Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘books’

Oprah Winfrey has selected Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as her latest book club pick, catapulting the famous book on the Holocaust onto the bestseller list over a half-century after it was first published.

“Night” was required reading in high school French class (though I seem to remember most of us cheating by picking up the English translation from the library). It’s a powerful book and Wiesel emerged as one of the key voices of conscience on the Holocaust. There was a time when Wiesel’s word would have carried more weight than Oprah’s.

Then again, with Holocaust-denial on the rise (from the usual suspects and the Left and the Arab world), and with the generation of survivors slowly disappearing, perhaps this was the right time to push the book back into the spotlight.

Imshin’s verdict is that this latest Harry Potter installment is better than the last.

I think the exact opposite. And judging by the comments section on her site, I’m not the only one.

Some news breaks:

An Iraqi bomb attack killed 98 people. We barely even blink anymore with the news of terrorist attacks in Iraq – maybe because they’re so commonplace, maybe because people assume it’s a country at war so for some reason these things are expected, maybe because some people even tacitly support them in their intense hatred for Bush and the Americans. I don’t know about any of that, but I do know that the 98 lives that were lost are just as tragic as 98 lives lost anyplace else, and that we need to stop taking terror for granted in Iraq.

In “what truce?”, part one zillion, five Israelis were wounded – 2 seriously – in mortar attacks on Neveh Dekalim, and the weekend saw over 10 Qassam rockets fired on Sderot. It is unclear which of the Palestinian factions is behind the attacks, though Hamas appears to be involved in the former. You know, the same Hamas that the Guardian thinks ain’t so bad despite its mandate to seek Israel’s destruction.

And the new Harry Potter book was released yesterday, to the delight of fans everywhere. I’ll wait to borrow someone’s copy, and hopefully nobody will spoil it for me before then.

Here’s the thing about chain letters… you can groan about them all you want, but sooner or later one gets to you and you find yourself completing it and passing it along despite yourself.

Pieter has “tagged” me on the latest one making the blogosphere rounds: book tag.

I’m a self-admitted bookworm, so this was a near-impossible list to compile. But for what it’s worth, here are my answers-of-the-moment. (If I’d compiled this tomorrow, I probably would’ve picked different books, but alas, I had to choose something.)

Number of books I own: About 150 currently in my apartment, because I don’t have a lot of storage space. But add about twice that number in boxes in my parents’ basement, and an untold more in my ownership past that were donated or sold at various garage sales. This doesn’t count my frequent library forays. Like I said, I’m a bookworm.

Last book I bought: Between Mountains by Maggie Helwig, which is a love story set against the aftermath of the Balkan wars.

Last book I read: Not counting the umpteenth re-read of books I first read a zillion years ago (because I do that), the last book I read for the first time would have to be The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. One of the more enjoyable reads I’ve had lately. I hear they’re making it into a movie that will probably be frighteningly awful and will destroy an otherwise excellent book. Why must bad movies happen to good books?

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• 1984 by George Orwell. Okay, this one’s almost too obvious; in fact, it was even on Pieter’s list, so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use it. But I challenge you to find a book that’s more relevant or insightful.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. I loved it when I first read it, and went through a brief period of hating it after having to analyse it to death for subsequent English classes in high school and cegep. Now I’m back to loving it.
• Exodus by Leon Uris. Sure, all the critical reviews are justified; it takes broad liberties with historical accuracy, the writing is often appalling, and it tries too hard to be an epic. Nonetheless, my copy is dog-eared and falling apart, and I probably bungled many a question on a Jewish history exam in high school because I remembered this book’s version of an event instead of the textbook’s.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. No, I have no interest whatsoever in motorcycles. I still love this book, though, less for the story than for the ideas it tries to set forth.
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I read this as a kid and it made a major impression on me as a model of standing up for the right thing even when it’s unpopular to do so. This is one of those timeless classics that will endure because it continues to be relevant to modern circumstances.

Yikes, now that this list is complete, I’m second-guessing it because of all the books I’ve left out. Ah well, I guess I have to hit publish sometime.

One last thing, I have to tag 5 more people. Lynn, Paul, Imshin, Meryl and Elana… you’re “it”.

Oh and P.S., last year’s meme was the whole listing of books from childhood. There’s a good list of some of my favourites from way back when up there.

So I finally borrowed and read The Da Vinci Code the other day, just to see what all the hype was about. And I was fairly disappointed. Being very unfamiliar with Catholic mythology or history, I’m not qualified to spot many of what I’ve heard were historical errors, inaccuracies, or just plain fabrications. But to be honest, I found it was just bad storytelling. The writing was stilted, the plot twists implausible and forced, and some of the clues were very obvious. If I wanted to read about conspiracy theories, I could check out Indymedia or Al Jazeera.

