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By Sara LeHoullier, on June 21st, 2010 [A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]
 I just picked up a new copy of The Sun Also Rises. I lent my last copy—the one I myself “borrowed” from a friend in college—to a boy I liked in the early summer of 2008. He moved away and I never saw him, or the book, again. I still mourn the loss of that particular chewed-up, ratty copy, the one in which I marked my place with a black-and-white picture from a long-ago New Years party; I look so stunningly delighted in the photo, clutching a bottle of cheap champagne, closed-eyes grinning, receiving a New Years smooch on the cheek.
I loved The Sun Also Rises most when I was volunteering for the Peace Corps in Madagascar. For twenty-seven months, I spent my Sundays sprawled on my foam mattress, reading random books gleaned from a pile of crap at the Peace Corps flop-house, discarded romances and science fiction thrillers, a biography of Basquiat, the sexual escapades of Chelsea Lately. Roosters crowed outside and my toilet was a hole in the ground, but in the midst of my weird, protracted acculturation, these books were tiny pieces of the familiar.
Sometimes, in the cool of the evening, I’d shut off the hanging bulb in the middle of the room and tuck myself into the mosquito net to read by candlelight –The Sun Also Rises was the only book I kept on my bedside table, providing a little company for the bug corpses. It was like going home, except home was Paris, or Pamplona, or Bayonne, or Madrid. In the absence of any other entertainment, it was like watching a film in my head; I could see it all, and I could imagine spending time with each and every one of the characters in all the gorgeous scenery, and being very drunk. …
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By Sara LeHoullier, on July 16th, 2009 This book has been selected as a Great Read.
Author: Mary Roach
W. W. Norton, 2008
Best ebook deal: Audiobook available at Seattle Public Library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If you’ve ever wondered about how a male chimpanzee woos a mate, how human pheromones function, or whether Viagra will work for women, this is the book for you. The study of sex has a long and harrowing history, which Mary Roach explores in an in-depth, but not overly technical manner. In other words, it’s a science book for non-scientists. My curiosity about Bonk was piqued when I saw Roach speak on the TED blog back in May. Her talk had a provocative title (10 Things you didn’t know about orgasm), and after listening to her for a few minutes, I had to know more.
Roach is extremely thorough with her research and it shows. In Bonk, she starts at the very beginning, at the foundations of the body of work on sex, when scientists were studying animals to try to figure out how humans functioned. She recognizes the important work of all of the players, from Kinsey (whom we’ve all heard about, thanks to the popular film) to Masters and Johnson, who studied laboratory sexual encounters for years and published their intriguing findings in 1979 – an article entitled Homosexuality in Perspective.
She explores behaviors from the 1500s, when a woman could sue her husband for impotence, and to prove the fact, a team of observers was required to enter his bedroom to verify the facts before granting a divorce. She looks at the trajectory of ED (erectile dysfunction), and the crazy lengths people have gone to cure it throughout the ages. She examines the machines that have been developed to aid in intercourse, and the orgasmic capabilities of people with spinal injuries. She is willing to participate in studies, attend talks, and go to otherwise great lengths to collect her data, and writes about these experiences very candidly. As someone hasn’t read a lot of nonfiction lately, apart from the depressing, the dry, and the painfully detailed, I found Bonk to be a breath of fresh air – it’s also full of fun trivia that you can use to wow your friends and family at the dinner table. …
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By Sara LeHoullier, on June 25th, 2009  Author: Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2007
Best ebook deal: Diesel eBooks; free audiobook version at the library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Haruki Murakami has been getting a lot of buzz over his new two-volume book 1Q84, which is selling like hotcakes in Japan even though the plot has remained a secret. After a 5-year wait, it seems his fans are satisfied.
But 1Q84 hasn’t yet been published in English, and while on vacation I came across After Dark, which happens to be his last novel. I didn’t know what to expect, since I haven’t read any of his other work, but I really enjoyed it and found it difficult to put down. In fact, I actually read it in one go.
It’s a surreal, heavily visual novel, drifting through a single night in Tokyo, Japan, and gliding by the things that happen after dark when rational behavior stops and real life blurs with dreams. The narration is an eerie first person plural, traveling through each scene like a movie camera, following each character as they make their way through a series of bizarre and magically interconnected events. …
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I just picked up a new copy of The Sun Also Rises. I lent my last copy—the one I myself “borrowed” from a friend in college—to a boy I liked in the early summer of 2008. He moved away and I never saw him, or the book, again. I still mourn the loss of that particular chewed-up, ratty copy, the one in which I marked my place with a black-and-white picture from a long-ago New Years party; I look so stunningly delighted in the photo, clutching a bottle of cheap champagne, closed-eyes grinning, receiving a New Years smooch on the cheek.
