Feed by M.T. Anderson

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Hi, my name is Titus and I am a teenager who has a feed in my brain.  I can't live without my feed, it provides me with everything I need, like music, shopping, advertising and messaging.  I don't need to think, talk, read or write because my feed does it all for me.  Like, it is the best thing ever invented.  You seriously need to get one.

I went to the moon for Spring Break and met this awesome girl named Violet.  We went dancing one night and then got hacked from some crazy man.  Our feeds were interrupted and we had to go to the hospital.  It was so unbelievably boring.  Like, we had nothing to do.  We couldn't connect to the feed, it was like total torture for me.

When we got home from the moon, Violet started acting weird.  I mean, I really like her, Unit, but something is not quite right about her.   She got her feed when she was seven, when the everyone I know, got it when we were babies.  And then, we started to get all these like weird lesions on our body.  The world is going off kilter.  Well, I am not going to worry about it because I got my feed and it doesn't let me worry too much.  Oh, Unit, I really like that shirt.  Ordering that up right now.

Hi, my name is Laura (Booksnob) and I just finished reading Feed over my Spring Break.  I wish I was able to travel to the moon like Titus but I stayed home instead.  I can't stop thinking about this book.  It is like Feed is literally stuck in my head and everywhere I look I see people connecting to their hand held devices, their personal feeds.  The characters are not particularly likeable, except for Violet, and the futuristic teen speak is frustrating at times but Feed gets under your skin and into your brain and makes you think. That's right, you have to think while you are reading this book.

Feed takes place in a future not far away from our present reality and that is what makes it so relevant.  Feed tackles important issues like consumerism, environmentalism, beauty, mind control and so much more.  It is a amazing book that will grip you by the throat and leave you gasping.  When you finish, take a look around the world and challenge yourself to find the feed.  It won't take long and you will see the world differently.  The feed is everywhere. 

Poem in my Post: A Cat in an Empty Apartment

Poem in Your Post:  A Cat in an Empty Apartment by Wislawa Szymborska  1923-2012

Today, I have chosen to highlight Wislawa Szymborska.  I have recently learned of this Polish poet from my BookWoman magazine and I wanted to highlight Wislawa most famous poem, A Cat in an Empty Apartment.  I am of Polish descent and feel drawn to this Nobel Prize winner from 1996.  A Cat in an Empty Apartment is frequently memorized and recited by Polish citizens.  Szymborska is one of their most celebrated poets. 
A Cat in an Empty Apartment.
 

Die? One does not do that to a cat.
Because what's a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls.
Caress against the furniture.
It seems that nothing has changed here,
but yet things are different.
Nothing appears to have been relocated,
yet everything has been shuffled about.
The lamp no longer burns in the evenings.

Footsteps can be heard on the stairway,
but they're not the ones.
The hand which puts the fish on the platter
is not the same one which used to do it.

Something here does not begin
at its usual time.
Something does not happen quite
as it should
Here someone was and was,
then suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent. All the closets were peered into.
The shelves were walked through.
The rug was lifted and examined.
Even the rule about not scattering
papers was violated.

What more is to be done?
Sleep and wait.

Let him return,
at least make a token appearance.
Then he'll learn
that one shouldn't treat a cat like this.
He will be approached
as though unwillingly,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
With no spontaneous leaps or squeals at first.

"9 Most Controversial Pulitzer Prize Winners of All Time"

"9 Most Controversial Pulitzer Prize Winners of All Time"

I have a goal to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winning novels and starting this year, I plan to read 12, one winner per month. 

One of my readers, Florine, contacted me about www.Bachelorsdegreeonline.com
Florine works with this group and they recently published this article about the 9 most controversial Pulitzer Prize winners of all time and she thought I might be interested.  Heck Yes, I am interested.  I am sharing their amazing article here on Booksnob, with their permission.  Thanks, Florine!

April 8, 2012
The Pulitzer Prize is the Academy Award for writers. Winning it means the admiration of peers and readers, recognition and validation of the subject matter, and a nice cash prize for the author. Like any contest that could define a career, there is the potential for heated debates and passionate disputes. For these nine Pulitzer winners, victory came with a big asterisk.

1. Walter Duranty

   Journalist Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for 13 articles he wrote for The New York Times in 1931 about the USSR under Joseph Stalin. We say "wrote" but it was more like he took down what Stalin dictated to him. He gamefully excused the dictator's genocide attempts by actually saying, in the paper, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." His cover-up of the murderous famine caused by Stalin's programs has led to his dubbing as "journalism's greatest liar" and "Stalin's apologist." The Pulitzer Board has twice considered revoking the award but declined to do so both times, to even the Times’ chagrin.