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I’ve also been introduced to the world’s most addictive card game. Play it at your own risk.

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I hate washing dishes. I think we need to invent self-cleaning dishes. Like the self-cleaning oven. Same concept. They’d sell like hotcakes. (What exactly is a hotcake? And if they sell so many of them, how come I’ve never seen one for sale?)

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At a trip to the library today, I experienced my usual frustration at finding all the books I wanted to read checked out, with 15 people on their waiting lists and no chance of getting my hands on them until 2007. Unless, of course, nice people buy me presents from my Amazon wishlist (hint, hint). But then I stopped to think about what would happen if everyone suddenly decided to return their books at once. No way would there be enough space in the stacks for even a quarter of all the books that the library must own.

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Being a night owl is really tough when you have a day job. No wonder I hate mornings so much. Goodnight.

Packing up boxes of old stuff that I haven’t even looked at in years inevitably caused the nostalgia to kick in. So maybe that’s why I was so excited when I stumbled on Emily Jones’ list of her favourite books that she read as a child. All the classics are on there, and Emily got the idea from a discussion with friends Sheila and Dan, both of whom have pretty steller lists themselves. Sheila’s list in particular reminded me of some of the books I used to love, but had totally forgotten about.

I always loved to read. Books were my candy. I would painstakingly save up my allowance every week to make a trip to the neighbourhood bookstore for new titles. That bookstore is gone now – a victim to the superstore phenomenon of Chapters/Indigo – but then, it was the kind of place where the salespeople knew me and had recommendations set aside every time I walked in. I would read my favourite books until they were in tatters, committing them to memory.

So I figure I gotta put together my own list, but I know I’ll leave so many out and I’ll probably have to add them once people remind me:

• The Kit Pearson books: “The Daring Game”, “A Handful of Time”, and the “Norah” series – about a young girl and her brother sent from England to Canada as “war guests” during WWII.
• From Anna by Jean Little, about a German girl who immigrates to Canada with her family, and the sequel “Listen for the Singing”. Jean Little also wrote a bunch of other favourites, including “Mine for Keeps” and “Home From Far”.
• The Babysitters’ Club series – all of them, until I got too old for them. I could quote from them. Literally. It was scary.
• The Root Cellar by Janet Lunn, about a girl named Rose who was transported back in time to the Civil War.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – a classic, of course.
• the “Booky” trilogy by Bernice Thurman Hunter, about her childhood growing up in Ontario during the Great Depression.
• Centre Stage- I can’t remember who the author is on this one, but it was about a little girl named Jenny who wanted to be a ballerina and attended the country’s most prestigious school in Toronto. The movie “Center Stage” a couple of years ago was clearly based loosely on this book, but they made the characters older and moved the story to the States, and though I looked high and low, I couldn’t find any mention of the book in the movie’s credits.
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – another classic.
• The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Both were made into movies, plays, and all sorts of other forms. The original books are still better.
• All of the Lois Duncan books – she wrote about the supernatural, and her books scared the hell out of me. Some of them still do.
• The “Ramona” series by Beverly Cleary. Thanks to the lists above for reminding me. To this day, I never hear the Star-Spangled Banner without thinking of the special kind of lamp, “the dawnzer lee light”.
• Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables is more famous, but I liked Emily better.
• The “All-of-a-kind-Family” series by Sydney Taylor, about a Jewish family with five kids growing up in the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the (last) century. Thanks to Sheila for reminding me of these.
• Sheila also listed Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia” which was a great book, and reminded me of one of my other favourites by Paterson, “Lyddie”.
• Dicey’s Song and the rest of the Dicey series by Cynthia Voigt.
• No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt, about a teenaged boy who leaves home to make it on his own with his little brother during the Depression.
• The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Especially the earlier books in the series, when Laura and Mary were growing up.

There are so many more and I’ll probably add to this post as I think of them. But this trip down memory lane’s been fun… feel free to join in.

The author of books including Exodus, Mila 18, and The Haj, Leon Uris, has died. He was 78.

If it looks like a publicity stunt, and sounds like a publicity stunt, and smells like a publicity stunt . . . then instincts tell me this is probably just that:

Thousands of copies of the long-awaited fifth Harry Potter book have been stolen from a warehouse just days before the book’s eagerly-awaited launch. The books were in a white TNT trailer parked on a trading estate in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, waiting to be distributed to stores ahead of the launch at 0001 BST on Saturday.

Merseyside Police said: “A man with the front cab of the lorry turned up at the trading estate and presented himself as legitimate and was able to get away with the trailer full of goods.

“How he did that is still under investigation.”

I just got the book The D’oh of Homer, a philosophy book about the Simpsons. Can’t wait to read it!