The Sunday Salon: I won!

Through Bookcrossing I have won the International SMILE day prize, this is drawn every 2-3 months, the participants sign up for the chance to win, in exchange they send a book to the winner. The choice of book is up to them but many base it on the winners wishlist or preveious readings. These are the books I have recieved:
The Wild Wood, Charles de Lint
Baumgartner's Bombay, Desai
Lucia, Lucia Trgiani
Northanger Abbey, Austen
On Love and Shadows, Allende
The Republic of Love, Sheilds
The 14-Carat Roadster
Random Acts of Heroic Love
The Things We Do for Love
Stone Cold
Gravity's Rainbow
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Beyond Black
A Lover's Lover

Library Loot

Library Loot is here
The Boy, Germaine Greer - Greer explores the sexualisation of pictures/paintings of young boys.
Collected Fictions - Borges - For a Librarything Latin American read and for my own Latin American challenge
O Pioneers - One I've always meant to read
Kimono, Dalby - For my non-fiction challeges
Rumpelstiltskin and other Grimm Tales, Carol Ann Duffy

Sunday Salon: While I've Been Gone....

I'm finally back, I deleted the massive piles in my Google Reader as there was way too much to trudge through so I will get back to commenting soon. My computer problem turned out to be something that was fixed in 30 seconds!
Anyway this is going to be a post about the books I read whilst I wasn't blogging, I didn't get through as many as I had hoped as I seem to have been in a reading slump and had one week where I seemed to have eye strain constantly.

NORTHERN CLEMENCY - Phillip Hensher
This is one of the Booker Nominees of last year, it was a fantastic read so it gives me hope as I'm in a group reading last years short list.
This is a family saga spanning the 1970s till 2006. The ovel starts in Sheffield, a northern English town famous for its mines and the mining strikes of the 1980s.
The beginning of the novel is a shocking introduction to the street that the novel is primarily focused on, the new neighbours move in witnessing on their first day a mother stamping on her sons snake and also revealing all her marital problems.
The novel then travels through the families ups and downs, success, illness, hatred and love.
This took a while to read because of the hefty size and weight but was well worth it in the end.
CHALLENGES:
A-Z (Title)
999 (New Fiction)
The Complete Booker
The Chunkster Challenge (738 pgs)

Birthday Stories [ed] Haruki Murakami
The is a amazing collection of short stories from around the globe, Murakami set out to fine stories which all featured birthdays. There was only one story in the whole collection I didn't enjoy. Definately a must read.

CHALLENGE:
999 [Short Story Collections]
A-Z (Title)
100 Shots of Short

So Many Ways to Begin, Jon McGregor
I read McGregor's 'Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things' last year and jumped at the chance to grab this copy at my last bookcrossing meeting.
This novel is about the lives of David and Eleanor, childhood sweethearts from two different parts of the UK. The ovel explores the way that love has to cope with all the incidents in peoples lives, the painful memories from the past and the small, incidental happenings which can spiral into something much larger. As with Nobody Speaks... the language and the sense of atmosphere is lovely, warming and gripping. An author who deserves to be discovered by many more people.

Challenges
A-Z (Author)
Themed Reading Challege (Move 'em Along)

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Brecdel
I spotted this in the library, a graphic novel-cum-memoir (two challenges in one!).
Alison's father can be abusive, he struggles to restore their home to Victorian perfection, and he is a closet homosexual (a fact she doesn't learn to she comes out herself). Her mother reveals her fathers secret affairs, including those with young boys and the babysitters. From this revelation Alison looks back at her childhood and her own developing sexuality, along with her relationship with her father before his death/suicide.
Challenges:
The Graphic Novel Challenge
In Their Shoes
A-Z (Title)


I also read The Master of Margarita graphic novel, which I'm still not sure of. I think I need to have read the novel before I pass judgement.

