I have been racking my brain for the last book for the Book a month Challenge. The theme is light and could be light reading, festivals of light, the science of light, titles with light in them or even something else. I don't know why it was so hard. I definitely did some light reading this month and I often read something during Advent about light.

However the book I have ended up with is A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation. I have been reading this book since some time in November so it should have popped into my brain before this. Luci Shaw has put together a wonderful compilation of religious poetry. I found poems by people I knew like C. S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle and many poets that I had never encountered before.

These are amazing poems; they are well written, thoughtful and thank goodness not sappy. My mental definition of religious poetry is always rhyming and not very deep. Not flattering, but that is what is stuck in my head. This is not at all true of this anthology.

This is an excellent book to end the year on. I once again want to thank Katie for her idea. It did help focus my reading a bit this year. I am not sure I will do another book challenge this year, but I will probably start one for work during our next fiscal year. We shall see... the best laid plans.

So what is your image of the Pilgrims and their relationship with the Native Americans? I have this mental image of Pilgrims in black and white outfits and Indians in feathers and buckskins. And of course they all sit down to a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner.

I had hoped that in reading this book, I would find things about the Pilgrims to be thankful for. The BAM challenge was to be about thanks and giving. I did not find what I was looking for, but this was a fascinating book.

Philbrick dispelled many of my preconceptions. Mayflower gave me a better idea about why the Pilgrims came to North America; what the difference is between Pilgrims and Puritans and what the relationship between the Native Americans and the Pilgrim interlopers was like. My history classes did not do justice to anyone from this time period.

Several things amazed me. First of all I had no idea how much we actually know about the Native Americans of New England. I am truly unaware of Native American history and culture. I wouldn't even know where to begin reading, if I wanted to know more.

Secondly, the Europeans were alarmingly convinced that they were the norm. This is an issue for most of us - we can only see the world through our own eyes. However, I am sorry that few of the people who came to this continent could see those who are native as actual people. Humans don't seem to learn quickly.

I wish that I found Philbrick's style a bit more compelling. However, I am more than happy that I have a better idea about some of our early history. So many books show me how little I know. Philbrick did a good job of teaching me more about my country. And for that I should be thankful.

I am almost done my 11th BAM book and want to again thank Katie for this challenge. I am seriously thinking about using this concept next year with our Readers' Advisory training. I haven't worked out all the bugs, but I need to make some major changes to how we do RA.

My book for the November challenge is Mayflower: a story of courage community and war by Nathaniel Philbrick. I now know more about the pilgrims than most of my friends would ever want me to know. My habit, when I learn something new, is to tell the world. Just ask some people I know about how I keep boring them with stuff from The Ominvore's Dilemma.

I am now going to go off and finish the book.

Not that anyone is reading this blog besides myself, but I wrote all this while waiting for the election results and then did not react at all to the election. HURRAH!!! HURRAH!!! HURRAH!!! Now on to the October BAM challenge.

Last month's challenge for BAM was books that haunt. I really don't like ghost tales; I am definitely not into horror and so, I was trying to come up with a book that haunted me in other ways. I got to the end of the month and had not read anything new that I found haunting. I read a bunch of books in October - 12 according to my list at Good Reads, but they were so memorable that I thought I could use them.

So I looked over my list and realized that two books that I read tie to a subject that has haunted me since childhood. I recently read both The Book Thief and We Are on Our Own. Both of these books are about the Holocaust. A topic that probably haunts lots of people.

I can't remember when I read A Diary of a Young Girl, but I think that is the first book that I read that showed me the horrors of World War II. I can still see (in my mind's eye) the movies we saw in high school history class.

I am of German descent, supposedly. None of my immediate relatives were in Germany at the time of the Holocaust. However, this connection has bothered me a lot. Would I have behaved differently than many of the German people living then?

The Book Thief is a very different take on this part of history. Death is telling the story and Death sees us very differently than we would like to be seen. This is an amazing story. Zusak is young, I think, but he has an old mind. To conceive of all this and to get it on paper. Just phenomenal.

Main characters are Liesel, Max, Rudy, Hans and Rose. They are all well imagined. I am still thinking about Liesel and her books. I have read lots of books about WWII. most centering firmly on the Holocaust. This is less on the actual death camps, but the atrocities are still there. Thanks to the way Zusak writes, I will be haunted by this book for a long, long time.

