By Rachel Laudiero on Jan 8, 2009 in Giveaways | 3 Comments
In celebration of the New Year, Old Musty Books and the Hachette Book Group is hosting a New Year, New You giveaway. We will be giving away five sets of eight books featuring a selection of titles for all tastes and opportunities to grow in areas important to you.
The giveaway will run from now until January 24th at midnight, and I will announce the winners on January 25th.
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By Rachel Laudiero on Jan 4, 2009 in Featured, Review, Sunday Salon | 0 Comments
I just got back from a fantastic holiday vacation in the Poconos Mountains. This is an annual vacation with friends in which I’ve been invited to attend for a couple of years now. Each year, there is inevitably many ad hoc conversations about various books. This year, I was telling someone about my personal challenge to read foreign authors in 2009. Lo and behold, she had a book by a foreign author she hadn’t read yet, but passed on to me anyway. How thoughtful! I have to confess, I read the book during the last two days of 2008, which, depending on how you look at it, disqualifies it for the personal challenge of 2009. However, I think I’m going to allow it as the first book for the challenge.
Falling Leaves is about Adeline Yen Mah’s plight as the fifth younger daughter in a Chinese family. Her mother died from complications during Adeline’s birth, her father remarried a European woman who was incredibly abusive, and her siblings treated her horribly. This is the story of how she survived to become a doctor and the most successful in the family. The story takes its reader through Civil War, the rise of Communist China and the economic boom of Hong Kong, and how the family was affected during these time periods. Read the rest
By Rachel Laudiero on Jan 3, 2009 in Featured, Review | 0 Comments
I’ve been working on completing the book Drood by Dan Simmons. I’ve never read any of Dan Simmons’ books, but I’ve been completely engrossed in Drood. The narrator of this story is Wilkie Collins. The storytelling technique is a very candid account to future readers written in 1865 of the last five years of Charles Dickens’ life after a train crash. In some ways, this book is a very long (773 pages) engaging letter not to be published until a few hundred years after the narrators death. Wilkie Collins is an intimate friend (remember back in 1865 the connotation of intimate friend is different) of Charles Dickens; they are both authors and Wilkie writes for Dickens’ magazine on a regular basis. Read the rest
By Rachel Laudiero on Dec 25, 2008 in Featured | 1 Comment
May the season be filled with warm moments and quality time spent with family, friends and good books!
Happy Holidays from my family to yours!
By Rachel Laudiero on Dec 16, 2008 in Featured, Review | 0 Comments
I spent the last week reading a book about the history of nuclear proliferation around the world. Every two pages (I kept track) had me exclaiming, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I finished the book last night, and while enjoying my morning joe this morning, I pondered how I could possibly write a review that does this book justice.
One of the things we have to remember when we read non-fiction is the topic is being written by one (or two) person’s view. If you are like me, you are extremely interested in the credentials of the author, who the sources are, and what documents they viewed. In The Man From Pakistan: A True Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, I didn’t even consider what the authors’ credentials were until AFTER I finished the book last night.
Here’s what I found: Read the rest
By Rachel Laudiero on Dec 14, 2008 in Editorial, Featured, Sunday Salon | 0 Comments
The Holiday season is in full swing. You know how I know? My mom’s house looks like she’s being featured in the holiday edition of Better Homes and Gardens. Throughout the year, my mom celebrates every major holiday by decorating the house. Sometimes we tease her about it, but never during the Christmas holiday. Well, okay, we half-heartedly tease her still, but I think we secretly LOVE mom’s during December.
See, growing up we didn’t have the cold weather and snow to signal the onset of the holiday season. We had mom crawling up to the attic, pulling down the Christmas decorations, and decorating the house over the span of the first weekend in December. Read the rest
By Rachel Laudiero on Dec 7, 2008 in Featured, Sunday Salon | 0 Comments
Happy first Sunday in December. Can you believe how fast this year has passed? I realized yesterday there’s only three weeks left until Christmas, which means four weeks left until 2009. Where has the year gone? Ah, but that’s a conversation for another day, I think.
This week (the Past) I received The Reincarnationist and The Memorist, both by M.J. Rose from Becca at Bookstack. I had never heard of M.J. Rose previous to reading Becca’s review of The Memorist. The book sounded fascinating (Becca has a great knack for writing reviews), and she was offering to give away both books. Lo and behold, I won. I absolutely absorbed The Reincarnationist in approximately two and a half days. I finished it this morning about four hours ago and have been fighting the urge to start The Memorist. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to actually review these two, or if I’m just going to absorb them as pleasure reading. Thank you so much Becca for this wonderful gift of books! Read the rest
It is with great pleasure to let you know that Bonnie J. Glover has been announced as a NAACP Image Awards nominee in the Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction category for Going Down South: A Novel (Random House/One World/Ballentine). Bonnie is the author of The Middle Sister, published by Ballantine/OneWorld in May 2005. It was longlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, Going Down South, is an inspirational story about second chances at realizing the unparalleled love exists between mothers and daughters.
