The Lucky Winner of A Lucky Child!

 

And the winner of A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is....

jemscout425!

Congratulations...I will be emailing you shortly to get your mailing address.  Thanks for entering everyone and have a wonderful weekend!

Book Club Chatter

Welcome to another week of Book Club Chatter where I hope to discuss all things book club on a weekly basis. I thought this would  be a fun way for each of us to share one little tidbit every week.



So here is my question for you this week:
Does your book group have an open membership that allows new people to join every month, or do you follow a set of guidelines before allowing a new member to join?

My Answer:  My book club does not have an open membership.  About a year ago we decided that we really like the size of our group now.  We have about nine ladies that meet on a regular basis, of course we do not have perfect attendance every month, but we usually do have a good turnout.  We feel that the size of our group is big enough to make for interesting discussions but small enough to keep it personal for all of us.  We decided that if someone really is interested in joining our group that we will discuss it and make a decision together.  We hope that this will allow us to be sure that the new member would be a good fit for our group.  I think that all groups are different and  it is good to know that the ladies you are meeting with enjoy reading the same types of books and have similar interests outside of reading.

There is not a deadline as to when you need to post or answer this question, so please feel free to join in at your convenience. You can either leave your answer in the comments below or post your answer on your blog and leave the link below.

Current Giveaways!!!

Here are some great contests that I have found recently:

So Many Precious Books, So Little Time is giving away the audio version of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova--Contest ends 2/5.

Savvy Verse and Wit is giving away Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford--Contest ends 2/5.

A Sea of Books is giving away the audio version of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova--Contest ends 2/6.

Peeking Between the Pages is giving away Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin--Contest ends 2/7.

A Sea of Books  is giving away the audio version of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris--Contest ends 2/7.

Peeking Between the Pages is also giving away the audio version of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris--Contest ends 2/7.

Savvy Verse and Wit is giving away Government Girl by Stacy Parker Aab--Contest ends 2/8.

Booking Mama is giving away The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale--Contest ends 2/9.

The Burton Review is giving away O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell--Contest ends 2/12.

Luxury Reading is giving away American Rust by Philipp Meyer--Contest ends 2/13.

A Circle of Books is giving away the audio version of The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova--Contest ends 2/13.

Hist-fic chick is giving away O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell--Contest ends 2/13.

Passages to the Past is giving away The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon--Contest ends 2/16.

Library Girl Reads is having a February giveaway--Contest ends 2/24.

And then don't forget about my giveaways for Lone Star Legend by Gwendolyn Zepeda that ends 2/12, and Drood by Dan Simmons that ends 2/15.

Good luck everyone!

Review: My Antonia by Willa Cather

Here is a summary of My Antonia from the Reading Group Guides website:

Perhaps the most popular of Cather's novels, My Ántonia is at once the intimate portrait of an American heroine, an elegy for a vanished frontier, and the story of an unconsummated love affair. Jim Burden, the narrator, meets Ántonia Shimerda as a child on the Nebraska prairie. He is an orphan and a Protestant, she the daughter of ill-adapted Bohemian immigrants; her father will kill himself when he is broken by the harshness and solitude of their new home. Jim and Ántonia grow up together, and he harbors vague and contradictory romantic yearnings toward her. But they are separated in their youth and spend most of their lives apart. While Jim pursues his education and becomes a lawyer for the railroad, Ántonia goes into domestic service, survives a near-rape, is seduced and abandoned by a heartless lover, and bears a baby out of wedlock. Much of her story unfolds secondhand, as Jim gathers it from other sources. They are reunited only briefly at the novel's end, and by then both of them are married, Jim unhappily so.

