Books on the Nightstand podcasts are so GREAT!

I have been a fan of podcasts since I got my iPod for Christmas in 2006.  Recently I have been taking advantage of listening to them on my iPad 2 while I get ready in the mornings and am doing my hair and applying my make-up.  I’m obsessed with listening to author interviews and book review podcasts and in my searches I have discovered a wonderful podcast and blog called Books on the Nightstand (BOTNS).  The hosts are Michael Kindness and Ann Kingman who work for Random House but the podcasts are their own personal opinions about books they love and industry chatter.  Their format is nice and covers a discussion topic, hot industry topics/titles/reading lists and two books they can’t wait for their audience to read.

I was listening to Podcast #128 the other day and I wanted to respond to it.  I thought responding on my blog would be a great way to do that so I’m starting a new thing here.  Responding to Books on the Nightstand podcast topics and possibly other podcasts as I come across them.  Be sure to check out Books on the Nightstand yourself.  If you would please click on the link to the podcast I’ll be responding to in posts and listen to it first and then come back and read my response I would love you for it.  I will always link to the podcast just like I did above.

Planet Books RESPONSE to the question “Do you read the epigraph?”:

Epigraph ~ (n) ~ a quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter, etc, suggesting its theme

I do read the epigraph!  Sometimes it does connect to the book and sometimes I go back while reading the book and the wonder what the hell it means.  Most times the epigraph ends up being relevant but on the rare occasion it remains a puzzle.  I believe that the epigraph can set the tone for the book.  It can give the reader a little hint of what is in store for them ahead.  I agree with Michael when he says he thinks that sometimes the epigraph was that one thread that the author jumped off from and got the idea for their book. 

It’s an interesting question!  Do you read the epigraph?  Did you used to read it when you were holding the old-fashioned paper and ink book in your hands and now you have an e-reader that automatically goes to the first page when starting a book so you forget about it?  I always go back to the cover page on my Kindle and then look at each page as I click my way towards the first page of the story. 

Let me know your thoughts and feel free to respond on the BOTNS site too.  I don’t know Michael and Ann but I like what they are doing with the podcast medium.  Their web site is great and chock full of book and publishing information and I’m learning about even more books out there and som behind the scenes info too.

What A Fabulous Day For A Book Festival!

Saturday I attended the 2nd Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival in Gaithersburg, MD.  The weather was picture perfect and excitement was in the air.  Stories were everywhere you looked but the stories I was there to hear were being told by Paula McLain, Rachel Machacek, Meg Waite Clayton, Caroline Leavitt, Eleanor Brown (for the second time in three days!) and Katharine Weber.  What a well run, smooth and seamless event!

I had a whole personal schedule put together of authors I wanted to see and you know what?  I listened to all of them speak and read plus one that was unplanned and received their signatures while enjoying short conversations with each lovely lady in the signature tents!  This was truly and bookish event. 

I started the morning with the long drive from my home in Northern Virginia to Gaithersburg, MD.  Actually it didn’t take that long because of the light, swiftly moving traffic (47 miles in 50 minutes) but my excitement for what the day had in store for me kept me anxious the whole way.  I drove past the pink Marriott Hotel where Hubby and I got married and felt a sense of happiness and excitement.  I didn’t know what to expect since this was only the second book festival the city of Gaithersburg had held but I did have faith because the organizers had been communicating so well on the social networks and in the local news media as well as through their website http://www.gaithersburgbookfestival.org/.  The date was May 21st, the supposed end of the world and Rapture.  So, I took it as a good sign that things weren’t as serious as some were trying to lead others to believe when I parked at a church a block from the event and asked a priest who was passing by if I could park there for the book festival.  He said, “Sure!” and continued leisurely on his way.  LOL!

