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Words Worth Reading  

A decidedly monthly newsletter from Words Worth Books~Waterloo's favourite bookstore! 

March 2010!  
Welcome to our March newsletter! 
Although our e-mail newsletter reaches you only once per month, you can view daily updates on book news, reviews, interviews and book giveaways on our book store blogs.
  
We are also "open" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for shopping on our fully searchable database and order desk, viewable at www.wordsworthbooks.com Click on any book cover in this newsletter to get to our ordering page.

                             

Enjoy!

 

                            Words Worth Books

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An independent bookstore is the heart and soul of a community. Words Worth Books has been a landmark on King Street for 25 years!   
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Words Worth Books
(519) 884-2665
100 King St. S
Uptown Waterloo
www.wordsworthbooks.com
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Meet Christopher Moore!

 
 
 
Contact us for details: Words Worth Books 519.884.2665

Directions to First United Church

Mark Your Calendar!
We're busy planning the details of our Words Worth Hearing Author Series, but for now mark your calendars! Complete event details to come:
May 5: Russell Smith (Girl Crazy, April) and Nicholas Ruddock (The Parabolist)

May 12: Sarah Hampson (Happily Ever After Marriage) and Judy Fong Bates (The Year of Finding Memory)

May 26: Guy Gavriel Kay (Under Heaven)
 
Reading In February
Despite the distractions from Vancouver, I got through several books in February. Here's what I learned:

Making Toast - that grieving is about caring for the living
IOU - that what we don't know about financial instruments can drive us into bankruptcy
An Altar in the World - that you can meditate without a consistent prayer life
Where the Gods of Love Hang Out - that love is messy
The Bread of Angels - that the darkest hour is just before dawn
 
Making Toast (HarperCollins $25.99) is a memoir by the author and playwright Roger Rosenblatt about coping with their daughter's death. Roger and his wife Ginny move in with their son-in-law and three young grandchildren following the sudden death of their daughter, a surgeon in her thirties. Roger is responsible for rising early and making toast for the family, a six-year-old girl and two boys, four- and one-years old. Their father, Harris, is also a surgeon. All of them are broken-hearted and struggling to carry on: making meals, driving to lessons and play dates, doing laundry, packing lunches, getting through the day. Roger is not an emotional or sentimental guy. He approaches his daily tasks with humility and takes pleasure in sharing time and stories with his grandkids. He continues to teach one day a week at a college some five hours away. I was touched when he mentioned driving through a stop sign as a clue to his grief-muddled mind. (I'd done the same thing recently.)
 
I.O.U. (why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, M&S, $32.99) is by the novelist John Lanchester. He was dismayed to the point of anger by the economic meltdown starting in fall 2008 and sets out to uncover how it happened. His lack of an economist's background is to the reader's benefit. If he can't make sense of the financial derivatives that added trillions to the instant shuffling of worldwide investments, then, just maybe, those derivatives were way too risky. This is why governments and their central banks were also sucked in. Bubbles are ever with us.
 
Barbara Brown Taylor was an Episcopalian priest who stepped down from the ministry (as described in Leaving Church). An Altar in the World (HarperOne $16.99) continues her spiritual journey, beginning with her pulling down the barriers between organized religion and spirituality. Each chapter is an answer to the question she was asked by an Alabaman priest whose church she was asked to preach to: "Come tell us what is saving your life now?"  The practice of being present in the natural world and with other humans is part of her answer, but also learning to say no, to feel pain, to set aside a Sabbath each week, and finally the practice of giving blessings, all figure in this map of faith.
 
Amy Bloom is the only fiction I tackled last month. I'm a fan of Away, the story of a Jewish immigrant to New York in the 1890s whose odyssey takes her across America and up to Alaska in an attempt to return to Russia and the daughter she left behind. Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random House $29.95) is set in modern day and consists of two groups of short stories each focused on a different couple. Clare is married to Charles but is drawn to their longtime friend William, even though she and his wife Isabel are also friends. Their affair will end in two divorces but middle-aged love involves aging bodies: William suffers from gout, and Clare breaks her ankle. The second group of stories focuses on the parents of a girl who barely survives a bout of flesh-eating disease, her social worker and doctors.  Bloom has a breath-taking ability to convey feelings between her characters with a stark minimum of description.

