Ruby Tuesday

All for the teacher

What have you got this week for Ruby Tuesday?

Fascinating Book Covers

 

Minimalism is a popular style used in graphic design and illustration, and is widely used in book cover design, helping the user to focus on the title of the book and the authors name. The style is often elegant, and uses icon design and simple photography and illustration on a regular basis.

Reposted from The Inspiration Blog

Birth Year Reading Challenge

I'm joining this great reading challenge. Go over to Hotchpotcafe and meet C.S. and J.G.

BIRTH YEAR READING CHALLENGE

What books were published the year you were born? This challenge encourages you to find out, and then read some of them. You might even draw some conclusions about what was going on in the literary world that year.

Wikipedia has lists of books by year published. Literary prize lists are a great source, and Googling “best books of _____” will also give you interesting results.

Ready to join? Leave a comment and a link to your post! (And we promise no one will make any snarky comments about your age.)

RULES

1. Join anytime between now and November 30, 2010. The challenge ends at midnight EST on December 31, 2010.

2. Books may come from your TBR pile or list, but they don’t have to.

3. Overlaps with other challenges are allowed and encouraged.

4. Change your list at any time.

5. Reviews and reactions are encouraged, but you don’t need to have a blog to participate.

6. All genres and formats are eligible. If it’s a book, you can count it.

7. One candle is awarded for each qualifying book you read. There is no limit on how few or how many candles you can earn.

PRIZES

When you meet your reading goal, we’ll let you select a book from our library – most likely a gently used trade paperback – and mail it to you. But keep reading because . . .

GRAND PRIZEOn January 1, 2011, the three readers who’ve earned the most candles will be entered into a drawing to win a collectible first edition/first printing copy of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008.

Participating:

C.S. (host: not eligible for prizes) (see comments for list)

Hip Chick of Hip Chick's Home

Christina of Readers of Romance (see comments for list)

maryt/theteach of Work of the Poet

J.G. (host: not eligible for prizes)

Julie of My Book Retreat

Stephanie V of Hookin', Knittin' & Livin'

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Here's my list for my birth year*:

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Harper)

Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith (Reynal)

Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham (Doubleday)

Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge (Coward-McCann)

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor (MacMillan)

The Green Years by A. J. Cronin (Little, Brown)

A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

* 1944

I've already read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Razor's Edge but I really want to read the others.

I'm an adjucnt professor in the Continuing Education Department of a local community college. I teach literature to 3 classes of older women. We are reading all the time. I've been at it for 12 years. I may assign some of these to my classes in the Fall.

Thanks, Hip Chick, for introducing me to this challenge!

Photo Hunters - heavy

tnchick's word for our Saturday Photo Hunt is HEAVY.

I have a few photos of HEAVY books.

Here is the HEAVIEST book I own...

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language - The Unabridged Edition.
Jess Stein, Editor in Chief
Published in 1966
2059 pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote the New York Times review of this dictionary entitled "The Latest Word" in October 1966.

Here are two other HEAVY books I own.

theteach

Photo Hunters - Narrow

tnchick's word for our Saturday Photo Hunt is NARROW.

There are fat books (like Tom Brokaw's book, Boom) and NARROW books. Two very NARROW books on this shelf in my office are Book Lovers Quotations given to me as a gift and Pink Geishas which is a collection of my poems.

Here's a quote from Book Lovers Quotations:

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones shoould be labelled 'This could change your life'." ~Helen Exley

theteach

Bernstein understands Hillary

From a New York Times review:

There are two new books about Hillary out there for our consideration:

In the last month and a half, three extremely well-respected journalists have come out with two books that attempt to divine who the real Hillary might be. One, Carl Bernstein’s “Woman in Charge,” is plainly sympathetic, while the other, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s “Her Way,” is more severe. (If there’s any doubt as to which is which, just consult the two book covers — Gerth and Van Natta’s shows Hillary in, quite literally, a much harsher light.)

The book covers are below:








































Both go off the rails at the moments their grand unified theories can’t quite accommodate the facts, and both practically narcotize readers when they descend into rote recapitulations of the Clinton scandals.

But it’s Bernstein who ultimately makes the sharper, more lasting impression, despite the soft-focus portrait of the junior senator from New York on his cover. While he plows some of the same emotional terrain as previous Hillary biographers — notably Gail Sheehy in “Hillary’s Choice” — his book holds together as a piece of writing, and he keeps the psychobabble to a merciful minimum.

Bernstein is best known for his coverage of Watergate with Bob Woodward six administrations ago.

But his book suggests that it isn’t his executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it’s his bona fides as a lousy husband.

Like Bill Clinton, Bernstein carried on a very public affair while married to a formidable, high-profile woman and one of the perverse strengths of his book is his intuitive understanding — a sinner’s lament, really — of what happens to a proud woman when she’s intimately betrayed and publicly humiliated.

The blockbuster news item to come out of Bernstein’s book was that Hillary contemplated running for governor of Arkansas in 1989, when she discovered her husband was thinking about abandoning his post and his family for another woman.

Read the rest of the article by Jennifer Senior.

theteach

Books: What to Get Rid of, What to Keep

A scrappy New Yorker, (Abigail A. Frankfurt) decides to take an apartment in the Midwest for $450. because she can't afford living in the City anymore. She takes care of all her belongings, I mean she gets rid of most of her belongings: kitchen utensils (easy), her cat (decides not to), clothing (she calls friends). (New York Times, Feb. 25, 2007)

BUT the BOOKS, she's got too many, she has to travel light (the apartment is not that big).

What goes (she gives them away): Graham Greene, Sedaris, Don DeLillo, the collected works of Poe, Aldous Huxley, Studs Terkel, “A Million Little ...,” all the books on how to be an angry left-wing feminist, anything by the Beats, everything by Tolstoy except “Anna Karenina,” out with Atwood and Capote, Hubert Selby Jr., Mailer and a bunch of other stuff.

WHAT I keep: Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” (given to me in seventh grade; I will never give it away); “Swann’s Way” (always almost finished, heavily underlined; I’ll get through it); Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (my Mom gave it to me when I turned 11); Robert Coover’s “Briar Rose” (when I finished it, I wanted to marry him); Donald Barthelme’s “60 Stories” (if I am on a date with someone and he says he does not like Barthelme, I walk out).

While I tell you the rest of the article is a must read, here's Ms. Frankfurt's conclusion...

When you are a native New Yorker, you bring the city with you wherever you go; like the books I lug around, the pages are part of my skin. New York is my nationality. Like a great line, written by an enduring author, it simply sinks in.

So my question is now what are the books you would keep and which ones would you get rid of?

theteach :)