Sunday Salon: Remedies by Kate Ledger

Title: Remedies
Author: Kate Ledger
ISBN: 9780425234488
Publisher: Berkeley Books/2010
Pages: 384

After a LONG time, I finished a novel. And it feels good.

Remedies is set in Baltimore, where Simon Bears is practicing Doctor and his wife Emily is a partner in a Public Relations firm. They have a 13-year-old daughter, Jamie.  On the surface everything seems to be going great for them. However, time has stood still for them since they lost their infant son 15 years ago. They are in a mode of denial about their relationship. And Jamie too is living under the shadow of her dead sibling, Caleb.

Simon Bears treats Chronic patients by trying to relieve their pain. Then he stumbles upon something which seems to be working for relieving the persistent pain. He knows it is a major breakthrough. He also pursues unusual interests. Emily is totally dissatisfied with her life and when she meets an old lover, she knows she wants out. Jamie deals with her pain in her own way. Each one them seem to be unaware of the other's problems. 

Remedies speaks about pain. Of the body, the heart and the mind. And can one or all of it be cured? Kate Ledger has tackled that very well. The dilemma a modern couple goes through. Or they way they are unable to communicate with each other. And also that, it spills over to their daughter. 

Kate has tried to deal with these issues but somehow Simon and Emily seem out of the reader's reach. And Emily's relationship with Jamie, was something, I could connect with. No mother leaves her own child to her own devices the Emily does. Yet I will say, Kate Ledger knows that a broken marriage can't be resolved that easily. Not unless both make an effort. Despite some hiccups, she writes well. I will look out for her next novel.  

Weekly Geeks : Reading Challenges 2011

Do you plan on participating in any reading challenges in 2011?. Are there any challenges you are looking forward to that haven't been announced yet? Or are you all about being free to read what you want, when you want?

I like to read whatever takes my fancy rather than reading for challenges. I don't join many challenges and the ones I do join, I take those in my stride without any kind of pressure.  I read varied genres, so even if I don't join any challenges, I do seek out books which are interesting, different and make me think. Poetry too comes into that.

The challenges that I will definitely be participating are:

1) Mystery and Suspense Reading Challenge 2011 which is hosted by Book Chick City and will go on from Jan-Dec 2011. One has to read 12 books of the genre. I am way ahead in this challenge for 2010!

2)  Canadian Book Challenge 2010-2011 hosted by John Mutford and runs from July 10 to June 11.

3) R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge VI to be hosted by Carl V Sept-Oct 2011

For the past two years, I have only been joining at the most, three challenges. In 2011 too I will not join more than three. 

Book Blogger Hop/Follow me

Follow Friday, is hosted by ParaJunkee,  Book Blogger Hop, is hosted by Jennifer (Crazy-For-Books), and
Follow Friday 40 and over is hosted by Java

Jennifer asks "What very popular and hyped book in the blogosphere did you NOT enjoy and how did you feel about posting your review?"


I really don't go in for the much hyped paranormal, fantasy novels which seem to be the rage in the blogosphere. Somehow they don't interest me and I seldom pick those up. 

ParaJunkee asks "What do you do besides reading / reviewing as a hobby??"

I like to do crossword puzzles. And paint too. Other than that, as all of you know, READING!

Do feel free to explore my blog. You will definitely find something that interests you as I read wide range of genres, except maybe for a few. I also write poetry. You can read that on my other blog, rooted. Now go, explore both of my blogs! And follow them, if you like!! I follow blogs I like via Google Reader...

Enjoy!

Literary Blog Hop: Favourite poetry

Literary Blog Hop is hosted by The Blue Bookcase. If you features book reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion, you too can join in!

This week's question is:

What is your favorite poem and why?

This is not easy to answer. I am a poet myself and I have been reading poetry for as long as I can remember. How does one compare the ancient poets with the medieval or the modern poets? Each one has written about what was relevant in their time period. Feelings and emotions do not change essentially but our reactions do change. Language too, changes with the time. Therefore, I can go on mentioning Homer to contemporary poets, who have made an impact on me. I have liked Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, and so many more. How do I mention only one when I like these poets and many more for entirely different reasons? 