 
*So Much for That* by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver's new novel, So Much for That is everything I 've come to expect from one of my favourite writers with a major difference.

A writer that I frequently hold up as an antidote to much best seller fare has written a novel that is ripped from the headlines pertaining to America's health care debate. So Much For That is full of flawed characters who con and bluster their way through their days, all orbiting around Shep Knacker; a fundamentally decent fellow who has meticulously planned a second life escape route, an Afterlife.

"Shep wondered and kept wondering, if you could at least survive in places like East Africa on a dollar a day, how well could you live for more like twenty bucks?"
Several false starts in the Afterlife have resulted in passing years and mounting tensions in the marriage. After living frugally, selling a successful home repair business and working for the new owner who resents Shep's continued influence in the company, he's bought  three one way tickets for his wife and son.

Shep is ready to lay his cards down.  He's picked a date a few weeks into the future and says he's going with them or he's going alone. Glynnis has come home from a doctor's appointment with news of her own.  She's been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a particularly malevolent strain of caner caused chiefly by prolonged exposure to asbestos.
 
The "insurance company from hell" basically torpedoes the Afterlife and the novel rests on what happens to a dream deferred. There are two other medical subplots in the novel via an employee at Shep's place. Jackson is a politically-charged fellow who continually works himself into lather via blogs and talk radio and has a self-inflicted medical problem he can't hide from his wife Carol for much longer; and their daughter Flicka is stricken with FD or Familial Dysautonomia, an extremely rare genetic disorder that attacks the body's nervous system.
 
All the attributes for a fine Shriver piece are here.  She is relentless.  She has a terrific ear for the conflict present in any home and writes genuine dialogue to match.  No one is unscathed and she simply demands more of her reader than most novelists that I know of. 
 
That said, and despite a harrowing trail for everyone; So Much For That gives the reader an almost happy ending, bearing in mind that this a novel for discerning adults.
-Dave
*The Parabolist* by Nicholas Ruddock

 Nicholas Ruddock's first novel is a book that I'm very much enjoying at the moment.
 

 The Parabolist hits that great spot between having literary chops and a genre-bending plot driven story.
Staid old Toronto is nudged into a city more resembling a crumbling South American metropolis filled with bombastic characters and a cinematic touch.

 

 Parabolist: noun (1) one who speaks in parables. (2) a member of a splinter group of disaffected young poets in Mexico City c. 1975. (3) a practitioner of the art of concentrating multiple sources of energy into a single focus, illuminating or, if left unchecked, destroying everything in its path.

Part comedy, part mystery, The Parabolist is a novel about murder, sex, the medical establishment, poetry and vigilante justice on the streets of Toronto in 1975.

 

We're very pleased to welcome Nicholas to Words Worth Books as part of our Spring author series, and as he lives in Guelph; we'll even get him home at a decent hour.
 

 --Dave

*The Girl Who Fell From the Sky*
 by Heidi Durrow
At a reccent book conference this winter, I met Heidi Durrow, the author of this engaging debut novel. She was a lovely young lady and even sent me a handwritten note a few days after we met. Though that is not why I think you should read this novel. I think you should read this novel because it is FANTASTIC! The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is about Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and an African American G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. 

When Rachel's strict maternal Grandmother becomes her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly Black community. She must learn to straddle the white world of her early childhood with the Black world of her present. She learns to swallow her grief to survive her new life. The book takes a surprising turn when she meets Brick, someone from her past who is desperate to find her and share a message that will help to heal her pain.

I found this hard to put down and finished it in a day. The book is the winner of the Bellweather Prize (created by Barbara Kingsolver) for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. I think there is lots of discussion potenial with this book and I would highly reccomend it for book clubs.
- Bronwyn
 
*The Savage Detectives* by Roberto Bolano
 
The Savage Detectives was recommended to me by one of my old university professor's  a few weeks ago. I had never heard of  Roberto Bolaño, but as so often happens, now that I am aware of him I seem to see references to his work everywhere I go.
 
I have a fondness for Latin American literature. I named my cat after Jorge Luis Borges, for instance. I must be out of touch, though, because apparently Bolaño is the biggest thing in Latin American literature from the past 20 years.
 
