Double-Stacked Bookshelves

Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo Logistics Title:  The Cellist of Sarajevo Author:   Steven Galloway Published:  May 15, 2008 Publishing Company:  Riverhead Hardcover Page Count:  235 Summary via Goodreads In a city under siege, four people whose lives have been upended are ultimately reminded of what it is to be human. From his window, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbors waiting in a breadline. Then, in a flash, they are killed by a mortar attack. In an act of defiance, the man picks up his cello and decides to play at the site of the shelling for twenty-two days, honoring their memory. Elsewhere, a young man leaves home to collect drinking water for his family and, in the face of danger, must weigh the value of generosity against selfish survivalism. A third man, older, sets off in search of bread and distraction and instead runs into a long-ago friend who reminds him of the city he thought he had lost, and ...

I borrowed Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns over a year ago from a dear friend and am finally getting around to reading (it was in storage for about a year due to a house fire...yeah).  I've yet to read The Kite Runner , or see the movie, but it's on my list; my ever growing list.  Regardless, so far I'm loving this book...here's a teaser: "Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces.  But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her" (153). Definitely worth the read...

With the end of the term in sight, I promise to get caught up on my reviews.  I have a pile of seven books sitting next to my computer...all read...all waiting to be reviewed.  Ugh.  In addition to that, I will be adding yet another to said pile in a few days because I'm nearly halfway through with The Diplomat's Wife , which I posted a teaser for last week just before starting it.  Despite my serious lack of reviewing (damn you student essays!), I am still posting teasers for new books that I'm starting.  So, without further ado, here's today's teaser from Alexander McCall Smith's La's Orchestra Saves the World : "The music reminded her:  love and loss were inextricably linked.  This world was a world of suffering; music helped to make that suffering bearable" (109).

I've had Teresa Neumann's Bianca's Vineyard for a while now, thanks to my grandmother, but have been skipping over it to read other books.  I don't know why I did this because it was actually a great read.  Neumann is a local author who decided to write a novel about family history.  The majority of the novel is based on factual evidence and personal family interviews.  There is one portion, which I won't give away, that is only speculated at by Neumann, but what she does choose to speculate is a highly probably scenario. The book is written in a way that suggests it is being told to the reader, as well as Egisto's son and his wife, through flashbacks from Bianca in her 80's.  We know this because the font and boldness of these sections gives personal reflection from Bianca and foreshadows what she will eventually reveal.  She takes you back to the beginning of what changed the course for this family, mainly one brother of the Bertozzi family moving to A...

Who knew that reading about Medieval queens could be so interesting!  I just finished Helen Castor's She-Wolves:  The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Castor, a historian from the UK, writes this history book with a real narrative flair that draws the reader in and presents true accounts without being boring or humdrum as so many historical books are.  The readability makes this nearly 500 page book a rather quick read and keeps you interested the entire time. As the title suggests, Castor focuses the book on four prominent ruling queens prior to that of Queen Elizabeth , the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn .  She starts the book with Mathilda , only surviving child of Henry I and eventual Empress of England, and chronicles her struggle to maintain order in the kingdom that she ruled for a few short months after her father's death.  She then jumps forward and examines Eleanor of Aquitaine ...