The Sunday Salon and SNOWY Reads...

Welcome to The Sunday Salon! It's that day of the week we talk BOOKS! So grab a cup of Joe, find a comfy chair and relax! And what better a day to do that then a snowy day!

Yesterday in Connecticut, we finally had a nice layering of snow to make it feel like winter. It was one of those beautiful heavy snows that make the evergreens look so pretty as the snow paints itself along their branches.  And what better books to read then SNOW books! Here are some snowy books to enjoy while either dealing with the snow or if you're in some beautiful warm and sunny part of the world, thinking about what that white stuff is all about! Here is a cozy mystery, a bit of magical fiction, and an anthology hot enough to melt any snow on the roof...

Snow Way Out (A Snow Globe Shop Mystery Book 1) by Christine Husom… Curio shop manager Camryn Brooks thought she’d seen every kind of snow globe—until she saw one depicting a crime scene… Ever since she was a child, Cami has loved the sparkling beauty of snow globes, and now, she sells them.  In fact, they’re so popular, Cami and her friend—coffee shop owner Alice “Pinky” Nelson—are hosting a snow globe making class. After the flurry of activity has ended and everyone has gone off with their own handmade snow globes, Cami spots a new globe left behind on a shelf, featuring an odd tableau—a man sleeping on a park bench. On her way home, she drifts through the town park and is shaken to come upon the scene from the globe—a man sitting on a bench. But he isn’t sleeping—he has a knife in his back. When the police arrive, it’s clear they consider Cami a little flaky and possibly a suspect. After her friends also come under suspicion, Cami starts plowing through clues to find the cold-blooded backstabber—before someone else gets iced…

First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen… From the publisher: Autumn has finally arrived in the small town of Bascom, North Carolina, heralded by a strange old man appearing with a beat-up suitcase.  He has stories to tell, stories that could change the lives of the Waverley women forever…

Sarah Addison Allen writes wonderful stories. She fills them with a bit of mystery, a sprinkling of magic and memorable characters. I loved her novel, The Peach Keeper. And First Frost welcomes back characters from her book Garden Spells, so a treat for anyone who has read that. I've read that this could be a stand alone novel, meaning that you don't have to read the previous book where the characters were introduced to enjoy this book, but I think I myself might indulge in Garden Spells first, so I can enjoy the characters from that first book and see how they grew.

Snowy Days, Steamy Nights: Come in From the Cold. An Anthology of 6 sexy snow romances by 6 award-winning romance writers. These are novella's that will have you enjoying being snow bound. Here are the novella's included and their authors... romance authors:

FROSTED, by Katy Regnery                         
GROUNDED, by Kate Forest
MELTED, by Jennie Marts
REKINDLED, by Susan Scott Shelley
SMITTENED, by Jamie Farrell
SNOWED, by Veronica Forand

I love these romance anthologies. They usually have great writing, the stories are a bit shorter so that you can read them in one night, and even if I'm familiar with one or two authors, I sometimes find new authors that I was not familiar with and could sample their writing. This is a Kindle or Nook treat! Right now this anthology is a bargain at $2.99 for either your Kindle or Nook. Click on whichever eReader you feed for the direct link. You can read all about the individual stories on Goodreads.

Weekly ReCap…
This week, we talked about Amy Poehler's new book, Yes Please on Memoir Monday, chatted a bit about what a "Guy Read" is suppose to be and what books to recommend to a guy on Wednesday and shared National Reading Day and National Readathon Day on Friday! If you missed anything, you can click on the highlighted link to check it out.

I also made a trip to the library this week. One of the books I returned was Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland. It is a tome at 800 plus pages. I did not read ALL of the entries, but enjoyed reading bits and pieces about favorite authors. The author covers some 17th century authors all the way to 20th century. From authors such as Paul Bunyan to Stephen King. Of course not every author is covered, but a breathe of oldies but goodies. I found it interesting, but not inspiring. Something that I thought I would be dying to buy a copy of my own because it was so fascinating, but in reality the writing just did not grab me. I wouldn't call it dull, more like factual. It's a good book to check out of the library.

Along those same lines, but definitely a much better read, I checked out Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher. Maybe it's a little voyeuristic, but it's so interesting to read through these letters. The last letter Virginia Wolff wrote to her husband before she committed suicide, A letter Mary Queen of Scotts wrote to her brother-in-law before her fate was sealed and even a letter from Elvis Presley to President Nixon. Look for my full review coming next week.

