TheBookJeanie

Sunday Reading with  THEBOOKJEANIE Just relaxing in the garden with a few titles picked up at the Tucson Book Festival . Once again it was an amazing event with the UofA campus filled with over 100,000 book lovers in attendance. Authors as diverse as Sandra Day O'Connor, Andrew Weil, and Scott Turow filled the lecture halls, classrooms, and tents on the vast lawn of the mall, accompanied by music, food, and festivities. Thank you to the UofA and the many local businesses and non-profit groups that sponsor this free event in Tucson each year, giving our community another reason to be proud of the richness of the old pueblo. Vincent and the Berenstain Bears  Tucson Book Festival - 2014 “Books fall open, you fall in, delighted where you’ve never been; hear voices not once heard before, reach world on world through door on door; find unexpected keys to things locked up beyond imaginings. What might you be, perhaps become, because one book...

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams READING WITH THEBOOKJEANIE Borrowing the title of Kenneth Koch's book on teaching poetry to children and pairing it with Aimee Sicuro's delightfully whimsical painting - perhaps this is how a writer feels when setting free a finished book out into the world. As novelist Ann Patchett noted, "Once the book is written, its value is for the reader to decide." With the passing of noted Southwest mystery writer Tony Hillerman,  I also sadly bid farewell to Leaphorn and Chee, the tribal policemen skilled in solving complex cases that often involved intimate knowledge and understanding of the traditional Navajo ways. I pulled out an old paperback copy of The Blessing Way in which seasoned veteran, Joe Leaphorn, grudgingly takes on a new young recruit as a partner, Jim Chee. Leaphorn quickly learns that Chee has the right instincts to be a good policeman as well as being firmly rooted in the Navajo traditions. Over the many subsequ...

Welcome a New Year of Reading with THEBOOKJEANIE Celebrating our one year anniversary! I would like to thank all of my readers for the support and encouragement that you have offered over the past year.  This has been an amazing adventure for me and I am so happy to have had you along for the ride! Some glowing reviews to warm your wintery January In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. In subsequent years her writing has only become richer and more eloquent and her most recent novel The Lowland is bound to be nominated for numerous awards. Set in India and America, Lahiri once again draws on her knowledge of the immigrant experience, herself the child of Indian parents who lived briefly in London where she was born and then eventually settled in Rhode Island. Her novel traces the journey of Subhash and Udayan, two brothers growing up in Calcutta, so close in many ways yet ultim...