Every month the readheads pick one book that all three of us read and review. Our book for August is Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.

Synopsis from Publisher’s Weekly:

Quentin Coldwater, a Brooklyn high school student devoted to a children’s series set in the Narnia-like world of Fillory, is leading an aimless existence until he’s tapped to enter a mysterious portal that leads to Brakebills College, an exclusive academy where he’s taught magic. Coldwater, whose special gifts enable him to skip grades, finds his family’s world mundane and domestic when he returns home for vacation. He loses his innocence after a prank unintentionally allows a powerful evil force known only as the Beast to enter the college and wreak havoc. Eventually, Coldwater’s powers are put to the test when he learns that Fillory is a real place and how he can journey there. Genre fans will easily pick up the many nods to J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien in the climactic battle between the bad guy and a magician.

Check back at the end of the month to see what we thought of this work!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we share a “teaser” from a book we’re currently reading. Want to join in? Here’s what you do:

1. Find a book you’re currently reading
2. Share two sentences from a random page
3. Comment on this post to share them with us! Don’t forget to include the title & author as well.

Sina’s current read: Njál’s Saga

Did you ever hear how Thor challenged Christ to a duel, and Christ did not dare to accept the challenge?

.

Kim’s current (favorite historical fiction re)read: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

A heavy weight struck me hard in the lower back and I pitched forward at full length, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of me. Rough hands flipped me onto my back, and Captain Jonathan Randall rose to his knees above me. He was breathing heavily and had lost his sword in the chase. He looked disheveled, dirty, and thoroughly annoyed.

Ranjana’s current read: Don’t Be Such A Scientist by Randy Olson

Again I shrug and smile – and even make the fatal mistake of saying, “I’m not feeling anything.” To which I should have added, “Why should I? I’m a scientist.”

Well, that’s what triggered the final eruption.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we share a “teaser” from a book we’re currently reading. Want to join in? Here’s what you do:

1. Find a book you’re currently reading
2. Share two sentences from a random page
3. Comment on this post to share them with us! Don’t forget to include the title & author as well.

Sina’s current read: Father Brown by GK Chesterton

I’m all for making a policeman into sausages… It’s a better definition of socialism than some recently given.

Ranjana’s current read: Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond by Lillian R. Lieber

On the contrary,
mathematics is way out in front
as regards freedom of speech,
but it is LIMITED so as
NOT to permit PARADOX.
THERE
is FREEDOM to GROW, to PROGRESS,
THERE
is REAL THINKING,
THERE
lies the way to
SUVIVAL,
to LIFE.

ETA: Kim’s current read: Wildthorn by Jane England.

But this isn’t a home. the shodows of bars fell across the carpet.
“An asylum for the insane.”
But I’m not insane. So why am I here?

Wildthorn will be out in print this fall, but is already available for Kindle!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we share a “teaser” from a book we’re currently reading. Want to join in? Here’s what you do:

1. Find a book you’re currently reading
2. Share two sentences from a random page
3. Comment on this post to share them with us! Don’t forget to include the title & author as well.

This week Kim and Sina aren’t around to post their teaser, so you’re just getting the one. Back to regularly scheduled programming next week!

Ranjana’s current read: The City and The City by China Miéville.

Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.

From Publishers Weekly:

Better known for New Weird fantasies (Perdido Street Station, etc.), bestseller Miéville offers an outstanding take on police procedurals with this barely speculative novel. Twin southern European cities Beszel and Ul Qoma coexist in the same physical location, separated by their citizens’ determination to see only one city at a time. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad roams through the intertwined but separate cultures as he investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, who believed that a third city, Orciny, hides in the blind spots between Beszel and Ul Qoma. As Mahalia’s friends disappear and revolution brews, Tyador is forced to consider the idea that someone in unseen Orciny is manipulating the other cities. Through this exaggerated metaphor of segregation, Miéville skillfully examines the illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities.

A little late with our usual link-round up this week, but just think of this as your reward for getting through another Monday! Kick back and enjoy:

• Why silence is replacing the rejection letter
• A summer-reading community dedicated to reading the world’s first novel
• Check out the prelude, prologue, and first three chapters of fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson’s latest book
• Find out what Americans used to read
• 20 things you never knew about Shakespeare
• The top ten “troubled males” in fiction
• The New York Times Student Challenge summer reading project
• Politicians and their ghostwriters
• Why e-books are actually saving the printed book

I’ve been pretty bad about reviewing our past books of the month, which is unfortunate because I actually have read all of them! To save you from some epic tl;dr and as the only way to finally be done with these books, I’m jamming them all into one post. This way I can give some short commentary instead of headdesking my way through full-fledged reviews for each book.

