This Is The Last…

This book was an amazing olfactory experience - seriously such a good book. Taking place in 18th century Paris, everything is described through scents and smells. Our main character is born into a putrid smelling city, he has no smell to him, and at the same time has a very acute sense of smell. From the time he is born nobody wants him, he grows up unloved and unwanted. As he grows up he realized how subtly attuned his nose is, he’s able to breathe people in and know things about them based on their smell. He starts learning the trade of perfuming. He wants to learn how to bottle the scent of a young beautiful virgin - which to him is perfection.

This book has been described as a psychololgical thriller, you are taken into the mind of the killer. It made me think about how sensual and animal some smells are. While its a thriller, there is no graphic violence. This story, especially the ending really stays with you.

This book is so well written. Put this on your summer reading list, it’ll be better than watching re-runs of Heroes, I promise. This book has also been made into a movie, directed by the guy that did Run Lola Run.

If you’ve read this book, please feel free to share your thoughts on it. I’d love to hear it.

For the month of October Chuck Palahniuk will be accepting fanmail and responding to it. Of course you’ve got to follow the rules. Your letter has to be postmarked in the month of October. But it sounds like he’ll respond with letters to some and care packages to others. So if you have a burning question that only Chuck can answer, send it off now.

The day has finally come! Chuck is allowing you all the month of October to write him letters via his agent at Donadio & Olsen. It’s been about two years since the last fanmail window was opened and Chuck has been very busy inbetween. So many of you probably thought this day would never come again. But Chuck has set aside much of the Fall and Winter to answer every piece of mail sent to him. And I can tell you that he’s already cooking up some new surprises for the reply mail he sends back to each of you.

(Link via Largehearted Boy)

When I first heard the premise of this story, I thought how could a 500 page story about rabbits, be any good? While I was wrong, it was fantastic. I’ve always heard people recommend this book. I could see myself coming back and reading this story over and over. The story flows, I didn’t want to put the book down. The author has a way of making distinctly different personalities for all of the rabbits.

This bunny-epic starts with a group of rabbits living in Sandleford Warren, where life is good. One of the runts of the group, Fiver, who has the gift of prophecy can tell that destruction is coming and he talks a handful of rabbits into leaving the warren with him. They leave the warren and begin to look for a new home, even though they have no idea where they’re going. Along the way they meet obstacles and dangers from humans, predators, and hostile wild rabbits as well. They get themselves setup in a nice, safe place and then realize they have no women among them. So they work out a plan, to get some does to join their warren.

Part of the reason I like this book so much, is because it seems like it could be real. Adams goes to great lengths to help us understand what daily survival is like for rabbits. He doesn’t make them humans. They’re not very bright, they don’t have good memories. They act on instinct. He also described what the rabbits do for fun - telling bunny folklore, playing bob-stones, playing in the grass. I can’t even begin to describe how well-written this book is.

I loved this book. This was a great adventure. I was sad to see it come to an end.

Awhile back, I read the book Fast Food Nation, which was kinda like the history of the fast food industry. They’ve made it into a movie, and they debuted it at the Cannes Film Festival this week. It stars Greg Kinnear, Ethan Hawke, and Patricia Arquette. I’m sure this movie will be similar to Supersize Me. Of course there’s controversy, people in the industry feel the need to defend themselves. But there is a lot of wrong being done, along the way by the people trying to make money.

You can watch the trailer here. The movie will come to the theaters this fall.

After I read the book, I decided to not eat fast food. I stuck to my guns for like a good 6 months, and then I caved. But watching and reading this kinda stuff is good motivation to eat right. And if there’s anyone that wants to share this information with their kids, this author wrote a book, just for kids called “Chew On This.”

Give Me the World is a travel memoir written by a 26-year old New Yorker woman and her 6 year old son. Leila Hadley is sick of her life, she works all the time, she’s buying stuff she doesn’t need, she’s in debt, she’s in a rut. One day a friend of hers suggests that maybe she should take some time off and travel around the world. And she does it.

