Cheers Y'all!

Don't bother just to be better
than your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself. ~ William Faulkner

Congratulations to all southern readers.
I raise my glass to y'all!

Cheers Y'all!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/08/cheers-yall.html

You Pronounce it "Car In"

My name is Karin (not Karen) Gillespie and it's pronounced "car in" as in "Is that your 'car in' the street with its bumper hanging off? My mother, who gave me this troublesome moniker, pronounces it "car rean" in a lovely lilting Austrian accent. My southern friends sometimes call me "corn" (as in Children of the...). My last name is pronounced the same as Dizzy's. (no relation)

~ Karin Gillespie

Bet Your Bottom Dollar (2004)

A Dollar Short (2005)

Dollar Daze (2006)

Tiny Little Librarian said of Bet your Bottom Dollar, "It's another book full of quirky small-town folks and each chapter begins with a quote from a bumper sticker, sign in someone's shop, someone's favourite quote or a song from the jukebox in the Tuff Luck Tavern, such as selection F-7: "I Still Miss You, Baby, But My Aim Is Getting Better."

Lynne's Little Corner of the World said of Dollar Daze's main character, "Attalee reminds me of a Southern Grandma Mazur."

You Pronounce it "Car In"

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/05/you-pronounce-it-car-in.html

Georgia Author Mary Kay Andrews

New blogger Angie of What is Angie Thinking? got an e-mail from Mary Kay Andrews this week! Pretty exciting and well humbling for me. I had no idea there was such a nice southern lady. Thank you for raising the rock I was under Angie!

This is an exert from author Andrews' blog:

Now, some writers absolutely hate the idea of a used bookstore. Not me. I know from experience that somebody who picks up a used copy of one of my books for a buck or two will usually decide they really need to buy my new hardback as soon as it comes out. Or, maybe they're a working mom or retiree who can only afford to feed their habit by buying used books. I'm good with that.

~ Mary Kay Andrews

Savannah Blues (2003)
Little Bitty Lies (2004)
Hissy Fit (2005)
Blue Christmas (2006)
Savannah Breeze (2007)
Deep Dish (2008)

Georgia Author Mary Kay Andrews

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/05/georgia-author-mary-kay-andrews.html

How Cool is This?!?

The author of Mudbound, Hillary Jordan, responded to my comment in LibraryThing! How nice is that?!? This is her comment, and the Faulkner reference is a nice local touch.

Many thanks for the kind words and for spreading the gospel of Mudbound! I had a wonderful time traveling around Mississippi on my book tour. My grandfather was from Oxford and knew Faulkner (in fact, the latter was in love with my great aunt at one time - he proposed and she turned him down) and it was fun to imagine them walking the same streets as I was.

Best, Hillary

How Cool is This?!?

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-cool-is-this.html

Cadaver Lab like Library?

“Before leaving the room, I clutched the doorframe and took a last look around. Even with the harsh lights, the well-scrubbed linoleum, and the funk of formaldehyde, it seemed less like a lab than like a library—a place where not only human anatomy but the spirit of anatomical discovery is preserved. And there, in the far back corner, I could easily imagine a small man in a black coat, Henry Gray. He had been here all this time silently working.”

The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy
by Bill Hayes
p. 61

Cadaver Lab like Library?

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/04/cadaver-lab-like-library.html

What Cruel Parenting!

“Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I was reading up to three or four books per week. This was mainly because my parents finally broke down and bought a television, and the rule was that I had to read a full book for every half hour that I watched it. The second rule was that I had to mute all the commercials so I would not be brainwashed into wanting products that I didn’t need.

When I started reading nothing but Sweet Valley High and The Baby-sitters Club, my parents decided that sugary teenage books didn’t count and that I had to read a literary “classic” for every half hour of television. My mom created elaborate (and oddly draconian) charts for my brother and me to keep track of all this. All I know is that suddenly I was plowing through Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as fast as I could—just so I could watch a measly hour of Saturday morning cartoons.”

~Jerramy Fine
from her memoir
Someday My Prince will Come

What Cruel Parenting!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-cruel-parenting.html

Get'em Jimi!

I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.

~ Jimi Hendrix

Get'em Jimi!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/10/getem-jimi.html

Happy Fourth!

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

~Mark Twain
Following the Equator (1897)

Happy Fourth!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/07/happy-fourth.html

Hee-Haw!

Here's a little something

to think about
as we embark on the

"Sense of Place" contest.

Photos of dead mules need not apply!

Oh, this one? He's restin'.

Thank yew to this hilarious post

from SFP at Pages Turned!

She did a little background check on "southernness"
which turned up this jewel by Jerry Leath Mills.

...there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it?

Hee-Haw!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/06/hee-haw.html

Born Today in 1880!