The Savage Detectives is loosely based on Bolaño's own life, only with a lot of poetic license employed. It follows the lives of two young poets on a quest- what the quest is for is not quite clear at times, giving the novel a nicely Quixotic feel. The story is in three parts, the first narrated by a naive young poet who idolizes the two central characters, the second by a series of interviews with people who have varying impressions of them, and the final part returns to the same narrator as the first, who has grown somewhat disillusioned with his former idols.
 
I liked the fractured nature of the story telling, and the implicit nods to the history of Latin American literature... Bolaño was very critical of Latin American literature that came before him, and you can almost see him delighting on riffing on stereotypical themes of the genre.
 
As one time aspiring poet myself, I really enjoyed the focus on characters who value poetry above all else. The characters are so extreme, almost militant about their choice to live the poetic lifestyle... I chose the gentler charms of a bookseller's life myself.
--Caroline  
*Eat Memory* ed. Amanda Hesser 
 
This collection of food writing from the New York Times Magazine is a really great bed-side table book. No matter what else I was reading, an essay from this collection finished off my day on a thoughtful and interesting note. The length of the pieces tends to be fairly brief, and the majority of them end with a recipe that relates to the anecdotal content of the story.
 
I never thought I would be interested in Julia Child, but the tone of her piece was so unpretentious and funny, about her final exam at the Cordon Bleu, that now I'm considering reading her longer food writing. I'm not sure if the Cordon Bleu was sexist, or just hated Americans, but they sure seemed to have given Julia a hard time. She ended up being tested on the simplest of recipes, and in the end had to admit that she was over complicating things.
 
This emphasis on simplicity recurs throughout the book, and was really refreshing. Many of the pieces are not even written by food professionals. One of my favourite essays was "Bean There" by Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson is an insufferable conservative republican that has been on CNN for years, sporting a too-tight bowtie that presumably cuts of air supply to his head. The funny thing was, I really enjoyed his piece. He wrote about working at a baked beans factory during his college years, and for once I found his tone charming and unpretentious and his analysis of the baked bean industry hilarious.
 
What I enjoyed most about this collection was how food was linked to a common humanity--everybody eats, even New York Magazine types, and it was interesting to have so many perspectives on the subject. I may not make any of the recipes in the book, but I will certainly start reading the New York Times Magazine food column.

--Caroline

*The Edible City* by Christina Palassio and Alana Wilcox
  (Our Apologies for missing Christina Palassio's name in the February newsletter!)
 

The Edible City is a collection of short essays about Toronto and food. The overall tone of the selections is thoughtful and balanced, and the range of topics is pretty comprehensive. The bulk of the pieces deal with food ecology and the difficulty of eating locally sourced meat and produce in a metropolis.

One of the pieces I found the most interesting was Sarah B. Hood's "Pickerel, Pork and President's Choice; A historical food map of Toronto" which detailed the city's relationship to food production in days gone by. Descriptions of Toronto in the 1800's, when the financial district was a series of orchards, really blew my mind. Next time I visit Toronto and have to cross Bay Street, I know I'll feel a little twinge thinking about how once, instead of steaming man hole covers, horn blaring cabs and glass monoliths, where I stand was a breezy orchard, full of bees buzzing and birds chirping.

This is not to say the collection is anti-progress, a lot of time is spent on Toronto as a food-processing mecca. In "High off the Hog: Hog town as food processing hub" Steven Biggs looks at the history of Toronto's factories and the hand they had in forging the community. I had no idea how many factories there are within the city limits of Toronto, or that it served as a hub for the eastern sea-board in food transport.

A lot of the essays dealt with restaurants, and how Toronto measures up against other cities in the world for food. Toronto has to be praised for it's diversity of cuisine, and the innovative way it meshes ethnic and domestic fare. I found it really interesting that while in other cities such as Paris, ethnic food is gets toned down and made more like the region's cuisine, Toronto tends to the exact opposite- foreign cuisines that come into the city end up influencing our food, so you end up with Mexican poutine or Thai hot dogs.

The collection left me wishing someone would put together something similar about Waterloo region; not to mention hungry.

-Caroline
Book Club *Musings*
During March we'll be reading

M.J. Hyland's This Is How.

M. J. Hyland is the multi-award-winning and Man Booker-shortlisted author of Carry Me Down. Her third novel, This Is How, is a psychologically probing and deeply moving account of a perpetual outsider longing to find his niche. When Patrick Oxtoby's fiancée breaks off their engagement, he leaves home and moves to a remote seaside village. In spite of his hopes for a new and better life, Patrick struggles to fit in and make the right impression. Certain that his new friends are conspiring against him, and with his already fragile personality further fractured, he takes a course of action that permanently alters his life.

