Before I announce the winners, I want say thank you to everyone for participating. I enjoyed the celebration of Dads and/or the teachers you had in school and the powerful inspirational lessons you’ve learned through life.

Without further ado, the winners are:

Rebecca S. Cox
kim v
Dixie
Christina McWaters
K Peters

Each of you will be receiving an email from Old Musty Books (please check your junk folder if you don’t see it).

The first half of Deviations: Covenant was one of the most vulgar reading experiences I’ve ever had.  My stomach churned, my lip curled in disgust and I contemplated the “I’m sorry I can’t review this” email to the author.

But then things changed. 

I began to be entrenched in the story and what it was REALLY about.  This series is about social cannibalism.  Specifically, its about one society using the resources of another to guarantee their continued existence.  According to the author’s site:

The series focuses on the social, ethical, and spiritual dilemmas surrounding both the literal cannibalism of the societies involved and the many ways in which their different communities feed off each other.

Allow me to get really specific for a few seconds.  The Masari eat the Yata, in exchange for their meat, the Masari consider the Yata gods, and provide them with the resources they need to survive.  There is a covenant between the two societies which makes the killing of the Yata ritualistic and demands the killing only takes place on Meat Day.  The preparation, the hunt and the post hunt is a beautiful spiritual process.  The doomed Yata even gives his/her blessings before the Masari takes his/her life.

There are people in both societies who despise the Covenant.  One group of people hate the idea of having a dependence on another culture that requires them to kill to survive, and one group hates the idea of being revered as gods, and killed so the other culture can continue to thrive.  The inter-dependence between these cultures causes assention all around, but in all the years since the beginning of the Covenant, people have more or less accepted it.  But then the whole idea of the Covenant somewhat shatters when some Masari take in a Yata woman in the woods who was raised as livestock instead of a god.

Deviations: Covenant is about an important discovery TripStone (Masari) has made and about Gria’s (Yata) final preparations for dissolving the Covenant. Deviations: Appetite is about the two groups joining forces to help make the Yata less dependent on the Masari for goods and the Masari less dependent on the Covenant for their survival, while making it a fair fight for the Yata. It is also the beginning of the destruction of Destiny Farm - the place that raises Yata like livestock and then turns around and sells the Yata to Masari when they don’t/can’t hunt - oh and sells better weapons ot the Yata. These books are an interesting study in social cannibalism and the effect it has on different societies - the cannibals, the victims and the factions exploiting both.

It turns out I really enjoyed Deviations: Covenant and Deviations: Appetite and have wondered all week how they will resolve in the third book which comes out in December.  If you are looking for something different with a great story line, I would suggest reading these books.  They are very well written and draw the reader into the story, possibly against their will. There are places in the books that were so beautifully written, I forgot the passage was describing the eating of another human being.

There is a rawness to these books that might make one uncomfortable while reading, but will push you towards completion. I couldn’t help asking myself what would our lives be like if we were dependant on another race’s flesh and blood for our survival? Would the killing be ritualistic? Would we deify the other race? Would I be able to kill another human to ensure the survival of my family? And I gotta tell ya - the answers were disturbing.  Maybe NOW we don’t physically eat the meat of other people, but there sure has been a great deal of cannibalism in our history in one way or another.  In some ways, I NEED to read the third book - I need to see that it turns out fine for both the Yata and the Masari and they can come to a peaceful resolution with the Covenant dissolved. I NEED to know humanity will be okay.

The author, Elissa Malcohn gives the books away in downloadable form for free.  That’s right - she gives them away!  If you go here , she explains why she is giving them away.  She has also given me permission to post the downloadable links here.  These books are free, the download is free and I recommend adding them to your book stack for something a little different.  It probably goes without saying the content of these books are not really PG rated, so be prepared.  Push past the initial reaction of “this is just disgusting” and try to remember there’s a bigger picture here.  I promise, you won’t be disappointed.

Here is the link for downloading Deviations: Covenant

Here is the link for downloading Deviations: Appetite

I recently had the enormous pleasure of reading book one in the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series, The Lightning Thief. A young friend of mine had been reading the fourth and fifth books in this series and was so excited by this series that when the opportunity came to read the first book, I couldn’t pass it up.

Before I go further, let me tell you a little about twelve year old Percy Jackson.  He’s ADD; he’s always getting in trouble at school (he’s about to be kicked out of yet another school); and he appears to be dyslexic.  His father [supposedly] “went away” before he was born and never came back and his step father is not a very nice man. He’s the troubled kid we have all known at some point in our lives.  But…he’s not, really.

