Skip to main content

Welcome!

Welcome to the Matthews Public Library's blog. This is our inaugural entry, and we are very excited to be able to introduce to you A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews.
Library staff will use this space primarily to post reviews of books and movies we have read or watched; we may also post reviews of music or other library held materials about which we are currently excited. These reviews may take the shape of the written form in typed entries posted on the blogspace as well as the audio/visual form in uploaded video entries to youtube that we link to from this blog. This space online offers us myriad opportunities to interact and communicate with our community both at a local and global level. It also offers us the opportunity to stretch our creative muscles in writing and video.
We at the Matthews Library are very excited to communicate and interact with you about all things related to the library and books. We look forward to growing this new endeavor with your help.
And now I'd like to engage you in a discussion in answer to this question: What book(s) has had the most impact on your life and why?
To start off the discussion I'll share one of the books that had an immense impact on my life. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is one of those books that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. It is creative. It is unique. It is haunting in both its subject matter and its writing. The novel is narrated by a fourteen year old dead girl named Suzy who has been brutally raped and murdered. Bones is not just her story, but also the story of her family and the aftermath of her disappearance. Ultimately, it is a novel that tells of one family's journey to healing in the face of tragedy. Sebold has a talent for hauntingly beautiful prose, and it has been a very (very) long wait for her follow up to Bones: The Almost Moon, which will be released in the coming weeks. I am also looking forward with great anticipation to the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones that has been undertaken by Peter Jackson, the man who brought Lord Of The Rings to the big screen.
Now you can post your own answer to the question "What book has had the most impact on your life and why?" by using the post comment feature at the bottom of this entry. We look forward to hearing from you.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Rosetta Stone said…
Hi Ms Angie! Have you ever read The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote? Every year when summer starts to fade into autumn I think about that book, well, a novella, really. Capote superbly captures the sights, sounds and smells of November in Mississippi in the 1930s. The story was written for adults but is also a beautiful book to read aloud to children and I return to it again and again to rediscover and relive the beauty that is to be found in the simples joys and pleasures that belong to November. Check it out!
September 18, 2007 at 1:46 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In The Woods by Tana French

"What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with the truth is fundamental, but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies ... and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely ... This is my job ... What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this--two things: I crave truth. And I lie." opening lines of In The Woods chapter 1, pages 3-4 In The Woods by Tana French, an Irish writer, is an extremely well-written and well-crafted mystery novel. The downside is that this is French's debut novel, and her website (located at http://www.tanafrench.com/ ) does not off...
24 comments
Read more

Broken by Karin Slaughter

Before I begin the formal review there are a few things I need to get off my chest in the wake of finishing this book; I'll do so without giving away too many (or any) spoilers. The OUTRAGE!: the identity of Detective Lena Adams' new beau; the low depths to which Grant County's interim chief has sunk and brought the police force down with him; agent Will Trent's wife, Angie's, sixth sense/nasty habit of reappearing in his life just when he's slipping away from her. Thank God for small miracles though because while Angie was certainly referred to during the book, the broad didn't make an appearance. One sign that I've become way too invested in these characters is that I'd like to employ John Connolly's odd pair of assassins, Louis and Angel, to contract out a hit on Angie; do you think Karin Slaughter and John Connolly could work out a special cross over? Hallelujah: Dr. Sara Linton and agent Will Trent are both back. There is no hallelujah fo...
3 comments
Read more

Generation Kill by Evan Wright and One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick

Non-fiction books aren't really my thing; generally, this is how my relationship goes with non-fiction books: I see a really interesting one, I borrow it, I start to read it, and then I ditch it a chapter or two later when the dry, boring writing and non-existent plot fail to hook me. However, this a review of two non-fiction books that I read back to back after a five year old three article series that I dug up on the internet; it was written by Evan Wright and preceded his book Generation Kill , which is basically a book version of the article series that he wrote and published in Rolling Stone Magazine . Recently HBO adapted Generation Kill into a mini-series that ran sometime last year; I got the series on DVD and in the midst of watching it, I decided I wanted to get my hands on the book to read. In the meantime, I stumbled across One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the lieutenant of the platoon that Wright embedded with, and I read that book while I waited for Generation K...
1 comment
Read more