Our future book club picks include:
 
    
 
Our main Book Club meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month. Our next discussion date is on March 23rd, at 7 pm, in store. Contact Mandy at mandy@wordsworthbooks.com, or phone the store directly at 519-884-2665, for more information.
Dude's Book Club *Musings*

Our Next Dude's Book Club Pick:
 

Birdman by Mo Hayder

Thursday March 25th


 

Greenwich , south-east London . The Met's crack murder squad, AMIP, is called out by nervous CID detectives to a grim discovery. Five bodies, all young women, all ritualistically murdered and dumped on wasteland near the Millenium Dome.

When a post-mortem examination reveals a singular, horrific signature linking the victims, officers realize that they are on the trail of the most dangerous offender known to the force: a sexual serial killer.

Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, young, driven, unshockable, finds himself facing both hostility within the force and echoes of his past in this, his first case with AMIP. He is tortured by the knowledge of a death long ago that he might have prevented. Now, as he employs every weapon that forensic science has to offer, he knows he has only limited time before the chaotic, sadistic killer strikes again. (From Mo Hayder's Website)

 

 

Our Dude's Only Book Club meets on the fourth Thursday of each month. Our next discussion date is on March 25th. Contact Dave at david@wordsworthbooks.com,
or phone the store directly at

 519-884-2665, for more information.


Our April Book Pick is
A Test of Wills by Charles Todd

 First Words
 Here are the first words from a book selected randomly off our shelves:
 
 From The Spice Necklace: A Food-Lover's Caribbean Adventure by Ann Vanderhoof

This time, I bring my rolling pin to the Caribbean.
I also bring my rat, Ramon T. Raton (made from a small coconut), and my elderly stuffed monkey, Curious George, a companion since childhood; my best pots and knives (and a proper sharpening steel); more baking pans and serving dishes; my trusty pressure cooker; two dozen tea towels; six stemmed wineglasses; three of my favourite silicone spatulas (all the same size and color); a digital kitchen scale; and one lonely electric appliance, a wand hand-blender with attachments that whisk and chop.
 
Of course, my husband, Steve, comes too. He calls himself my official taster and, aided by a lightning-fast metabolism, he's an unstoppable force when it comes to food. West Indian market women adore him--setting commerce aside to chat, tucking an extra piece or two of fruit into his bag, routinely giving him big hugs hello and goodbye--and cooks can't resist spoiling him, especially since he looks like he can use a few thousand extra calories. Inevitably, he's the one who's given the largest fish, the plate with the scoop of the extra something, the invitation to "take a taste" of whatever's in the pot.
This is Phase Two.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Care and Feeding of the Backlist
At Words Worth Books we not only have on hand the most recently published titles, we pride ourselves on the importance we give to the backlist, books that have continuing value years after their publication. So don't miss this great read a second time!

This month's backlist selection is:

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

Last week was the 5th anniversary of Hunter S Thompson's death. It seems crazy that it's been 5 years already!
 
I read The Rum Diary 10 years ago. I was working at a candy store in Toronto at the time and I would go to the Chapters next door and read a chapter every lunch hour. The story itself is pretty simple, a reporter goes to Puerto Rico, drinks a lot, and steals some guy's girlfriend. The book is quite unlike the bulk of Thompson's work, instead of the bitter, drug addled screeds against American complacency, we get a simple story. But that simple story is so full of energy and youth and fun, that it provides a refreshing change of pace to his other dark, albeit hilarious work.
 
Anyway, re-reading The Rum Diary is a nice way to remember HST- not as the twisted gun crazy iconoclast that he became, but as the young, devil may care sports reporter that he started out as.

--Caroline

*Books and Babies*
Books for Kids 
 
At Words Worth Books we keep a close eye on our children's, young adult, and teen sections in the store, because these are formative reading years and we love to see the best books in the right little hands. We have fantastic recommendations for baby shower gifts, birthday gifts, or just-because occasions for the special young people in your life. Drop in or phone ahead and ask us to assist you in these sections of our store, and have a guided look through the books that we hand-pick for our shelves. Here are just some of the books that we're loving this month:
 
 Dear Zoo is a fun treat, 25 years after its initial publication. The story goes where every good board book should go--a patterned question and silly answer format where babes and toddlers can learn how to anticipate each page. Plus, who doesn't love lift-the-flaps?
 