Percy’s story starts off by telling us:

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now.  Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to live a normal life.

See, Percy found out the Greek gods are real and living in America - Mt Olympus is on the 600th floor of the Empire State Building; he finds out his best friend is a satyr; and he’s about to be reliant on one of Athena’s daughter’s.  Oh, and his dad that went away - yeah, he’s one of the Olympians.

But, he didn’t know any of this until he vaporized a teacher on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.  This field trip, by the way, is organized by the latin teacher who just so happens to be a keeping an eye on our little demigod, Percy, and is a centaur named Chiron.  Yeah, you know, the creature who trained Achilles and Jason.

And thus, you have a good idea now about the neat adventure Percy is about to begin.  After he vaporizes his math teacher, he is taken to Camp Half-Blood, where he learns the Olympians - Zeus, Posedian and Hades - made a pact not to have children.  Well, his dad sort of went against the pact.  Percy starts his education, if you will, right before the start of a war between the gods.  He’s sent on a quest to find a missing item which will stop the whole thing.

Let’s get on to the review.  The Lightning Thief is a fun book!  I can completely see the draw to this series.  I would classify it as YA fantasy, however, not the same type of fantasy as say, Harry Potter or Eragon.  I learned nothing of use in either of those books. However, in The Lightning Thief, I remembered who did what in Greek Mythology to a large degree (though I’m not really sure how useful that is except for litary references). The Lightning Thief takes place in real places in America (well, except for Camp Half-Blood). And while both the two books mentioned above was about the quest and overcoming diversity, Percy Jackson had an added component that made it possible for the reader to really relate him.  Percy is a real kid with real challenges that most kids can actually relate to. He has a tough time in school, he has family challenges he’s not sure how to deal with, and he realizes he’s not so different when he’s introduced to kids just like him. And, sometimes for all of us, it takes being chased by a minotaur to realize we aren’t the only ones in the world dealing with [similar] challenges.

The Lightning Thief was well-written and full of action. There were a couple of places with a little drag, but nothing major.  It was written in language kids could understand and the characters appeared to be real.  I found myself wondering “what if” the Olympians really existed in our world and “what if” the things that happen in the world is a result of squabbles between the different gods. While this book is largely written with a polytheistic view of religion, I don’t think it would deter a young adult from a monotheistic view of religion.  There is no ritualistic worshiping of the many gods and goddesses in the book, and the gods, goddesses, and demigods are portrayed as biological parents, more than omniscience beings. (Just thought I’d through that out there because I could see this being a deterrent for some parents.)

I’m a sucker for quests - no matter how odd they seem. After I complete reading about someone’s quest, I always wonder what happens to the hero after the quest.  My young friend has warned me that in his opinion he thought book two was not as good as the rest of the books in the series.  Regardless, I am looking forward to reading them all and seeing how our hero, Percy, grows and what becomes of his life as a hero.

Old Musty Books collects personal information when you register for an Old Musty Books service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information to provide a better user experience.

Old Musty Books NEVER sells your personal information to any third party. Old Musty Books NEVER sends unsolicited email advertisements (i.e., Spam) to you. We collect your personal information to provide you with a customized user experience.

Old Musty Books uses cookies and other technologies to enhance and customize your user experience and to learn about how you use Old Musty Books services in order to improve the quality of our web site and content.

Old Musty Books’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.

We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content.

We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.

You may decline to provide personal information to us and/or refuse cookies in your browser, although some of our features or services may not function properly as a result.

What I really want you to do with these books is take a mini-vacation from the hustle and bustle of your life.  Summer may be a busy time to do this because the kids are out of school, we plan vacations that leave us feeling we need a vacation from our vacations and we have to balance it all with our jobs.  And with the economy the way it is, we may not even get that vacation at all.  What better way to take a little time out than taking a good book on a little mini-vacation?

Hachette is helping to facilitate this mini-vacation I’m talking about with the following ten books:

• The Secret Speech By Tom Smith ISBN: 0446402400
  
• Julie and Julia By Julie Powell ISBN: 031604427X
• Swimsuit By James Patterson , Maxine Paetro ISBN: 0316018775
• Obama’s BlackBerry By Kasper Hauser ISBN: 0316074357
• A Summer Affair By Elin Hilderbrand ISBN: 0316018619
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames By David Sedaris ISBN: 0316154687
• Any Minute By Joyce Meyer , Deborah Bedford ISBN: 0446582530
• The Book of Lies By Brad Meltzer ISBN: 0446616141
• Kill for Me By Karen Rose ISBN: 0446616931
• Miscarriage of Justice By “Kip” Gayden ISBN: 1599951975

All you have to do is leave me a comment telling me where your favorite place to read is.  I will run the contest until 11:59pm on July 3rd.  Five winners will be chosen and announced on July 6th.

