Title:Nothing Left to Burn Author: Jay Varner Genre: Memoir Year: 2010 Acquired: Purchased Rating:
Summary (from IndieBound):
Nothing Left to Burn eloquently tells the story of a son ‘s relationship with his father, the fire chief and a local hero, and his grandfather, a serial arsonist.
When Jay Varner, fresh out of college, returns home to work for the local newspaper, he knows that he will have to deal with the memories of a childhood haunted by a grandfather who was both menacing and comical and by a father who died too young and who never managed to be the father Jay so desperately needed him to be. In digging into the past, he uncovers layers of secrets, lies, and half-truths. It is only when he finally has the truth in hand that he comes to an understanding of the forces that drove his father, and of the fires that for all his efforts his father could never extinguish.
Review: I read Nothing Left to Burn midway through the Read-a-Thon and know that I enjoyed it, but I’m having a complete brain malfunction trying to talk about it. I was impressed with the way Varner was able to build tension in the story even though at least part of the mystery — his grandfather’s history as an arsonist — is disclosed early in the book. There’s still a strong tension as Varner uncovers the clues and puts together the stories of his past.
I haven’t talked about it much yet, but next week I’ll be leaving my dorky lair in Wisconsin to head to New York City for Book Expo America, a three-day trade show and convention dedicated to books!
Last year I only went to BEA for a total of about two days – I’d just started my new job and didn’t have much vacation. But this year I’m going all out: seven full days in New York to go to BEA, the Book Blogger Convention, and (hopefully) a little bit of sight-seeing around the city.
I’ve loved checking out other blogger’s plans for BEA – and found a few events I would have otherwise missed – so I’ve put together a tentative-ish list of the things I’m hoping to get to while I’m there. None of these plans are set in stone. I’m just putting up a list to see if other people want to try to meet at certain events or otherwise meet up.
In 1962, Margaret “Peggy” Marcus, an American Jew living in New York, picked up her life and moved to Lahore, Pakistan, a convert to one of the more political and extreme forms of Islam. She took the name Maryam Jameelah and went to live with the Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, her mentor and man who helped lay the intellectual ground for radical Islam to take root.
In The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, Deborah Baker attempts to reconstruct Maryam’s life through an extensive collection of letters, drawings, and political writing archived at the New York Public Library. In her explorations, Baker uncovers many unsettling truths about Maryam and her life, including an unhappy childhood, periods of mental illness, and her eventual fate as the second wife of a political extremist in Pakistan. Even more effective, Baker extensively quotes the letters, giving Maryam’s voice an immediacy and impact a straight biography would have missed.
I found this book very unsettling, both because of how foreign I found Maryam’s religious and political beliefs to be and because of the way Baker built this story much like a detective — slowly revealing details about Maryam’s mental heath and the motivations of those around her, shifting the portrait the book was painting dramatically as it progressed.
On Friday afternoon I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, NPR MonkeySee’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, which was discussing upcoming summer movies the various participants were excited about. One person mentioned The Help, which will be coming out this August.
I knew the movie was coming out, but hadn’t seen a trailer yet, so popped over to YouTube to find one:
And that’s when I was totally shocked to discover that the main character, Skeeter, was a journalist! How, after skimming a million enthusiastic reviews of this book, could I have missed that major fact? Especially considering that I love (love!) books with journalists in them.
The votes are in and it looks like BookClubSandwich will be readingThe Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry for our next selection. The Kitchen Daughter won by a pretty wide margin, getting 10 of the 21 votes cast in our poll. This also the first fiction book this online foodie book club will be reading, which is exciting!
I love the description of the book from IndieBound:
“After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna’s soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, dead for twenty years, who appears with a cryptic warning (“do no let her…”) before vanishing like steam from a cooling dish. … The more [Ginny] learns, the more she realizes the keys to these riddles lie with the dead, and there’s only one way to get answers: cook from dead people’s recipes, raise their ghosts, and ask them.”
Andi (Estella’s Revenge) and I decided the start of our discussion will be July 25, far enough away that there’s time to read the book, but before Andi and others need to start thinking about school again. Usually we discuss the book for a week through comments on the blog, so stop back here on July 25 for the kickoff post.
Thanks for voting, and have fun reading! Feel free to leave and questions about BookClubSandwich in the comments.
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