Thoughts on “A Northern Light” by Jennifer Donnelly (Audiobook)

About the Book:

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (audiobook cover)It’s 1906, and Mattie Gokey lives in the Adirondacks of New York State with her father and younger sisters. Her mother is has recently passed away, and it’s up to Mattie to run the household while her father tries to keep the family farm alive. Mattie dreams of attending college in New York City when she finishes high school, a dream she shares with her best friend, Weaver. Mattie loves words, picking a new one to focus on each day, and longs to spend her days writing stories instead of keeping house.

But as tempting as the prospect of college is, there are things holding Mattie back. Her family needs the extra pair of hands, even if her father would allow her to go to college, which he won’t. And there’s Royal Loomis, the boy next door who just might capture Mattie’s heart.

Told in flashbacks, A Northern Light moves between recent days in Mattie’s past and her present, when, while working at the Glenmore Hotel on Big Moose Lake, a suspicious death occurs and Mattie comes to possess a pack of letters from which, try as she might, she cannot escape.

My Thoughts:

I enjoyed A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly very much. Having lived in upstate New York, many of the places were familiar to me. I also love historical fiction, when it’s well done, which A Northern Light most definitely is. The tension between Mattie’s recent past and her present kept me holding my breath until the final pages, wondering how the story would end. I’d expected, based on the beginning, that the novel would be something of a mystery, but instead it was very much about Mattie herself.

Mattie is everything you could want in a heroine. She is bookish and clever, but still a little clueless when it comes to certain matters. She’s just proud and ambitious enough, yet accurately limited by her time and situation. She struggles to balance what she wants to do and what she feels she must do. She grows, changes, stumbles, adapts. I rooted for her all the way through. She’s so very human I just couldn’t help myself. And she rewards the reader for her (or his) trust and faith.

The novel is based on an actual murder that took place on Big Moose Lake in 1906 and was the inspiration for An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. I’ve not read Dreiser’s novel, but knowing Mattie’s tale was woven around a piece of history made it more real.

The audio production was splendid, narrated by Hope Davis. Her voice is full and mature, yet she still managed to sound young without reading in the squeaky, breathless way in which some readers portray younger narrators. The voice Davis chose to use matched my mental picture of Mattie well. I would most highly recommend the audiobook to anyone interested. It’s a story that works well for teens, of course, but as an adult I found it to be wonderful as well. And if you read and loved Donnelly’s more recent novel, Revolution…all I can say is I liked A Northern Light even better!

Those are my thoughts. Check out A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly on Goodreads or LibraryThing, read a plethora of other bloggers’ reviews, or listen to an Audible sample!

Book Show and Tell (I Can’t Resist!)

As many of you know, I used to do a weekly vlog about the books that found their way to me during the week. As my schedule got busier, I realized weekly vlogs were no longer feasible, and instead I’ve been posting exciting library sale finds and mailbox surprises on Tumblr. The past few weeks, though, have been far too exciting when it comes to books, and I cannot resist sharing all my new acquisitions here!

Library Sales

I’ve been to two library sales over the past few weeks. At the first, I picked up two books:

  • A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
  • Wait for Me! by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire

Sounds all tame and restrained, no? Don’t worry. My true book-obsessed nature came barreling through at the second sale, where…well…I picked up two stacks. This sale was my hometown’s annual event: a middle school cafeteria plus lobby brimming with amazing finds, all in excellent condition and painstakingly organized. It’s really amazing. And since my mom volunteered to work the sale this year, and I was home visiting her, I ended up going all three days! The damage (half of which is still at my parents’ house, as it would not fit into my suitcase):

Anderson Library Sale Haul

The Left Stack:

  • Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
  • Exiled: Memoirs of a Camel by Kathleen Karr
  • Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
  • East of the Sun by Julia Gregson
  • When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
  • The Great Man by Kate Christensen
  • The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
  • Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
  • Mistress of the Sun by Sandra Gulland
  • Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
  • Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama

The Right Stack:

  • A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (such a pretty edition I couldn’t pass it up!)
  • Anne Frank by Francine Prose
  • Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
  • Runaway by Alice Munro
  • A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
  • The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
  • The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
  • The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald
  • The Bells by Richard Harvell
  • Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Whew! I’m thrilled because well over half of those were already on my TBR list. Anyone else up for reading something together? I see all kinds of Reading Buddies potential here!

