The Possessed

I was intrigued by The Possessed when it was featured in Powell's Review-a-Day in May. I put it on my mental list of books to feature on the student services blog. Strangely enough our library has since acquired two copies of the book.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed? (22)

Elif Batuman went to college intending to study linguistics in the belief that "learn[ing] the raw mechanism of language, the pure form itself" (10) would inform her development into a novelist. Her introduction to the Russian language inspired a fascination with Russianness, which eventually landed her in a PhD program studying the form of the Russian novel. Batuman has yet to publish a novel, but she's had great success as an essayist in large part due to her ability to make both literary theory and staid academic life accessible to a broad readership.

The Possessed is a book that defies genre classification: it's a travelogue and an intellectual coming of age tale with a healthy dose of literary criticism and dry humor. Some of the essays contained within The Possessed have appeared, in slightly different form, in Harper's Magazine, n+1, and The New Yorker, but when read together they become an ecclectic, cohesive whole.

The book's title is taken from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons, the title of which had previously been translated as "The Possessed." In the book's final essay, Batuman admits that Demons "haunts [her] like a prophetic dream" (255) and then shows just how much certain things that happen between the students in her graduate program parallel the events of the novel. While the titular essay isn't the most entertaining in the book, it's a perfect illustration of The Possessed's theme: the intersection between life and literature.

The Passage

Coming soon to a student services blog near you:

The Passage by Justin Cronin

A viral, it was said, was a being without a soul. [...] In its blood was a tiny creature, called a virus, that stole the soul away. The virus entered through a bite [...] and once it was inside a person, the soul was gone, leaving the body behind to walk the earth forever; the person they had been was no more. These were the facts of the world, the one truth from which all other truths descended; Peter might just as well have been wondering what made the rain fall; and yet, [...] he thought it. Why would a viral come home if it had no soul? (270)

It's hard to know what to make of a 766-page "postapocalyptic vampire fantasy" written by an English professor. The premise of The Passage is intriguing, but its length is daunting.

The Passage is set in the near future (Jenna Bush is Governor of Texas at the beginning of the novel). Scientists working on a secret, government-funded project, create a race of vampires while attempting to develop a cure for aging. When the vampires get loose, they decimate the human population of North America (and possibly the world). Only small outposts of human civilization survive and they must be vigilant because the virals are always hungry and never far away.

The Passage won't be everyone's cup of tea. I suspect it's one of those books that you'll either love or hate. Personally I didn't love The Passage, but I didn't dislike it as much as I thought I would when I first started reading it. While the book is dark and does seem to drag at points, it's hard not to get invested in its story. I kept reading because I really wanted to see where it would go (it was also interesting to see what parts of the vampire mythos Cronin decided to incorporate into his breed of blood suckers). The most problematic thing about The Passage is that it is the first in a series. Readers who aren't aware of that fact will be find the book's ending unsatisfying.

You can read on the first fifteen pages of The Passage on the author's website.

The Book of Beginnings and Endings

I had a hard time coming up with a book to feature as the book of the month for the student services blog this month. Because I used The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa last month (see post) I couldn't justify fiction for November. I had two books checked out because they sounded interesting (one was a comparative cultural history of dreams, another about women in the Middle East), but when I started reading them I found them less than compelling. The newer nonfiction titles I thought would be perfect (like The Emperor of All Maladies) weren't (yet) part of the libraries' collections.

I had another idea. I wanted to feature The Book of Beginnings and Endings, but I couldn't find the book on the shelf. Now I can't recall how I came across The Book of Beginnings and Endings, but the description I read somewhere was compelling enough to make me dig around in the stacks on numerous occasions over the course of the month searching all the logical places the book could have been misfiled. Eventually I admitted defeat and brought a print-out of the book's catalog record over to those more familiar with the collection than myself. Guess what? The book was in the stacks on the shelf where it belonged, it had just slipped behind the other books housed on the shelf.

The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays
by Jenny Boully

Poet and essayist Jenny Boully is known for her eloquent and innovative writing. Her 2002 The Body: An Essay, for example, consists only of footnotes, leaving the body of the text to the reader's imagination.

