A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 - Adobe Press

This educational, "Classroom in a Book" published by Adobe to train people new to Lightroom 3 is excellent.  It includes a CD with photos to use in each of 10 lessons.  The exercises are easy to follow while providing a very thorough demonstration of all of the features of Lightroom 3.  For anyone serious about photography, Lightroom 3 is a must, and this book is a great way to learn the complexities and great tools of this software.

Cross Channel - Julian Barnes

A great collection of short stories on interactions between the British and French covering various times in history.  The stories are wildly unique, curious, and very personal.  The writing is superb and immensely entertaining and thought-provoking.

People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

I might as well say, right from the jump: it wasn't my usual kind of job. I like to work alone, in my own clean, silent, well-lit labratory, where the climate is controlled and everything I need is right at hand. It's true I have developed a reputation as someone who can work effectively out of the lab, when I have to, when the museums don't want to pay the travel insurance on a piece, or when private collectors don't want anyone to know exactly what it is that they own.

The Lemon Table - Julian Barnes

The Lemon Table is a collection of short stories about aging.  Barnes is inventive with these stories and they are a pleasure to read.  Both amusing and thought-provoking, it is a great collection by a great writer.  These stories are so rich in the breadth of emotion and originality that they often feel like individual novels more than short stories.

Why Suicide? - Eric Marcus

This book is laid out in a question and answer format and covers a broad range of questions about suicide.  I found it very informative and is a book well worth reading, especially by anyone touched by suicide.  I was surprised how little I understood some aspects of suicide and some of the myths that I gave some creedence.

By Nightfall - Michael Cunnigham

Touched by Sucide - Michael Myers

How does one explain the inexplicable? Make sense of the senseless? Speak about the unspeakable? When someone you know and love dies by suicide, these and many more questions--an avalance of questions--take over your life.  Suicide is a death like no other. It is deliberate and chosen. Is it rational? Rarely. Desparate? Always. Ignited by internal pain, suffering and absense of hope? Almost always. And it always leaves behind a legacy of mystery and devastation. Suicide touches you and you are never the same.                                                                                                                              This is an excellent book for those touched by suicide.  In a very straight-forward style it presents a lots of information, dispels many myths, and provides comfort for those surviving.  I like the casual format with a lot of first person stories.

Horoscopes for the Dead - Billy Collins

Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for this one, but it didn't really work for me.  Sure, Billy is a good poet, and I have enjoyed some of his earlier books.  This one, however, seemed like he ran out of things to say and just got cuter and sillier while he discussed more meaningless little things.

Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby

We were captured off the east coast of Sicily on the morning of the twelth of August, 1942, about four miles out in the Bay of Catania. It was a beautiful morning. As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.


A remarkable story of the author's capture and escape during WWII.  His adventures around Italy, evading both the Nazi's and the Italian fascists, is a tale of adventure and the humanity of the Italian people who assisted him.

Edible Stories - Mark Kurlansky

You know you are on the edge when you live in Seattle, with nothing more to the continent than Puget Sound. The sound looks like a white-gray sheet of aluminum, often stained slighthly darker by ripples of rain, as though the rain had gotten the water wet. ...If it were true, as was once believed, that you could fall off the edge of the world and be devoured by a giant turtle, Seattle would be a place where that might happen.

I loved this funny and inventive novel told in sixteen parts.  Each part is a stand-alone chapter based on a different edible item.  Original and well-written, it is hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this book.

Edward Weston - Manfred Heiting

Edward understood thoughts and concepts which dwell on simple mystical levels. His own work- direct and honest as it is -  leaped from a deep intuition and belief in forces beyond the real and the factual.

This is a great small compilation of Weston's work in the Taschen Icon series.  It is small in size, but the quality is excellent, especially considering the inexpensive price.  An article on Weston written by Ansel Adams provides insight into this great and ground-breaking photographer.

Lola Alvarez Bravo - Elizabeth Ferrer

Lola Alvarez Bravo is often over-shadowed by her more famous photographer husband, Luis.  This excellent book displays the span of her photographic work and shows her to be a worthy photographic.  The text is well written and provides an informative biography.  She lived in an exciting time for the arts in Mexico.  Her friendship with Frida Khalo is described in the text and many intriguing pictures of Frida are included in this book.  For any fan of photography, this is compelling body of work showing a unique vision and documenting a time of creative expression in Mexico.

The Niagra River - Kay Ryan

Small Crimes - Ann Menebroker

Ilse Bing: Photography Through the Looking Glass - Larisa Dryansky

Reading the OED - Ammon Shea

Passage to India - E. M. Forster

Siegfried - Harry Mulisch

Venice - Peter Ackroyd

The Photoshop Darkroom - Harold & Phyllis Davis

Venices - Paul Morand

My Antonia - Willa Cather

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford - Wendell Berry

The Prospector - J.M.G. Le Clezio

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve - Adrienne Rich

Waiting for Rain, Music

Burn me some music Send my roots rain I'm swept
dry from the inside Hard winds rack my core

A struggle at the roots of the mind Whoever said
It would go on and on like this

Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car
palming a notebook scribbled in

contraband calligraphy against the war
poetry wages against itself

The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell

Amsterdam is on its knees; our shipyards are idle; our manufactories silent; our granaries plundered; The Hague is a stage of prancing marionettes tweaked by Paris; Prussian jackals and Austrian wolves laugh at our borders: and Jesus in heaven, since the bird-shoot at Kamperduin we are left a maritime nation with no navy. The British seized the Cape, Coromandel, and Ceylon without so much as a kiss-my-arse, and that Java itself is their next fattened Christmas goose is plain as day!

This is a very engaging historical novel set in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Japan.  It is a complex story with many levels within the fantastic tale.  Mitchell is a superb writer who displays wonderful talent and an ability to dive into the time period convincingly.  This book is everything you can hope for in a historical novel: intriguing characters, an exotic time and place, and unfolding mysteries.

Inherently Unequal - Lawrence Goldstone

The descent of the United States into enforced segregation, into a nation where human beings could be tortured and horribly murdered without trial, is a story profoundly tragic and profoundly American. And the Supreme Court was a central player in the tale.

If the Court's complicity in the subversion of equal rights had been due to rogue justices, or was an aberration of jurisprudence, Americans of the current day might merely shake their heads, deplore a shameful episode in their history, and congratulate themselves that the United States was no longer that nation. If, however, the Court's actions were not aberrant at all, but simply examples of ongoing practice, in which justices subordinate the role that Hamilton espoused for them to the exigencies of popular politics--or worse, their own personal beliefs and prejudices--the equal rights decisions of the latter decades of the nineteenth century become expressions of issues deeper, more disturbing. For then the United States Supreme Court would have, in a very real sense, eschewed the dispassion that the Founders thought so vital and become merely a third political arm of government.

Subtitled "The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court 1865-1903" is an excellent historical account of disturbing action and non-action by our highest court. Containing a lot of legal analysis, the book is compelling and hard to put down. I was attracted to the book by actions of the current court and found the similarities I suspected, personal politics taking precedence over sound legal decisions. The author is quite a scholar and presents historical insights into both the Supreme Court and America's rejection of equal rights for all its citizens.