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I found my kicks on Route 59

post from Detectives Beyond Borders on 07 November 2009 09:59:00 PM. © Detectives Beyond Borders

For me, Houston will always mean the sweetish scent of fried food and auto exhaust.

Saturday night flat on my back in a pickup truck by the Gulf of Mexico. More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2009/11/i-found-my-kicks-on-route-59.
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post from on 07 November 2009 08:25:18 PM. ©

Winners of the Harry Potter Pumpkin Carving Contest Announced[...]

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http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/

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TSS: Literary Flicks: (German) Bookpiles

post from Lizzy's Literary Life on 07 November 2009 06:15:24 PM. © Lizzy's Literary Life

Stacks of books were piled high all over the house – not just arranged in neat rows on bookshelves, the way other people kept them, oh no! The books in Mo and Meggie’s house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There were books in the kitchen and books in [...]

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http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/tss-literary-flicks-german-bookpiles/

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An Ethereal Romance

post from A Life In Books on 07 November 2009 04:37:00 PM. © A Life In Books

certain-slant-of-light I first read about Laura Whitcomb’s novel A Certain Slant of Light, not to be confused with A Certain Slant of Lightby Cynthia Thayer, in a book where the writer did indeed get them mixed up, but ended up reading both. I thought I read about the mix-up in Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time, or Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, but Amazon’s nify Citations feature doesn’t list either one. If anyone can solve the mystery for me, please do.

So anyway, it’s been a few years since I’d added the book to my wishlist, but I had never come across it in bookstores and wasn’t so keen to read it to make one of my rare online book purchases. Serendipitously, one day I was browsing through a large special display of bargain books at a Border’s and was shocked and pleased to find a copy of the book in amongst the others. What made it even stranger was that it was the only copy of the book I could find there, while it seemed like all the others had multiple copies. It was meant to be! I gleefully took my find to the cash register, took it home, and promptly forgot about it. (As happens with too many of the books brought into my home.)

While perusing my bookshelves one evening late last month for a last-minute read for Carl’s RIP Challenge, I came across A Certain Slant of Light once again. I figured since it involved ghosts it fit the challenge, and was of a suitable length and subject matter that I could read it within a couple days in time before October 31st and the end of the challenge. Well, I was certainly correct in that assumption. I took the book to bed with me and within a few hours (and a little burning of the midnight oil) I had devoured the entire thing. I simply could not put it down and wait to finish the story.

And the story, for those of you who’d actually like to know, is about two ghosts, or beings of Light, as the one, Helen, calls herself. She has been dead for more than 100 years, haunting one person, unbeknowst to them, for a period of time before they die or she otherwise moves on, to a new “host.” One day, while observing the students in her current host’s high school classroom, she notices one observing her right back. The realization that for the first time in her post-living existence, someone is seeing her both frightens and intrigues Helen, and it isn’t long before she confronts him, a teenaged boy named Billy. But Billy’s body is actually being inhabited by another ghost, James, who found Billy’s body empty of its soul but able to receive his spirit. James and Helen are drawn to one another like moths to a flame, and it isn’t long before their passion ignites, setting into motion a series of events that neither one could have predicted.

For fans of Edward and Bella’s romance in Twilight, this ghostly couple’s ardent love for one another will make theirs seem lukewarm by comparison. And just as Twilight isn’t really about vampires in the traditional sense, A Certain Slant of Light isn’t really about things that go bump in the night. Instead, it is about the powers of guilt, forgiveness and love. It’s a wonderful book, and the only other thing I wish it had in common with Twilight is that book’s length. Helen’s and James’ pasts and presents are much too fascinating for the reader to be satisfied with what we’re given. But alas, that’s all we have. So just savor every moment.

And with that, a dual miracle has occurred. With four books read (The Forgotten Garden, The Observations, The Likeness and A Certain Slant of Light), I have actually completed a challenge, the first time in a very long time that I’ve been able to make that claim. And secondly, I am FINALLY caught up on my blog posts! Now let’s see if I can keep it that way.

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http://www.alifeinbooks.com/?p=1046

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On the Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins

post from Maud Newton on 07 November 2009 04:36:00 PM. © Maud Newton

My dad’s forebears were glad to tell you about Grandma’s Pre-Revolutionary Virginian ancestor or our connection, by marriage, to the Mannings of football fame, but they seemed to suffer from a peculiarly targeted kind of amnesia when you started asking about the Newton line.

I always assumed this caginess was limited to my little branch of the family tree, but recently I tracked down my granddad’s cousin, now 83, to see if he could verify that Jesse Newton, Arkansas spiritous liquors retailer, is in fact our ancestor. He could not.

“We had the same problem that you had,” he told me. “We just could not get anyone to give us information — it was as if the Newton family started with Minnie,” my great-great grandma, who raised her kids in a house without a ceiling.

