SUNDAY, January 31, 2010
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." (Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye)Reclusive author Jerome David Salinger died on Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. Following the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became one of the world's most admired authors. Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of the novel, spoke to adolescents in a rebellious voice they recognized as their own. Salinger withdrew from public life and the fame that Catcher in the Rye brought to him. He had not published anything since the 1960s and had not been interviewed since 1980. In a Boston Globe interview that year, he said, "I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it."
Tomorrow night, Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 6:30pm RiverRun Bookstore and the Wiggin Memorial Library in Stratham present novelist Katharine Weber, reading from True Confections. Weber will read at the library which is located at 10 Bunker Hill Avenue in Stratham, New Hampshire.
The Big Fish of Barston Falls by Jack Noon (Moose Country Press, 1995)Since the Great Meredith Rotary Fishing Derby is this weekend (January 30-31, 2010) it seems appropriate to choose a fish tale for this week's book.
"In the summer of 1822 twelve-year-old Sue Reckford and Malik, an old man and one of the few Abenakis left in the Connecticut River valley, fish together in the river at the Vermont village of Barston Falls. They catch perch every day and trade them in the village square.
In response to a teasing bet from the oldest settler in the village about the size of the fish, Malik sets out to catch something bigger. He and Sue start fishing out in the big eddy below the falls and there they make an astounding discovery." (jacket copy)
The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick (The Blue Sky Press, 2009)"Philbrick (Freak the Mighty) offers rip-roaring adventure in this Civil War–era novel featuring a mistreated orphan who doesn't let truth stand in the way of spinning a good yarn. When his guardian, Uncle Squinton—the meanest man in the entire state of Maine—sells off Homer P. Figg's older brother, Harold, to take a rich man's son's place in the Union army, Homer can't just stand around doing nothing. Determined to alert the authorities (and his brother) that Harold is too young to be a soldier, the plucky narrator traces the path of the regiment. He faces many dangers, including an abduction or two, and being robbed and thrown in with the pigs, and joining the Caravan of Miracles before landing smack in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg, where he reunites with his brother and more or less drives the Confederates away. The book wouldn't be nearly as much fun without Homer's tall tales, but there are serious moments, too, and the horror of war and injustice of slavery ring clearly above the din of playful exaggerations." (from Publishers Weekly)
White on White: Churches of Rural New England by Steve Rosenthal (Monacelli Press, 2009)"The early churches of New England hold a special place in the American consciousness, revered for their physical beauty, simplicity, and elegance and for their role in the early history of this country. Places of worship they were and are, but they are also icons of a particularly American sensibility and artistic vision. Photographer Steve Rosenthal has traveled throughout the northeast capturing the gems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and tracing the evolution of church styles from the early, dramatically simple meetinghouse form through the changing patterns of Greek and Gothic revivals. His photographs capture the intrinsic beauty of the architecture while creating a world of rich order and rational light. He has frozen in time the New England buildings that may soon be—or have already been—lost in a chaotic, contemporary world."