The Book of Beginnings and Endings is compromised of twenty-six essays. Each is two pages long: the first page is a beginning and the second, an ending (the final page of the narrative), the middle (the bulk of the text), left out. The beginnings, however, don't always seem to match the endings leaving the reader to wonder whether they are the first and last pages of two different works.

This all sounds quite complicated, but in practice it is both strange and beautiful much like the image on the book's cover (a photograph of White Cabinet and White Table a sculpture by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, held by MoMA). While the book can be seen as an author's exploration of form and of what it means for something to be complete, reading The Book of Beginnings and Endings is a very personal experience. The beginnings and endings highlight the missing middles and the reader doesn't interpret the text so much as imagine it.

The Storyteller

October's book of the month for the student services blog...

The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat” (prize committee). Vargas Llosa is a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction; 25 of his books exist in English translation. His The Storyteller has been one of my favorite novels since I first read it in the late 1990s.

The Storyteller begins with a Peruvian writer touring Florence. He stumbles upon an exhibit entitled “Natives of the Amazon Forest” at a small gallery. In that exhibit he sees a photo of a tribal storyteller and is overcome by a sense of recognition.

It then begins to tell the story of the writer’s school friend Saúl Zuratas (known as Mascarita, mask face, on account of birthmark covering most of the right side of his face). Brilliant, but alienated, Zuratas is an outsider because of the birthmark, his Jewishness, and his inability to live the life his family wants for him. He decides to leave urban Lima to study the Machiguenga tribe deep in the Amazon. He goes native, eventually becoming a central figure in the tribe. As hablador (storyteller), Zuratas is responsible for preserving and sharing the history and mythology of the tribe.

Zuratas’ storytelling is interspersed throughout the narrative. While the Machiguenga stories are interesting in their own right, what is most fascinating is how elements Zuratas’ own history, experiences, and belief system begin to creep into their stories.

The Storyteller is about storytelling and identity, memory and truth. It questions the attempts of anthropologists and ethnologists to preserve native societies and the benefits and disadvantages of hybridism. The novel is multilayered and builds to a thought-provoking conclusion.

97 Orchard

While browsing through the library's list of recent acquisitions for ideas for September's book of the month, I came across one that sounded absolutely fascinating...

97 Orchard by Jane Ziegelman
An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

Today 97 Orchard Street is the site of New York City's Tenement Museum. For many years, though, it was but one of the thousands of tenements housing working-class immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

97 Orchard tells the story of five families who lived at that address between 1863 and 1935, focusing specifically on their culinary lives. While 97 Orchard is more about the foods eaten in the Lower East Side than the families themselves, it is still a fascinating read.

How various immigrant groups were subsumed into and helped to redefine American culture is the overarching theme of 97 Orchard. By using food as the means to explore the topic, author Jane Ziegelman highlights the relationship between our culinary heritage and American identity.

For more information on the book and its subject, listen to Guy Raz of NPR's All Things Considered, interview the author or visit the Tenement Museum's virtual tour of 97 Orchard Street.

Paradise Beneath her Feet

It's book-of-the-month time for the student services blog...

Paradise Beneath Her Feet* by Isobel Coleman

Subtitled "how women are transforming the Middle East," Paradise Beneath Her Feet has as its focus Islamic feminism and its proponents. Its author, Isobel Coleman, is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations where she is director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program.

While many would argue that secularization is the only sure means for achieving gender equality in the Middle East, many men and women throughout the Islamic world are working for women’s rights within the religion rather than trying to dislodge it. By seeking progressive interpretations of Islamic texts, they are able to use Islam as a force for women’s empowerment.

In Paradise Beneath Her Feet, Coleman first lays a groundwork for understanding women’s issues in the Middle East. She outlines the importance of women’s empowerment, the rise of Islamism within the region, and the tensions inherent in any attempt to modernize. After describing the genesis of Islamic feminism, Coleman focuses on the work of female activists in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. She concludes this scholarly but readable book on a positive note recognizing that cultural change is slow but inevitable.