He theorizes that we’re related to the Newton Boys, “America’s most successful bank robbing family,” which would sort of delight me, actually. A recent (fascinating) article in Hill Country Magazine describes them this way:

By the time they were captured (after a $3 million train robbery near Chicago in 1924), the ?Newton Boys? had netted more loot than the James Gang, the Dalton Boys and Butch Cassidy combined. During that time, they had never killed anyone, and (in their rare daytime crimes) were famous for the courtesy with which they treated their victims.

But while their family was descended from a Jesse Newton of Arkansas, and mine probably was too, they’re not the same man. So far I haven’t found any tie between our lines, just similar names and close proximity.

Pretty Boy Floyd (above), on the other hand, appears to be my 8th cousin on my dad’s mother’s side.

Knowing my Newtons, I can’t rule out the possibility that they were cagey about their background not because they actually had anything to hide, but because they feared their ancestor might be mistaken for someone disreputable. Which is kind of funny given that their mantra was always loyalty to blood.

When I severed ties with my dad, my grandparents froze me out for a while. First my granddad sent a warning. “What’s happening up there?” he wrote. “Are you changing your e-mail also? It must be serious to cause you to cut your roots. Better think about it long and hard.”

I am, Grandpa, I am. Just not in the way you intended.

In honor of Cousin Pretty Boy: At his blog about WPA writers, David Taylor recently posted about the “1930s outlaws who capitalized on the unpopularity of banks to boost their popular support. You see reflections of that atmosphere in the WPA guides and in the stories the WPA writers gathered.” He ends with a quote from that Woody Guthrie song.

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http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9528

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post from on 07 November 2009 04:26:06 PM. ©

New from Noble Collection: Crystal Goblet from Cave, Dumbledore's Knife, Narcissa Malfoy Wand[...]

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http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/

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The Women Unbound Reading Challenge

post from A Work in Progress on 07 November 2009 04:00:00 PM. © A Work in Progress

I tend to steer clear of reading challenges these days. They always sound so tempting, but I usually fizzle out somewhere near the middle and by the end it's generally long forgotten (except for Carl's annual RIP Challenge, which I always look forward to even if I don't finish on time). But I think I'm going to give in to temptation for this one--the Women Unbound reading challenge that's being hosted by Eva, Aarti and Care. I tend to read mostly women's authors anyway, so joining this particular challenge really appealed to me. And it helps that it runs from this November to next, so there should be plenty of time to finish eight books.

I'm going to go all out and try to read eight and aim for the Suffragette level. I don't always stick to a set reading list, but since I like to make lists these are the books I have in mind at the moment. I'll have a look at my bookshelves and note down a few alternative titles as well. I'd like to read four novels and four nonfiction titles.

My Antonia, Willa Cather (I will read her yet!)
Angel, Elizabeth Taylor
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Undecided--maybe a novel by Dorothy Whipple or Margaret Atwood or Margaret Laurence. Or perhaps The Convert (this last one is about the British Suffrage movement).

I'm not sure that the novels I chose are really "feminist" but I think they all have strong (even if flawed) protagonists. I had lots to choose from in terms of nonfiction, which makes narrowing things down difficult.

A Very Great Profession, Nicola Beauman (I've wanted to read this one for so long--I've now got my "excuse" to pick it up.
Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832, Stella Tillyard (the BBC adaptation of this book was wonderful).
America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Gail Collins (I've got several books like this--surveys of women's history--not sure which I'll end up reading).
Deb's at War, Anne de Courcy

Of course these are the books I want to read today. A month from now my list may change drastically, but all these books are on my shelves and I've wanted to read most of them for some time now. Whichever books I end up reading, this is a topic I greatly enjoy, so perhaps I'll stick with the challenge.

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http://danitorres.typepad.com/workinprogress/2009/11/the-women-unbound-reading-ch
allenge.html

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Rape-Rape

Jenny Diski’s personal take on Roman Polanski and rape, at the London Review of Books.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/themillionsblog/fedw/~3/Lk206KitARI/rape-rape.html

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'The Lonely Londoners' by Sam Selvon

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 160 pages; 2006.One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train. So begins Sam Selvon's bittersweet story about a group of West Indian immigrants living in 1950s London. It's a truly evocative look at a city through the jaded eyes of a black man, Moses Aloetta, a veteran Londoner who somewhat reluctantly welcomes newcomers from his homeland and shows them the ropes. ("I don't know these people at all," he tells one of his friends, "yet they...

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http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2009/11/the-lonely-londoners-by-sam-sel
von.html

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Jane Austen in New York

At the Morgan Library in NYC: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” Read the NY Times review of the show here. And, if your hankering for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English art isn’t sated by the Austen, the Morgan is also offering “William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun’”.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/themillionsblog/fedw/~3/s7VIWZI_uC4/jane-austen-in
-new-york.html

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