Posts Tagged ‘books’

Favorite book moment of the week: Helping Eleanor Brown ring in the birth of The Weird Sisters.  She read and spoke with aplomb, and the crowd went wild.  Bonus:  time to browse around The Tattered Cover in Highlands Ranch.  I talked to the staff a bit, signed a few books (faced-out in the literary criticism section and on a table of cozy winter lit!), picked up a prize for February’s Heroine Love event and bought a book for Top Secret Super Project.  Which leads me to…

Literary challenge of the week:  Fear.  Yup…same old same old.  The cursor on the blank screen.  A half-baked idea itching to be refined and expressed.  My mantra:  I’m the only one who can do the work in front of me, and I have much support and many opportunities on the horizon.  After all, the scarier a piece of work is, the more deserving it is of my attention…right?  Right?  Besides, what better practice for The Glamour of Writing (Not): Romance and Writing In Spite of It All at the Boulder Writers Meetup? 

Review/testament of the week:  Tiffany says “I love love pink puffy heart love this book.”  Cue loving expression on my face.*

Current favorite “customers who bought this item also bought” pairing on Amazon: Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, by Pamela Smith Hill.  Amazing.

This time ten years ago: I was rocking out as the lead singer of an indie rock band in Hollywood.  I am serious.  Oh, how things have changed…

Current personal heroine: Carlina White, the young woman who just found her birth parents after being abducted in a hospital when she was 19 days old.  Not only did she have the guts to doubt the lies she had been told about her life, but she found the courage and perseverance to actually act on those doubts.  23 years later, she’s been reunited with her parents and, I hope, will begin to tackle the task of reconstructing her life and self with the fortitude she showed in questioning her own identity.

*Wonder what the heck she’s talking about? Go to your local indie bookstore or buy The Heroine’s Bookshelf online and let me know what you think!

Favorite book moment of the week: It’s a toss-up between being a fly on the wall for the many omgBorders conversations (what can I say, I’m fascinated by spectacular rises and falls) and, of course, witnessing the enormous outpouring of good cheer and support for February’s Heroine Love event, which will feature 12 of my favorite book bloggers, an ever-more-amazing prize pack, and lots of literary secret-telling and praise.  More and more I realize that community is the most incredible thing to come out of The Heroine’s Bookshelf…a community of writers and a community of readers who are so dear to me.

Review/testament of the week: I had the great pleasure of speaking to the first-ever Heroine’s Book Club at the Burke County Public Library in Morganton, NC on Saturday.  The topic was Louisa May Alcott, and one of the ladies had very nice things to say about how I addressed the author’s life along with that of her heroine.  Still beaming over here. *

Current favorite “customers who bought this item also bought” pairing on Amazon: Skippy Dies: A Novel, by Paul Murray.  I had the pleasure of hearing the Macmillan/Faber & Faber rep talk about this book at the Boulder Book Store’s book club event and it’s been inching its way up my crazy to-read list ever since.

This time two years ago: I was furiously working on the book proposal that would become The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  The more things change…

Current personal heroine: Tavia Gilbert!  You may know her as the incredible woman who voiced The Heroine’s Bookshelf in audio form for Blackstone (and what a job she did).  I had the privilege of meeting her on The Littlest Book Tour, and she is not only well-spoken, beautiful, and whip-smart, but she works on bettering herself and expressing herself every single day.  What more can you want in a real-life heroine, I ask?

*Wonder what the heck she’s talking about? Go to your local indie bookstore or buy The Heroine’s Bookshelf online and let me know what you think!

Okay, so I’d love to pretend that there were constant swirling rumors about The Heroine’s Bookshelf…but dare to dream.

However.

I am very pleased to officially announce February the month of Heroine Love. For many, it’s a bitter month, or a swoony one, or just a normal one, but just once, this once, I want it to be all about love of literature and, of course, love of literary heroines.

How will we celebrate?  With guests, lots of them.  In fact, no fewer than twelve of my favorite book bloggers will be joining the blog throughout the month of February to extol, praise, and ruminate on the literary ladies who made them who they are today.

Better yet?  The prize.  Yes, there will be a prize…and it will be big.  I’ll announce specifics of the prize pack later in the game, but suffice it to say that it is going to be awesome, and that its artistic, literary, and trinket-like contents were contributed by a diverse set of book lovers and a publisher who will go unnamed but can surely be guessed.  Yours for the winning February 18.

