Musing Mondays: Favorite Romance or Love Story

This week’s musing asks…

What is your favorite romantic book –or book that includes a love story? (an adult romance, young adult, kids’ story, anything)

My favorite love story is probably Possession, A.S. Byatt's novel with two sets of romances, one in the present and one in the past. And actually it's more like three, if you count the love triangle at the heart of the past-tense romance. Other favorite love stories of mine are:

• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell,
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and I don't care what anyone says about it being ridiculous, etc.; also
• A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot, set after World War I and about a woman's determination to find out what happened to her lover,
• The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, the book so much better than the movie, and
• Persuasion, by Jane Austen, a more grown-up look at the marriage plot than most other Austens.

More Musing Mondays at ShouldbeReading.wordpress.com.

Musing Mondays- Super Bowl Sunday!

 This week’s musing asks…

Did you do any reading in lieu of watching the football game, yesterday, or were you foregoing reading to watch the game? If you read a book (or books) what did you choose?

I watched the Super Bowl! I live in Boston- our team was playing, so I watched, and what a boring, underwhelming game it was. My husband and I, and our visiting friend Phil of Read Irresponsibly, hung out with my husband's parents and had chili while we watched. Of course for me "watching" is a relative term; while I was technically in the room and looking at the television, I didn't understand much of what was going on and my mind was on the books in my bag even if my eyes couldn't be!

More Musing Mondays at ShouldbeReading.wordpress.com.

Musing Mondays- My Favorite Book to Recommend

This week’s musing asks…
What’s one book you always recommend to just about anyone?

When I'm asked for recommendations for adult reading, the one book I come back to again and again is Ariel Sabar's masterful, moving and wonderful My Father's Paradise. It's not always easy to sell this memoir and biography of an Iraqi Jewish father and son to a non-Jewish audience, but even if you think you're not interested in the subjects of this book, you will love it. You will. Sabar is an accomplished journalist and his writing is fluid, accessible and beautiful. The story is universal, despite the apparent niche audience- it's about immigration, about a family, about parents and children, fathers and sons. It's about a man who turned a disadvantage- being from a backwoods rural area with a language no one else spoke- into the thing that built his life. And it's about another man who grows to appreciate a father whose nerdiness and nonconformity embarrassed him. It's just the most wonderful book.

I've known almost no one who didn't like this book. One woman, a patron at one of the libraries I've worked in, wrote me a letter to express how much she loved it. It's a winner. Read it!

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Musing Mondays: Judging a Book by its Cover

This week’s musing asks…

Do you judge a book by its cover?

All the time! Who doesn't? Cover art sets the tone, gives you a clue about the theme, subject or setting of a book. If you're writing about about, say, Marie Antoinette, and you put a movie-tie-in picture from the Sophia Coppola film with Kirsten Dunst in a floppy hat, that's going to make a pretty different impression than, say, her portrait by Vigée-Lebrun. And those choices are deliberate and done to attract different kinds of readers. I paid $15.99 for the trade paperback of one book because I liked the cover and the overall packaging better than the $7.50 mass market version. Books are products like anything else, and of course the outside matters. The inside is what really counts, but who doesn't love a pretty thing?

More Musing Mondays at ShouldBeReading.wordpress.com.