immediately obvious and I wondered for the first few chapters how it was all going to tie in together but once revealed it's ingenious. First person confessional voice of Anna allows the reader to track along with her thoughts as she copes with grief and faces the effects it has had on her life, particularly her relationship with her mother.

Mother-daughter relationships lay at the heart of this novel as it is this relationship, both as the daughter and later the adoptive mother, that define Anna. Stolzman investigates this most emotionally fraught relationship with both delicacy and a clear eye, enabling the reader to see both Anna and her own mother as both mothers and a flawed human beings - something not easily achieved as too often portrayals of mothers become one dimensional or fall into the perfect mother/evil mother dichotomy.

The only regret I had about this book was that it wasn't longer - I felt that there were places in the novel that could have been lingered over a bit more, even if only for the reader to absorb what had happened but it felt occasionally as if we were being hustled along. This doesn't really detract from the novel - just at times I wish I'd had a bit more space and time within it to really enjoy what was happening.

Overall, I loved this novel. It is beautifully written and a thoroughly enjoyable first novel. It takes on some very big issues and handles them with finesse and intelligence. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, this is one I would highly recommend that you read. It's one that will stay with me for a long time.

Image credit: Here

Where do you draw the line?

Earlier this year I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It was recommended to me by a good friend who had just finished reading it and loved it and sure enough, I also really enjoyed it. Hmm. Maybe "enjoyed" is the wrong word. It's hard to 'enjoy' the unblinking account of how two society drop-outs come to brutally murder a decent and community minded family of four... Let's just say I was gripped by it. I could not put it down nor could I read anything else until I knew how it all ended.

What made it such a compelling read? Partially, of course, Capote's writing keeps the reader involved but I think the main driving force behind this book is the fact that it is real. This happened - the facts are all real (although there is some controversy about the accuracy of Capote's reporting on some details). Capote read about these killings in the paper and immediately packed up his suitcase and went out to Holcomb, West Kansas to cover this story. This Guardian Books article looks at this case which happened fifty years ago this month - it's a cracking read, so I recommend you check it out.

Truman Capote

Image credit: Here

The article got me thinking though. It mentions that although some townspeople were happy with the book and its epic success (millions of copies sold and four movies made), there were plenty that were not. As a result of the popularity of the book and it's movie spinoffs, there has been and will undoubtedly continue to be a steady stream of people from all over the world coming through to see the place where it all happened. Bobby (now Bob) Rupp, the then-sixteen year old sweetheart of Nancy Clutter, now 66 year old father of four, grandfather of eight, stated his displeasure with the books and movies, which incidentally he has never read nor watched and never will, as he felt that this attention has made people only focus on the fact of the Clutters' bloody demise rather than on what they achieved as people during their lives.

This and the ethically thorny issue of profiting from re-telling someone else's misery are commonly raised when literature deals with tragedy and disaster. Even though I haven't even started writing it yet, I have come across this in my thesis about post 9/11 literature. Some people have reacted angrily to those who wish to portray the events of that day through any media - be it literature, in films, through photography... And this is understandable. For those suffering the loss of someone, their grief is a very personal experience and any intrusion into the sacred space of the memory of their loved one be it direct or indirect is intolerable. However, for events such as 9/11, there is another grief at work: public grief. This grief is predicated on not personal loss but societal loss, the collective trauma of seeing, time and time again, from various angles the planes flying into the towers and their subsequent collapse, knowing we were watching people lose their lives. There's also the grief for the loss of a sense of security and loss of stability.

Image credit: photographer unknown

To work through a collective trauma it seems that representations of the event are necessary, but that doesn't mean that those who feel intruded upon are likely to be any more understanding. It seems to me to be a necessary evil, that these events must be memorialised and entrenched into our history through the written word and film. Because, as painful as it is that these things happened and though we may wish we could, we cannot and should not forget them.

I have to wonder about In Cold Blood, though. Was it necessary to have this gruesome murder written so definitively into America's history?

What are your thoughts on this? What do you think of representations of human tragedy and disaster? Historically and socially necessary or ethically and morally questionable?

Saturday by Ian McEwan: Review

Image credit: Here

When I was searching for novels that fell into the "Post 9/11 Literature" category I was really excited to see that Saturday was considered to be one. Although I had at that stage only ever read one other of McEwan's novels, I knew that I would enjoy anything he had written. I was right.

Saturday is set in the course of a single day but this fact is easy to forget as this novel moves along at such a pace and so much happens that only once you've finished and are sitting back, reflecting that you think crikey - that was all just one day! The novel follows Henry Perowne, a well-known neurosurgeon living a life of affluence and contentment in Central London on a day that is anything but normal. A cascading series of events happen that culminate in a heart stopping climax that has the reader in the grip of a powerful suspense and intrigue. McEwan has painted these micro level events on the background of 2003, post 9/11 pre-Iraq London in what appears to me to be a reflection of the macro scale political happenings at the interpersonal level.

I'm loathed to give any further details away about the plot as part of the beauty of this novel is that these details surprise, delight and horrify. Knowing that they are coming won't do a potential reader any good. I read (luckily, after the fact) a review that was basically a plot summary that gave everything away which I thought was a horrible shame. I'm glad that I hadn't seen this before I read it.

This novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for McEwan in 2006, a highly prestigious award based out of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I'm not surprised, it really is a masterpiece and a very thoughtful and clear-headed view of the world, post 9/11, unlike some other novels I have read which seem to grab desperately at the straws of patriotism and "us vs them" - all understandable reactions but not particularly helpful literary contributions.

I'd highly recommend this novel - especially to those who enjoy a good read that has intelligent content, a gripping story-line and characters with such depth that you feel like you actually know them.

Have you read this or any of McEwan's other books? Which have you enjoyed the most?

[Image of Ian McEwan credit: Here]

International Giveaway: Autographed copy of Sign for Drowning

This is my very first giveaway so I'm pretty excited - and I'm even more excited that the book is autographed by the author! 

Ok! So without further ado, here are the details of the giveaway:

Title: The sign for drowning
Author: Rachel Stolzman
Published by: Trumpeter Books, Boston
Year published: 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59030-720-5

The blurb on the back says:
"Anna has grown up haunted by her younger sister's death. In the life she constructs as a barrier against the emotional wreckage of her family tragedy, Anna settles comfortably into a career as a teacher of deaf children. But a challenge arrives - in the form of a young girl. Adrea's disarming vulnerability and obvious need for love offer Anna the possibility of reconnecting with the world around her - if she has the courage to open her heart."

About the author:
Rachel is a New York based writer. She has received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College - initially she planned to focus on poetry in her MFA but given that she was already an accomplished and published poet, she decided to work on her fiction writing skills. This is Rachel's first novel. For further information, please see Rachel's website.

Terms and conditions of the competition:

1) To enter, please comment on this post and tell me something about Rachel that you read on her website that I haven't already mentioned here.
2) For an additional entry, become a follower of my blog and mention this in your post (if you're already a follower please notify me of this also).
3) For another additional entry, comment on another of my posts and let me know.
4) For an additional 5 entries, put a link to my giveaway on your blog and tell me about it.
5) This giveaway is open internationally.
6) I also have a review copy of this book so your copy will be unread.
7) Closing date for entries will be 30th November 2009 at midnight Taiwan time.
8) I will announce the winner on or before 7th December 2009.
9) I your email address is not included on your profile, please email it to me so I can contact you if you win.

All images from Rachel Stolzman's website.

For my review of this book, please see here.