While Paradise Beneath Her Feet does not seem to discuss how Islamic feminism will affect the non-Muslim women living in these countries, it is still a useful introduction to this brand of activism.

*On pages xxvi and xxvii Coleman discusses how the hadith (a saying of Muhammad or a report about something he did) that inspired the title can and has been interpreted in a number of different ways both pro- and anti-gender equity.

The Poetry of Rilke

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.¹

The above is one of my favorite quotes. It's from Rainer Maire Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

I wasn't sure what book to use for the student services blog's book of the month for May, but my decision was made for me when a second review of the new Rilke collection showed up in my inbox.

The Poetry of Rilke, translated and edited by Edward Snow

One of the 20th century's most significant lyric poets, Rainer Marie Rilke was a modernist who never abandoned traditional modes. "Though Rilke was marginal in his own time, his lyrical waywardness is prized in our post-Romantic one; praised by only a small group of connoisseurs when he was writing, his poetry is now beloved" (Ange Mlinko, The Nation).

With The Poetry of Rilke Edward Snow offers a wonderfully substantive bilingual edition of Rilke's poetry to American audiences.

Snow is described by Craig Morgan Teicher (Virginia Quarterly Review) as "Rilke's best and most important ambassador to American readers." I think it quite possible, though, that Lady Gaga, with her Rilke-quote tattoo, may take over this role at least with regard to American youth.

Including more than two hundred and fifty poems, The Poetry of Rilke provides a thorough overview of the poet's oeuvre. It also contains complete translations of Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, Rilke's most significant work. The translations are printed side by side with the German originals for easy reference.

Regular readers of this blog will have probably surmised that I'm not a huge fan of poetry. I rarely post about it. It's not that I dislike poetry, but more that I'm not drawn to it the way I'm drawn to fiction. For me individual poems can be revelatory, but in many cases they feel like too much work.

In any case, I thought it might be nice to share one of the poems from The Poetry of Rilke. I didn't want to chose anything from the Duino Elegies or Sonnets to Orpheus, but rather a stand-alone poem.

Blue Hydrangea

These leaves are like the last green
in the paint pots—dried up, dull, and rough,
behind the flowered umbels² whose blue
is not their own, but mirrored from afar.

They reflect it tear-stained, vaguely,
as if deep down they hoped to lose it;
and as with old blue writing paper
there’s yellow in them, violet and gray;

Washed out as on a child’s pinafore,
things that are finished with, no longer worn:
the way one feels a small life’s brevity.

But suddenly emotion seems to flare
In one of the umbels, and one sees
A moving blue as it takes joy in green. (171)

I love hydrangeas (Hortensie in German, isn't that pretty?). Reading this I'm reminded of hydrangeas at the end of the summer.

1. The translation above is one I got online and tweaked a bit. "Liebhaben von Mensch zu Mensch: das is vielleicht das Schwerste, was uns aufgegeben ist, das Aeusserste, die letze Probe und Pruefung, die Arbeit, fuer die alle andere Arbeit nur Vorberietung ist" (14 May 1904 letter to Kappus).
2. umbel: a cluster of flowers with stalks of nearly equal length that spring from about the same point, like the ribs of an umbrella (umbel, umbrella: same root word)

Dark Roots

I believe this is the first time I've used a short story collection as the book of the month...

Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy

Dark Roots is a short story collection by critically-acclaimed Australian author, Cate Kennedy.

In the volume's title story a 39-year-old woman begins dating a 26-year-old man. At first the love affair makes her feel invigorated, sexy and powerful, but slowly insecurities begin to take over to the point where she begins to unconsciously sabotage the relationship.

The seventeen stories included in Dark Roots are full of individuals like this, true-to-life characters confused and unsure about their futures. Their actions, though, range from eerily familiar (things you can imagine yourself doing if you were in that situation) and completely inexplicable (things that leave you wondering just how desperate you'd have to be to take such risks).

Dark Roots explores what it means to be human. In these stories there is comedy and there is tragedy and in many cases it is Kennedy's subtlety that is her greatest strength.