How was your reading week? Any books you'd like to share? How about any "Snow" reads?!  And, did you participate in the National Readathon Day, saturday? Hope you found something here to read!

Happy Reading… Suzanne

The Sunday Salon and Book picks for Veteran's Day

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....

That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book.

And since tomorrow is Veteran's Day, I thought we'd take a look at a few great books written about war. I'm not a big fan of "war" books, but there are stories that take you beyond the horrors of the fighting and show the human quality, a kind of behind the scenes look at war....

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival by Mitchell Zuckoff... From the publisher: On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search and rescue missue became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. With the weather worsening, the U.S. military launched a daring rescue mission, sending a Grumman Duck amphibious plane to find them. After picking up one member of the B-17 crew, the Duck flew into a severe storm, and the plane and the three men aboard vanished. In this thrilling, true-life adventure, Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account of these harrowing crashes and the fate of the survivors and would-be saviors. He also recounts the efforts of a modern-day adventurer, Lou Sapienza, who worked for years with the Coast Guard and Commander Jim Blow to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.

It amazes me sometimes the stories you never hear about until someone decides to write a book. I had never heard of this crash in this frozen wasteland, but I am so intrigued. That and the fact that the conditions were so harrowing that one rescue mission crashed and the other disappeared entirely makes this even more mysterious, and makes me want to read about what happened. This is on my TBR list! Published by Harper Collins this past April, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival is available in Hardcover, Kindle Edition and Nook Book.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand... From the publisher: On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.  It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini.  In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails.  As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile.  But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater.  Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion.  His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

Laura Hillenbrand is a fabulous writer. I absolutely LOVED her book Seabiscuit, which told the story of the racehorse with a heart, Seabiscuit, and the behind the scenes look at horse racing, which I could have cared less about, but once I opened that book I could not put it down and it still remains one of my favorite books today. Her WWII story, Unbroken, has gotten rave reviews and again tells one story that may have remained unknown to us had not someone decided to share it. This is on my TBR list. It was published in 2010 by Random House and is available in Hardcover, Kindle Edition and Nook book.

Night by Elie Wiesel... from the publisher: A candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of Elie Wiesel's survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Elie Wiesel's Night is a slim 148 pages, but it's not the length of the book, but the impact that the words contained in this account of being in a Nazi death camp that have made this an important piece of literature. Originally published in 2006, there is now a new translation offered in the newest edition from Macmillan, available in Paperback , Kindle Edition and Nook Book.

If you're looking for fiction, don't forget Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally, a novel based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industralist who saved more than 1000 Jews from the Nazi death camps.

**UPDATE...Fellow book blogger Booksync, who has a wonderful blog called Books in The City, shared You Know When The Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon as a recommendation for Veteran's Day reads. She writes,  "it is a collection of short stories each about life on the base when men are away fighting or just after they return. It was a really interesting perspective on the sacrifices military families make in addition to the soldier." Thank you Booksync for the recommendation! On Amazon it has earned 4 1/2 stars from over 100 reviews! Here are the links for the Paperback , Kindle Edition , and the Nook book.

Weekly Recap... This week on Chick with Books, for Memoir Monday we highlighted An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler. The harrowing true account of falling in love and being whisked off to a foreign country, and suffering from the cultural differences. If you missed it, Here is the Link to read all about it.

And then on Thursday I put up the video made by about three dozen authors attending the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show in New Orleans. the authors all read from Lane Smith's children's book, It's a Book, and then through the magic of editing, they put it all together so that each author was reading parts of the book as we followed along. Lane Smith's book is wonderful. It's a simple book about the beauty of an actual book with three friends, a Jackass, a mouse and a monkey. Jackass is internet savvy and can't quite understand how a book works, but eventually Monkey straightens him out. To watch the video, click on this link.

Book News... If you haven't heard, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is coming to the big screen! Keep your eyes open for the release in your area this month! The previews look wonderful! And the book? Well, the book was great! Here's the synopsis from School Library Journal...

"Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book–although she has not yet learned how to read–and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves." –Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA

*KINDLE BARGAIN BOOK ALERT... If you haven't read the The Book Thief yet, you should! Right now, it's available on Kindle for just $2.90! Here is the link to The Book Thief to grab that bargain price! 

Do you enjoy books on war? Fiction or nonfiction? Hope you enjoy the book selections this week! And to all of our Veterans... Thank you for your service!

