I am so excited. I got my first book for May RMTBRBB. It came from a PBS member in Burlington MA. I don't know who it is from. I don't know how I am going to wait 25 days to open it. :D :D :bananadance: :bananadance:

What is a RMTBRBB? :ask:

It stands for Rocky Mount To Be Read Book Babes. This is one of our book swap groups. Twelve people sign up to participate and each person is assigned a month. Each month the person who has that month will get a book from all the other members. So when it's your month - mine is April - you should get 11 books.
There are a bunch of other groups like this one going, but with different names and different members.

ETA: There are a couple of groups right now looking for more members.

I mailed your book out, tranq, but I forgot where it was coming from - I think it was Louisiana. Anyway, if it looks suspect, don't open it until May. :D

I received packages in the mail today from Tennah and lizziwhizz. :bananadance: :bananadance:

Can't wait till I can open them.

I got another package in the mail today. It is from Russell, PA but I am not sure who that is.

thats from me via PBS

I received a package from Karendawn. :D :D

It is finally the first of May and I get to open all my packages. :bananadance: :bananadance:

The first package I open is from lizziwhizz. Wow it has 2 audio books.

Best of NPR's Lost & Found Sound Vol. 1 (unabridged cassettes)




The stories
Tony Schwartz: 30,000 Recordings Later
Gettysburg Eyewitness
Cigar Stories -- narrated by Andy Garcia
Carnival Talkers
LBJ and the Helium-Filled Astronaut
Archival Sound Restoration
West Virginia Steam Trains
Listening to the Northern Lights
Partridge Family Tour
Tennesse Williams: The Pennyland Recordings

From the back of the box
From NPR's All Things Considered: A cardboard disc recorded by Tennesses Williams in a New Orleans penny arcade, a home recorded letter from World War II, the songs of a 1930s fish vendor -- sounds, lost & found. This eclectic collecion of radio stories and sonic snapshots chronicles how recorded sound has captured and shaped American life.

"These producers are posessed. By sound. This is the most wonderful collection. The rich rewarding sounds of life that might otherwise have escaped us. The sounds of the street and the soul. These are the times that sound has no equal." -- Peter Jennings, ABC News

From the publisher
On January 1, 1999, All Things Considered aired the first in a series of richly layered stories that trace the soundtrack of the 20th century. Broadcast weekly through 1999, continuing monthly through 2000, Lost & Found Sound chronicles, reflects, and celebrates the human experience in rare recordings and "sonic snapshots" submitted by listeners. Blending the historic with the everyday, the monumental with the personal, this is evocative, haunting, eclectic listening -- endangered sounds, shifting accents, vanishing voices, home recordings, and audio artifacts that reveal a sense of place and mark the passage of time.


I love short stories on audios because I frequently listen on short car trip.

Find Me by Rosie O'Donnell

From Publishers Weekly
One day, TV talk show host O'Donnell (Kids Are Punny), aka Rosie, impulsively left a phone message for a pregnant, 14-year-old girl, whose tragic story of rape she had learned about at the New Jersey adoption agency she funds. Within days, the girl, Stacie, called back. Rosie introduced herself and offered to help the girl in any way she could. "And as I said those words, it was like a shell breaking open or a bird coming out," writes O'Donnell. "I said hello and a crack came, and we all fell in, straight into looking-glass land." What follows is an enormously powerful story about the mystery of identity, about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond. Rosie chronicles her increasingly obsessive phone and e-mail relationship with a poor, broken kid who comes to show her that beneath her gifts of humor, fame, money and even love, she is still the child who lost her mother and is calling out to her. But what makes this brief book extraordinary by any standard is that it captures the way a core self, a true I, can appear in the midst of the most broken life. In the kind of lean, clean, witty prose that comes only with complete honesty, Rosie imparts some unexpected truths. Readers will come away persuaded that the road of obsessiveness can sometimes lead to the palace of wisdom, that faith and grace are real. Those who declare this merely a sexual "coming-out" story (there are passing references to dating a woman and to Rosie's partner, Kelli) need a heart and brain transplant. Here, Rosie offers us an unsentimental and utterly real tale about the power of love.

Lizziwhizz know I wanted this one because I had selected it from her in the audio VBB. When she tried to find it to send she couldn't find it. So she let me select another audio. Now it has turned up and it is mine. Thank you lizziwhizz for both.

The next I opened is from karendawn.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith




From the back cover:
I capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle" - and the heart of the reader - in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

This is a wishlist book. I am really look forward to reading this.

The next book is from tenneh.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost



From Publishers Weekly
At 26, Troost followed his wife to Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. Virtually ignored by the rest of humanity (its erstwhile colonial owners, the Brits, left in 1979), Kiribati is the kind of place where dolphins frolic in lagoons, days end with glorious sunsets and airplanes might have to circle overhead because pigs occupy the island's sole runway. Troost's wife was working for an international nonprofit; the author himself planned to hang out and maybe write a literary masterpiece. But Kiribati wasn't quite paradise. It was polluted, overpopulated and scorchingly sunny (Troost could almost feel his freckles mutating into something "interesting and tumorous"). The villages overflowed with scavengers and recently introduced, nonbiodegradable trash. And the Kiribati people seemed excessively hedonistic. Yet after two years, Troost and his wife felt so comfortable, they were reluctant to return home. Troost is a sharp, funny writer, richly evoking the strange, day-by-day wonder that became his life in the islands. One night, he's doing his best funky chicken with dancing Kiribati; the next morning, he's on the high seas contemplating a toilet extending off the boat's stern (when the ocean was rough, he learns, it was like using a bidet). Troost's chronicle of his sojourn in a forgotten world is a comic masterwork of travel writing and a revealing look at a culture clash.