 

I was meeting a couple of friends, Diane & Beastmomma, but as usual was the first to arrive.  Nothing on my friends!  I’m just always early or on time and can count on one hand when I have been late.  I made my way onto the festival grounds and looked around.  I checked out the tent where most of the authors I wanted to see were going to present later that day.  After getting a water and scone from a vendor I ran into Eleanor Brown, the author of The Weird Sisters.  We had met two days prior at her event at One More Page Books and had hit it off.  We caught up, compared schedules and began walking.  Eleanor was looking for the VIP tent since she was one of the featured authors of the festival.  We parted ways but continued to bump into each other throughout the day.  What a lovely and fun woman she is!  I found the signing tents and the B&N book sales tent which I entered to check things out.  I was pleased with how nicely all the books by the featured authors were displayed.  Tables and tables of books, some familiar and most not.   I had already brought some books I bought especially to be signed at the event but I discovered some by authors I was seeing that I ended up buying.  Let’s just say my bag was very heavy.  I know you know what I’m talking about!

  

Time was moving so I made my way towards the F. Scott Fiztgerald tent for the first event I was attending.  Paula McLain would be discussing her debut novel The Paris Wife.  Ms. McLain was just darling!  She was passionate in discussing the background of her main character Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.  She told us how Hadley and Hemingway had met and then a bit of their lives together, their adventures and misadventures in Paris and she set the scene for her book.  Then she read, really I should say recited passages, from her book.  During the reading my friends arrived.  After her presentation we met Paula McLain in the signing tents where I chatted quickly with her while she graciously signed my copy of The Paris Wife.  One down, five books to go!

 

 

The day continued without a hitch under picturesque blue skies and light breezes.  I had to make a choice about which author to see in one time slot so I missed listening to Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson, True Confections, Triangle, The Little Women and Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear but I did get to meet her in the signing tents where she signed my copy of The Music Lesson. 

 

Next was my unexpected addition to my schedule.  Per Eleanor Brown’s recommendation my friends and I went to the H.L. Mencken Pavillion to listen to Rachel Machecek talk about her book The Science of Single: One Woman’s Grand Experiment in Modern Dating, Creating Chemistry, and Finding Love.  What a good idea that turned out to be seeing her!  Rachel was HILARIOUS and gave a great talk!  She was self-depreciating enough and very likeable.  Funny and thoughtful and critical but not mean.  My friends and I were cracking up and as soon as the event was over we bought her book and met her over at the signing tents.  Rachel asked me if I was single and I told her that I had been out of the dating scene for a decade now.  I shared with her my story of meeting Hubby in D.C. and I told her that I was proof that dating in D.C. isn’t hopeless by any means.  She was very interested in the details and was kind and signed my book. 

 

After grabbing a quick bite one of my friends and I headed back to the F. Scott Fitzgerald tent and listened to Caroline Leavitt and Meg Waite Clayton.  Caroline’s book Pictures of You has been heating up the book blogs this year so I was very curious about her.  Also Meg Waite Clayton has some very popular books under her belt.  The Wednesday Sisters, The Language Of Light and her newest novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells.  I felt that pairing the two authors together on stage was a bit awkward but the let us know that they were happiest not being alone on stage.  Authors aren’t performers.  They’re creativity flows from solitude and quietness so sometimes the stage is not the most comfortable place authors.  Caroline talked about her book Pictures of You and gave us some background on where she was coming from when writing it.  Having not read it yet I had to go on the things bloggers have been saying about the book to follow but she made me even more excited to read it.  Meg Waite Clayton was a force to be reckoned with in her presentation.  She used to be a lawyer and it showed!  She talked about living in Maryland’s horse country and the time there raising her young children and really starting to write.  After their event my friend and I met them in the signing tents.  I enjoyed the conversations I had with both and even got a hug from Meg because I had bought two of her books.  She was very grateful and it was very sweet.

 

 

The last event on my list was Eleanor Brown being interviewed by The Washington Post’s Ron Charles.  What an energy filled, funny and enjoyable event that was!  Eleanor was star struck by the famed Post fiction critic and he was in awe of Eleanor and her creation, The Weird Sisters.  Eleanor had told me earlier that she was going to have the same stories and jokes as the other day but this event was made even better because of Ron Charles’ questions and interest in getting to the heart of Eleanor’s writing. 