Hand-Me-Downs

A few books came my way from friends (to whom I am so grateful!):

  • The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy (coming out in July)
  • The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly (coming in out in August, though I have to read the first two in the series before I start this one!)
  • The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam (also coming out in August)
  • Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu (coming out in September)
  • Wildwood by Colin Meloy (also coming out in September)
  • Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (which has been out for a while but which I have very much been wanting to read!)

Mailbox Goodies

I’ve also had more books than usual find their way to me through the mail recently:

  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents: Earth (The Audiobook): won via Devourer of Books during Audiobook Week!
  • Beauty Queens by Libba Bray: won via Write, Meg!
  • The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock: won via In the Next Room!
  • The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (ARC): won through Shelf Awareness!

Now I just have to find the time to read all of these. Book acquisition photos will move back over to Tumblr now, at least until I get too excited about something and have to share it with a larger audience!

Your Turn!

Has anything you’re extra excited about found its way onto your shelves lately?

Thoughts on “Feed” by M.T. Anderson

I read the YA novel Feed by M.T. Anderson with my new informal IRL reading group.

About the Book:

I usually write my own summaries, but I really like the one from the back of the book, so I’m going to use it:

“‘We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.’

So says Titus, a teenager whose ability to read, write, and even think for himself has been almost completely obliterated by his ‘feed,’ a transmitter implanted directly into his brain. Feeds are a crucial part of life for Titus and his friends. After all, how else would they know where to party on the moon, how to get bargains at Weatherbee & Crotch, or how to accessorize the mysterious lesions everyone’s been getting? But then Titus meets Violet, a girl who cares about what’s happening to the world and challenges everything Titus and his friends hold dear.”

My Thoughts:

Feed by M.T. Anderson (cover)Feed is just the sort of novel I enjoy. It features a unique narrator, adopts well re-imagined slang, and presents issues that are both fascinating to consider and interesting to follow. It didn’t take me long to read, but for such a quick book, Feed packs a big punch.

When I started reading Feed, I had difficulty imagining the world in which it takes place. People go to the moon for the weekend, drive flying cars, and live in vertical subdivisions under individual climate domes. It’s also a world where the media and consumerism drive every aspect of life. Ads are constantly delivered via the feed and tailored to people based on what they search for and buy. People suddenly go blank mid-conversation while they chat virtually with friends in their heads. Even School (TM) and Clouds (TM) have gone corporate. The physical world felt unrealistic and distant, but the feed felt far too familiar and real. I struggled to settle these two dissonant components down into the same story.

The more I pondered these elements, though, the more their juxtaposition began to make sense. It’s pretty clear Anderson’s interest lies with the feed, not with the fancy-schmancy futuristic world. What better way to highlight something so dangerously imminent than to surround it with improbable things, so that readers can’t help but see it in stark contrast to all the science fiction around it? The focus of the book is unmistakable, I think, precisely because what we can imagine stands out against what we cannot.

What I liked most about Feed was how Anderson is unafraid to look critically at the direction our current information culture is going. He isn’t afraid to ask questions: is access to information all the time a good thing? Who controls the information we see and watches what we seek, and to what extent can they then influence our lives? What might terrorism and medicine look like in a society like Titus’s? What happens to those who hang back, hesitant to jump on the newest technology bandwagon to roll through town? And what happens to the individual person in the information deluge?

Overall, Feed gave me plenty to think about and my group plenty to discuss. It’s a quick read, once you get used to the way Titus speaks, but not one you’ll soon forget. In closing, I’ll leave you with a thought from the author interview at the end of my copy:

“I think we all have, at this point, a direct connection to the media in our brains. It’s impossible for us to think of our life without conceiving of it in images that are taken from movies, from songs, from ads, all of which are images that are challenging us to be better consumers rather than better people.” (M.T. Anderson, Feed, p. 306)

Those are my thoughts. Check out Feed by M.T. Anderson on Goodreads or LibraryThing, or read a plethora of other bloggers’ reviews!

Looking Back: June 2011

Another month has come and gone, and 2011 is half way over! Here’s what my June looked like:

Books

Looking Back: June

Total books read: 8
Total pages read: 2,675
Favorite book: This month was a winner. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and When She Woke by Hillary Jordan were all phenomenal.
Least favorite book: Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner
The rest: The Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair, Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt, The Snow Whale by John Minichillo, and Feed by M.T. Anderson

Audiobooks

Total audiobooks listened to: 3
Total hours listened: 22 hours, 42 minutes
Favorite audiobook: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
Least favorite audiobook: none…they were all very good!
The rest: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and Savvy by Ingrid Law

Erin Reads

On Erin Reads this past month:

Your Turn!

