"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies." - Mother Teresa

The Newsweek that arrived in my mailbox yesterday was the usual fall preview.
The book section was small, but encouraging.

First to pique my interest: Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
I find Oliver Sacks fascinating; his explorations of the brain’s intricacy and quirkiness are always good reads – insightful, informative, and well-written. Generally starting out with the odd case study, he then dissects the whys and wherefores, as far as possible, of a relevant disorder. Good stuff. His latest book explores the intertwining of music and the brain; if not a perfect Christmas gift for my husband, at least a book he might enjoy, marrying the art and the science in a way his mathematician/musician brain will appreciate.

Alice Sebold, of Lovely Bones fame (I have not read it), and lesser Lucky fame (I have read it and found it powerful and scary), has a new book titled The Almost Moon. I am not yet convinced of Sebold’s powers as a writer, but I’d be willing to take a look.

Peter Hoeg’s newest, The Quiet Girl, features a clown as its protagonist. I HATE clowns. But if this book even comes close to touching the oddity of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, I might pick it up at the library.

Lynne Cheney has a book coming out titled Blue Skies, No Fences.
Back when I was a hormone-addled adolescent, I recall picking up somewhere a copy of a book called Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene (my paperback had a different cover, though). Judging from the Amazon reader reviews, I was not the only sex-crazed teenager to discover and, uh, appreciate this book. I wonder if Mrs Cheney is aware of the title parallelism? I am guessing she is not, as Cheney would DEFINTELY not approve of Greene’s sexy book. You’d think an astute editor would have caught the title similarities and advised accordingly.

And last, but certainly not least and not mentioned in Newsweek but crossing my radar and engendering much discussion via email with my personal Catholic advisor (otherwise known as Joke): Mother Teresa’s correspondence, Come Be My Light, detailing among other things her decades-long crisis of faith. That this woman could continue the charitable work at which she labored for years in the squalor and poverty of India, while not feeling one iota of her God’s presence, is just amazing to me. I have a post brewing about this, so won’t say anything else till I have really hammered out my feelings and thoughts, but I definitely want to read this book.

And now I must grocery shop, as we have no food – or at least no bread, milk, yogurt, or bananas, which amounts to the same thing – in the house. And the grocery store is right next to the Barnes & Noble - even though I have a library copy of The Last Witchfinder and a secondhand copy of The Dante Club sitting on my nightstand.