Happy Reading... Suzanne

"It's a Book... "

To support print books and indie bookstores, approximately three dozen authors attending the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show in New Orleans this fall teamed up to make an entertaining video in which they read aloud from Lane Smith's It's a Book. SIBA devised the project, supported by Smith and her publisher, Macmillan.... This is Great!

Memoir Monday & An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler

Memoir Monday returns with a book that drops us into the heart of Afghanistan and in the life of a new bride. This bride is American though and Jewish as well. It is not simply a memoir of a young woman who falls in love and discovers afterwards the cultural differences that exist between her and her husband's family, An American Bride in Kabul is about the rights of women. Phyllis Chesler is a fierce supporter of women's rights, especially in Afghanistan, the Country where she once was captive. After 50 years, she has finally written her account of her marriage and life in Kabul.

An American Bride in Kabul by Phyllis Chesler... From the author's website: The dramatic, riveting, and timely tale of how one woman's harrowing ordeal in a harem in Afghanistan shaped her into a modern feminist leader and life-long defender of human rights. Eighteen years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on a passionate love affair with a glamorous foreign student, which led Chesler to her destiny and nearly to her death in Kabul —and to a journey which has lasted for more than half a century. Upon arrival, Afghan authorities seized her American passport, and Chesler found herself trapped as the property of her husband's polygamous family, without an ally and without any rights. Despite her seclusion, her mother-in-law's campaign to convert her from Judaism to Islam, and her husband's wish to permanently tie her to the country through childbirth, she escaped. Yet these lovers, a Muslim and a Jew, have remained connected ever since. Chesler draws upon personal diaries, correspondence, memories, and research in this vivid and eye-opening account of what she learned about central Asia and the nature of gender apartheid. Though she nearly died in Afghanistan, Phyllis nostalgically recreates this beautiful, ancient, and exotic culture and country, including its Buddhist and Jewish history. An American Bride in Kabul is the story of how a naïve American girl learned to see the world through eastern as well as western eyes. She re-creates a time gone by, a place that is no more, and shares the way in which Chesler turned adversity into a passion for freedom and women's rights.

This is not the first American woman to discover the cultural differences in a country new to her, but Phyllis Chesler's story puts us in the heart of these differences as a young bride dealing not only with her new Country, but her new family and what is expected of her, in what seems to be a total turnaround from the loving relationship she had with her new bridegroom. And even with all that had happened between them, the relationship between the author and her ex still seems to exist. I look forward to reading An American Bride in Kabul to learn how this woman survives her ordeal, but also to learn more about the culture of the country that Phllis Chesler also shares in her account. This book was released in early October by Palgrave Macmillan, and is available in Hardcover , Kindle and Nook Book.

The Sunday Salon with a Wrap up of Reading and Reading Independently, Literally...

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! It's been a busy two weeks since I've gotten back from Savannah. Connecticut has been HOT and I've spent the last two weeks trying to stay cool and catch up on all my reading! So, here's what I finished, about to finish and in the reading pile...

First, I finished The Nine Fold Heaven by Mingmei Yip! What an incredibly fun read! I love Mingmei's writing style- it's light and airy, kind of dreamy and sprinkled with Chinese folklore. The stories she writes always have such depth that you might not notice right away because you are so into the characters that have become part of your life. Keep a look out for my review of The Nine Fold Heaven this week! Long story short is I really enjoyed it!

Next on the almost finished table is Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe. It's a true crime novel that takes partly in place in Greensboro, NC, a place dear to my heart. I picked it as a book club book for two reasons. First, I've spent a lot of time in Greensboro, NC the last year and as everyone knew I was a voracious reader, they wanted to know if I had read about the gruesome murders that took place in town written about in Bitter Blood. I had not, so to the local bookstore I went. The second reason I picked it for the book club is, that most everyone in the group use to read murder mysteries and those types of books. The interesting thing that has happened over the years is that no one in the reading group reads much of that type of genre anymore. We kind of forced ourselves to read more "literature" and as time has passed (I think this year is the 9th year of the reading group?) our tastes have changed. One member in fact told me that he discovered that he didn't really like that type of book anymore. Reading groups can open up your reading horizons depending on the books you choose. I use to choose all the books for the group (and I enjoy all types of genres), but then suggested that we all take turns and pick books out. That suggestion opened up a floodgate of variety, made it fun for me to be surprised at what the next book was going to be and introduced new authors and subject matter. It also got the members more involved. I love our reading group and we always have a great time discussing our books. I always list our pick on the sidebar of this blog, so you can always check out what we're reading. And Bitter Blood? Well, I have enjoyed getting back to reading this genre, and Jerry Bledsoe really does his homework to cover the crimes with all the background and still make a good read that will have you turning those pages to see what's going to happen next. I'll be reviewing this the beginning of August.