 

What an inspirational and wonderful day!  I think what made it even better was the fact that it wasn’t over attended.  The Annual National Book Festival that is held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is so massive, crowded and manic at times that in comparison the Gaithersburg Book Festival was a joy in every moment.  I know that will change as the festival grows in popularity over the coming years but I’m glad to have attended this year when calm and order was the name of the game.  I was happy to learn that for the first time this year the National Book Festival will be expanded to two days from the one day it’s been for the last decade.  Hopefully that will alleviate some of the crowd problems it faces. 

 

I hope that if your local area hosts a book festival in the future that you will take advantage and attend.  The authors I saw were so happy to talk about their pride and joys.  They lit up when fans presented them with blank title pages of their books to be signed.  Happy reading!

Bookish Fun In Arlington

Earlier this year I received a phone call from my mother-in-law telling me about this book she was reading on her Kindle.  It was called The Weird Sisters and she thought I might like to read it too.  She gave me a little summary about the book and explained that though the father was a professor of Shakespeare and not a physicist like mine and though there were three sisters instead of the two in my family, there were some similarities between the fictional family and mine.  So I put it on my ever-growing TBR list over on Goodreads.com. 

In April I discovered that the author, Eleanor Brown, would be doing a reading/signing event with one of my favs Sarah Pekkanen here in Northern Virginia at One More Page Books in May.  I ordered the book immediately, started reading it a few days before the event and just in time (four hours shy of the start of the event) I finished reading it.  When I walked into the wonderfully cozy and friendly independant bookstore One More Page Books in Arlington,VA I went over to say hi to Sarah who then introduced me to Eleanor Brown.  Damn do I love that woman!  She is AWESOME!  We hit it off immediately.  I told her that I had finished the book in time (I had typed on her Facebook wall earlier that day that I had twenty pages left to read before that night) and she recognized me from Facebook.  I then shared with Eleanor and Sarah the similarities between my family and the fictional Andreas family.  My mother is a breast cancer survivor, I have a father who is obsessed with physics and grew up surrounded by books and creative thinking and I have a strained relationship with my sister.  Eleanor’s response was, “Well that’s because I was following your family around as I wrote this book!”

Sarah Pekkanen & Eleanor Brown @ One More Page Books in Arlington, VA

 

The discussion was great and the chemistry between Sarah and Eleanor was sensational.  The space is small but adaquate and it was great to see so many people who turned out for these hometown girls.  As you can see it was a very animated and funny event.  Afterwords each author was set up on opposite sides of the store.  I finally got a signature from Sarah for her latest novel Skipping A Beat.  I had read it on my Kindle the week it came out but wanted to get the physical book version for my collection.  With that done I popped over to the other end of the store and hat a nice chat with Eleanor.  I told her how funny I thought she was and that I was looking forward to seeing her again in two days at the Gaithersburg Book Festival in Maryland.  A fellow fan took our picture too which turned out nicely.  

Eleanor Brown & me, Karen @ Planet Books

 

I was so glad to have this opportunity to meat Eleanor and see Sarah again!  Also, for maybe the first time I had the books read before the event.  That made a world of difference because then the conversation is about the book.  It seemed like most of the attendees had read The Weird Sisters too which made for a great Q&A.  I hope that they also take the time to read Sarah Pekkanen’s wonderful second novel Skipping A Beat.  If you can I highly recommend visiting One More Page Books!  It’s the newest indepenant book shop in the DC Metro area but what makes it even better is they sell wine and chocolate and serve both as well as pastries for their events.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Summary ~ The Weird Sisters ~ The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. See, we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much. But the sisters soon discover that everything they’ve been running from-one another, their small hometown, and themselves-might offer more than they ever expected.