2. Janet Cooke

   Give Janet Cooke credit: she knew a Pulitzer Prize-worthy story when she saw one. Except, of course, she didn't see one; she fabricated one. In 1980, Cooke received a Pulitzer for her Washington Post article "Jimmy's World," the story of an 8-year-old heroin addict who had supposedly been hooked since age 5. Unfortunately for Cooke, the story was a little too good. The mayor of D.C. ordered a task force to search the city for the boy, who they obviously could not locate. As her story began to unravel, Cooke fessed up, resigned from the Post, and the Pulitzer was returned.

3. Edith Wharton

   As it was the first time for a woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton's 1921 win in the Novel category should have been a happy affair. Instead, controversy mired the proceedings, and even Wharton herself was disgusted with the Board's choice. The decision of the three fiction judges to award the book to Sinclair Lewis for his controversial Main Street was overturned by the conservative head of the advisory board. He changed the wording of the award's fine print from going to the best example of the "whole atmosphere of American life" to "wholesome American life" and gave the award to Wharton for Age of Innocence.

4. Sinclair Lewis

   Robbed five years earlier of a prize that was rightly his, in 1926 Sinclair Lewis finally won a Pulitzer with his novel Arrowsmith … and he turned it down. "All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous," he said in his refusal letter to the board. "The Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented." The "terms" he meant were the surreptitiously modified words "wholesome American life." To Lewis, the phrase made the contest less about literary merit and more about "whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment."

5. William L. Laurence

   In 2005, journalist and host of "Democracy Now!" Amy Goodman began calling for the revocation of William "Atomic Bill" Laurence's Pulitzer Prize. Laurence had won the award in 1946 for his coverage of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. However, as Goodman revealed, "Atomic Bill" was on the payroll for the State Department at the time of his writing. His deployment to Japan was an effort on the government's part to combat "negative" press by independent journalist Wilfred Burchett, who had shocked the world by describing the "atomic plague" that was killing Japanese well after the initial detonation. Goodman and others felt that 50 years of media silence on the effects of nuclear war were a direct result of Laurence's writing.

6. No one

   OK, stay with us here. That no one was named the winner for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1974 was controversial because the fiction judges had unanimously settled on a winner. Their recommendation: the bizarre, 760-page World War II novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Pulitzer's advisory board found the book's graphic depictions of sex and drug use "obscene" and the complex, progressive style "unreadable." Over the years critics have united behind the book, lending more poignancy to the controversial decision.

7. Joseph Rosenthal

   The photographer behind the iconic image of six soldiers planting an American flag at the invasion of Iwo Jima never could shake the popular belief that he had staged the famous photo op. Even being awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1945 was not enough for Rosenthal to dissuade people of the notion that it was based on a lie. Part of the trouble was a comment Rosenthal made when asked if he had staged the photo. Thinking the question was referring to a second photo of soldiers celebrating by the flag, Rosenthal had replied, "Sure."

8. Bilal Hussein

   Like Joe Rosenthal, Bilal Hussein also won a Pulitzer for Photography, in 2005. But unlike Rosenthal, the controversy surrounding Hussein's award was much more serious. Hussein had been hired by the AP in 2004 and trained in photography. The collection of 20 photos for which he won the Pulitzer aroused suspicion well before he received the award. Bloggers wondered how exactly he had managed to stumble onto scenes of terrorists shooting rockets and executing people in the street. Could he have been tipped off by high-ranking insurgents? Possibly, considering he was arrested and held for two years by U.S. forces in 2006 for "security reasons." Hussein maintains he was simply doing his job.

9. Wynton Marsalis

   Before he won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997, Wynton Marsalis was already a polarizing figure in the world of jazz. Critics did not appreciate his complaints that jazz is under the control of a white establishment, or the fact that the media treated him like the genre's official spokesman. But his Pulitzer win had its own niggling problem: the piece that earned him the prize may not have been eligible for consideration. Selections had to have premiered since at least March of 1996; Marsalis' "Blood on the Fields" had premiered in 1994. He sidestepped this technicality by rewriting a saxophone part here and a percussion part there.

  

Hereafter by Tara Hudson

Hereafter by Tara Hudson

Amelia has lost her life and is stuck in the Hereafter.  She has no memory of who she is, or what happened to her the night she died.  The only thing Amelia knows for sure if that she drowned in the raging river.  Amelia is trapped in her own personal nightmare as she relives her death over and over and is drawn into the river.  One fateful night, someone else is in the river, fighting for his life.  For a brief moment, Joshua's heart stops and in that moment of time, Amelia and Joshua connect.  This connection changes both of their lives.

This boy in the river causes a positive reaction in Amelia and she begins to change and piece together the mystery of her life with Joshua's help.  Joshua and Amelia begin a unconventional romance that people in both worlds are trying to destroy.  When they touch, both spheres of their world collide in an electric force. 

Amelia is a powerful heroine who fights for her man and defends her territory.  The transformation of the main character from the beginning of the book to the end is vast.  Amelia starts out as a ghost afraid of her own shadow to a ghost in control of her afterlife.  Once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop as I just had to find out what happens.  The cover art is beautiful and draws the reader to the story, like the characters in the book are drawn to the river and the haunted bridge.

Hereafter is an unconventional ghost story as well as a good mystery, with paranormal romance elements.  I am drawn to ghost stories and enjoy being taken into a unique afterlife and Hereafter was very creative and has a sequel coming out in June called Arise. Hereafter raises interesting questions for me like Does love continue to grow after death?  Are our loved ones nearby, earthbound?  Do we create and envision our own afterlife?  Since the beginning of time, humans have held a curiosity about the circumstances of the afterlife.  Tara Hudson creates a afterlife that leaves a soul in charge of their destiny yet tricked by circumstance.  Scary.

In my afterlife, I want to be in the largest library in Heaven, full of authors to discuss their work and an eternity to read.

Vote: Independent Book Blogger Awards!

Vote for this blog for the Independent Book Blogger Awards!
Vote

Voting starts today for the Independent Book Blogger Awards on Goodreads.  The winners in each category win a trip to New York City for Book Expo conference.  I have never attended this conference and would love to go for the first time.  I am asking you to vote for Booksnob in the fiction category.  Just click the Vote button above and it will take you there.  Otherwise you can go to www.goodreads.com and vote that way.  Oh and tell all your friends and family.  I need LOTS of votes.

Thanks so much.  Sending you a big hug for doing this.
Leave a comment and let me know you voted. 

Contest: Chasing Alliecat

Contest:  Chasing Alliecat by Rebecca Fjelland Davis

Hometown Track, Minnesota Author in the Spotlight, Rebecca Fjelland Davis is giving away 2 copies of her book, Chasing Alliecat to Booksnob followers.  She has agreed to send internationally as well!  Rebecca is a fellow Humanities teacher who loves dogs and competitive bike racing. 

Here is the synopsis of Chasing Alliecat from Goodreads: 

While training for an off-road bike race, Sadie, Allie, and Joe find a priest, badly beaten and near death. After calling for help, Allie mysteriously disappears from their lives. It's not until the day of the race that Sadie learns the truth about Allie, and her connection to the priest.

 

Contest Rules:

Fill out the form below

Leave a comment please.  

Open Internationally.

Must be a Booksnob follower.

Good Luck!

 

Poem in my Post: You're It by Hafiz

April is National Poetry Month and so I have decided to highlight a favorite poem and poet of mine once a week on Sundays in April.

The Gift.  Poems by Hafiz. The Great Sufi Master was given to me for Christmas in 2010 by my Aunt Rose and Uncle Dave.

It is so hard to choose a poem out of this collection because they are all so amazing.

Hafiz is from Persia and he lived in the 14th century.  He wrote about 5000 poems but only about 600 or so have survived.

I chose to post this poem, You're It by Hafiz because it always makes me smile.
It is perfect for Easter and Passover and reminds me of all the wonderful things that could happen in my life and those that already have. 



    YOU'RE IT

          God
       Disguised
As a myriad things and
       Playing a game
          Of tag

Has kissed you and said,
         "You're it-

I mean, you're Really IT!"

            Now
    It does not matter
What you believe or feel

For something wonderful,

Major-League Wonderful
     Is someday going
              To

          Happen.


Poem is found on Page. 30 in The Gift
Have a beautiful, wonderful week.  Oh and Tag, You're It!

March by Geraldine Brooks Contest Winner!

March by Geraldine Brooks Contest Winner!

I would like to congratulate the winner of March by Geraldine Brooks.  March won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and is based off the story of Little Women.  Mr. March is the absent father in Little Women.   The book is set during the first year of the Civil War.

The winner is Margaret F from Mission BC, Canada.

Thanks everyone who participated in the contest.  I will have another international contest soon.  Thanks for reading my reviews and have a great Holiday weekend everyone.

The Long-Shining Waters Contest Winner!

The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin Contest Winner!

I would like to congratulate the winner of The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin, March's Author in the Spotlight.  I would like to thank Danielle for giving away a copy of her book to Booksnob followers.

Congratulations to Carol W. from Texas.

If you didn't win you can still order a copy of Danielle's book, from Amazon.  The Long-Shining Waters is about three amazing women connected through time and place.

Please visit Danielle's website at http://daniellesosin.com/.

Robert Alexander, author of The Kitchen Boy, visits South High!

Robert Alexander, author of The Kitchen Boy, visits South High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

My ninth grade students are reading a book in Humanities 1 and creating a wiki web page/scrapbook on it.  All the books on the book list deal with the themes of Revolution or Colonialism.  The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander is one of the books that was on the list and about 18 students chose to read it.  The Kitchen Boy is an excellent story of the Russian Revolution in 1917 where the Tzar and his family are arrested and imprisoned in the House of Special Purpose in Siberia.

One of my students was able to Skype with the author, Robert Alexander and he mentioned he might be able to come and speak to students.  Well I didn't wait long and sent him an e-mail asking if he would visit South and speak to the students who read his book.  He said YES!

Robert Alexander spoke to a small crowd of high school freshman in the media center on Thursday, March 29th.  He brought pictures of the Russian Royal family and told us about their last days.  He announced that The Kitchen Boy is being made into a movie and he is currently at work on the screenplay.  This was surprising and welcome news to all of us as The Kitchen Boy will make a great film.   He has to make some changes to the ending of the The Kitchen Boy because history is always happening. (Can't give out any spoilers here, in case you haven't read the book yet) Robert thinks filming should start as early as this fall.  OMG, I cannot wait to see this movie and am thinking I need to reread the book. 

Robert Alexander real name is R.D Zimmerman and he is also a great mystery writer.  He chose to write under Robert Alexander for his historical fiction books so he could be toward the front of the alphabet and therefore his book will have better placement in bookstores. 

After he spoke to students and answered questions, he talked to students, posed for pictures (see above) and signed their books.  It was a great visit and I am so happy Mr. Alexander took the time to visit my students. 

Days like these make me so happy and proud to be a teacher.
Oh and if you haven't read The Kitchen Boy yet, my students would ask, What are you waiting for?  You totally need to read it before the film comes out.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana.  Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana starts with a dedication "To ALL THOSE WOMEN whose stories will never be told" and ends with the story of one woman who defied the odds and started a business during wartime.   During the occupation of the Taliban in Afghanistan and their fight for control of the country, all the rights of women were banned.  It was against the law for women to laugh, wear nail polish, go to school or to be seen outside of the home unless accompanied by a male relative.  Women were forbidden to talk to men unless they were relatives and daily life became very difficult because women were not allowed to work outside of the home.

Kamila knew she had to do something or her large family would starve.  Her father and brother had fled to Iran and left only one 13 year old brother to run errands and be the "Male relative" for Kamila and her 5 sisters still at home.  So Kamila asks her older sister Malika to teach her to sew and Kamila in turn teaches her sisters to sew and they sell their designs at the market.  As Kamila's business takes off she is able to hire other women in the neighborhood and then create even more business opportunities and so on.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana proves that women are amazing, powerful, and resilient human beings that have the will to survive, take care of their families and prosper, against all odds.  This book makes me want to stand up and applaud the amazing women of Afghanistan for their strength and will.  Kamila's story is very inspiring and gives me the impression that women everywhere can perpetuate change in the world if given the chance.  The Dressmaker of Khair Khana celebrates the modern working woman.

"Money is power for women," Kamila said.  "If women have their own income to bring to the family, they can contribute and make decisions."  (Pg 235)  Money changes lives, help families and opens doors to opportunities.  It is so important to educate women.  We are lucky as American women to have a free education and the freedom to choose a career and more.

Lemmon wrote The Dressmaker of Khair Khana as part of her MBA degree for Harvard.  She wanted to find successful women business owners in wartime countries.  We always hear about the great deeds of men during wartime but rarely do we hear a positive story surrounding women during a war.  This is a positive story about women who made a difference in their small community near Kabul, Afghanistan and taught others how to help themselves. 

April- Hometown Track Author in the Spotlight

April- Hometown Track Author in the Spotlight

Welcome to the great month of April, the first month of Spring and the celebration of Easter.  April is the month of Venus, National Poetry month and National Autism Awareness month.  It is also the month that Rebecca Fjelland Davis is the author in the spotlight on Booksnob.  Yeah Rebecca!

I met Rebecca at the Minnesota Book Fair in October.  Her Young Adult book is called Chasing Alliecat and she has also contributed to the anthology Girl Meets Boy.

Here is the synopsis from Goodreads for Chasing Alliecat:

While training for an off-road bike race, Sadie, Allie, and Joe find a priest, badly beaten and near death. After calling for help, Allie mysteriously disappears from their lives. It's not until the day of the race that Sadie learns the truth about Allie, and her connection to the priest.

This month you can expect a book review, a contest, an author interview and if we are lucky a guest post by Rebecca.    You can find Rebecca at her blog,

http://rebeccafjellanddavis.blogspot.com/  You can also expect rain, hopefully some sunny weather and lots of good book reviews from Booksnob.  Enjoy the month of April.

Here is the book trailer for Chasing Alliecat