Next on my reading plate is The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd. "Five years after her young husband’s death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another’s privacy. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. She is determined to live a life at a remove from the chaos and competition of modern life. Everything changes with the arrival of a new tenant..." I have been dying to read this after so much great pre-release press! And thanks to the generosity of the folks at Macmillan, I am cracking the spine on this one today! (actually I cracked it already, but had to put it on hold to be polite to my other books!) Look for a review of The Affairs of Others coming soon... P.S. Don't you just love the cover?!

And this week on Chick with Books a return to talking about what's going on in the reading world. Sometimes we get wrapped up in just talking about the great books that are coming out, but there is so much more going on in the reading world and I've missed chatting about it on the blog. Like, what do you think about the J.K. Rowling admission that she wrote The Cuckoo's Calling? When it's initial release only sold 504 copies under Robert Galbraith, it then was revealed that J.K. actually wrote it,  and now the publisher is printing 300,000 copies (and I'm sure they will sell), what does that say about unknown writers? I have met "virtually" some great independent writers through my facebook page, (which has a link to a Chick with Books page...shameless promotion I know) and I am so impressed with their writing! These writers are publishing independently, digitally and paper, and silently making a surge in the reading community. I'll be highlighting some of these writers, and asking them to come aboard and tell us about their struggles and successes of publishing. Want to read a sample of one of them? ...

I talked to author Danielle Stewart after my trip Savannah, when I was beginning to organize a post on "Southern" fiction. She has begun this wonderful romance/suspense series called The Piper Anderson Series, and book one, Chasing Justice, which takes place in North Carolina, is FREE at all major digital retailers!!! (which includes Nook and Kindle). Here's a little about Chasing Justice from Goodreads...

Piper Anderson has been given a fresh start in the picturesque town of Edenville, North Carolina. But her plans of settling into a normal life are derailed when she witnesses a prominent judge in her community committing a violent assault. Running from her own past and fueled by a passion to make the judge answer for his crimes, Piper is forced to decide if she’ll play by the rules or achieve justice in her own way.

I've downloaded the book and am ready to dive in! The sample that I read showcases some great writing from Danielle, and brings to mind that you don't have to have a big name in publishing to be a wonderful writer. With the ever growing popularity of eBooks, these independent writers can satisfy your need to read. Stay tuned for more great writers and more about Danielle too! BTW, book two in Danielle's series just came out! It's called Cutting Ties and if you enjoyed book one, book two is a reasonable $2.99 right now for Nook or Kindle.

And speaking of eReaders... I think I've mentioned before how a special someone bought me my Nook HD for Christmas (yes, new hubby Jim!). I love it! BUT, all of a sudden Google has taken over my Nook! Look for my post next week on how Nook was supposedly saved by Google, but readers may have another opinion!

And how was your week?! Any bookish things happening in your neck of the woods? What great books have you discovered this week? And what do you think about independent writers? Have you tried any? I'd love to hear all about it!

Happy Reading... Suzanne

First Lines... The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland

"Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday..."

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Ana Juan being released May 10th, 2011!

Originally this was a fictional book within a book! In Catherynne M. Valente's book The Palimpsest. "a part of the protagonist’s childhood, a strange novel for children written in the 1920s, about a young girl spirited away to Fairyland by the Green Wind, and her adventures there..." People began asking if the book existed, and finally much to everyone's delight Catherynne wrote it! The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland also won the 2009 Nebula/Andre Norton award for best children's literature (this is a scifi/fantasy award). I recently received an Advanced Reading Copy of this book in the mail and am so excited to read it! The illustrations are beautiful that head each chapter too! Expect a review soon...

First Lines...

"The wierdest part about dying is that nothing really changed.

I mean, you'd expect a big change, right? Because dying--well, let's face it, it's pretty dramatic stuff. They write songs about it, books and screenplays too. Heck, it's even a major theme on Saturday morning cartoons. But the thing is, it's nothing like you see on TV."

..."First Lines", Chapter 2, Radiance by Alyson Noel (Release date: Aug. 31st)