April Reads at Book Ends

Book Group Selections At Book Ends

Dear Book Group friends,

I am pleased as punch to have April showers, and looking forward eagerly to May flowers…but while the rain is coming down, it’s nice to have a good book to curl up with. Curious about what your friends and neighbors are reading? Below is a list of the selections made by local book groups registered at the store. If you would like to register your book group here at Book Ends, please let us know by phone, email (shop@bookendswinchester.com) or, of course, in person. We will stock your title and discount your selection, 10% on paperbacks, and 20% on hardcovers.
A very happy Spring to all-
Marilyn
The Sisters Antipodes
By Alison, Jane
2009/03 – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)
9780151012800 – Hardcover
List Price $23.00

The Sisters Antipodes is a unique window on the intimate devastations of family betrayal, in equal measure unsettling and engrossing. Two girls are thrown into a state of silent combat for the affections of their absent fathers–a contest that would prove tragic….More

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
By Baker, Tiffany
2009/01 – Grand Central Publishing
9780446194204 – Hardcover See Other Formats
List Price $24.99

In this family saga, unearthed secrets lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually breaks the Morgan family apart forever. However, one woman’s reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places….More

Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
By Bashir, Halima
Lewis, Damien
2008/09 – One World
9780345506252 – Hardcover See Other Formats
List Price $25.00

In this first memoir of its kind from a woman affected by the war in Darfur, a female doctor in Sudan shares her harrowing tale of courage, hope, family, and survival….More

The Middle Place
By Corrigan, Kelly
2009/01 – Voice
9781401340933 – Trade Paper See Other Formats
List Price $14.95

Corrigan’s beautifully written memoir intertwines her own story with that of her larger-than-life, Irish-American, born-salesman father’s, and illustrates both an unbelievably powerful and healing father/daughter relationship and the unbreakable bonds of family….More

Gardens of Water
By Drew, Alan
2009/02 – Random House Trade
9780812978445 – Trade Paper See Other Formats
List Price $14.00

Powerful, emotional, and beautifully written, Drew’s stunning first novel brings to life two unforgettable families–one Kurdish, one American–and the sacrifice and love that bind them together….More

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
By Eire, Carlos
2004/01 – Free Press
9780743246415 – Trade Paper See Other Formats
List Price $15.00

This haunting memoir of the Cuban Revolution, seen through the eyes of a small boy, is the heartbreaking story of the author’s privileged childhood in pre-Revolution Havana, and how he lost everything, including his father….More

Still Alice
By Genova, Lisa
2009/01 – Pocket Books
9781439102817 – Trade Paper See Other Formats
List Price $15.00

Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman’s sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer’s disease, written by a first-time author who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind and Ordinary People, this work packs an emotional punch….More

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By Goodwin, Doris Kearns
2006/09 – Simon & Schuster
9780743270755 – Trade Paper See Other Formats
List Price $21.00

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in her #1 New York Times bestseller, as she chronicles the rise of the the one-term congressman/prairie lawyer from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president….More

April is Poetry Month

Two short poems that can be read as allegories of a poet’s creative life, fifteen years apart in the career of Mark Strand. “The Midnight Club” originally appeared in his 1991 collection The Continuous Life; “I Had Been a Polar Explorer” in Man and Camel, in 2006.

——————————————————————————–

The Midnight Club
The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

I Had Been a Polar Explorer

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

Spring Poem

A spring poem for Easter day by Jean Garrigue (1914-1972), anthologized in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition The Four Seasons, edited by J. D. McClatchy.

——————————————————————————–

Spring Song II
And now my spring beauties,
Things of the earth,
Beetles, shards and wings of moth
And snail houses left
>From last summer’s wreck,
Now spring smoke
Of the burned dead leaves
And veils of the scent
Of some secret plant,

Come, my beauties, teach me,
Let me have your wild surprise,
Yes, and tell me on my knees
Of your new life.

Poem A Day

Touch-Me-Nots

She brought a little of the country into the city
in the pots of impatiens she had planted.
The petals white, pure, the opposite of color.
She had transferred the impatiens from the garden,
digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam,
one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing
the roots into the earth. Despite the quality
of the soil—its rich decomposition of life—
still they would not last. The plants were hardy
and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves,
the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air
awash in pollen. She looked into the flower
as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering
sustenance independent of a body, free floating
and regenerative and wholly belonging
to what was impossible ever to touch.

 

Jill Bialosky’s Intruder is a volume which stretches our understanding of the creative process and the mind behind it, as in “Touch-Me-Nots,”