Book log
Books I’m bringing with me for an up-coming trip this Monday:1. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It’s the sixth book by Atwood that I’ve read so far. She weaves a very good yarn now and then. It’s always worth reading her stuff. Looking forward to this book, which appears to be rather different from her usual stories.
Book synopsis: Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and raccoons. A man, once named Jimmy, now calls himself Snowman and lives in a tree, wrapped in old bed sheets. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.
2. Hilary Mantel’s Vacant Possession. Picked this up for free, amongst other books, when old boss relocated to NY. Brit author. Other than that, I know nothing about the author or this book.
Book synopsis: No. 2 Buckingham Avenus is a bright, suburban house where Colin Sidney, a schoolmaster, is bringing up his family. One day a spectre from the past appears – Muriel Axon, who ten years before lived in the house with her mad old mother and her mysteriously conceived baby. Muriel wants revenge: she wants her territory back.
3. Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. Picked this up at the 50% discount bin at My Bookstore. I often need a lot of non-fiction (none of those “Make More Money crap” or “Improve Your Life crap” books though) to balance the amount of fiction I digest. Of course, there’s non-fiction, and then there’s lite non-fiction. This book falls into the latter category.
Book synopsis:The sinking of the Nantucket whaleship Essex by an enraged spermwhale far out in the Pacific in November 1820 set in train one of the most dramatic sea stories of all time. Accounts of the unprecedented whale attack inspired Herman Melville’s mighty novel Moby Dick, but In the Heart of the Sea goes beyond these events to describe what happened when the twenty mixed-race crewmen took to three small boats and what, three months later, the whaleship Dauphin, cruising off the coast of South America, discovered when it spotted a tiny boat sailing erratically across the open ocean.
Obviously these three books would barely tide me over the two week long trip. I think I can squeeze in two or hopefully three more books in my bag. One of them would likely be Harry Potter: Order of the Pheonix. Most likely will bring Mayr’s “What Evolution Is” or Stephen Pinker’s “Blank Slate”. What would I do without my books?
posted by Cayce @ 7:00 PM
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