Across Many Mountains by Yangsom Brauen

"Across Many Mountains"by Yangsom Brauen, is a very interesting and enlightening story about Tibet and it's people. You'll learn about the Buddhist religion and the stree it is undergoing with it's people scattered all over the world. This is a very timely story since the Dalai Lama just recently visited with the president of the United States.

You'll learn that the tight-knit Tibetan family ties are the only thing that helps them weather all the struggles brought about by the Chinese occupation of their lands.

I enjoyed the book very much and would highly recomment it to all my friends.

The Paris Correspondent

This is an engaging book from beginning to end. I have always admired a good journalist and this book shows some at their best. A good story about journalism and journalists with their own stories.

I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

Nina sits at the bedside of her husband Philip, who has just passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest. Over the course of one night, she holds vigil over his body while remembering some of the key moments of their relationship. This novel, the fifth by Lily Tuck, is a collection of those remembrances, conveyed in short and - in my opinion - disjointed vignettes. Tuck documents everything from Nina and Philip's first meeting in Paris to their final conversation (a throwaway as she prepares his dinner and he goes upstairs for a nap); however, these moments in time are not recorded chronologically but, rather, as they happen to cross Nina's mind during the long night she spends at his side. This jumping around in time, coupled with the sparseness of the language, made the book almost incomprehensible to me. I felt no real connection to the characters or their lives, and without that framework of investment to grab on to it was difficult to care about (or follow) all of their random conversations from over the years. If you are a reader who likes to be gripped by a good story, I wouldn't recommend this book. I could see it being an interesting choice, though, for someone looking for a more experimental format.

Dancing on Glass by Pamela Binnings Ewen

From the beginning chapter something is wrong, Amalise is injured badly, Phillip her husband is missing. The story is interspersed with a Mother's worry and feeling of something wrong with the man her daughter is seeing.

The author uses the glass metaphor throughout. The last name of Sharp and the use of carving and paint knives to build our sense of uneasiness. This story is gripping and suspense filled as we know damage has been done, but, how has it been done.

Amalise talks to her God, Abba, all her life and believes she is led by him to help the people she loves. She thinks she can change people with her strength of faith and her absorption of their hurts. She is manipulated through mental and finally physical abuse.

I enjoyed this story and would look for other stories by this same author.

Mary Edwards
Galesburg, IL

The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie by Tanya Lee Stone

Disclaimer: I am a doll collector, a Barbie fan, and president of a doll club. The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll's History and Her Impact on Us traces a bit of Barbie's history but is mostly about her existence as a cultural icon. It is not stridently anti-Barbie, so if that's what you are looking for this is not the book for you. It presents Barbie in both a positive and a negative light.

I've read a number of books on Barbie, and there wasn't really anything new in this one, but I found it interesting all the same. If you are looking for a short (107 page) book that touches on the Barbie doll in culture, this is a good selection.

(A Different Take on) Plugged by Eoin Colfer

(Dear Reader, I would have posted this simply as a comment on Norm's post, but Blogger doesn't allow for formatting on comments.)

Reading Eoin Colfer always makes me feel like I've stumbled into Boy World. As the mother of three girls, I can't rightly claim to know a lot about what Boy World looks like, but I'm fairly sure there would be fighting, swearing, gizmos and fart jokes. In the techno/fantasy Artemis Fowl series, for example, one character has the ability to burrow through the earth by virtue of his unhingeable, super-strong jaw. Of course, all that pulverized stone has to go somewhere and in Boy World, that need is too irresistible not to address. And yet, Colfer's playful ease with language hooks me like those neighborhood boys who used to revel in telling us girls dirty jokes. Repellingly intriguing, repellingly funny.

In Plugged, Daniel McEvoy, Irish ex-army, ex-pat with a psychological need to pro-tect, finds himself embroiled in a noir-ish* nightmare, trying to solve the murder of his could-be girlfriend, hostess at the seedy casino for which he serves as a bouncer. Accompanying Dan on his self-appointed mission is the subconscious voice of his presumed-dead friend, who practiced plastic surgery without the benefit of a license, morals and probably sobriety. Like Artemis, McEvoy also strikes an uneasy partnership with an extremely confident (see definition 7) female cop, unlike Artemis, McEvoy is fully adult. The Adult Situations never stray beyond the PG-13 range, although the Action and Language would likely encourage those MPAA folk to dial up the rating. Which brings up a pet peeve: Colfer's writing does sometimes seem like a novel in search of a screenplay. On the other hand, the quippy dialogue would probably play well and this is Boy World without the gross adolescent humor so prevalent in current “comedies.”

This one's not going to win the Pulitzer, but I found it enjoyable for a light read.

*If noir-ish means battling an existential crisis simultaneously battling dudes from the seething underbelly. But in a funny way.

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke

I have loved Dick Van Dyke since I was a kid. Mary Poppins was the first movie I paid to see more than once in the movie theater (and it was 30 years before I did that again), and the Dick Van Dyke show is my all time favorite tv show. In junior high we had to write a report on a contemporary hero (someone living we admired), and I picked Carl Reiner while everyone else in the class was picking Dorothy Hamill and Barry Manilow.

All that said, I was bound to find this book interesting and I did. Carl Reiner's books about the show are better, but that's not surprising since he is the writer and Dick Van Dyke is the actor. For an actor's memoir, this is an enjoyable read.