The amazing thing about this story is that it takes place in the 50’s. So she goes to places in the Middle East and she’s relatively safe. She gets to go places that would be far too dangerous for an American to go to these days. I’ve heard that certain areas of the Middle East are really beautiful and I know I probably won’t ever get to go there and see for myself. She goes to Hong Kong, Ceylon, Bangkok, Dehli, Dubai.

Her trek ends up lasting 18 months all together. She meets up with 4 American men that are sailing a schooner around the world and she talks her way into hitching a ride with them.

This story is very well written. Its clear that the author really has a knack for colorful descriptions so much that you can clearly imagine what it would have been like to be there. Before she went on her trip, she worked for a magazine. After she came back and wrote this back, she become a travel writer specializing in books about travelling with kids.

If you like books like this, you would probably also really enjoy Maiden Voyage by Tania Albi.

I just finished reading A Family Daughter a wonderfully written novel by the sister of the Decemberists’ front man Colin Meloy. Everyone knows that Colin was a literature major in college and he wrote a 33 1/3 book about the Replacements, so its no surprise that his sister would be an interesting writer. So last week while Jason and I were at Barnes and Noble I picked up and started reading it. I finished in 2 days! From the moment I picked up this book, I was engrossed by the characters.

The book is a story about three generations of a family. The story is mainly about Abby, the granddaughter of the Santerre family. At the beginning of the story Abby is a little girl, stuck in the her grandparents’ house with chicken pox and boredom. Her parents are going through a divorce, and her mother is trying to find herself. Her cool uncle Jamie drives down from college, to be with Abby and cheer her up. The book flashes forward and Abby is 21. She has a a major tragedy happen in her life and she is torn apart by grief.

Each chapter is told from a different family member’s perspective. The story has death, sex, an affair, a foreign rich girl, an adopted son, an ex-russian prostitute, and a reunion of old highschool sweethearts. The book is a bit steamy, and there was one scene that I was like… what the hell? Aside from that, this was a very well-written book. I definitely want to pick up another of Meloy’s books.

After reading the book I found out that A Family Daughter is actually a sequel to Meloy’s earlier book Liars and Saints. So if you were interested in her writing, you might want to pick that one up first.

I came across a pretty good, old interview with Colin Meloy in Believer Magazine. Its really interesting, even if it is from June of 2004. There’s some really interesting bits about how his relationship with his sister affected his writing. You can read it here.

Bill Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail in 1998. That’s a walk over 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine. Through forests and over countless mountains. Before reading A Walk In The Woods I knew very little about the AT. But I love camping and spending time outdoors and wish I had more time for it. I’ve done a bit of walking on the west coast in California and Oregon, and a bit in New Zealand, but nothing as extensive as the experience Bryson and others have embarked on the AT.

A small percentage of people who attempt the AT even get a quarter of the way through. And only a fraction of those actually make it to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The trek takes around 8 months for most who complete the journey. Like all Bryson novels, it’s full of interesting facts and stories of those who’ve attempted the trail before him, horror stories of being stranded in the extreme weather, and bears. I really like the book, and although I don’t think I’ll be attempting a through walk of the entire AT anytime soon, there were parts of the trail that I think I’d really enjoy. So much of the trail is extremely undeveloped and scarcely traveled. In some areas Bryson went entire days without seeing another hiker on the trail. Which is amazing since the north eastern United States is one of the most densely populated areas of the world.

Bryson also spent a chapter talking about how modern technology has infiltrated the AT. “The nuisance of satellite navigation devices, cell phone, and other such appliances in the wildernesses”, as he put it “have brought a measure of civilization that simply doesn’t belong in the woods.” A hiker once called up a National Guard Unit in Maine asking for a helicopter to pick him up and take him back to his car because he was tired. Another hiker called and requested a helicopter because he was a day behind schedule and was afraid he would miss an important business meeting. People are bringing laptop computers and navigation devices that give you their exact longitude and latitude to a hundredth of a degree but these same people don’t carry a map! I agree with Bryson that the point to getting out and enjoying the outdoors is that you could detach yourself from such modern constraints and walk the woods, untouched. Bryson wrote this book in 1998. I’m sure by now people are posting daily on their blog from the Appalachian Trail.

