The Readin Roos

In Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake nine year old Rose Edelstein discovers that she can taste the emotions of whoever prepares the food she tastes. One day after returning home from school Rose's mother is preparing a lemon cake. However, when Rose tastes the cake she also tastes her mother's feelings of emptiness, sadness, and desperation.

Bender blends magical and surreal elements into mundane, everyday life.

First I want to warn everyone you may see more reviews of audiobook version of books by Mary Kay Andrews in the near future. My new approach to checking these out at the Lawrence Public Library is to just focus on one shelf and pull some books to listen to.
 
The book starts with our heroine, Keeley Murdock, at her pre-wedding dinner in a small town in Georgia.

William Mandella has issues, and he's going to deal with them frankly. A conscript for an interstellar war against the Taurans, he finds himself flung through collapsars to distant maybe-battles, engaged in automation-mediated combat that wipes out most of his unit. Finally making it back to Earth and out of the service, he finds it impossible to adjust to a civilian life that has changed markedly in the twenty-one Earth-years that he has been gone (aging only a couple years himself due to lots of near-relativistic-speed space travel).

This book is pretty much what the title states: a story of a group of women who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and the ups and downs of their friendships and what holds them together.It examines how their teen lives, college years, marriages, families, career decisions, illnesses, cross-country moves, and even death affect their friendship. Communications have changed over the last forty years, and so have how these women interact, now scattered across the country. It also discusses the differences in men’s and women’s friendships.

This slim volume of poetry is written as a series of prayers by Noah and several other denizens of the Ark. Taken at face value, the poet has captured aspects of what we often perceive as the "personality" of the animals who offer the prayers. From the arrrogant rooster who makes the sun rise to the to the meek mouse who asks to be kept safe from cats, we are given glimpses into the thoughts of some of Noah's passengers. Yet these poems also give us a window into the human soul.

Critics fell in love with this book when it came out, so perhaps my expectations for it were somewhat inflated. I really shouldn't read very many reviews for books before I read them or movies before I see them. The exception is when I read reviews that say something is bad and I read or see it anyway. Then, it's not so bad as I expected it to be. By no means was The Coast of Good Intentions bad, maybe just a little bland for my taste. It's been a few days since I finished the book and the characters are already slipping my mind.

Wow! This is the first time I've read anything by Octavia Butler and I found it absolutely captivating. The title story, which Butler calls her "pregnant man story," was excellent, but I find myself still mulling over the implications of "Speech Sounds." In it, a disease causes people to lose their ability to speak and/or read and write. It is absolutely devastating. The collection also includes afterwords for each story. I'm usually not a fan of reading what writers have to say about their work, but Butler's insights were pretty compelling.

This is a book for the layperson or beginners. The author devotes a chapter each on structural topics or well-known structures, such as the Eiffel tower, the pyramids of Egypt, or the Hagia Sophia. Written 30 years ago, you will find certain modern architectural concepts not discussed. CADD software is something new to the author. But, the basics of physical concepts used in architectural engineering are well-covered. New materials make modern building design possible. Aesthetics and structural integrity are never independent.

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson is a popularized history of the English Language and it's evolution to the modern day. Bryson traces the origins of the English language, it's climb to a global language, the etymology of words, various dialects and swearing.

Reviewed by Ashley Fick

It is an elite cadre of authors whose materials I have loathed so much I couldn't bring myself to complete them. In fact, in 37 years of reading life, I can count their number on one hand. Today Chuck Palahniuk is breathing that rarefied air. I was so thoroughly sickened by the content of Invisible Monsters that I'm putting it down less than halfway read and you could not pay me to pick it back up. If it were my own copy, I'd burn it, that's how much I really hate this book.