That was my June. How was yours?

Reading Buddies: Updates and Changes

Reading Buddies Button

Reading Buddies has been going strong now for five months. Five months! I can hardly believe it. I’ve finally gotten around to reading some excellent books, and I’ve gotten to discuss them with fellow readers. Thank you to those who have read with me so far! And to those who haven’t but mean to: I’m very much looking forward to it!

As I look ahead at my own schedule as well as think back over the past five months, I’ve decided to try a few new and different things. Here’s a rundown of the updates and tweaks to Reading Buddies. I hope they’ll make the project better! I know I don’t tend to be particularly concise, so there’s a summary of what follows down at the bottom of the post.

The Long Version

Staying Connected

As we’ve gone along, I’ve noticed two features in particular that seemed to be missing. First was some way to keep interested parties apprised of the current schedule, including unscheduled informal reads. Second, there was nowhere to discuss the books with one another while reading. To remedy these two issues, I’ve created:

  • The Reading Buddies reminder list: you can sign up for very occasional email reminders about monthly and/or informal reads!
  • The Reading Buddies Goodreads group: participants in each read will have a place to ask questions, share impressions, gasp over plot twists, and note favorite passages together. If you’re on Goodreads and interested in Reading Buddies, you are very welcome to join!

Are there other features you’d like to see incorporated into Reading Buddies? If so, I would love to hear about them!

Revamping the Current Schedule

We’ve been tackling two books a month as formal, scheduled reads. During July and August, however, I’m going to have to slow the pace a bit. July is a hectic month for my summer classes, and it turns out I’ll be away for nearly all of August, with only occasional access to Internet. So, I’m revamping the schedule a bit, dropping a book from each month. Originally, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell were up for July, and August was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. The new schedule will be:

July: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (discussion post: 7/15; wrap-up: 7/29)
*(I’m also doing an informal reading of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell between now and mid-July, if you’re interested!)*
August: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (discussion post: 8/12; wrap-up: 8/26)
September: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (discussion post: 9/16; wrap-up: 9/30)

If anyone is still interested in tackling Gone with the Wind, please do let me know! I’d like to read it, but with my school schedule, I’m not sure I can get it, plus other books, plus schoolwork squished into a single month for a formal read.

Tweaking the Process

What I’d like to do, from now on, is to have one formal read per month, posting the wrap-up on the last Friday of the month and the discussion post two weeks before that. That should allow me to up the number of informal reads. The few I’ve done have been very enjoyable, and this way I’ll have more time for them. I’ll be better about posting them as well as keeping the Reading Buddies page current. I’ll also add them to the Goodreads group and send out email reminders to those who’d like them.

I’d also like to change how we do the book selection process. I’m thinking two months ahead of time, I’ll post a poll of books that were frequently chosen from my original lists. (If you want to nominate books, just fill out this form!) Polls will be up for a month, probably in my sidebar, and then I will announce the chosen book, leaving people a month to track down a copy, shuffle their reading schedules as needed, etc. So, a poll will be up for all of August, the result announced at the beginning of September, and the winning book read in October. Does that work?

The Short Version

If all of that was more than you want to know, here are the highlights:

  • There is now a Reading Buddies reminder email list and a Goodreads group!
  • Due to schedule issues, the July thru September schedule has been reworked. See the pink box above. If you’d still like to read Gone with the Wind, let me know and we’ll work something out!
  • From here on out, I’d like to do one formal read per month, thus allowing me to increase the number of informal reads. I’ll post informal reads on the main Reading Buddies page, send out email reminders to anyone who signs up, and add them to the Goodreads group so everyone can stay current.
  • We’re trying out a new selection process! Each month, I’ll post a poll including frequently chosen books. After a month, I’ll announce the winner, which will be read during the next month. (So, during August, we’ll pick the book for October, which will be announced at the beginning of September.)

Your Input?

I would love to hear any suggestions or feedback you might have! I love Reading Buddies and want it to be as easy and fun to participate in as possible. What do you think of these changes?