I think its about time that I introduced to you to two of my favorite Icelandic photographers. Though their styles are very different as well as their subjects they both have passion for black & white photography. And there’s something about their pictures that is very dramatic and human at the same time.

Ragnar Axelsson, better known as RAX, has been working as a photographer for Iceland’s biggest news paper Morgunblaðið since 1976. He has had his pictures published in magazines like LIFE, National Geographic, Le Figaro, Stern and TIME. He has won several awards and held exhibitions well threw the world. His last book Faces of the north was published in 2004 and is truly one of my favorite books. In the book are pictures taken over 15 years in places like Siberia, Faroe Islands, Greenland and Iceland.

Nökkvi Elíasson is an amateur photographer that is mostly known for his amazing pictures of deserted farms. Some of his work has been published in local news papers in Iceland and he’s first big exhibition was held in Reykjavík Museum of Photography in 2001 with Brian Sweeney. His book Abandoned Farms is absolutely amazing and shows many of the Icelandic farms that are deserted in the country side.

The New Yorker published a Haruki Murukami short story this week. It’s entitled “Shinagawa Monkey”. I just finished reading it and it was pretty good.

Click here to read it.

I read Norwegian Wood a while back and I liked it. I want to read another one of his books. Does anyone have any other Murukami recommendations for me?

(Link via Large Hearted Boy)

I just finished reading The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs. Jacobs is also a contributing author to Mental Floss magazine, which has recently become one of my favorites.

This book chronicles Jacobs’ quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica from A to Z. The book is part memoir and part educational. Jacobs’ family and friends all tell him its a waste of time. Even his father, who tried to read the entire encyclopedia, but didn’t even get through the B’s.

I expected this book to be a lot of Jacobs sharing the quirky facts that he found while reading the encyclopedia. But it was also a lot about his relationship with his wife, his dad, his job, his quest for knowledge, his need to feel more than ordinary. He shares a lot about himself. He talks about his awkwardness in social situations, and how he jumps at any chance to talk about something that he just read about, even when its not at all relevant to the conversation. His wife charges him $1 for each irrelevant fact.

One of my favorite stories out of the encyclopedia with this entry:

Chang and Eng were the first Siamese Twins, born in Siam in 1811. They were joined at the hip. As children, a British merchant took them on tour and made a fortune off them. When they turned 21, they ditched the Brit and made money for themselves. They take their money and settle in North Carolina as farmers. In 1843, they married a pair of sisters and maintained separate households 1.5 miles aparts from eachother. Where they would alternate 3 day visits were their respective spouses. They adjusted well to their condition. They became expert marksmen, they could run quickly and swim well.

A few more that I found interesting…

Teddy Roosevelt renovated the second floor of the White House to make room for all of his children’s pets, including a raccoons, snakes, a badger, and a bear.

The French philosopher Renee Descartes had a fetish for womem with crossed eyes.

Coriander is the British word for cilantro.

In the past, hatters often became ill because they used mercury salts to make felt out of rabbit fur. The mercury poisoning led to a mental deterioration know as erethism. Hence the phrase “mad as a hatter”.

In ancient Balinese culture, it was believed that twins (of different sexes) should get married, because it was believed that they had already had sex in the womb.

This was a pretty good book. When I first started reading this book, I was annoyed by Jacobs’ personality. It seemed like he was so insecure, that he needed to be proving to everyone just how smart he is all the time. But he grew on me. While I don’t believe that reading the encyclopedia makes you smarter, I do think that sometimes fact is better (weirder) than fiction. This book was an interesting read.