Yet, I want to share here a poem by a Contemporary poet, Anne Caston. 

"Judah's Lion"

Irony is beyond a boy like mine. As is symbolism.
    Allegory. Metaphor, too. All is literal with him
        though that doesn't rule out a wildebeest,
the one he meets each morning in the fallow field
    beyond our yard, the one who lies beside him
        each night now in the dark.

Some morning the boy stands a long time, one hand
    shading his eyes, looking sunward, scanning the wide
        sky for that fiery wheel - Ezekiel's wheel - way up
in de middle ob de air. He says he'd like to see that
    himself. Just once. If the sun would
        get out of the way.

God has a lamb, he tells me one night after prayers,
    who followed Jesus to school just like Mary's
        lamb in the Mother Goose book.
And God? God, for him, is just one giant eye roaming to and fro    
over the dark earth, peering through the windows at night
        like some neighborhood peeping Tom.

To him, a fiery wheel is a wheel in flames, a lamb a lamb, an eye
    an eye, and as of this morning's sermon, the Lion
        of Judah - coming again, and the unholy
shall be judged and torn - is an orange cat that belongs to Judah
    Michaels, a boy who lives two door down.
        "I will kill that lion if he comes near," he mutters,

pocketing stones and pebbles as he walks all afternoon the gravel drive
    between our house and Judah's, the young tom pouncing
        bugs in the weed-riddled grass of the Michaels' front yard.
But now, the Sunday sun is almost spent and we settle
    together on the splintered back stoop while shadows
        creep forward from the field where his wildebeest waits.

While fireflies sputter on and off and crickets
    call out across the twilit lawn, he is telling me now
        about Zion, that beautiful city of God, which is
somewhere, he says, in Georgia, near Stone Mountain
    except everything there - streets, people, trees - has gone
        gold as Christmas glitter. God's people, he says,

are marching, marching upward to Zion, and he tilts
    the stick he's holding to show me how steep is the climb.
        He's going there too one day, he says, when he is big,
when he is old, when he must leave me. I stare at the darkening
    field, considering again the lilies, the wildebeest I cannot see,
        the whole thorn-torn mess a world can sometimes be.

Who wouldn't long for a Zion like his: the sky gone fiery, bright
    overhead as Ezekiel's wheel, Gabriel singing us home
        to Georgia again, this boy and me and his wildebeest,
all of us marching up, up God's glittering mountain
    where the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah
        lie down together and wait for us

there, somewhere, in the polished hard and shining future.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is written for her son, who had a  diagnosis of Autism. Here she tries to show us the world from his point of view. This poem touches us and shows us new insights about someone who is closed in a world of his own and yet can have wonderful view of the world, in his own way. That is what is beauty of poetry.

Come share your poetry post with me. I would like that very much.

Booking through First Editions

How about First Editions? Are they something special? Or “just another book” to you?


For contemporary fiction, it does not really matter, if it is a first edition or not. But for poetry books and some old novels, I do love the first editions I possess. I like the covers and the smell of those book. These books are somewhat VERY special. However, I will never go out of my way to acquire any first editions. As long as I get a copy to read, it doesn't really matter much.

Teaser Tuesday: Remedies by Kate Ledger

"The piercing was too sexual. It was too declarative. It made her look like a child who'd already rejected parenting."

~page 76, Remedies by Kate Ledger

Mondays: Mailbox/Where Am I

Mailbox Monday has moved over to Knitting and Sundries, for the month of November and In My Mailbox is a weekly meme hosted at The Story Siren.