This book surprised me!  I was a slightly afraid to read it because my mother-in-law had suggested it to me because of the similarities she was finding between the fictional family in The Weird Sisters and my family.  Getting started on book proved to be a bit challenging.  I had just finished reading Tatjana Soli’s The Lotus Eaters which is a thoroughly developed piece of historical fiction set in the tumultuous Vietnam War and the pace of The Weird Sisters took some getting used to.  Once I found the flow of the book I began to enjoy the characters and appreciate the plots.  There is a unique quality about this book that confused me initially.  It is told in plural first person.  I had never read a book in this style before and I kept wondering who was telling the story.  I was so distracting that I found myself Googling that question and was relieved to discover the answer.  Once I understood that there were three narrators, the sisters, I was good to go.  Turns out I wasn’t the only one with that problem.  My mother-in-law had the same confusion as have several people who shared about it on the Internet.

I think the most important thing about The Weird Sisters was what it taught me about Shakespeare.  Throughout the book Brown has the family communicate in difficult moments through the lines and quotes of Shakespeare plays.  She would also provide backdrop of the line and where and why it was said in the original play.  Putting Shakespeare into the context of an American story was brilliant and breathed new life and meaning into the old hum-drum words that I never could thoroughly understand on their own.  I think that incorporating The Weird Sisters into the Shakespeare curriculum in our schools and using it as a reference tool after reading it while reading the plays would help put things in perspective for the high school student of today.  At least I believe it would have for me and maybe I would have done much better than the C’s and D’s I got that semester in high school.

When I first started this book I also had the thought, “Not another character with cancer!”  I have started sharing this opinion with a dear friend of mine with terminal cancer.  She won’t read a book if cancer plays a part in it.  She doesn’t want to read about what she is living through.  Having said that I think that the way Brown wrote the mother’s story, her illness, treatments, horrible side effects and how everything effected her family around her was brilliant.  I learned that Brown’s mother is a twenty-two year survivor of breast cancer.  It showed that Brown had personal experience with the disease in some way because of the care and tenderness with which she wrote those scenes. 

With all that said, I truly took a lot away from reading this book.  I found the sisters, Rose (Rosalind), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia) to be all frustratingly relatable and foreign.  Rose is written like other eldest sisters are written in other books I’ve read but she learns her lesson with grace and quite unexpectedly which was nice.  I do have to say though that not all eldest siblings are the uptight, frumpy, and not as pretty as the rest.  Wink! Wink!  Bean was wicked fun to read and I felt that her problem was by far the most serious of the three sisters.  Cordy was enjoyable and I enjoyed seeing her grow up on the page and discover that she was valuable.  I enjoyed the men opposite each sister.  Rose’s fiance Jonathan was level-headed with a sense of adventure that nicely offset Rose.  Bean’s interactions with the handsome and engaging Father Aiden were a treat to read.  I was really rooting for Cordy when she started to work at the local coffee shop and was reconnected with its owner, Dan, the funny, thoughtful and concerned friend who helped her grow into adulthood without holding her hand too much. 

All in all The Weird Sisters and Eleanor Brown deserve the praises bloggers, newspapers (specifically The Washington Post), and the stints on bestseller lists have given.  A beautifully written book about family facing epic and miniscule problems and trying to make it out the other side with love, friendship and support. 

{Rating ~ 4 out of 5} 

I’m Singing Over On YouTube!

I have a new favorite thing to do.  Using the iPad 2 that my folks gave me for my birthday (Thanks Guys!!) I am recording myself singing along with karaoke tracks and uploading them to my YouTube channel.  Yes, I have a YouTube channel!  If you search kbrandt241 you can find it.  I sing at karaoke weekly if I can manage it and I am always practicing (yes, I’m the diva that practices for karaoke) at home.  I just thought, why not put this stuff on the internet?!?  So I did.  I hope you’ll enjoy and maybe even subscribe!  I plan on posting at least a song a week on there.  You can click on THIS LINK for a direct link to one of my videos.

