Double-Stacked Bookshelves

Brooke Parkhurst's Belle in the Big Apple Logistics Title:  Belle in the Big Apple Author:  Brooke Parkhurst Published:  September 16, 2008 Publishing Company:  Scribner Page Count:  224 Summary via Goodreads When Belle Lee, a vivacious, tart-tongued daughter of Mobile, Alabama, decides that the only way she'll ever make a name for herself as a journalist is to leave the family paper and head to New York,she soon realizes just how daunting life in the big city can be. An outsider desperate to carve a place for herself in the cutthroat world of New York journalism, Belle marches all over town in her kitten heels and her single Chloe suit to hand-deliver resumes and smiles, and to beg for a job from the indifferent or downright hostile office drones.She refuses to give up. With heroic persistence,a wicked sense of humor and a taste for the gourmet, Belle sees what it takes to become a New Yorker. She flirts with a gorgeous young man on the ...

I don't think I've been this disappointed in a book for a long time.  That's saying something... Nicole Krauss' The History of Love follows the journey of a book written sixty years prior as it makes its way from Poland to South America to New York.  This book is a history--a history of the love one person has for another.  It's been hidden (or lost) for years, but manages to resurface in an unexpected way.  Told from the perspective of two people, the aging Leo and fourteen-year-old Alma, it is a testiment to just how far people will go to discover the truth in times of healing.  This book manages to bring these two characters together in a roundabout way that is both fitting and justifying.  Pretencious...overreaching...angering...rough.  Have I said enough?  I had such high hopes for this book.  The plot sounded intriguing.  The synopsis sounded good.  The characters sounded interesting.  Instead, I was left complet...

Julia Glass' Three Junes is by far, hands down the BEST book I've read this year.  It was the 2002 winner for the National Book Award for Fiction and definitely deserved it.  I picked this book up for my scattered Edinburgh bookclub and I can honestly say that it's my favorite of all that we have read in the past nearly three years (ugh).  It makes you laugh, cry, smile, and think.  That's what makes this book so good. The story centers around the McLeod family, natives of Scotland, and follows members across continents, years, relationships, sexuality, heartache, anguish, and happiness.  It's told in sections from the perspective of the patriarch, Paul, his oldest son, Fenno, and Fern, a woman who manages to weave herself into the lives of these two men without much effort and who, after the first section of this book, the reader does not really think about again. We first meet Paul in 1989 and are welcomed into his personal anguish over the death of his w...