I received three books, in the past week, thanks to authors/publicists:

at the Crossroads of terror by Lenny Emanuelli: Charlie Johnson, a man suspected of killing a local merchant, reluctantly teams up with a television street reporter, Sherry Mann, trying to prove, he is innocent which takes them both deep into the world of an organized Asian street gang, who is on the verge of making their biggest stride, in their drug business. At the Crossroads of Terror is a very contemporary action filled thriller that crosses over to many genres. The story captures action, crime, suspense, and romance with a touch of comedy. 

Remedies by Kate Ledger: Baltimore physician Simon Bear is a confident, magnanimous man with an inflated view of himself and his abilities. His wife, Emily, a star public relations executive, handles corporate crises with an ease, but can't find a way to connect with their moody adolescent daughter, Jamie. While the Bears outwardly appear an enviably successful couple, neither Simon nor Emily has ever resolved the tragic and early death of their firstborn. Simon buries himself in work and with all-consuming hobbies (his latest is winemaking). Emily, too, is consumed by work, though she's privately devastated about her shortcomings as a mother and tempted by another man. Jamie, meanwhile, presses her mother's buttons, knowing she can never make up for the loss of the dead brother she never knew.

We Can Pull It off by Suresh Taneja: It was the most unusual vacation for Vikram, Yuvika, Manisha and Akshay the G4, as they called themselves. In the first few days of the vacations, they experienced some shocking incidents of declining moral values and corruption. These completely shook them up when they understood the implications. They dreaded the thought of being labelled as citizens of a corrupt country. G4 found this deplorable and decided to plunge into action. They had two weeks of vacation, which they productively used to start an initiative to address this issue. They used their creativity and a number of unique strategies which left an indelible mark on the public, making their initiative a mass movement. 
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I finished two albums of Tintin. 

Also started Remedies by Kate Ledger.

Slowly, slowly...baby steps towards that reading again. Wish me luck, Folks! I need it...

How well read are you?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.


Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis 
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I have read 44 out of this list. Not bad at all...How about you? Consider yourself tagged!

Book Blogger Hop/Follow me

Follow Friday, is hosted by ParaJunkee,  Book Blogger Hop, is hosted by Jennifer (Crazy-For-Books), and
Follow Friday 40 and over is hosted by Java

Jennifer asks, "What is your favorite book cover?"

I like covers which touch me somehow. How can I answer which is my favourite cover? There are too many and for very different reasons. Somehow I don't really understand this question.

Do feel free to explore my blog. You will definitely find something that interests you as I read wide range of genres, except maybe for a few. I also write poetry. You can read that on my other blog, rooted. Now go, explore both of my blogs! And follow them, if you like!! I follow blogs I like via Google Reader...

Enjoy!

Literary Blog Hop: Modern Classics/Booking through thanks

Literary Blog Hop is hosted by The Blue Bookcase. If you features book reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion, you too can join in!

This week's question is:

What makes a contemporary novel a classic?
Discuss a book which you think fits the category of ‘modern classics’ and explain why. 

A novel which has the timelessness feel to it can be taken as a classic. Any novel, contemporary or otherwise, that fits this spirit can be termed as a classic. Now what is a modern classic? For some it might be a contradiction of sorts. A modern novel which is classic. But why not? If it expresses life with beauty and truth artistically, and has a lasting effect, then it is definitely a modern classic. It also has to have an universal appeal. When each one of us connect to that in some way or identify with that somewhat, that novel is termed as a classic. Therefore themed books which depict, love, hate, death, that struggle for life, faith, belief along with emotions touch all of us in one or the other. 

I name certain authors which are taken as modern classic authors..Few of those are John Steinbeck, John Kerouac, Orhan Pamuk. J.M. Coetzee, and Gunter Grass. They depict society of different places yet we can identify with their writings. Because the human spirit can never die and unifies all of us.

I can mention so many books but I will only mention one. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Why? It maybe an tongue in cheek account of travesty of war but it is precisely that which makes it a timeless classic as it tells us about the ramifications of war.
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What authors and books are you most thankful for?

I am thankful to any author who writes timeless books. Modern, or otherwise. Add any book that gives me pleasure....be it poetry, crime fiction or science books..