Our very own Alabamian, Helen Keller!

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

~ Helen Keller

Born Today in 1880!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/06/born-today-in-1880.html

Born Today in 1811...

I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Born Today in 1811...

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/06/born-today-in-1811.html

6 more days...

...until Southern Reading Challenge begins! So, pull up a rocker and get comfortable!

"The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination, and the homeland for an array of Americans who consider themselves southerners. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends."
~ Bill Ferris

6 more days...

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/05/6-more-days.html

I Suggest Raney!

The Raleigh News and Observer said, “Clyde Edgerton is the love child of Dave Barry and Flannery O’Connor."

Where Trouble Sleeps (1997)
In Memory of Junior (1992)
Killer Diller (1991)
The Floatplane Notebooks (1988)
Walking Across Egypt (1987)
Raney (1985)

I Suggest Raney!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/05/i-suggest-raney.html

This Made Me Giggle!

If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

~ William Faulkner

This Made Me Giggle!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/05/this-made-me-giggle.html

Honorary Southerner

“A southerner talks music.”

~ Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age (1873)
Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
What Is Man? (1906)

Honorary Southerner

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/04/honorary-southerner.html

Read Any Walker Percy?

The Moviegoer (1961)
The Last Gentleman (1966)
Love in the Ruins (1971)
Lancelot (1977)
The Second Coming (1980)

The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)

"I think the day of regional Southern writing is all gone. I think that people who try to write in that style are usually repeating a phased out genre or doing Faulkner badly." ~Walker Percy

Read Any Walker Percy?

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/04/read-any-walker-percy.html

Southerner Wins EB White Award!

First time novelist and Alabama naive, Watt Key, wins the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for Older Readers. His book Alabama Moon is set in the wilds of Alabama and perfect for the Southern Reading Challenge.

Exert

"I could trap my own food and make my own clothes. I could find my way by the stars and make fire in the rain. Pap said he even figured I could whip somebody three times my size. He wasn’t worried about me."

DearReader's Booktalk

For as long as ten-year-old Moon can remember, he has lived out in the forest in a shelter with his father. They keep to themselves, their only contact with other human beings an occasional trip to the nearest general store. When Moon’s father dies, Moon follows his father’s last instructions: to travel to Alaska to find others like themselves. But Moon is soon caught and entangled in a world he doesn’t know or understand, apparent property of the government he has been avoiding all his life. As the spirited and resourceful Moon encounters
constables, jails, institutions, lawyers, true friends, and true enemies, he adapts his wilderness survival skills and learns to survive in the outside world, and even, perhaps, make his home there.

Southerner Wins EB White Award!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/04/southerner-wins-eb-white-award.html

Sharyn McCrumb on the South

I find that the more I write, the more fascinated I become with the idea of the land as an intricate element in the lives of the mountain people, and of the past as prologue for any contemporary narrative. This connection to the land is personal as well as thematic.

~ Sharyn McCrumb

Elizabeth MacPherson Series
1. Sick of Shadows (1984)
2. Lovely in Her Bones (1985)
3. Highland Laddie Gone (1986)
4. Paying the Piper (1988)
5. The Windsor Knot (1990)
6. Missing Susan (1991)
7. Macpherson's Lament (1992)
8. If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him... (1995)
9. The PMS Outlaws (2000)

Bimbos of the Death Sun Series
1. Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987)
2. Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992)
Bimbos and Zombies (omnibus) (1998)

Ballad Series
1. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990)
2. The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1992)
3. She Walks These Hills (1994)
4. The Rosewood Casket (1996)
5. The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998)
6. The Song Catcher (2000)
7. Ghost Riders (2003)
8. St. Dale (2005)

Sharyn McCrumb on the South

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/04/sharyn-mccrumb-on-south.html

The Captain's Wife (notes)

"...letters are nonetheless peculiar historical documents that must also be read for what is evaded or unspoken. People's lives, and the ways in which they remember and record those lives, can never be perfect reflections of one another. The act of recounting always involves the selection of observations, the editing of emotions, even omission of entire experiences. By choosing which episodes to dwell upon and which sentiments to impart..." p28-29

Did we start this evasion of truth at our first summer camp? Our letters filled with flowing "Great Times!" and "Having so much FUN!" Really, all we wanted was our own bed and neighborhood friends.

The Captain's Wife (notes)

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/04/captains-wife-notes.html

Long Live the Book!

People still burn books. But that only means that books are still dangerous enough to destroy. And if people want to destroy them, they are valuable enough that they will endure.

Note: A Special Report from Forbes.com on Books edited by Michael Maiello and Michael Noer.

Long Live the Book!

http://maggiereads.blogspot.com/2007/03/long-live-book.html