Please visit http://www.notcot.com/archives/2011/02/penguin-great-ideas.php, great blog where I got this picture.

Title: Human Happiness

Author: Blaise Pascal

Publisher: Penguin Books

Genre: Non-fiction, Theology, Philosophy

Length: 106 pages

“Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.” – Blaise Pascal

There’s something magical about reading the thoughts and opinions of someone who died three hundred and twenty some odd years before you were born.  To experience theology, reason, or even the lack thereof, through the eyes of someone so ancient is exciting.  That’s why I love Penguin’s Great Ideas series.

I’ve mentioned this love before in my Conspicuous Consumption review, but every time I pick up one of these pocket sized source documents, I’m reminded of what a treasure knowledge and books can be.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world.  They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other.  They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution.  They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted.  They have enriched live – and destroyed them.  Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. – Penguin Books

I love that Blaise Pacal was included in this group of writers and definitely find his material that of the “enriching” nature.  It was extra special, to read this particular author knowing that my oldest nephew was named after him.  And as usual, upon completion, I can’t wait to read my next Great Ideas book.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=anakawhims-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141042516

Regardless of that justification, it has led me to some horrible mistakes (I thought Rudolf Steiner’s Festival series was going to inform me of the historical significance and establishment of festivals, not be metaphysical ravings of his take on religion butchered by an editor) but also to many happy mistakes.

Directly, it led me to Tanya Egan Gibson’s (Yes, I have a writer crush on her right now, forgive me) How to Buy a Love or Reading, whose cover is amazing, but what’s inside is unexpectedly ten times better.  Indirectly, I have discovered the delightful Edna St. Vincent Millay, and that story is a little more intricate.

You see, I once belonged to an online book club.  It was lovely place that I adored, where as a group, we read lots of British things.  We had fabulous nicknames (I was Lady Klemm of Deasa Manor) and were only required to read the selections and maintain our character.  At first… later there were a whole host of requirements, like reading and participating more each year than you did the last and agreeing with the admin of the group on every particular.  I was kicked out, “expunged” the admin liked to call it, indirectly for getting pregnant and having a child, directly for knowing the proper definitions of literary terms.

In this group, the Mitford Sisters were often referenced,Nancy the most often for her Pursuit of Love.  Browsing my favorite bookstore one day, I saw a book which I presumed was by Nancy Mitford, but only at a quick glance, but impulsively added it to my stack of purchases.  I took it home without further survey.

You will laugh when I reveal that instead of Nancy Mitford, I had grabbed a book by… wait for it….

Nancy Milford,

but didn’t realize this until months later as I was reading through my TBR pile, something every voracious reader has stashed about the house and never seems to diminish no matter how quickly you pluck through it.

Alas! It was a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford.  Well, who is this?  I asked myself.  I can’t read a biography on a person without reading their work first.  I want to have a feel for the quotes, I want to understand their mood they were writing my favorite piece, and I can’t get the full picture without having a favorite piece!

So, back to the bookstore I went and found myself a hardback of Edna’s poems, a collected works.  It’s been heavenly.  Reading her poetry has made for some of the sweetest moments with my baby.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Late at night, when she’s teething and can’t sleep, we rock in the glider and in the lamplight of my library I whisper lines from Edna.  When Ayla is at her crankiest, she sometimes crawls into the chair ahead of me and points to the white spine, she is aware that she is soothed by the rhythm of these poems.  When it’s raining, like today, and we’re feeling scratchy and feverish, all the singing and hot tea in the world is no match in comparison to the calm that is offered by reading Edna aloud.

Poetry is not something I read often; it’s not my “go to” genre.  But I appreciate it, usually the sarcastic and simple like William Carlos Williams, a pre-teen favorite of mine. Edna St.Vincent Millay has changed that for me, I think.  I’m prepared to seek out more poetry in the future, especially as I raise this kid, my beautiful daughter, in hopefully the most literary household anyone has ever seen.

Buy Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Work Here

You're Invited!

But this year, its been put in perspective of things I love and things I can do to make it more fun.  This year, I’m an Event Coordinator for a bookstore I love and I get to make it what I want.  This year, its about celebrating some of my favorite stories of all time (books like The Scarlet Pimpernel and Time Traveler’s Wife will absolutely be featured, as well as biographies on people like Nicholas and Alexandra and so on) and celebrating a fabulous little Italian restaraunt in Humble that I’ve grown to love.  This year, you can come to the Humble Half Price Bookstore, buy your favorite love story and upon purchase be entered to win a dinner for two to Italiano’s in Humble.  How much fun is that?

What’s even better? We’re doing it on the 10th, not the 14th, so people who already have big plans, or have to work because they are in the retail or service industry, or just don’t want to fight Valentine’s Day traffic can have a low-key but intimate date night with us.  On top of that,  some lucky couple will get to do Valentine’s Day, or some other special day they choose, practically for free!