What is it that makes Ántonia a genuinely heroic figure? Partly, it is her ability to emerge undiminished and unembittered from circumstances no less bleak than the ones that killed her father, to improvise happiness in the same way she once improvised stories. In the course of the novel, Ántonia also becomes an embodiment of the narrator's memory, which has the power to withstand time and redeem its losses. Of course, it is not only Jim's memory that is in play: Ántonia represents all the strength, resilience, and unselfconscious nobility of a decisive moment in our nation's past. The virtues that Cather associates with her heroine have either become obsolete or have receded into our collective unconscious, but the sight of her is enough to reawaken our memory of them: "She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true....she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things." [p. 258]

My Review:
What a beautiful classic novel this was, laced with Bohemian traditions and vivid descriptions of the landscape.  I will admit that at first this book was a bit difficult for me to read, but once I decided to lock myself away without any distractions I became immersed in the pages.  Although the story is about Antonia, I think it is more about how Antonia impacted Jim Burden's life.

Jim lived with his grandparents on a farm in Nebraska and his life seemed to change when Antonia moved to a neighboring residence with her Bohemian immigrant family.  He becomes very close with Antonia and her brother and can only imagine that they will be friends for many years to come.  Antonia's mother is portrayed as a very greedy woman and vocally shares her inhibitions with her neighbors.  When times get tough for the family the greed and selfishness seems to spread to her children and this creates a feud of some sort between Jim and Antonia that will last for a couple of years.

When Jim's grandparents become too old to manage the farm they move to the city to live.  Jim starts to attend school in the city and is introduced to a new set of friends.  He sees that an element is missing from these friendships compared to the relationship that he had with Antonia.  So you can only imagine his happiness when he learns that Antonia is going to also be moving to the city to work as a servant for a home nearby.  Their friendship picks up again as if there were never an argument of any kind in the first place.  

Lena is another important character in this novel.  She becomes a good friend of Antonia's and you can see that she definitely has a much wilder streak about her.  Jim worries that Lena will take Antonia down the wrong path and just be a very bad influence on her.  I found it very interesting how Cather portrayed both Lena and Antonia when they were young girls, and then as adults.  

The story was heartbreaking in the sense that you could feel the love that both Jim and Antonia felt for each other, but they never acted upon their feelings. When the book ends Jim seems to come to terms with the direction that his life has taken and how Antonia had affected it.  When he catches a glimpse of the life and love in Antonia's eyes at the end of the novel that is all he needs to know that they both had taken the right paths.

This book was so much more to me than a classic novel with beautiful descriptive writing.  Many of you know that my Grandma recently moved in with me and she is also Bohemian.  So as I was reading this book it juggled memories of her life and stories for me.  I could see so many comparisons with the Bohemian traditions that it truly amazed me.  I found it interesting how Antonia had such a close relationship with her father, as my Grandma's father/daughter relationship was similar.  My Grandma will still tell you to this day about the hollyhocks that she grew by her house in the summer.  This was a beautiful story and it also created a great book club discussion for my group.

My Rating:  4/5

Disclosure:  I borrowed this book to read for my own entertainment. 

Teaser Tuesday-Feb. 2

Check out Teaser Tuesdays from Should Be Reading.  TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

Grab your current read.

Let the book fall open to a random page.

Share with us two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.

You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week my teaser is from The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley:
Yamaga was there too and that was a memory that could never be pure, it would always come with pain attached to it.  I took up the cup he had last sipped sake from and let it fall to the floor; it broke into three shards, I stamped on them, powdering them to dust.

pg. 57

Giveaway: Drood by Dan Simmons

I am happy to announce that since Drood is being released in paperback this month Valerie from Hachette is offering to give away three copies of this book to my readers!

Here is a summary of Drood from the Hachette website:

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.

Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?

Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.

Here is how to enter:

To enter this contest you must be at least 18 and live in the U.S. or Canada.  No PO Boxes please.

For one entry leave me a comment including your email address below.

For two additional entries, blog about this contest or add the link to your sidebar.

Please include your email so I will have a way to contact you if you win.

You will have until February 15th to enter and I will draw for winners on February 16th.

Mailbox Monday-Feb. 1

 

Thanks to Marcia of The Printed Page for hosting the Mailbox Monday Meme that has us list the books that we received last week. You can go to her blog to see what everyone else got last week or to play along.

Here is what was in my mailbox last week:

 

Black Hills  by Dan Simmons

Wench  by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

So what was in your mailbox last week?