In the story I mentioned above, the protagonist is reading the list of side-effects of her new birth control pills, among them is a "tendency to hirsuteness". I didn't recognize the word and was intrigued when, in the following sentence, the character resolves to avoid alcohol except in moderation, something that didn't seem to relate to any of the other side-effects. So, I looked it up and it seems that alcohol doesn't relate to hirsuteness either, as hirsute means "hairy" or "covered with hair".

Case Histories

A few years ago I reviewed the sequel to Case Histories, One Good Turn (see post). At that time I'd really wanted to read Case Histories so when I was trying to figure out what book to highlight on the student services blog in February (a fiction month) Case Histories came to mind as the perfect choice.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

A unique and engaging mystery novel, Case Histories focuses on three cold cases: a beloved child disappears from her backyard without a trace (1970), a 20-something is brutally murdered by a mysterious man who barges into her father's law office on her first day of work there (1994), and a young mother essentially orphaned her daughter when she attacked her husband with an ax in a fit of rage (1979).

One way or another police inspector-turned-private investigator Jackson Brodie becomes involved in the cases, forgotten by all but the people personally affected by the traumatic events, and endeavors to find ways of bringing closure to those same individuals.

While the storylines in Case Histories are myriad, they are balanced in such a way that the reader never becomes overwhelmed. All of the characters in are multilayered and Atkinson's understanding of the psyche is what makes this novel stand out.

Beneath a Marble Sky

Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors

In his debut novel, John Shors tells the personal story of India's most famous monument, bringing 17th Century Hindustan to life.

The heroine of Beneath a Marble Sky is Jahanara, daughter of the Shah Jahan I and his favorite wife, the woman who has come to be known as Mumtaz Mahal. A favorite of her father's, Princess Jahanara is asked to oversee the construction of the Taj Mahal after the death of her mother. She falls in love with the architect, but Beneath a Marble Sky is so much more than a love story. The constraints women lived under during this time period, the vagaries of royal politics, loyalty and sacrifice are all themes of this mesmerizing novel.

Starbucked

I haven't finished this book yet, but it comes likely recommended from Russell and I needed a nonfiction title for the November book of the month for the student services blog.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Published in 2007, Starbucked sets out to answer the question of how Starbucks became so popular. More than just a company history, Starbucked is an exploration of America's love affair with coffee.

While author Taylor Clark is not a fan of the coffeehouse chain, it is clear that his journalist roots compel him to strive for balanced reporting. Clark makes an effort to dispel myths about Starbucks and shows how it compares favorably to other infamous corporations like Walmart and McDonalds. This objectivity is precisely what makes Starbucked different from other books about the company, the majority of which are either aggressively pro- or anti-Starbucks.

You don't have to be a Starbucks fan or coffee lover to enjoy Starbucked because economics, cultural change, and quirky trivia are equally part of its narrative.

Frank Lloyd Wright: the Interactive Portfolio

With the Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo Venture: from the Larkin Building to Broadacre City exhibit opening at the UB Anderson Gallery on October 3rd it seemed appropriate to feature something related to Frank Lloyd Wright for September's book of the month for the student services blog.

Frank Lloyd Wright: the Interactive Portfolio by Margo Stipe

The Interactive Portfolio is a unique book that focuses both on Wright's personal and professional life. The author utilizes material from the Frank Lloyd Wright archives (as well as copious photographs) to engage readers, bringing Wright's work to life.

You don't read The Interactive Portfolio, you experience it. It contains facsimiles of drawings and letters that can be removed, giving readers the sense of working with primary source documents. These items are so realistic-looking that the letters even have rust stains from the paperclips that once held them together.

The book also includes an audio CD, entitled "Frank Lloyd Wright speaks" that includes excerpts from interviews and lectures that took place in the 1950s.

Absolutely American

I've been wanting to read Absolutely American by David Lipsky for quite some time so I decided to feature it on the student services blog this month. Kind of appropriate for July with Independence Day and all, it would have been better if I'd gotten my act together a bit earlier in the month though.