My hope is that if we get a lot of people in the door, next year more businesses will donate gift cards and the year after that even more people!  We could maybe one day build Valentine’s Day up to a bookstore extravaganza so that even the most non-Valentine-date night people ever, like me, will look forward to the month of February.

So, if you’re in the Houston area, come celebrate Valentine’s on February 10th with me as we bask in the loveliness of books – our mutual true love.

Love Coffee by Ahmed Rabea

I’ve been watching a lot of comedians on Netflix lately, and inevitably each one will have a few minutes devoted to dogging the Coffee Date.  Women will comically lament: Shouldn’t a man spend money on dinner? What’s with only shelling out a few bucks for coffee? Men talk about how it’s the worst idea ever because you’ll both have bad breath and diarrhea.  And so on.  I always laugh, because I see their point – kind of, and of course, they say it in a way that forces one to laugh – which is why they get paid to do what they do.  But when all is said and done, I think: I love coffee dates.  I loved them when I was dating, and I love them now that I’m married.

See, the coffee date is the perfect date.  You just met someone; you don’t know them well enough to know whether you’d like to suffer through dinner.  You can dodge out of a coffee date 10 minutes in, and its no big deal, you only met for coffee after all. Not so with a dinner date, where you have to at least wait for the bill to be dropped off, or you’d be considered an absolute jerk.  Or, if things are going well, you can sit for hours and no one cares, you can have intimate conversations in typically comfy chairs in a very cozy environment.  And with most coffee shops, if you get hungry while you’re there, its easy to order something to snack on for a bit without gorging yourself on food.  It also offers the easiest chance to turn coffee into something more than coffee: We’ve enjoyed this coffee, let’s take a walk.  After dinner walks tend to be a bit awkward and anticlimactic.  You’ve already eaten too much,  your outfit doesn’t fit the way it did when you got in, and you’re more likely to have to pee halfway through the walk, because you already sat through dinner and now you’re digesting.

I find coffee dates exceptionally more interesting and better for ‘dating’ than even the movie date.  The movie date, to me, is the worst kind of date.  This date is the date that says, ‘I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to know you, I just want to put in two hours of time so I don’t look like a slut when I make out with you.’  It says: I don’t put much time into thinking, and just want to sit with you in a dark room, where I can cop a feel.  It says: my thoughts on dating haven’t progressed passed high school.  Movie dates are for married people, who don’t need to talk, and just want to get out of the house for a change of pace, not for people just starting out.

But if you’re truly trying to get to know someone, which is what ‘dating’ is supposed to be, getting together for coffee is awesome.  It’s possible that it’s just the book nerd in me, and we tend to be coffee/tea folk, but I just really feel like half ofAmericalooks for the wrong thing when they date. ‘How much money is he spending on me?’ is just not a suitable date night criteria.

Side Note for My Tea People

I was contemplating this blog rant on my way home from church today when I stopped at my local honey stand.  As a huge coffee and tea drinker, I go through a lot of honey.  What’s tea without honey?  And in doing so, I’ve chosen to “support my local bees” as Bob’s sign proudly announces at the bee shack on Kuykendahl and Spring Cypress.

The bees are from A.C. Bees, here in Spring, and the stand is Bob’s Local Honey.  The honey is the best you can buy, and when you bring his glass jars back, he’ll give you a $1/ jar cash or towards a purchase.  My family goes through tons of this stuff, so I wanted to share.  He’s there at the stand Tuesday through Sunday and his phone number is 713-628-4774, call if you have any questions.

How to love a cat: Hold him gently in your lap.  But don’t panic if he bites – he’s only playing.  Be careful not scare him away.  Listen for his ‘motor.’ He’s telling you he loves you, too.

Nodset writes a simple and easy to understand story of trial and error as a little girl chases the cat she wants to play with and how he react.  She presents a very basic and child-like dilemma: “I like you cat.  Why don’t you come? Don’t you like me?” with answers the child can derive from the next step and the illustrations “Then I’ll come to you, cat.” Throughout the book, you learn to pet softly, don’t squeeze too hard and a number of useful lessons for a soon to be young pet owner.  Ayla loved pointing out where the cat was on the page, and of course, my meow sounds.

The Night Pirates – Peter Harris and Deborah Allwright

I love this one!  And Ayla thought it was pretty great too, which is always a plus.  Reminiscent of Where the Wild Things Are, Tom goes to sleep only to be bombarded by girl pirates and taken away to a treasure island via his floating house.  Its pretty awesome and the illustrations are fun and colorful.