January’s book of the month was Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way. The book elegantly recounts our species’ interest in space, from ancient Sumerians and Greeks through Copernicus to modern-day theoretical physicists. While our knowledge of the universe seems infinitely superior to our ancestors, Ferris reminds us that:

Science is young. whether it will survive long enough to become old depends upon our sanity and courage and vigor, and, as one always must add in this nuclear age, upon whether we blow ourselves up first. “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse,” as Sophocles said, and the knowledge of how the stars shine is very great, and its dark side is very dark indeed.

I love Ferris’ writing style throughout this book, especially when recounting the more personal histories of various scientists. Genius did seem to walk hand in hand with madness (or at least extreme eccentricity) for Kepler, Newton, etc… and Ferris’ gently amusing treatment of them made their stories all the more enjoyable. In fact, I loved his writing so much I recently purchased another book of his, called Seeing In the Dark – all about backyard astronomers. I strongly believe that the communications gap (more like gaping chasm, really) between scientists and non-scientists needs to be closed, and if there were only more writers like Ferris, that would happen all the more quickly.

Final Grade: A

In April we read another nonfiction, David Grann’s The Lost City of Z. Grann intertwines two epic voyages in one double biography. The first was British explorer Percy Fawcett’s quest to find an ancient, beautiful, and wondrously rich civilization called “Z” that was supposedly hidden in the Amazon jungle – instead, his entire party disappeared and despite following searches, no clues were ever discovered as to their fate. The second voyage was Grann’s own attempt to retrace the explorer’s steps some 75 years later to discover what happened to the missing expedition. Neither journey lacked for adventure; in fact, the entire history of the search for Z is one larger-than-life story after another:

[E]verything in this story is true: a movie star really was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows; and at stake amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World.

I enjoyed each story Grann told – his writing was perfectly suspenseful, mysterious, amusing, and serious in all the right places – but the format really didn’t work for me. Much like our February’s book of the month, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, the biographies alternate every chapter. For the White City, this worked beautifully. For Lost City of Z, not so much. For me the difference was that Larson’s stories were synchronous and both in the third person, while Grann’s stories were asynchronous and awkwardly shifting from first person to third. About 80 pages in I finally realized I was going to have to read Fawcett’s story all the way through first, and then come back to read Grann’s. When read in this way, the book flowed much more smoothly and was immensely more enjoyable.

Final Grade: B

Last month’s book choice was The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho. The premise behind this book is that it is a collection of statements made by acquaintances, friends, and family of a murder victim named Athena. It’s only by tying all perspectives together that the reader can begin to understand Athena’s existence.

Who knows, perhaps she sought death the way a shipwrecked victim sees an island. She must have stood late at night in many a Tube station, waiting for muggers who never came. She must have walked through the most dangerous parts of London in search of a murderer who never appeared or perhaps tried to provoke the anger of the physically strong, who refused to get angry. Until finally, she managed to get herself brutally murdered.

After beginning with her death, the transcripts then move forward chronologically from her adoption at a young age, to her early marriage and career restlessness, to her search for her birth mother and the Mother goddess, all of which stemmed from an intrinsic wanderlust that she could never satisfy.

Having previously been impressed by Coelho’s The Alchemist, I was really looking forward to this book, and I was only very slightly disappointed in my expectations. I sometimes felt that description needlessly overpowered the plot, slowing the story down without enriching my appreciation of the objects described. However, the flow of Athena’s story was impressively smooth, given the shifting narrative voices, and the surprising twist at the end of the book was neither too obvious nor too out of left field, leaving me pleased that my suspicions were correct. In the end the novel was not about Athena at all, but about her impact on those telling her story.

Final Grade: B

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we share a “teaser” from a book we’re currently reading. Want to join in? Here’s what you do:

1. Find a book you’re currently reading
2. Share two sentences from a random page
3. Comment on this post to share them with us! Don’t forget to include the title & author as well.