Family Matters, Mistry
I won this fantastic novel from Bethany from B&B Ex Libris as part of the OT challenge last year, for anyone taking this challenge this year you should certainly stick this on your reading list if you haven't already read it.
The Chenoy family are living on the brink of poverty in a tine two roomed flat. Their jealous siblings, envy them their freedom. These siblings live in an 8 roomed apartment with plenty to eat, but with the burden of looking after their elderly step-father. When he breaks his leg and becomes bedbound he is simply dumped on his youngest daughters doorstep. Despite a lack of food and space she cares for his every need and his developing Parkinsons Disease. Her family struggle with the problems the grandfather brings with him but learn a lot in the process.
Challenge:
999 TBR

Two Challenges

Biblo File is hosting The Guardians 1000 Novels everyone should read challenge.
You have to read 10 books, There are 7 categories and you need to read 1 book from each category, and one book you have never heard of. I'm going to pick books as I go along.
The LIST
The numbers in brackets show how many books from tht section I have already read.
THE CATEGORIES:
Comedy [6]
Crime [8]:
Family and Self [45]: Currently reading The Karamazov Brothers
Love [37]
Science Fiction and Fantasy [25]
State of the Nation [27]
War and Travel [13]

I'm also going to participate in the Banned Books Challenge held href="http://pelhamlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/01/banned-book-challenge-2009.html">here I will be reading 4 banned books between Feb 22nd and the 30th of June

Out of Action!

Just a quick note to say my home computer is broken so I'm out of action for a while - hopefully only a week or so. However I'm getting a lot more read!

Short Story Monday: 'Reunion' by John Cheever

This is going to be very short and sweet as I have to spend my evening working (bleurh!). Rather tha reading a short story I listenened to one from The New Yorker's short story podcast (if you click here you can also listen to the short story or even subscribe to the podcasts for free.

'Reunion' is a very short story, lasting only around 7 minutes. The story tells of a young man meeting his father for the first time in three years. His father offers to take him out for dinner. His father's attitude to every person he meets who he considers of a lower status than him is a disgrace, he is rude, ignorant and arrogant obviously feeling power with every person he manages to belittle.
This story is well worth a listen, especially because the man reading it, Richard Ford, has such a lovely voice and intonation. Check it out!

Plus check out my much more prolific short story reading from yesterday here

The Sunday Salon: Indonesian Short Stories

The latest issue of Words Without Borders (always well worth checking out) includes several short stories by Indonesian women. As I'm having a Sunday filled with marking, housework and reading the heaviest novel I can find I decided that I would dip into these in my breaks between tasks.
Maybe Not Yem by Etik Juwita
In a very plain and undersatate language this short story tells of the journey back to Indonesia by a group of migrant female workers. The narrator sits beside a woman determined to spring fear into her, filling her with tales of crimes migrant workers play onto their wealthy bosses.
The journey portrays the many ways that these women are in a constant battle, everyone is out to rip them off, so by the time they return home to their families the little money they earned working so hard has been tugged and pulled in many directions all for the benefit of others.


In complete contrast to Maybe Not Yem, is The Century Carver
by Oka Rusmini
This story is rich and full of detailed description. The Carver in the story is Kopag, blind for the whole of his life he has been taught the beauty and power of wood. Able to carve beautiful women without ever having seen one he earns his families fortune.
When one day a woman walks into the room and speaks to him, he declares her the most beautiful woman alive, comparing her to the beauty of wood:
"The beauty of this young woman was extraordinary. The indentations of her body and her face resembled those in a piece of timber. She was timber of exquisite beauty. It was odd that other people were unable to see her loveliness, to appreciate the beauty that nature had entrusted to her. Even old Gubreg made no comment when Kopag praised the prettiness of this eighteen-year-old girl. What was wrong with the criteria he had used to judge her beauty?"
His family are shocked and distraught at his choice as externally she is pitifully ugly,without sight his version of beauty is very different from the conventional concept held by the rest of society.

Road to Heaven by Abidah El Khalieqy is the story of a mother's death and life. As the mother dies her appearance cahnges to one of extreme beauty and happiness, a smile creeps over her face, eeryone comments on it, except the father:
"A telephone rang in my heart. "He's jealous, extremely jealous," a disconnected voice said. With the smile of an angel on her lips, my mother looked very young, as if she had returned in time to her age as a young woman, on the day she got married twenty years ago."
As the daughter travels with her mother's body to the final resting place we hear of the brutality her mother felt at her father's hands, brutality caused because the father was jealous of his wife's love of God.