Pooh Loves – Classic Pooh Board Book published by Grosset and Dunlap

Ayla is a sucker for all things Pooh, even though I didn’t really introduce her to him.  She picked out a Winnie the Pooh book on the first shopping trip to a bookstore we had together after she was walking and I allowed her to pick stuff up off the shelf.  She handed it to me and was very excited to get to take it out of the store with her.  Then, this Pooh book she picked out at the library all by herself as well.  There’s something about Pooh, forever and always, and this one is exceptionally sweet.

The Lion and The Mouse– Jerry Pinkney

This is one we’re going to have try another time.  It’s all pictures and no words, but it’s a picture book and not a board book.  Ayla kept demanding that I read to her, but I had to kind of just tell her a story.  The illustrations are based off of Aesop’s Fables and it’s been too long since I’ve read them to recite the tale.  If you pick this up, be familiar with the tale so that you’re prepared to help walk your kid/baby through the book.  Your kid makes you feel like a pretty crappy parent when they open a book and all you can say is “Uhhh, that’s a lion…”

http://bookinginheels.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-good-omens-by-terry-pratchett.html

I send you to this review, because I, too, would like to “take a picture of myself licking the book and call it a review.” It is that fabulous.

Kudos Hanna of BookingInHeels and congrats on winning the cafepress pillow for the dreaming of books blog hop.

www.damnyak.ca

Title:Murder on the Links

Author: Agatha Christie

Genre: Mystery

Length: 173 pages

One of the most wonderful parts of January has been the cold – and Agatha Christie.  At the start of the year, I committed myself to a 23 month plan to read all of the Agatha Christie Crime Collection, of which I own a beautiful black and red leather set.

The picture may be old, but its the same fireside.

In the evenings, my daughter and I light the fire in the fireplace, turn on the radio (its one of those old school looking wooden ones from Target, complete with turntable, cd player, and tape deck) and jazz immediately warms the living room with sound.

I keep my Scentsy burners on constantly and this month we’ve had a lot of Honey Peared Cider, Weathered Leather, and Cozy Fireside going.

Ayla, my daughter, is 14 months old.  The jazz comes on and suddenly its dancing time!  We sway and swing until the tea kettle is ready (it doesn’t whistle to my utter chagrin), and then curl up together and I read aloud the selected Agatha Christie for the evening.

This is the one time of day that we spend in the living room, most of our ‘living’ happens in the library where all my books and Ayla’s play mats are.  How silly of us that our living room is where we do all our reading on death and murder.

This arrangement is everything I imagined would be wonderful about spending time with my daughter, and Agatha always lives up to her end of the deal, with all the excitement of a three ring circus.

In this second installment of the Poirot investigations, Poirot cleverly and humorously antagonizes other detectives as he and the narrator, Hastings, solve the crime together.  If I said anything more, I would give away all the best parts!

Featuring the Best Bookstores inTexas

Despite being an Amazon.com affiliate, I truly believe in being a patron of a brick and mortar bookstore.  In my mind, online sales are a necessary evil for the true bibliophile who cannot afford to travel toWalesfrom theUnited Statesto pick up a copy of the next book in the Scarlet Pimpernel series.  (I shop abebooks.com every three or four months for this exact purpose.)  Online sales are for that student looking for the cheapest textbook because its that or don’t eat for a month, and where not eating for a day or two is fathomable, not eating for a whole month would counter the act of trying to improve your mind.  I shop online if I’m gravely ill and cannot expose my disgusting germs to the outside world for a few weeks and am dying to read that biography that is just obscure enough that my favorite stores wont have it in stock for months anyway.  I shop Amazon.com for Paul Collins books on the regular, because they are readily available there, but most his stuff is out of print and isn’t carried by Barnes & Noble (I really like the one at the Woodlands mall) and rarely seen at most used stores.

For this reason, I am signing paperwork on Tuesday to be an Event Coordinator at my local Half Price Books (Humble), my favorite family owned bookstore in the country and the easiest store to shop inTexas.  I’d like nothing more than to generate traffic at a place I love while mostly still being a stay at home mom, as this job is only 20 hrs. a month and is a bit like a consulting gig.

That being said, Half Price Books isn’t the only great bookstore inTexas.  I’m also a huge fan of Murder By the Book inHouston, mostly for the fact that they have become world famous and still manage to be the coziest place in the world.  Murder By the Book is right around the corner from a Half Price Books, and though I stop at HPB first, if they don’t have the latest and greatest in stock yet, I have no problem popping over and buying a current pub if I have to.  The real life story to this hypothetical scenario being when Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Angel Game was first released.

