After seeing the movie Winter’s Bone, I didn’t think I’d want to read the book it was based on. Don’t get me wrong. The movie is excellent. The Sundance Film Festival awarded it the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatics and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and CBS Sunday Morning recently called it “the movie of the year.” But because of its subject matter–the violence and poverty that surround methamphetamine drug culture in the Ozarks–at times the movie is difficult to watch.
However, Daniel Woodrell’s book came across my desk a couple of weeks ago, and I opened to the first page and read this:
“Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.”
After that, I found it pretty hard to put the book down.
In Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Trond Sander, a widower in his late sixties, leaves the city for what he hopes will be an isolated life in a rustic cabin in rural Norway. He soon learns that his closest neighbor is the brother of Jon, a friend from his adolescence. This chance meeting causes Trond to recall the life-shaping events of the late 1940’s summer when he and Jon went out together to “steal” neighbors’ horses.
Out Stealing Horses is moving, evocatively written, and full of surprises. It is one of the few books that has received unanimous approval from my rather critical book group. Although we have found that the books we all like don’t always make for the most interesting discussions, Out Stealing Horses is so faceted and subtly mysterious that it gave us plenty to talk about.
Here is what some other critics had to say about Out Stealing Horses:
“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.” —Thomas McGuane, The New York Times Book Review
“Read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. From the first terse sentences of this mesmerizing Norwegian novel about youth, memory, and, yes, horse stealing; you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller.” —Newsweek
“That’s the effect of Per Petterson’s award-winning novel: It hits you in the heart at close range.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered
“Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force . . . Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.” —The New Yorker
Book trailer videos have become popular enough to have their own awards ceremony, complete with red carpet and formal attire. The ceremony for the 2010 Moby Awards for Best and Worst Book Trailers is tonight in New York City. If you’ve never seen a book trailer before, check out the list of finalists here.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandmother is a finalist in the Best Cameo in a Book Trailer category for his book Eating Animals. Adult Services Librarian Sara recommends this book, but be warned that she became vegetarian after reading it. (Don’t worry–the book trailer alone won’t make you want to change your eating habits.)
Bich Minh Nguyen, author of the award-winning memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, takes another look at life as a Vietnamese-American in her latest novel Short Girls. Sisters Van and Linny Luong are as different as night and day. While mousy Van was studying and planning for college, Linny hung out with her friends and did just enough to pass. Now both have gone their separate ways: Van to a demanding career as a lawyer in Detroit and a broken marriage in Ann Arbor; Linny to an apartment in Chicago and an affair with a married man.
When a customer ordered Tessa Kiros’s cookbook Apples for Jam: A Colorful Cookbook through interlibrary loan, we reference librarians liked the book so much we decided to order it for the library.
Kiros breaks away from traditional cookbook organization. Instead of presenting chapters on appetizers, main dishes, and desserts, she organizes the book by color. For example, under red, you’ll find recipes for tomato risotto, chicken casserole, and strawberry sorbet.
After seeing the movie Winter’s Bone, I didn’t think I’d want to read the book it was based on. Don’t get me wrong. The movie is excellent. The Sundance Film Festival awarded it the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatics and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and CBS Sunday Morning recently called it “the movie of the year.” But because of its subject matter–the violence and poverty that surround methamphetamine drug culture in the Ozarks–at times the movie is difficult to watch.
