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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Bonnie Palmer has commented on (8) products
People of the Book
by
Geraldine Brooks
Bonnie Palmer
, May 02, 2008
I would recommend this novel to the stout-hearted reader who is interested in the critical role books can play in the history of a people and in the darker side of European history. What I enjoyed most about "People of the Book" is its clever duel narrative structure: the framing story relates how the novel’s protagonist, a book conservator, attempts to piece together the history of a famous Jewish manuscript called the Sarajevo Haggadah, as well as telling her own story of the personal and professional crises that plague her as she works on the book’s conservation; meanwhile, a second set of chapters moves backward in time from the recovery in 1996 of the haggadah through it’s endurance over five centuries of religious strife to it’s unlikely inception as illuminations of the Passover story. It is this second narrative that really makes the work haunting because author Geraldine Brooks’ invented history for the manuscript is absolutely heartbreaking. The people who create and care for the book face imprisonment, torture, exile and ignominious death to insure its survival, taking the reader with them into the Nazi annexation of the Austrian Empire, the African diaspora and the Inquisitions of early modern Venice and Spain. Her descriptions of medieval waterboarding are particularly shocking and poignant today. The novelist’s point in guiding the reader on this grueling tour of European atrocities is to demonstrate that this unique illuminated haggadah was the product of moments in history that ever-so-briefly permitted the cultural coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians, periods which inexorably give way to repeated repressive regimes. As a student of early modern European history, I found this work gritty, thorough-going and challenging. If I have a complaint of this novel, it is that the author only hints at rather than depicts the craft of bookmaking in the various periods of history she explores. Overall I cannot say I loved this novel as much as I felt drawn into the narrator’s sometimes disturbing literary pursuits. The well-plotted tale of the haggadah becomes enthralling as the reader plunges further into its murky past, while the heroine’s story likewise becomes more compelling as the novel progresses and she must confront not just the challenges of an extraordinary book restoration, but must also come to terms with flaws in her own carefully-crafted identity as a conservator and an individual.
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Treasure Island
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Bonnie Palmer
, April 18, 2008
This was my first favorite book as a kid. When I began to re-read this childhood classic as a middle-aged woman, I wondered what attracted a younger me to what definitely seems today like a boy’s book. As I finished the book, I knew exactly what the attraction was: a ripping good yarn, with a mercurial villain, set in an exotic location and punctuated with salty seafarers’ jargon – what’s not to love – or as Long John would put it, “Shiver me timbers!”
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(16 of 28 readers found this comment helpful)
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Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
by
Maureen Corrigan
Bonnie Palmer
, March 28, 2008
Maureen Corrigan’s careful readings of whatever books she has been able to get her hands on throughout her life have obviously stimulated her own writing and critiquing abilities, making her an excellent author of her own story as well as a terrific book critic. But what really comes through in this memoir is how reading is a skill that can be practiced and honed, just as learning a musical instrument or playing a sport can, and that Corrigan is a master at it. Though I am fairly literate and have a master’s degree in history, I feel like a novice reader compared to Corrigan; but she also inspires me to want to read more, read better, and eventually scale my own reading versions of Mount Everest, whatever they may be. This was an highly enjoyable book from which I gleaned many recommendations for future reading. I particularly liked the section on detective fiction that analyzed its value as literature about work, which Corrigan wishes there were more of – and I agree!
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(5 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)
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Philosophy Of Boredom
by
Lars Svendsen
Bonnie Palmer
, March 17, 2008
I liked this intellectually challenging book because it was also an entertaining and fairly accessible academic work. I think savvy readers might enjoy it (yes, actually enjoy a scholarly book about boredom) because it examines a common modern dilemma that everyone in the Western world has at some point understood first hand. Whether you only occasionally experience situational boredom, or regularly struggle with deeper, more profound existential boredom, Lars Svendsen’s ruminations on the topic – from its Romantic underpinnings to its twentieth century philosophical treatments to its depiction in literature and pop culture – are far from dull. Most of the book traces boredom’s history as an idea in the West, including many philosophers’ and artists’ attempts to analyze, solve or even banish boredom. But Svendsen posits that boredom is a conundrum that cannot simply be eliminated; rather boredom must be lived through, and even embraced, in order to understand its impact both as a personal difficulty and as a phenomenon in the Western modernity. In the end, Svendsen insists, only half jokingly, that “It is our duty to lead a life that torments us.” As I read this book over the course of a couple of weeks, my boyfriend kept taunting me, “How’s your boring book?” And I repeatedly, honestly answered him, “It’s fascinating!” Now he is reading it too.