The other haunting book about WW II that I have recently read was We Are on Our Own by Miriam Katin. This book preoccupies my mind for several reasons. One, it is a story about WWII that is not familiar to me. I had never thought much about those who tried to escape. What Miriam and her mother went through was very difficult.

Two, the drawings of this "graohic novel" are very evocative. Most of the GNs I have read have been black and white, and very clear. These drawings are in colored pencil and are less clear. As one reviewer stated - they look like a child's memory. Really true.

However, I am mostly disturbed by where Katin's experiences put her with her religion. She has been left haunted herself - without a clear belief system. This is hard for me to imagine.

Hopefully all this explains how I was haunted for the October BAM challenge.

I am looking forward to November and the topic of giving.

Change is the topic of the month at the BAM challenge blog. I had lots of ideas about what I was going to read. Change is part of our life at PRL and so I figured I would read something about coping with change or managing change - you know, the books good managers read to help them and their staff cope.

However, I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston just the other day. And all I could think about after finishing the book was talk about change!

I had read this book about 25 years ago when I had just moved to Virginia. I found it to be powerful, moving and significant at that time. My library is about to do this book as our Big Read, so I decided to listen to it this time around. I had forgotten how powerful Hurston's writing is. She had an utterly amazing way with words.

Janey's life involved so much change. Janey thought she knew who she was, but other people had other ideas. Her grandmother, her husbands, her neighbors all thought they knew who Janey should be. It is not until the end of the book that the reader and Janey learn the truth about how a woman might be.

And then there is the change (and lack thereof) since Hurston wrote this book. It has been 71 years since Their Eyes was published. Hurston was given grief for not uplifting her race. What would happen if this book was published now?

African-Americans and women of all colors have made advances in our society. However, we still struggle with our place as it is assigned by this culture. You only have to look at our upcoming election to see that.

I had not expected much change by listening rather than reading. I was wrong. This was so much better for me as an audio book. The book is written in dialect which I can read, but I really did not hear until it was read to me. I am blown away. Janey's story is the story of one of the most wonderful women I have ever read about.

I read this book because it is our next Big Read adventure at PRL. I have changed my mind about doing TEWWG for The Big Read. This story is one that more people should encounter. I hope we can do that through this reading program.

Lastly there is the change in my life since I read this book 25 years ago. I am not a re-reader. There are so many books out there waiting for me. However, I have changed since I read this book for my book group. It was good to encounter Janey and Tea Cake once again. I see their lives in a whole new light since I am older.

Everyone should read this book.

It is not like I forgot that Gretel Erhlich existed. I knew she had published new books since her book about being struck by lightning (A Match to the Heart), I just hadn't read anything by her for a really long time.

What a mistake. Now I will have to go back to find the books I haven't read. Ehrlich is a superb writer. She has a way with words that made me want to read The Future of Ice out loud. From the beginning of the book until the end I was so envious. I have no desire to write for publication, but who wouldn't be jealous of Ehrlich's phrasing. Listen to this:
"All I know is this - and maybe I don't know it at all: The inner world is the one where
the cold flame of passion is used to set ourselves free from desire."

The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold was published in 2004. It was a wake-up call about the possible end of winter and what that would do for our world. Ehrlich was one among many who were talking about global warming long before Gore. I don't object to Al Gore's books, but they are not as beautiful as this one.

I suggested cold for the BAM challenge because by August I am tired of Virginia summers. I was not sorry to find my self in some of the coldest places on this planet with Ehrlich. However, I did not expect to be so moved by my BAM choice. Thank you Gretel Ehrlich, for writing with such passion about your winter experiences.

The July BAM topic is Independence. In my usual convoluted way, I found Blindsided by Richard M. Cohen. I am not sure why I thought a book by a man who lives with multiple sclerosis and who has survived two bouts of colon cancer was the book to read for the topic of independence. I know that when I started the book I was thinking that anyone with a chronic illness might be interdependent rather than independent, but that is probably because I don't deal with chronic illness. Now, having read the book, I would say that Cohen is very independent - maybe too much so for his own good.

I read a couple of reviews before I read Blindsided. I had heard some things about Richard M. Cohen since his wife is Meredith Vieira, anchor on the Today Show. He is an amazing human being. How he and his family have managed is beyond me. MS has been part of Cohen's family for three generations - his father and grandmother both had it. Cohen tells his story well and it is evident that he has great skills as a writer.

