Let it Snow...while I read

Our Home ~ Winter 2010

According to me, there are only two things you need when the snow starts falling.........groceries and a good book. Shovels are optional, I'm not going anywhere if I have some good fiction. It's the excuse I live for each winter, it almost as if someone is whispering go read..............let it snow, let it snow. I have the feeling this is going to be a particulary good winter for reading. With that in mind, some of my favorites from my 2009 Book List. They are all winter storm worthy...........the best kind. In the same note as my last post on A Bookish Gift, each book selection is accompanied by a quote , something to entice you to open their pages if you haven't already. This list should get you all the way to April, depending on the forecast of course. Let's start with my favorite 2009 read. The rest are in no particular order.

"My sisters and I have fought over shoes, over who's had a better life, and over who's smarter and prettier, but this time I don't have a chance. I know who will win. For so long I've wondered about my destiny. Now the tears of my greatest loss of my life roll down my cheeks." Shanghai Girls by Lisa See.

* I have omitted one line in the above quote that would have given away part of the story.

"The thought of what I needed to do in order to survive made me quite breathless at times; I'd have to sit and put my head between my news, like a grand lady overtaken by a spell of the vapours, like my Lady herself on one of her bed days. I had no time for such weakness. Time and time again, I forced myself back onto my feet." Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger.

"Children picked strawberries for the fun of it. Colored folks picked them for extra money, and for making jams. Farmers packed them morning, afternoon, and evening, and put them up in boxes to be drawn by horse to Toronto and to Hamilton. I didn't mind eating the strawberries, but I never picked them. Colored people had been bending over and picking things off farmers' fields for hundreds of years in the United States, and I sure as hell wasn't going to do it in Canada." Any Known Blood by Lawrence Hill

"She'll wake up soon and then be gone, so for awhile I'll watch her breathe and dream. So lovely. She's wearing a cotton nightgown, modest and opaque, but of course it reveals what isn't there, the breast she surrendered last year to save her life, and looking at her now, knowing the small secrets she's kept in her good heart, I feel a little better about my own. Perhaps we are all entitled to keep a small place that is our own." Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo.

"Even before I got to the front steps, I heard it. A wretched, unloosed, primeval keening. A sound I couldn't possibly be hearing from a human being, except that it was. I stood on the front porch, hearing the sound. I stood there. I even started to open the door. The knob was in my hand. Then I turned around and walked back home." Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

"She wanted to be someone else. The old Claire seemed provincial, ignorant.She had been to a party at Goverment House, sipped champagne at the Gripps while women she knew twirled around in silky dresses. She had her nose pressed up against the glass and was watching a different world, one she hadn't known existed. She could not name it but she felt as if she were about to be revealed, as if there were another Claire inside, waiting to come out." The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. Lee


"When my share of the world's cruelty struck, I was nine years old. It would take a great portion of my time as an adult before I realized that tragedy was hurled freely into every one's life as though it were a cheap newspaper, advertising porn shops and strip shows thrown into a overgrown yard. I was an old man by the time I turned ten years old, and I caught the terrible drift of things many years before my number should have been called." South of Broad by Pat Conroy

All photos by Sande Chase ~ A Gift Wrapped Life