Writer David Lipsky's first encounter with West Point came when he was given an assignment to write a feature on the United States Military Academy for Rolling Stone. As Lipsky explains,

The initial idea was for me to spend a few weeks on post, follow around a bunch of plebes, write something short. I ended up staying most of the year.
When that time was over, I didn't believe the story was fully told. I decided to rent a house in Highland Falls, [NY] and stayed until the plebe class graduated four years later--the only time West Point has let a writer in for such an extended tour of hanging out.

The result of that 4-year stint is Absolutely American, a fascinating look at life at the Academy and those who live it.

Absolutely American flows well and is eminently readable. Lipsky is a keen observer and thoughtful chronicler. Even those with little interest in the military will find the book compelling reading.

The Penelopiad

I decided to feature The Penelopiad on the student services blog this month mostly because I love talking up the Myths series. In pulling together that post, however, I was disheartened to find that the library only has a few of the Myths series books in its collection. The Penelopiad, A Short History of Myth, and Weight and were the only ones I could find in the catalog.

Anyway, here's a quick little write-up.
If you want more of me on the Myths series, check out today's book of the month post and this October 2006 post.

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood

In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood retells the story of Penelope--daughter of Icarius of Sparta, cousin of Helen of Troy, wife of Odysseus--using both the classic narrative of Homer's Odyssey and less well-known versions of the tale. In Atwood's tale, Odysseus is very much a secondary character, with pride of place given first to Penelope and second to the twelve slaughtered maids. This perspective forces readers to consider the other stories contained within a tale we know so well.

In all honesty, I didn't have strong feelings about The Penelopiad. I like Atwood (I can't say "love" here as while I love some of her books, I'm not crazy about others), I appreciate The Odyssey, and I love the Myths series, but this title didn't do all that much for me. I thought certain parts were very strong (particularly the portrayal of Penelope and Helen and the way that all the characters interact with each other in the afterlife), while others were somewhat weak or nonsensical (mostly the sidebars like the courtroom drama).

Reading the OED

May is a non-fiction month for the student services blog. Russell really enjoyed this book so, since the library owns a copy, I decided it should be the book of the month.

Reading the OED by Ammon Shea

Reading the OED is a bit difficult to describe. It is the story of a man who spent a year reading the entirety of the Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes and nearly 22,000 pages) and in that way it is a memoir of a year spent immersed in the English language's largest dictionary. Reading the OED is also the vehicle by which author Ammon Shea shares the hidden gems he found while reading the immense dictionary, words like psithurism (the whispering of leaves moved by the wind) and inadvertist (one who persistently fails to take notice of things). Shea's comments on these words (sometimes snarky, sometimes not) are memorable and it is his personality that makes Reading the OED such a great read.

While reading Reading the OED will do nothing to inspire one to undertake Shea's great task (his list of reading-inspired complaints will surely dissuade even his biggest fans), it will pique one's interest in lexicography (dictionary-writing) and in words in general. Checking the OED's word of the day may become habit. As Shea and that may lead to browsing the print or online versions, for as Shea relates, the OED “tickles the familiar, telling me once again about words that I’ve known for years and forgotten that I forgot. It tells me things that I know I knew about words, but with additional insights that I have blithely ignored over the years. And it tells me things about words that I never could have imagined on my own” (96).

Some of my favorite words featured in Reading the OED are keck (to make that cat-coughing-up-a-hairball noise), petrichor (the smell after the rain), and of course psithurism mentioned above.

Little Bee

Little Bee is another title that taunted me from the library's recent acquisitions list so it had to be this month's book of the month for the student services blog. I was intrigued by the cover art (and a review that made its way into my inbox via Powell's Books' Review-a-day newsletter), but I was hooked from the first line: "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl."

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

A powerful and moving novel, Little Bee tells the story of two very different women connected by one horrific event.

Narrated in turns by Little Bee, a teenager fleeing Nigeria, and Sarah O'Rourke, a women's magazine editor with a seemingly perfect life in London's suburbs, the novel begins in the middle of the story, slowly revealing its genesis and then tripping towards its conclusion.