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

 Summary ~ The Lotus Eaters

In the final days of a falling Saigon, The Lotus Eaters unfolds the story of three remarkable photographers brought together under the impossible umbrella of war: Helen Adams, a once-naïve ingénue whose ambition conflicts with her desire over the course of the fighting; Linh, the mysterious Vietnamese man who loves her, but is torn between conflicting loyalties to his homeland and his heart; and Sam Darrow, a man addicted to the narcotic of violence, to his intoxicating affair with Helen and to the ever-increasing danger of his job. All three become transformed by the conflict they have risked everything to record.

In this much-heralded debut, Tatjana Soli creates a searing portrait of three souls trapped by their impossible passions, contrasting the wrenching horror of combat and the treachery of obsession with the redemptive power of love.

I had wanted to read The Lotus Eaters ever since it first came out and so I jumped at the opportunity to win it for my book club when TLC Book Tours offered it in their book club giveaway in December.  While relaxing on my birthday, New Year’s Day, I received an e-mail from Lisa at TLC and was super thrilled to read that I had won copies of The Lotus Eaters for my book club.  Thing about that was it wasn’t my turn to present my pick for the club until May 1st.  I had such fun presenting everyone with their very own copy of the book and I dived in that afternoon when I got home.  Now a week and a half later I have reluctantly finished the adventure that was The Lotus Eaters.

Where to start?!  Well, like the heroine Helen who did not want the war in Vietnam to end so she wouldn’t have to leave her life there I did not want this book to end.  I found myself carrying the book around the house just to hold it and feel the cover.  I would take breaks from reading so I could reflect on the story that continued to blow me away.  It was difficult to believe that I hadn’t read one hundred pages, when in actuality I had only read a measly thirty, because there was so much description, emotion and action within each sentence, paragraph and page.  Now I am done.  Now I’m reading entries on Wikipedia about The Vietnam War and trying to give this book justice with my review.

Helen, Sam and Linh are so great!  These characters, war photographers for LIFE Magazine, live through horrors on the page that real life war photojournalists continue to face everyday.  War unfortunately is an endless cycle.  Different place, different time, different reason, same old war.  The first chapter had me a little worried because I felt that it was disjointed but looking back on it now it makes sense.  The Lotus Eaters starts at the end of the story.  The reader is plunged into a historic day in Vietnam, The Fall of Saigon.  Helen and her Vietnamese husband Linh are two of the very few journalists and foreigners still in Saigon when the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) take over the city.  Helen gets the wounded Linh onto a U.S. military helicopter and then goes back to the chaos for that last picture.  Then the reader is taken back to Saigon before the war becomes what it became. 

Passion, battle, death, injury, friendship and love.  These words make up The Lotus Eaters.  Sam Darrow and Linh have been a team for a time when Helen, green and full of desire, arrives in Saigon.  The three are eventually pulled together as partners and lovers.  I especially enjoyed Helen and her sense of self that she gained through the years.  I  loved her passion for getting that photo that could tell the world what was happening in one shot.  Unfortunately that passion required her to follow the danger of war. 

Soli’s description of combat missions out into the jungles of Vietnam where death was hiding under rocks, in rice paddies and in the eyes of the people, children included was heart stopping!  I found myself holding my breath constantly.  I was amazed to learn in an online interview that Soli has never been to Vietnam.  I read Born on the Fourth of July and The Things They Carried, both memoirs written by Vietnam Vets and felt the same depth, description and raw emotion in the pages of Soli’s novel.  Relationships that Helen has with U.S. troops create the human connection to war that made the book even more rich and powerful. 

The heaviness of the horrors of war and seeing it all through the lens of a female war photographer makes for a thrilling and fresh read.  This book is not for the faint of heart but it is a very memorable story that I hope you will take the time to read. 

{Rating ~ 5 out of 5}

Check out Tatjana Soli’s website for more information on her and her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters.