my lil' book club's selection this month is the book thief, by marcus zusak, and as always there are no copies available at the public library. . .

so I'm throwing this out to the bloggernet. . .

does anyone have a copy I could borrow?



{book club is november 20th, I need to have it read before then.}


UPDATE: my cutest mother bought the book for me. isn't she nice? that's why we love her around here {because she's so thoughtful, not just because she buys us stuff} LoVes + avalanches, mamma!

book club readings: ordinary wolves

if I were to have a book club, this would be on the list. seth kantner's novel, ordinary wolves, is a beautifully expansive story of the alaskan wilderness and all those living within. it is a coming of age story; a story of social unjust and racism; a story approaching some of life's toughest questions. in it the land and her people are not romanticized; it is a harsh reality set amongst a harsh landscape. and as kantner grew up in the wilderness of northern alaska himself, some say that ordinary wolves is somewhat autobiographical. I think it is one of the truest depictions of the land, native and non-native peoples, and attitudes between the two.

The sun was warm on my neck. Slowly, I felt like Cutuk again, the little boy in the big wilderness. Before this constant thirst hiding between coffee and alcohol, sugar and sex. I wondered if I had always been afraid. All my life there had been power out there that made the decisions. It hadn't been so apparent when no man owned the land and we could laugh at storms and hunt harder. But no w everything was square and electric and came off airplanes. And we lived here not really knowing what the power looked like, who it listened to, or how it held its fork.

I was tired of it. I didn't believe in it. I stood up and brushed sand off my butt. "I'm not going to be a dog. I'll take the wolf's deal."

seth kantner is a true artist. not only of the written word, but of wildlife photography as well.

books galore

A while back my brother stumbled across a list of 1,001 books to read before you die, of these I have read (those I've only started reading but never finished are in italics) the following:

49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
86. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
223. Beloved – Toni Morrison
315. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
349. Sula – Toni Morrison
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
522. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
767. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
837. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
857. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
867. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
970. Candide – Voltaire

I guess I need to keep reading, or just never die.