This was on my wishlist. My son also recently added it to his Amazon wishlist. So I will read it and pass it on to him. tenneh you have made both of us very happy.
This book is also in the Virtual armchaair swap. I was planning on stealing it, but it looks like it is very popular over there and wasn't going to last until my turn. Now I have my own copy.

The next book is from PBS. I think it is the one from nvangel2073. It is another wishlist book.

Everyman by Philip Roth.



From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Sara NelsonWhat is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics—Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family—and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick."And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark—like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father and a philanderer, a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works—there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal—and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional.

I love Philip Roth and I am sure I will love this book.

Nope, Everyman is from me. Enjoy!

I think the next on is from Lovemylife. She said she thought that her's was coming from Louisiana. This one is from Book Blessings in Hammond Louisiana. It's another wishlist book.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe



Amazon.com
One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence. His Ibo protagonist, Okonkwo, is a self-made man. The son of a charming ne'er-do-well, he has worked all his life to overcome his father's weakness and has arrived, finally, at great prosperity and even greater reputation among his fellows in the village of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a champion wrestler, a prosperous farmer, husband to three wives and father to several children. He is also a man who exhibits flaws well-known in Greek tragedy:

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

And yet Achebe manages to make this cruel man deeply sympathetic. He is fond of his eldest daughter, and also of Ikemefuna, a young boy sent from another village as compensation for the wrongful death of a young woman from Umuofia. He even begins to feel pride in his eldest son, in whom he has too often seen his own father. Unfortunately, a series of tragic events tests the mettle of this strong man, and it is his fear of weakness that ultimately undoes him.

Achebe does not introduce the theme of colonialism until the last 50 pages or so. By then, Okonkwo has lost everything and been driven into exile. And yet, within the traditions of his culture, he still has hope of redemption. The arrival of missionaries in Umuofia, however, followed by representatives of the colonial government, completely disrupts Ibo culture, and in the chasm between old ways and new, Okonkwo is lost forever. Deceptively simple in its prose, Things Fall Apart packs a powerful punch as Achebe holds up the ruin of one proud man to stand for the destruction of an entire culture.

Months ago I had ordered this one on titletrader. It never came. I got my point back but I was very disappointed. now I have copy

:bananadance:

OK then I think this one is from nvangel2073. She posted her message right after I post this package from Russell PA. I was confused because it doesn't indicate PBS. There are 3 books in the package and a nice note from Abby saying that she saw that I like Margret Atwood so she was including an extra Atwood book.

3 books by Atwood. Bodily Harm AND Lady Oracle were on my wishlist. Dancing Girls is one that I just hadn't discovered yet. I am sure I will love all three. Thank you nvangel2073.

Bodily Harm




Book Description
A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love.

Lady Oracle




Book Description
Joan Foster is the bored wife of a myopic ban-the-bomber. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands dead and well in Terremoto, Italy. In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time.


Dancing Girls



Book Description
This splendid volume of short fiction testifies to Margaret Atwood's startlingly original voice, full of a rare intensity and exceptional intelligence. Her men and women still miscommunicate, still remain separate in different rooms, different houses, or even different worlds. With brilliant flashes of fantasy, humor, and unexpected violence, the stories reveal the complexities of human relationships and bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter, compassion and recognition--and dramatically demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.

yes all the atwood books are from me.

great haul, tranq1! Happy May :)

I received a book today from Kyrissaean by way of PBS. It is another wishlist book. Thank you so much. I can't wait to read it.

Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
by Paul Auster



Product Description
An old man sits in a room, with a single door and window, a bed, a desk and a chair. Each day he awakes with no memory, unsure of whether or not he is locked into the room. Attached to the few objects around him are one-word, hand-written, labels and on the desk is a series of vaguely familiar black-and-white photographs and four piles of paper. Then a middle-aged woman called Anna enters and talks of pills and treatment, but also of love and promises. Who is this Mr Blank, and what is his fate? What does Anna represent from his past - and will he have enough time to ever make sense of the clues that arise? After the huge success of The Brooklyn Follies, Travels in the Scriptorium sees Auster return to more metaphysical territory. A dark puzzle, and a game that implicates both reader and writer alike, it is an ingenious exploration of language, responsibility and the passage of time.

Oh good, I'm glad it got there OK! :D

Sneaky book -- I've been watching it on the delivery confirmation map, and it passed through Jacksonville on Friday and then snuck into your mailbox without getting scanned again!

I received another wishlist book today, Cane River by Lalita Tademy from boogal. I think this came by way of BookMooch based on the bookbooch card inside. I listened to Lalita Tademy's other book Red River. I really enjoyed that one and I am looking forward to this one. Thank you boogal