However, this book and I did not meet each other at the right time. I did not have enough patience for the style and may be even the content. As a relatively healthy person, maybe I just can't face the scary parts of chronic illness. So although this is a well written book, I just couldn't get into it.

So this is not really a review. I may try to read other things by Cohen. If I need to know more about chronic illness - I may even come back to this particular book. I did not do this book justice, but sometimes that happens. On to next month's challenge.

Here it is, almost a month since I posted last. Shameful, shameful. I may be the only person actually reading my blog, but I promised myself that I would keep it up in some way or another.

All I have to say at this moment, I finished two more books from my TBR pile and I gave the BAM challenge an idea for August. The first book is Quiet in His Presence which I liked very much. I am not crazy about the "his" part, but I will get into that when I post my review on Shelfari. The second book was The Bridal Wreath - definitely not my favorite book. More as I said - on Shelfari.

For the BAM challenge we will be doing cold books in August. Right now I need to finish the book I am reading for the July challenge which is independence.

Life is speeding along - our vacation, even at two weeks, was too short.

Title: The Rover
Author: Mel Odom
Genre: Fantasy
Reading Level: Adult

June's BAM challenge is Knowledge. Katie gave us lots of ideas, but I had had good luck searching our catalog and NoveList Plus before, so I started with our catalog (http://www.pamcat.org/). Found two books with knowledge in the title that looked good, until they came in delivery.

Using NoveList Plus, I just entered "knowledge" as a search term and limited it to adult and fiction. What I got was The Rover by Mel Odom (among other things). I remember that when I purchased this for our library, this fantasy intrigued me, but I did not remember that Wick (the main character) is a Third Level Librarian in the Vault of all Known Knowledge. So The Rover looked like the perfect choice.

I happen to love books where I get to follow characters around a world that I am unfamiliar with. It can be Tudor England, modern day Kansas, or a spaceship winging its way to a new planet. I am not picky about genre (the only one I don't read is westerns) and the pacing can be fast or slow. I mostly want to fall into a world and live there for a few hours or days.

I lived with Edgewick Lamplighter for most of last weekend. I had no plans except to relax and read and so I opened The Rover with great anticipation. Odom did not steer me wrong. He has created a wonderful world with pirate, trolls, elves and great battles of good versus evil. Just what I needed for an extended read.

Edgewick Lamplighter has been a third level librarian for way too long. He works in the Vault of all Known Knowledge where they are busily cataloging the history of the world. He spends much of his free time reading books from the Hralbomm Wing of the library - these books are full of frivolity, which apparently has "no place in the proper history of the world."

Fortunately for us all, Edgewick, Wick to his friends, has to deliver a message for the Grandmagister. And although I could see that this was going to give Wick the opportunity for quest, I could not have ever guessed how the author was going to get Wick the adventures of a lifetime.

The story is a magical quest, like The Hobbit and even a bit like Harry Potter, but Odom took familiar stories and made them new. I give The Rover 3 stars (***). Next time I have a long weekend, the next volume, The Destruction of the Books is probably going along.

The May Book a Month Challenge. This continues to be a lot of fun.

I may be stretching the point here, but I really want to review Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario while it is still fresh in my mind. This was the book under discussion at my book group last night and it was a great choice. We had much more discussion than I had thought possible and the conversation may have started with immigration and Enrique, but we were all over the map.

Nazario is a reporter for the LA Times and after a conversation with the woman who cleans her house, Nazario felt compelled to research one small aspect of immigration from Central America. She managed to do a story for her paper on the _____ thousand children who ride the trains through Mexico to get to the US.

By following Enrique on his quest to be reunited with his mother (See there is the connection to this month's topic), Sonia Nazario put herself and us in these children's shoes. It is an amazing story.

All of us in the group had our moments with this book where we were depressed or overwhelmed. I won't lie - there are alot of difficult events in this book. However, I highly recommend this tale for several reasons.

1. This is a side of immigration that most of us know nothing about.


2. You will be amazed by the journey Enrique makes by himself.


3. What Sonia Nazario does as a reporter will blow you away.

I give this book a 9 on 1-10 scale. I think that this ranks up there with other good social issue nonfiction (like Nickel and Dimed) and I plan to pay a bit more attention to immigration as we go through the upcoming election.