Reason for Reading: I adore Virgina Woolf.
Synopsis: Nicolson, the son of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s occasional lover, gives us a short biography of Woolf’s life, including her rough childhood, marriage, friendships, writings, and struggles with insanity.
Reason for Reading: A book I heard good things about, but forgot about until I saw it on the shelf at the library.
Synopsis: Fuller, known to her friends as Bobo, tells the story of her childhood, where she grew up white in Africa during changing times of black power, revolution, and war. Her family survives by farming and moving around Africa, influenced as much by weather (floods, drought) as the political upheaval in the area.
Reason for Reading: An interest in the law that led to an interest in Canada’s justice system failing miserably, as in the case of Guy Paul Morin. The gripping title helped, too.
Synopsis: In 1959, fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was accused of the brutal rape and murder of his twelve-year-old classmate, Lynne Harper. For over forty years, Truscott has protested that he was innocent. With this book, Sher produces a mountain of judicial bumblings, hidden testimony, exaggerations, and lies that led to Truscott’s initial judge sentencing him to ‘be hanged from the neck until you are dead.’
Reason for Reading: Raves at BookCrazy.
Synopsis: New Yorker Helene Hanff begins twenty years of correspondence when she writes to a bookstore in London, asking them to find (cheap) used books for her. Soon Hanff is sending them packages, as they can’t find eggs and other foods in post-war England, and everyone at the bookstore is writing Hanff, as they find all of their lives oddly intertwined by letters.
Reason for Reading: Constant demand for it when I worked at a bookstore.
Synopsis: In this autobiography, champion cyclist Lance Armstrong explores how testicular cancer halted him in the middle of a successful career, and looks at his struggle to not only recover, but to prosper again.
Reason for Reading: I was curious about what that magical equation actually means.
Synopsis: Bodanis breaks down the famous E=mc2 equation in a very accessible way. Each component of the equation gets its own chapter explaining its history and the scientists who discovered it, and then moves on to how the equation has been used in the past hundred years from the atom bomb to powering emergency exit signs to the eventual demise of the sun and the universe as we know it.
Reason for Reading: I have an inexplicable adoration of Manson.
Synopsis: Shock ‘n’ roller Marilyn Manson’s surprisingly honest autobiography, covering his life from childhood up to the release of his album Anti-Christ Superstar. Manson isn’t afraid to look like a huge geek, although most of the stories from his later life, are, of course, of the variety that make parents want to lock up their children when he comes to town.