Dear Zoo has simple and sweet illustrations in eye-popping colour, sure to grab attention. And you'll fall in love with the last gift from the zoo, a proper pet to keep!
 
 
 
Chester's Masterpiece by Melanie Watt
 
 I love the Chester books by Melanie Watt! In Chester's Masterpiece, he proves his creative genius, elbowing the real author, Melanie, out of the way. What follows is a picture book mash-up of scribblings, post-it notes, and clashing egos, as Chester flamboyantly takes over the story, armed with his big red marker.
 
Chester's Masterpiece takes longer to read than most kids' picture books-there is just so much happening on each page. He pops out from behind the page, erases what Melanie has written, and doodles in his own story ala Harold and the Purple Crayon.
 
Kids will always have a blast reading the Chester books!
 
 Tunnels by Roderick Gordon
 Will Burrows has a strange family. The only thing he has in common with his father is his passion for archaeological exploration. The book opens with Will and his dad digging up an abandoned tunnel below London, and find the beginnings of a major secret. Then his dad disappears and strange men are following Will.
 
Tunnels is a great read; action-packed and mysterious. Each chapter opens up a whole new set of questions and kids will be lured into the story by Will's quest to save his father and uncover his family's secrets. Tunnels reminds me of the best parts of City of Ember, Kiki Strike, and even H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Tunnels is the first book in the trilogy.
 
The Prince of Neither Here Nor There by Sean Cullen 

"This is a story about Faeries. Not Fairies. There's a big difference, and it isn't just that one is spelled with an "e". Fairies are ineffectual little things that flit about in children's stories, shoot magic dust into people's faces, and dress up in flower petals and all that hooey. Insipid little things! No. No. No! The Faeries we will be dealing with are something different altogether! They are a noble race, an ancient race, often marvelous and magical but just as often deadly and dangerous. I hope you are up to this. If not, put down this book and back away carefully" 

 Told through a hilarious and sometimes unreliable narrator, The Prince of Neither Here Nor There is a great hero myth adventure story. Brendan has a terrible time at school and it gets worse when he finds out he is a Faerie who's been lost to the human world. Once he figures this out, he starts to feel himself turn into something more Faerie than human. When a strange group of otherworlders begins to tempt him to use his Faerie powers for evil, Brendan must figure out where his allegiances lie-with the Faeries or with humans. I was surprised by how funny the story was too; there are footnotes and hilarious asides to the main action throughout the story.   

 
Hearts at Stake, The Drake Chronicles #1 by Alyxandra Harvey
 
I personally don't think the popularity of vampires in teen fiction is going anywhere anytime soon. Twilight was a good read at the time, but Hearts at Stake, the first book in The Drake Chronicles series by Canadian author Alyxandra Harvey, is something different. It's funny and the story centers on characters around the vampires, as mush as on the undead themselves.
 
Solange Drake is a vampire princess, and unique as a creature in that she's the only vampire to have ever been born, not created. And she's in danger. She and her royal family have enemies on all sides, including a bounty hunter intent on revenge for his father's death. When Solange is kidnapped by a rival vamp queen, her human friend Lucy has to team up with Solange's overprotective brother to find her.
 
Hearts at Stake has a double romance as the four main characters battle to help Solange retain her true role as future vampire queen. A refreshing break from the usual vampire theme.
Fun Ideas for March Break!
  
   
 
*New and Notable*
Click on picture to see availability or to order 
 
      
    
 
We've Got Issues by Judith Warner
The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj
Union Atlantic Adam Haslett
Big Girl by Danielle Steel
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Marry Him by Lori Gottlieb
Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Infinite Possibilities by Mike Dooley
 
*New* in Paperback!

 
Click on picture to see availability:

 

 Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home by Maria Finn
Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris
Skim by Mariko Tamaki
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Columbine by Dave Cullen
It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

 

The Fine Print

 

Words Worth has a few entertaining blogs! Our main blog, a Teen blog, and a Book Club Blog. We are on facebook but not Twitter.
 

WWB provides books for off-site events at Perimeter Institute and CIGI events, among many others. Contact us to have books at your event.  

 

 

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