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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
By the time election day arrived, my election-habit had reach chronic
proportions. In the normal course of events I'm happy to catch up on the
news daily at most, and find that the world gets along perfectly well without me
following its every movement, but by November 4th this year I was an addict.
Not content with picking up the news every day or so, I'd moved to hourly, even
minute by minute checks - keeping screens open to key sites and refreshing them
feverishly every few minutes, just in case something, anything, had happened.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Back in 2003, Alan Brennert published
Moloka'i, set on the Hawaiian island of the same name which, for many years, was home to the isolated leper colony
at Kalaupapa. The book was a sleeper hit, in large part due to the enormous amount of time and enthusiasm Alan put into reaching out to book clubs and spending time with them chatting about his book.
Now he's back with Honolulu, to be published in March 2009.
Honolulu explores the early years of Hawaii's capital city through the eyes of a Korean 'picture bride' who arrived in Hawaii in the early years of the 20th century. The term picture bride refers to a practice in which Asian immigrant workers (usually Japanese or Koreans) selected brides from their native countries via a matchmaker's photograph (a precursor to today's "mail-order brides" which,
incidentally, the United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services estimate result in between 4,000 to 6,000 marriages between US men and foreign brides each year).
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
What's with Google and beta tests? A beta-test is supposed to be a short lived stage in between a product going live and it being declared sound enough to be offered to the general public. But four years after launch, with tens of millions of users, Gmail is still in beta (as are any number of other Google products). Surely, by now the bugs must be ironed out sufficiently so that Gmail can stand tall without having to hide behind the apologetic 'beta' tag?
Then again, perhaps Google's on to something. If their products can be in perpetual beta-test, maybe the rest of us can be too? Imagine, no more berating yourself for the silly mistakes you make. Instead, having made a mistake, fix it or learn from it, and congratulate yourself for ironing out one more bug in the great beta-test called life. After all, if a life in beta is good enough for Google, maybe it should be good enough for the rest of us?
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Our household is one of many pets - the dog, the hamster, a dozen or so fish, and an indeterminate number of worms.
The worms moved up the familial totem pole from organic waste disposal unit & free mulch-makers to family pets a couple of years back when husband refused to give up a handful for fishing purposes, claiming that worms were friends not food. With his close affection for our invertebrate friends it was a sad day last week when we lifted the lid of the worm bin to deposit a bowl of potato peelings, to find that the worms were no more - the delicate balance of moisture needed to keep them in health and happiness (wet enough to keep them slithering but not so wet that they drown) had gone awry and the whole bunch had shuffled off their mortal coils.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
A few weeks ago a copy of
What You Should Know About Politics But Don't: A Nonpartisan Guide to
the Issues by Jessamyn Conrad turned up in the mail from Arcade Publishing.
In 13 snappy chapters Conrad covers it all. I read a chapter a day (give or
take) and at the end of the first week I was a whiz on Elections, the Economy,
Foreign Policy and the Military, not to mention Health Care, Energy and the Environment. By the end of the second week I'd got my head around Civil Liberties, the Culture Wars, Socioeconomic Policies, Homeland Security, Education and Trade.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Looking for a dose of intelligent escapism to get you through the
financial crisis and election woes? Look no further than
The Heretic Queen, Michelle Moran's second novel following
Nefertiti.
Set in the 13th century BC, The Heretic Queen tells the rip-roaring story of the life of
Nefertari, wife to Ramesses II, who is remembered as one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs and, possibly, its longest reigning (an estimated 66 years, two years longer than Queen Victoria).
The Heretic Queen is the sort of book you can stay up late reading but not regret in the morning, it's a fun, fast read but also a very good and informative one - bringing to life a time and place that maybe more than 3000 years in the past but isn't really all that different to today. Fashions come and go, wars are won and lost, people starve while others live in splendor and so on.