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(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
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Endymion Spring
by
Matthew Skelton
Bonnie Palmer
, December 13, 2007
Do you remember That One Book from your youth? You know the one I mean: the one that did more than just narrate an adventure story about virtuous characters vanquishing dastardly villains; the one that actually taught you that reading could be a miraculous adventure in and of itself; the one that almost single-handedly made you into the ardent reader you are today. In his debut novel, Matthew Skelton presents a children’s book with the faintly familiar storyline of a quest by a modern boy for an ancient object that will yield a significant historical secret--a powerful object which must of course be kept from those who would use its secret for evil purposes. But Endymion Spring’s real charm is as an homage to That One Book that made a reader of you, and to the delightful world of books that followed. This novel deftly weaves together the history of printing, the value of libraries as repositories of the written word, and the obsessive acquisitiveness that drives the book collector in his hunt for elusive quarry. It is also a fine kids’ book that tackles a child’s fears of family disintegration, sibling rivalry with a favored child, and the indescribable joy of finding That One Book that awakens one’s interest in the pleasures and the possibilities of the literary. Buy it for a young person who is teetering at the edge of the literary cosmos, or for yourself to relive falling into that marvelous universe.
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Mindless Eating Why We Eat More Than We Think
by
Wansink, Brian
Bonnie Palmer
, August 24, 2007
Author and food psychologist Brian Wansink has created with this book a fun-to-read, easy-to-digest study of food as a sociological phenomenon that appeals as much to the foodie as it does to the dieter. In fact, I would characterize this monograph as a thinking person’s “diet” book. Wansink does not so much advocate any one right way of eating, but rather exposes the myriad ways in which we in America both as individuals and as a culture mindlessly overeat. Some of his empirical research--based on nearly two decades of observing and testing our social eating habits–-might sound obvious, commonsensical or overly familiar; but some of it also will set off “ah, ha” moments of insight for the reader, and some of it quite frankly just cannot be believed without trying it out for yourself. (Believe it or not, the size of the dishes you eat from really does effect how much you “think” you need to eat to “feel” full.) While Wansink’s goal is not to dish up a regimented diet program, he does offer helpful strategies for “mindlessly” eating healthful food in healthful amounts. With a corporate-driven food industry that produces for each individual American twice as much nourishment as we need every single day, this book is a terrific tool to help us recognize the cultural hidden persuaders that demand of us as good consumers to mindlessly eat and eat and eat.
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(9 of 18 readers found this comment helpful)
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Three Bags Full Sheep Detective
by
Leonie Swann
Bonnie Palmer
, August 16, 2007
This is a charming and engaging mystery of the English cozy variety, as well as a delightfully parochial, gossipy slice-of-a-life tale set in a picturesque Irish village, but what really makes this novel stand out is Ms. Swann's fully-realized ovine protagonists. She has created a group of characters--a flock of sheep--that think about, act in, and particularly scent out the world in their own distinctively sheep-ish manner. While they are curious about the human world, especially in order to understand how and why their human caretaker George met his end, they are mostly puzzled and repulsed by the hygiene, customs and cruelties of its denizens. No wonder their shepherd spent his evenings not with his human companions in the pub, but rather reading to them from novels in the pasture. This is a lovely lark of a novel for anyone who has had enough of the anthropomorphizing of Hollywood animated and computer-enhanced live-action features; I hope they never turn it into a movie. (Please note this review originally appeared for this same Random House title, but under a different ISBN number. It was featured in the August 2007 Daily Dose column.)
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(3 of 7 readers found this comment helpful)
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Three Bags Full
by
Leonie Swann
Bonnie Palmer
, August 03, 2007
This is a charming and engaging mystery of the English cozy variety, as well as a delightfully parochial, gossipy slice-of-a-life tale set in a picturesque Irish village, but what really makes this novel stand out is Ms. Swann's fully-realized ovine protagonists. She has created a group of characters--a flock of sheep--that think about, act in, and particularly scent out the world in their own distinctively sheep-ish manner. While they are curious about the human world, especially in order to understand how and why their human caretaker George met his end, they are mostly puzzled and repulsed by the hygiene, customs and cruelties of its denizens. No wonder their shepherd spent his evenings not with his human companions in the pub, but rather reading to them from novels in the pasture. This is a lovely lark of a novel for anyone who has had enough of the anthropomorphizing of Hollywood animated and computer-enhanced live-action features; I hope they never turn it into a movie.
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(9 of 14 readers found this comment helpful)
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