By my calculations, there are a whopping 19 days until Heroine Love kicks off on February 1.  That’s 19 days to spread the word, my loves…and to mull over heroic feats to come.

PS – While you’re at it, check out Beth’s wonderful post on just this topic on An Accomplished Young Lady!

You know how sometimes all conversation, media consumption, and thought seems to coalesce into a Grand Theme for a moment?  Well, lately, a cool 69 days since The Heroine’s Bookshelf was released by Harper, the theme has been (im)perfection.

Like many of you, I enjoyed Black Swan and Tron: Legacy in movie theaters Christmas week, but I also had the pleasure of reading Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s new biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Wild Unrest, and Daphne Kalotay’s exquisite Russian Winter.  Without spoiling any of them, I will say that each has something to say about the nature of perfection and the reality of imperfection.  Perfection lingers, tempts…imperfection stays, concrete and gritty, and colors all it touches.

With one of the most eventful years of my life coming to a close, I can’t help but see imperfection all around.  I’d wanted to finish another book by this time, somehow be a Much-Lauded Bestseller (!), lose a small person’s worth of weight, perfectly balance the demands of running my own business and being a working writer.  Yeah, not so much.  But there are still moments of perfection in there.  An exquisite tea to celebrate Jane Austen’s birthday.  A room full of seventh graders growing interested in reading.  A constant stream of conversation with other writers and readers who care about literary heroines as much as I do.  Reviews that are heartfelt and positive and that do justice to the time and heart I poured into my first book.  Stealing glances at a Christmas card that meant a lot to me.  Refining and finding my voice with every day of sloppy and imperfect writing.

I wrote The Heroine’s Bookshelf firm in the belief that we all need some heroines to get us through our days.  Luckily, they weren’t perfect and neither were their authors.  As I muse on my own heroically imperfect life these days, I have a feeling that’s exactly as it should be.

“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

“That’s the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Now that November is coming to an end, it’s time to celebrate the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, who was born on this day in 1832.  And so, you’re in for a treat…Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott , is here to give her thoughts on the very human LMA.  Welcome, Kelly!

I have always loved Little Women, of course, but Little Women is not really what made me want to write a novel about Louisa May Alcott. If I had never read any other novels or stories written by Louisa, nor any of the books written about her, I probably would have gone on happily rereading Little Women each year around Christmastime and not thinking very much about the woman who created it.

But one day in the library I picked up a copy of Martha Saxton’s biography of Louisa May Alcott. It stirred something in me and suddenly I wanted to read everything in the Alcott solar system but Little Women. This includes dozens and dozens of stories, a few novels, and one piece of thinly disguised journalism about her experience as a nurse during the Civil War. Next, I turned to Louisa’s collected letters and journals and the biographies by Madeline Stern and John Matteson.

The narrative voice of Little Women is polished and reserved, a spinster aunt telling a group of children a cozy story in which she has no personal stake. But the voice and content of Louisa’s other work, not to mention her letters and journals, is immediate and vibrant. This writing and the biographies reveal her to have been a person of intense and changing states of mind, one who was, in turns, passionate, depressed, prickly, angry, manic, lonely, and full of good humor. In other words, Louisa May Alcott was a real person. And realizing that is what made me want to write a novel about her.

I could list the facts that usually scandalize and/or surprise fans of gentle-mannered Little Women, and there are plenty—Louisa wrote sensational tales under a pen name and was very much motivated by money; she wrote about love gone violently awry, stalkers, and illegitimate children, as well as the experience of opium, to which she became addicted after years of chronic pain—but a mere list, without the context that life, day in and out, provides, seems to me a boring exercise.

I was and am interested in the choices Louisa made each day in her attempt to cultivate a certain kind of life that was rare indeed for a woman in her time: A life of independence and fulfilling work. We know, looking back, that she was destined to become one of the most famous women in human history, but until, at age 35, she wrote the book that became a bestseller, she did not know what the future held. And, yet, she rose each day and wrote until her hand cramped, determined to persevere to publication—not to be lauded, but so that she could provide for her family. Where does that drive come from? What hopes and wounds resided in the heart of this real woman? That’s the question I wrote The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott to answer.

Kelly O’Connor McNees is a former editorial assistant and English teacher. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived in New York, Rhode Island, and Ontario and now resides with her husband in Chicago. The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is her first novel.