Please check out my blog post over at I.N.K. Here's the link. What do you think? Please leave a comment over there. Or here. 

Please check out my post over on I.N.K. 

I am being a bit promiscuous with my blogging this week. Today I have a post over on the Nonfiction Book Blast about horse poop. Check it out here. 

And tomorrow I'll be on I.N.K. pontificating about covers. 

Maybe someday soon I'll get back to blogging here regularly... but the news is good: I'm working away and I have to neglect something! 

In the meantime, Happy Passover! 

 
"The American home is disintegrating. Homes are not made the center of interest. Amusements are found in commercialized places instead of in the family circle. The average family does not read anymore. People buy magazines and throw them away." July 25, 1920

 Please check out my post over on I.N.K. 

 

Happy 2011! That's the main thing. May this be a happy, healthy, prosperous, peaceful, fun-filled, funny,  love-filled, lyear for you and yours. May you be intellectually and artistically stimulated. May you discover one new thing you really love to do. And eat. And drink. (But in a responsible way.) May this year not see any of our government officials do anything really stupid. May this year be the year that is a boring news year. We could take boring. Lots of good news is too much to hope for, but how about uneventful? Dull? Maybe with a smattering of nice things? 

And may this be a year when nobody suffers. I know, I know. Can't happen, but boy do I wish it could. (As we used to say as kids: understatement of the year. Decade. Century. Millenium.) 

I have had about six weeks of back pain, which turned into nerve pain, which was about the worst pain I have ever had and certainly the worst pain I have had that went on for longer than, say, a couple of hours (ending in either a baby or root canal). There is a silver lining to that much time in that much pain. Actually two silver linings that I can see as the pain diminishes: One is that it really puts all kinds of stuff into perspective. And makes you realize things:  Like how perfect your life is without the pain. Yeah, perfect. Perfect with problems. Fine. I'll take it. I love it. It is my life and I love it, bumps and all. Just please, no more nerve pain. Thank you. 

The other silver lining: It gave me time and permission to read. I wasn't walking or cooking or working (shhhh...) because it hurt too much. But I could and did read. And so I am here to share with you some of my favorite books that I read during this time. In no particular order, but I would recommend each of these wholeheartedly: 

ALIVE AND WELL IN PRAGUE, NEW YORK  by Daphne Grab. A tender and funny and spot-on YA about a girl with the great name of Matisse and her struggle with a move from The Big Apple to a small town in NY. Matisse and her parents move because of her father's terrible Parkinson's disease. Having watched my mother-in-law suffer from something similar I can say that she is spot on about not only the disease but also the ways family members deal (and don't deal) with such a devastating illness. Grab explores love, friendship and family times deftly and with humor. She also captures completely what it is like to be a teenaged girl in the middle of a very grown-up crisis.  And there's one scene in there--a scene about acceptance and letting go--that is so True it made my heart sing (while I cried). I never thought anyone could write a scene that so completely mirrored something in my life, but Daphne did it. 

WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED by Judy Blundell. This amazing YA novel won the National Book Award a few years ago, and no wonder. Wow. I started it one afternoon when I couldn't move very much. And I finished it late that night (well, 2:00 am), in joyous rapture at how good it was. The Percocet couldn't touch my pain but Judy's novel vanquished it. (Or at least made me forget about it for all those hours.)  The language is exquisite, and the plot is perfect; the story line is--well it's a page turner that just does not let up. But it's also profound and poignant and every one of the characters jumps out of the page into the room with you. (And no, that was NOT the Percocet.) I'm not saying more because I want you to read it and discover all the mysteries on your own. Preferably with only a small glass of wine next to you, if you want. No narcotics. 

WHERE THE GOD OF LOVE HANGS OUT by Amy Bloom. This is a collection of short stories that literally blew me away. Each one is exquisite. I just went to make sure I was getting the name completely right and I saw a reviewer on Amazon say that Amy Bloom is a perfect writer. I don't know if there is such a thing--come to think of it, if there is, then all of us writers are going to need massive amounts of therapy, so no, there isn't. But I do know the impulse that made the reviewer say that. I used to say that I wanted to write like Grace Paley. O.K., maybe I still do. But now I also want to write like Amy Bloom. I know, I know, you're supposed to write like the best YOU. So what I really should say is that in addition to being wonderful reads, Bloom's stories are inspirations. As is Bloom the writer. Hey, she's a therapist, too, isn't she? Hmmmm. 

DOG TAG SUMMER by Elizabeth Partridge. You can't read this middle-grade novel yet, unless you are lucky enough to get an ARC like I was. But this is one you can look forward to (the ARC says in March). Pre-order it at your local independent bookstore, read it, love it, and then give it (or another copy of it) to a young person in your life. It's a beautiful book about a young girl in the post-Vietnam area coming to terms with her history and her life. Tracy--Tuyet--is Amerasian, the child of a Vietnamese mother and a GI father. She is growing up in California with a best friend name Stargazer. DOG TAG SUMMER is funny and poignant and profound and filled with kid-appeal. I am not a seer, but I predict classic status for this book. 


Please share your recent wonderful reads with me, too. I am not signing up for more pain. But I am signing up for more reading. What I'm reading now: TO THE END OF THE LAND by David Grossman. It is, so far, devastatingly gorgeous. I am afraid it is also going to be devastating. But that's all for now. 

Again, Happy New Year!