Book Cover of the Week: A Day Late - by Louise Tripp

Bonsoir mes amis. It's been a full week and as you can see, I got a little sidetracked – and completely forgot to post Wednesday's Book Cover of the Week. Ah well...better late than never? This week's post features multiple book covers and is my current top ten “to-read” list done in photos (in no particular order):

1. Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum – A former friend gifted me with this book several years ago and it's just another one of those I have never gotten around to reading. Erlbaum was a columnist for one of my favorite magazines, Bust at the time she wrote this about a time in her life when she fled her home to live on the streets because her mother let her abusive stepfather come back.

2. February House by Sherill Tippins – This is a little nonfiction book about a little house in Brooklyn that, during WWII, housed W.H. Auden, Carson Mccullers and Gypsy Rose Lee, to name a few. I've heard so many terrific things about this book (and considering my deep and endless love for all things Carson Mccullers, it had to make my to-read list, no?), but it's been on my shelf since 2006 without a single crack to the spine.

3. The Whole World Was Watching by Romaine Patterson – A memoir by the best friend of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student killed in Wyoming 12 years ago next Saturday.

4. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie – I was excited to find this, an Alexie novel I haven't read, among a stack of book donations at the library where I work.

5. Everybody Into The Pool by Beth Lisick – My girlfriend and I picked up Lisick's “creative nonfiction” at a Sister Spit reading earlier this year because the writer was so funny and charismatic when she read her work. I'm looking forward to finally getting around to this book.

6. Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford – A biography of one of my all-time favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poetry and the Jazz era – what could be more intriguing?

7. A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz – I discovered this book when I signed up for the Goodreads book giveaway, but unfortunately didn't win. I'd like to read it anyway, though. I love a good fairy tale retelling.

8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – Oh, how many times have I tried (and failed miserably) to read this much-beloved Tolstoy novel. Maybe the third time is the charm.

9. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama – I actually attained my copy of the president's memoir by accident. I'd ordered a different book, this was sent by mistake and the seller sent the correct book along after I messaged her, telling me I could also keep this one for my inconvenience. Kind of a happy accident if you ask me.

10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – While I am not fond of her sister Emily's most famous novel and have not read her sister, Anne's books in years, I thought I'd finally get around to giving Charlotte a try. 

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or  got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Lit Links - compiled by Louise Tripp

• On NPR's Books page, Nancy Pearl offers a list of lesser-known summer reads, because summer's not over yet.
• Elaine Koster, the publisher and literary agent who gave Stephen King his big break, has died. Read more here.
• Speaking of King, the author/director/you-name-it will be guest-starring on Sons of Anarchy when it returns for its third season in September.
• Elle Magazine's site features a list of August book releases readers may find handy; Amazon.com also has a list of new and upcoming releases here.

Book Trailers

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith (Fiction)

If I Stay by Gayle Forman (YA fiction)

Tweak by Nic Sheff (Memoir)

Skinned by Robin Wasserman (YA fiction)

Review: Gail Caldwell's Let's Take The Long Way Home - by Louise Tripp

Gail Caldwell's latest book, Let's Take The Long Way Home comes out next Tuesday (August 10th). Here is my review:

I am just going to write this as candidly as possible, just as Caldwell wrote her novel: this book touched my heart in a way so profound that I am fumbling over how to even begin to talk about it. Saying that life is so fragile, as is love and friendship and allowing yourself to open up and know someone and be known, almost feels too cliche to speak the words. I cannot possibly tell you about this book – I am not the writer that Gail Caldwell is. But Let's Take The Long Way Home took my breath away – another cliché, but it's true. It's full of so much profundity, so many analogies and metaphors and stories that it's amazing that such a small book could hold it all. It's about death – the death of the author's best friend and fellow writer, Caroline Knapp. It's about their friendship. It's about Caldwell's life, her struggle with alcoholism. It's about beloved dogs and the way it feels to love a place, to love a river and the woods around it. Mostly, it's just about hope. I stayed up until 1:00am finishing it one night and sobbed, but just felt so overwhelmed with gratitude for having read it.

It made me miss people. It made me miss the friendships that used to be so deep and now have come and gone. It made me ache with longing for that feeling of belonging when you are with people who “get it.”

I cannot recommend it enough.

Some quotes from Let's Take The Long Way Home:

“I would be the sensitive heroine, or doomed romantic, or radical bohemian – I was Hamlet, Icarus, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart. God forbid that I simply face who I was, which was somebody drunk and scared and on my way to being no one at all.”