Kim’s current read: Book 1 from The Darkest Powers Series, The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong

Then it touched me again. Long, dry, cold, fingerlike things tickled across the back of my neck. An indescribable smacking, crackling, rustling sound set my every hair on end. The sound repeated until it became not a sound but a word. A horrible mangled word that couldn’t come from any human throat, a single word endlessly repeated.
“Help. Help. Help.”

Ranjana’s current read: Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris

The spectacle of Saturn seen through a telescope has turned more people into stargazers than any other – or such is my impression, from asking amateur and professional astronomers over the years about how they got interested in the night sky. Reactions to seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time tend to run the lines of “Oh, my God!” “Amazing!” and “Is that real?”

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly book meme hosted by Should Be Reading, where we share a “teaser” from a book we’re currently reading. Want to join in? Here’s what you do:

1. Find a book you’re currently reading
2. Share two sentences from a random page
3. Comment on this post to share them with us! Don’t forget to include the title & author as well.

Kim’s current read: The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

They sat for a moment, simply looking. The smell from their plates rose with the last bits of steam, butter releasing whispers of shallots and hazelnuts. Antonia raised a bite to her mouth. A quick crunch of hazelnut, and then the pasta gave way easily to her teeth, the pumpkin melting across her tongue, warm and dense, with soft, spicy undercurrents of nutmeg. It felt like going home, and she relaxed into her chair with a sign of happiness.

Ranjana’s current read: The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

But on that other gray morning, in the foyer of a gloomy hotel, all I was concerned about was whether my interpreter would manage to get a car and enough petrol so that I could carry out some final research for the BBC documentary I was working on. He was taking a very long time, and I was beginning to have my doubts.

Jumping on the nostalgia bandwagon from Children’s Book Week, I’d thought I’d share a few thoughts on how my reading habits as a kid have influenced my life.

It’s not just that my reading tastes today are an extension of what I appreciated as a kid (for example, I’ve moved on steadily from Agatha Christie short stories to P.D. James and Reginald Hill novels), but that my reading patterns are also the same. I usually find myself torn between what I actually want to read, and what that sneaky creeping voice in my head that tells me what I should be reading. That’s why one of my current projects is the Well-Stocked Bookcase.

Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment this argument began – my 4th grade summer reading list. We were supposed to read books that had won Newbery Medals, and the minute I held the list in my hands I knew my mission. I was going to defeat every other kid in class. I was going to read every. single. book. Even the awful ones, like The Giver and Walk Two Moons. So I know that despite not particularly wanting to read The Maltese Falcon (saw the movie, good enough for me!), I’m going to, because the competitive little 9 year old in me wants to dominate this newest list and won’t shut up until I do.

I can’t help but credit my parents for cultivating my love of reading as a kid. Sure, I loved playing Super Mario Bros. and Command & Conquer, but I also loved that there were bookshelves in every room of our house and I could try reading whatever I wanted. You have no idea how cool I felt knowing I was reading a book meant for grown-ups. (Although upon further reflection, The Joy Luck Club was about as boring to a 10 year old as it was to a high school senior.)

I also remember the almost weekly visits to Children’s Book World down on Pico & Prosser to read the next book in the Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown series. And a few times I remember my brother and I being babysat by the Borders in Westwood – we’d mosey around the store and read for a few hours until we were wanted again. It was a pretty sweet trick – my parents knew that any time my brother and I spent reading was time we weren’t trying to drive each other crazy.

My parents view reading as a fun, relaxing activity, and I’ve inherited that attitude from them. Don’t get me wrong, ask me to come play Mario Kart and I’ll happily hurl some tortoise shells, but leave me alone with no work to do and I’ll inevitably start reading something. The format may be different – I may be turning physical pages, or flicking digital ones, or even having my computer’s text-to-speech read aloud to me while I crochet (imagine a robot reading a romance novel – it’s hilarious. And possibly the best mood booster this side of prescription pharmaceuticals.) But the passion remains the same. I know that my love of stories comes straight from my childhood, when my parents encouraged me to read and never told me I couldn’t try the “grown-up” books on their shelves.

Hey everyone! How’s your Thursday going? (It is Thursday, right? This week has seriously been dragging!) We’re right in the middle of Children’s Book Week 2010, which is great timing for Borders’ new summer reading challenge for kids! Kids under 12 who read ten books by August 26, 2010 can pick up a free book at Borders. For the deets, visit the Borders “Double Dog Dare” info page. For more info on CBW events, check out their website!

That’s all for now. Expect some more CBW-related goodness in the next few days! Happy reading