top5s online

April was historical nonfiction month for book club. It was hard to think of a topic to read about, but somehow I stumbled upon library burnings. I'm a librarian, so I ran with it. Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century By Rebecca Knut 2003 296 pages Generally I like nonfiction books, but I missed the marked slightly with this one - it was just too academic. The first few chapters explained the concept of libricide, comparing it to genocide, by defining it as the systematic destruction of books and other cultural artifacts as part of a plan by a psychotic regime or ruler to eliminate a particular culture or group of people. So libricide is thus not destruction as a casualty of war like in bombings, but a strategic and calculated destruction in order to maximize the elimination of a culture. Not overly uplifting. It's an interesting concept, but I just didn't want to read about it as a concept for 100 pages. I wanted to re...

I read a book for fun again. It's my new 2014 thing apparently. I'm so proud of myself. I'm actually looking forward to not having cable in a couple months so I can read and knit without distraction (except maybe netflix distraction...). This book came highly recommended by a couple of colleagues. And maybe I didn't even mean to read it now but when a nice colleague takes the book out on her card for you there's this expectation that you'll actually read it instead of incurring fines on her account. So here goes! A Tale for the Time Being By Ruth Ozeki 2013 432 pages Ruth is a lapsed novelist who lives on a tiny island on the west coast of BC with her tree planting husband and cat. She finds a diary, letters, and other bits in a Hello Kitty lunchbox that has washed up on shore - perhaps from the 2011 tsunami in Japan? From then on, the narration skips between Ruth's story while she reads the diary, and Nao's story, the teenage girl from Japan who is writ...