Murder By the Book is great, but they are a bit of a drive for me.  So when I want the same cozy atmosphere, comfy chairs, and intimate shelving units, but not the drive, another favorite place for me is Good Books in the Woods in Spring, off Oak Ridge, almost to the Woodlands.  It’s a quiet little gem tucked away literally in the woods, a house turned bookstore.  They have their own book clubs and writing workshops.  They specialize in first editions, signed copies, and all that is old and interesting, but there are some run of the mill things you can find there too.  It’s a bit more expensive than HPB on most days, but sometimes worth it if HPB doesn’t happen to have what you’re looking for and you’re too impatient to wait for it to be shipped to you.  I say “a bit more expensive,” but their prices are always reasonable, I’m just used to my beloved HPB clearance section.  (Visit Good Books in the Woods here: http://www.goodbooksinthewoods.com/)

As I’m headed back home, often severely hungry because I’m always hungry, on the southbound side of 45 you can also find Once and Again Books, often mistaken as an HPB because its quite similar.  Honestly, I only shop there because its next to my favorite food joint: The Olive Oil, fabulous Greek Food.  And it’s on the way home.  But its nice, its clean, and in good order.

Now for myDallaspeeps:

I’m absolutely, positively in love with the Recycled Bookstore inDenton.  The entire shopping experience happens, literally, in layers.  There are stairs and cubbies and closets, all brimming with organized, clean, lovely used books.  They also function in an old school fashion and will negotiate prices with you, something most stores just can’t do anymore.  For my every day Dallas shopping, I stick to all the near by Half Price Books locations peppered all over the city, but on special day trips up the highway, a bookstore in an old Opera House is just the thing.

As for Dallas Half Price Books locations (and there are quite a few!), my favorites are of course the flagship for its enormity and coffee shop, and the Cedar Hill location for having been my college haunt and my first introduction to Half Price Books at all.

Now, Texans, really… with all these just moments away, why would you go online to shop unless you absolutely had to?  Amazon.com, abebooks.com, hpbmarketplace.com, all those fabulous .com bookstore – are tools when you need them, not your first go to.

Author: Elizabeth Kostova

Publisher: Little, Brown

Genre: Fiction

Length: 561 pages

Buy Work by Kostova

There are writers whose voices fall in step with some inner voice of my own.  They have a seamless and perfect tambour that has no problem intertwining and conversing with the language of my soul.  F.Scott Fitzgerald is one of those writers, Tanya Egan Gibson is one of those writers, John Steinbeck is one of those writers – their sentence structures find a rhythm that beats to my own personal drum.

Elizabeth Kostova is not one those writers.

Her stories are so fascinating.  I have every desire to read everything she’s ever written.  But making that desire a reality is a struggle.  I find myself saying “Just get through this chapter so you can find out what happens next,” both in The Historian and The Swan Thieves.

Therefore, as I’m reading The Swan Thieves, I feel as though I am not the right person to review her books.  Kostova is talented and inspiring: such captivating stories! such a high word count for a debut novel! (The Historian was a little over 241k words) such interesting ideas! But she just doesn’t speak to me.

When I come across books like these I become exceptionally curious.  I’d like to know who she does speak to, what’s the difference in our brains? Is it a geographical dialect issue? Do I not follow her phrasing because my inner voice is either southern, British, or some indistinguishable ‘Yankee’ and she speaksMichigan? I don’t know, I’ve never been toMichigan.  Please read it yourself and come discuss with me, I’d like to find out!

This title was actually added to the previous Low Down on Kid’s Books post in an edit before I decided to make this a weekly ritual, but it belongs in this grouping.

Ayla wasn’t sure about sitting through the first page, but by the second she was hooked. The first time we read this she made me read it three times in a row and carried it around the house for an hour after that. The illustrations are fun and she loved being introduced to new animals she hadn’t seen before: wombat, emu, and koala. Plus, the story is super cute too.

Busy Penguins – John Schindel & Jonathan Chester

So I totally thought this rocked, despite the page dedicated to penguins pooping. But I love penguins. Ayla, on the other hand was not so interested. It didn’t matter how cool or cute the penguins were being, she was 100% focused on Where to, Little Wombat by Charles Fuge. Therefore, no matter how cool I thought it was, I can’t give it higher than a 3 out of 5 stars because kids books really should *mostly* be for the kids.

Jon’s Moon – Carme Sole Vendrell
Oddly spiritual in a creepy way for a kid’s book. Didn’t care for it. We had originally picked it up thinking the title would be fun for her because its got her daddy’s name in it, but you can’t judge a book solely on its title. The illustrations are beautiful though. Could be useful for teaching personification to a small child.

The Tickle Tree – Chae Strathie and Poly Bernatene
“A phantasmagorical flight of fantasy at your fingertips…” is no misconception! We adore this one at our house. The writing is reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, if Seuss were more soothing and less rambunctious. The illustrations are worthy of being compared to Bryan Collins (of bacstudio.com) and if you follow me on anything, you know how much I love his work. The Tickle Tree should be part of every child’s bookcase, and maybe a few adults’ as well if you are a collector of poetry and art.

Click on the titles to see the books on Amazon.com.