Written by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave, Little Bee is political but not overtly so. Full of well-drawn characters, the novel is heartwrenching and profoundly personal. It's also very difficult to write about without giving away too much of the plot, which is the last thing I'd want to do as part of the experience of reading the book is discovering the story through the two narrator's perspectives.

The Orchid Thief

Better late than never... the March book-of-the-month offering:

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

The story of John Laroche, a plant dealer who was arrested in 1994 for poaching orchids from a Florida state park, is the jumping off point for New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief.

Seeking to understand the man behind the headline, Orlean spent two years among Florida's orchid fanciers. The result is an engaging book with a similar feel to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The history and character of Southern Florida are as integral to the story as the feverish nature of botanical collecting and Orlean weaves the threads together with both precision and humor.

The Orchid Thief is indeed as its subtitle suggests "a true story of beauty and obsession."

My favorite line in the book: "The English have especially felonious urges toward orchids." The passage continues "Kew Gardens has to display its orchids behind shatterproof glass and surrounded by surveillance cameras the way Tiffany's displays its jewels. In 1993 a rare six-foot-tall monkey orchid with light pink flowers bloomed near London, and the Naturalists' Trust had to hire two security guards to stand watch and protect the plant from collectors" (156).

Snow in August

Fiction this month for the Student Services blog...

Snow in August by Pete Hamill

Set in post-WWII Brooklyn, Pete Hamill's Snow in August is the story of an Irish-Catholic boy and his unlikely friendship with an elderly rabbi.

11-year-old protagonist Michael Devlin life revolves around comic books, baseball, and his duties as an alter boy at the local church. His worldview begins to change, however, when he witnesses an attack on a local merchant and inadvertently becomes the Shabbos goy* for the local synagogue.

While Snow in August is a bit sentimental and melodramatic, it has heart. Its ending, which is a drastic deviation from the novel's gritty realism, will charm some readers and annoy others. I'd love to write more about it, but it is simply too hard to discuss the ending without spoiling it for those who haven't yet read the book.

* a non-Jew who does work on Sabbath that a Jew cannot do

Hello, Cruel World

Nonfiction for the student services blog this month...

Hello, Cruel World by Kate Bornstein

Subtitled "101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws", Hello, Cruel World is an irreverent guidebook designed to help anyone and everyone navigate the sometimes cruel world in which we live.

With a foreword by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara and a detailed introduction by Bornstein, a transsexual trailblazer who defies categorization, the book unapologetically provides coping mechanisms (some extremely unorthodox) and encourages readers to follow their "hearts' harmless desires". For Bornstein anything is preferable to suicide: do whatever you need to do to stay alive, just "don't be mean".

Hello, Cruel World is unconventional, eye-opening, and life-affirming. The layout makes it fun to read and because Bornstein makes a point not to exclude anyone, it's a book that can speak to everyone.

Here's one of my favorite blurbs about the book:

I realize Kate Bornstein is trying to save teenagers — the beautiful weirdos on whom the fate of our future rests—but if her book gets into the wrong hands, she might inadvertently save a whole lot of adults too. —Carol Queen

If you can't get your hands on the book right away, you can get your fix at Kate Bornstein's Blog for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.

The Haunted Tea-cosy

Seasonally-appropriate fiction for the student services blog this month...

The Haunted Tea-cosy by Edward Gorey*

The Haunted Tea-cosy is classic Gorey and perfect for the holiday season. It is essentially a retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The story begins with protagonist Edward Gravel is interrupted from his correspondence and fruitcake by a human-sized cockroach that seems to have jumped out from underneath his tea cosy. This is the Bahhum Bug** who will introduce Gravel to Gorey’s versions of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.

Gorey has a macabre and wonderfully eccentric sense of humor that makes reading his books quite an experience. While the drawings in The Haunted Tea-cosy are less detailed than Gorey’s usual work, they will no doubt intrigue readers new to Gorey and hopefully inspire them to check out some of Gorey’s other work.

* Expect to see this book here again a little later this month ;)
**This type of wordplay is typical Gorey