Winners are restricted to US and Canadian residents. No PO Boxes please. Please also, remember to leave me your email address so I can contact you if you have won.

Bob is a crook, a liar, a thief and a murderer. He has traveled the world and can’t go back to some of the places he enjoyed the most, because of his crimes. He’s a racist, an alcoholic and an opportunist. He’s a crappy husband, an absent father, and yet, you get the sense that he does care about some people in general. Bob is the type of person you expect to see at the neighborhood dive, drinking way more whiskey than he probably should and weaving a tale of excitement that makes the young people in the bar envy his life of adventure, and not thinking until the next day (after the hangover has been nursed) what a freak that guy at the bar last night was.

He doesn’t see himself as a crook though:

“Because I think it is very wrong for a man to waste his opportunities. But a crook is a man who does not wait for opportunities; a crook is a man who makes his opportunities. I would never be a crook, because I would not choose to live by a life of crime.”

Bob Moore spends the the whole book explaining how he isn’t a crook. ‘I did this but, it was because of that.’ and ‘I killed a man, but it was because someone else said to, and I didn’t think before I pulled the trigger.’ He takes no responsibility for his actions and reasons that the crimes he committed were because of other people.

In this autobiography Bob Moore tells us in very meticulous detail why he can’t go back to all the places he’d like to go back and the rational as to why he acted the way he did. In some ways, I think good ol’ Bob thought he was helping people to learn the lessons of life -

“I suppose there are people that would say I should have got back quicker to meet her, but I really think she learnt a valuable lesson, because now if she ever has a daughter that she has to warn about how dangerous it is to get talking to a strange man in a train she will be able to speak from personal experience.”

I’ve never read a book where I despised the main character as much as I did Bob. There was nothing endearing about this man at all in the book. But the book is an autobiography probably written in the 1920s and published in the 1930s. I bring this up because life was extremely different then. Bob was an immigrant from Glasgow, he had to figure out a way to make it in the world. He chose a life of what we would consider crime. Personally, I think he was crazy.

Strangely, I enjoyed Don’t Call Me a Crook!. It is a raw autobiography written by a man who was not a literary genius (not even close). The current publisher, Dissent Books, does a great job of leaving footnotes to explain terms and phrases we may not use today; while at the same time, leaving the book probably as raw as the day Bob Moore started putting pen to paper. The tone was very conversational and kept me engaged. Towards the end the story began to drag a bit, but that’s something that happens in most memoirs I’ve read.

This is not a book I think I would pick up in a bookstore, however, I’m happy I had the opportunity to read it. After completing Don’t Call Me a Crook!, I can’t help but wonder if Bob Moore every actually re-read what he wrote and found himself to be as despicable as I found him, and whether at some point in his life if he came to the conclusion he was in fact a crook. I also can’t help but wonder if this stuff really did happen or if Bob Moore was just trying to make some money with his talent for storytelling.

June is also the month we celebrate Dads and people graduating from high school and college. To help celebrate this great month, Hatchette Books Group has generously provided five sets of eight books entitled the Dads and Grads Book Giveaway.

Here’s all you have to do:

Leave me a comment, sharing one piece of wisdom your father imparted upon you or something you learned in school that has stayed with you.

That’s it. That’s all. I will pick five entries to win the following set of books:

1. The Nine Lessons By Kevin Milne ISBN: 159995074X
2. Do-Over! By Robin Hemley ISBN: 0316020605
3. The Man’s Book By Thomas Fink ISBN: 0316033642
4. BoneMan’s Daughters By Ted Dekker ISBN: 1599951959
5. An Honorable German By Charles McCain ISBN: 0446538981
6. The Richest Man in Town By W. Randall Jones ISBN: 0446537837
7. Lincoln on Leadership By Donald Phillips ISBN: 0446394599
8. Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell ISBN: 0316017922

This contest is restricted to US and Canada participants and will close on June 30th at 11:59pm. Please remember to include your email address.