“...my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.”

“To people who have spent their lives thick with the bounty of other people, attachment itself is complex but assumed. For the introvert, it is a more nebulous territory.”

“ We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so that they can invent what they need someplace else.”

“Accepting a death sentence is like falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion. You take it in one bruise at a time – a blow, a landing, another short descent.”

“Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.”

“Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.”

“The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring that its end.”

Review: Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love - by Lindsay Moore

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Journey for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert is another book that may have just been added to my top 10 list. Some of you have seen the trailer for the upcoming movie based on the book, which stars Julia Roberts. *insert squeal* I had heard several great things about the book before the movie even came into play but have just recently gotten the chance to read it. And I was the farthest thing from disappointed. 

With everything from a prophesizing guru to an old American man in India who always speaks in “bumper sticker” to a no carb left-behind mission, Gilbert has one hell of an adventure and comes up with one hell of a story to show for it. The conversational tone of the book was enough to make me love it from the start. I love reading a book that makes it seem like the author is talking directly to you and in their own style and voice. That’s why I read a lot of autobiographies and “Based on a True Story” type deals which is exactly what this book is. Eat, Pray, Love documents Gilbert’s world travels and her journey towards personal and spiritual contentment following a nasty divorce. One must understand the rule of thirds and the importance of the trinity to truly appreciate this book. In the Introduction, Gilbert makes sure to explain an Indian tradition known as the 109th bead, and the importance of the number 3. The novel is divided into three “books”, each composed of 36 stories, pertaining to her adventures in each of the three countries listed in the title.

Gilbert also incorporates her brilliant use of anthropomorphism into several circumstances throughout the novel. My favorite being the “cops,” Depression and Loneliness and the conversation she has with them all leading to her being frisked and interrogated.
Gilbert definitely makes me feel better about the notion of talking to myself to help when I am stressed or in panic mode. She even writes to her inner voice in a private notebook. And I thought I was the only one that did that! The whole book itself seems to be a self-dialogue to help her cope with the personal troubles. And I like that. And I hope you will too.

Lindsay Moore is a junior communications major from South Carolina with a passion for reading and writing. She hopes to one day work for a magazine in Charleston and open her own bookstore.

Beach Reads: Completed Summer Reading (So Far...) - by Louise Tripp

This week I managed to complete another book on my year-long reading list and it turned out to be a really wonderful book for the summer, being set at a beach-front vacation home. Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman is a memoir that takes place very near where I grew up, in a city that I, in fact, have spent a great deal of time: Virginia Beach, Virginia. A scene in which she, her sister and her mother are driving through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel was especially familiar.

“We are inside the tunnel. It's a filthy place, like a big yellow-tiled bathroom with soot on the walls and bad lighting. I wonder if the tunnel ever leaks and how I will get out if it begins to flood.”

I couldn't help feeling a sense of recognition when I came to this; I, too, used to get frightened traveling through the tunnel. I, too, used to wonder about the water leaking through. Truth be told, I still do, though it's been almost six years since I've been there.

This is not the only part of the book in which Holman's prose feels dead-on, though. Even when I couldn't relate per se, I could completely empathize. Though the back cover and the critic blurbs on the book boast of its incredible portrayal of schizophrenia – Virginia's mother, in the summer of '75, began showing signs of the illness- it is actually about a child's eye view of life as she grows up in a world of unreliable adults. It begins with her mother stealing her and her baby sister, Emma away to the family beach house in Kechotan, Virginia. She believed that she was being called upon to set up a hospital for orphans in preparation for the “secret war” to come. In reality, the author's mother was hearing voices. There at their vacation home, she enlisted her eldest daughter to help sanitize their surroundings and paint the windows black. All the while, to their closest neighbors (Holman's uncle and aunt and their children), she tries to appear normal.

Virginia Holman's novel spends much of the time showing how such a young girl makes sense of her mother's acute illness: at one point, she thinks that if she could be baptized it would clear away her sins and make her life (and subsequently, her mother's life) okay again. While it probably sounds depressing, it's actually a story fill of hope and eventual compassion for the mother who made life a nightmare for her children and husband. And there is much light through the cracks – beautifully written scenes of Holman and her cousins running around the beach, picnics with the family during the good times, a thrilling, terrifying description of a hurricane and more. Holman's memoir of resilience is definitely worth the read.

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library.