Are you giving books as gifts this holiday season? Are you hoping to receive books as gifts this holiday season?
December 1, 2009, 258 voters
December 2009
I am not sure where this year went. I feel like I was wrapping Christmas presents about 20 minutes ago and now I am doing it again. As I look back, I think it would be interesting to arrange my bookshelves with the books I read this year, lining them up in order. For those of us who love books, they often tell so much of the story of our year.
Editorial content for Past Imperfect
About the Book
“Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while….”
Nearly 40 years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season.
The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud’s. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing --- and it was, but not always quite as expected.
PAST IMPERFECT © Copyright 2011 by Julian Fellowes. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin’s Griffin. All rights reserved.
Editorial content for Lit: A Memoir
About the Book
THE LIAR’S CLUB brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. CHERRY, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now LIT follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness --- and to her astonishing resurrection.
Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord --- but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.
LIT is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up --- as only Mary Karr can tell it.
LIT: A Memoir © Copyright 2011 by Mary Karr. Reprinted with permission by Harper Perennial. All rights reserved.