There is one thing I’d like to request of you: As you know if you’ve left a comment previously, you must register for the site. I have not figured out yet how to port over your registration files from old to new, and I would be greatly appreciative if you would take the time to re-register. I apologize for this inconvenience.

That wraps it up for now. There may be some periodic changes over the next couple of days. Please bear with me while these changes are being made. Stay tuned.

“We have these images of the straight-marching lines of boys and the ‘Heil Hitlers’ and this idea that everyone in Germany was in it together. But there still were rebellious children and people who didn’t follow the rules and people who hid Jews and other people in their houses. So there’s another side to Nazi Germany,” said Zusak in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.

At the age of 30, Zusak has already asserted himself as one of today’s most innovative and poetic novelists. With the publication of The Book Thief, he is now being dubbed a ‘literary phenomenon’ by Australian and U.S. critics. Zusak is the award-winning author of four previous books for young adults: The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, Getting the Girl, and I Am the Messenger, recipient of a 2006 Printz Honor for excellence in young adult literature. He lives in Sydney.

I first started this book sometime back in February, and could only read a few pages at a time.  It was weird and odd and the flow was a bit too scattered in my opinion.  The narrator told you what was going to happen in the end and it was a period in human history I knew about, so it seemed the outcome was going to be dreary and sad.  In retrospect, I think time period was why I kept putting it off.  I don’t think I wanted to get to the end of the book.

Well, over the weekend, I hunkered down and read the last half of the book.  By Sunday morning, I was sobbing as I finished the final pages. I couldn’t read the last 50 pages without putting the book down every couple pages to ingest the words and prepare myself for the next few pages. The last couple chapters took me several hours and I had to stop so my vision would clear enough to read the words.  And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

The Book Thief is genuis.  The book is about a little girl, placed in the late 1930s in Germany.  Liesel is nine, illiterate and I suspect from a Jewish family (this much is not completely clear).  Liesel’s story begins on a train with her mother and her sick little brother, she and her brother are being taken to live with their new foster parents who live in Molching, Germany.  Her brother never makes it and her mother is never seen from again.  This is the first time the narrator “meets” Liesel.  See, Liesel’s little brother dies on that train, he’s buried in a tiny little cemetary and our narrator is Death.

Liesel is illiterate but is wise enough to know she has nothing to remember her brother and oddly decides to steal the Grave Digger’s Manual from the cemetary.  This becomes her link to her little brother.  Death is taken aback by this theft and thus our story begins.

Over the course of time, Liesel’s foster father teaches her to read with this prized possession of her’s.  During the years, Hitler’s reign becomes more powerful and during a book burning party, she steals her second book.  This second theft is the catalyst for an odd friendship with the Mayor’s wife.

The course of this book takes place in a span of several years, we figure out at the end, Liesel is a teenager, but we don’t really know what age.  During this time, Liesel has much heartbreak and grief and she has many instances where she “runs into Death”…and Death takes notice of her each time.

I remember reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” but I do not remember having such a profound reaction after completing the book.  Obviously, when we read historical books, we pretty much know the outcome, we know someone is going to die and there’s going to be a sad ending when we read specifically about Hitler’s reign.  However, I can’t think of one book I’ve ever read narrated by Death.

Having Death as a narrator gives the reader an insight which is a bit more surreal in my opinion. This technique, when done well, makes us ponder the emotions rather than just the words.  I didn’t get lost in Liesel’s life, I got lost in the how the times effected her life and her actions.  I got lost in knowing the sadness was going to happen at the end and hoping it wasn’t going to be her.  I wanted Liesel to live a wonderful life after “it was all over”, but I also knew it would be filled with much grief.  Death tells us at the very beginning how much sadness there will be - he didn’t account for the pages getting soaked by my tears, I don’t think, but he let it be known the ending was going to be emotionally brutal.  Death explains things to the reader in a way which made this reader truly understand what was going on in the late 30s-early 40s Germany in a way no history book has every allowed me to understand.

I mentioned The Diary of Anne Frank. In my humble opinion, I would suggest school systems across the country to put The Book Thief on thier summer reading lists for high school students - the summer before having to read The Diary of Anne Frank.  I think kids would get more out of it, and then, I would have them write a comparison essay on the two books, more specifically, the main characters, during the year.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a classic, but The Book Thief is more suited to today’s teenager.  Anne Frank was a Jewish girl, Leisel Meminger was being raised as a German to save her life (this is my own understanding of why she was living with German Foster Parents). Combining these books would be an opportunity for an actual understanding of the way life was for young kids during that time.