I've spent a large part of the weekend pounding out reviews for multiple venues in order to catch up and also to get way way ahead (some of these are for January or even later). Here are some quick thoughts on many different sorts of books:

Anastasia Suen's Wired came in several months ago and I kept picking it up to read with my son and then getting diverted and setting it aside. Finally read it a couple of weeks ago and it's really really cool. The point here is quite simple - just to explain the journey electricity makes from dam to house but the author does such an outstanding job of explaining all the points in between, like transformers, generators, high voltage wires, etc., that the by the end no matter how technologically or mechanically inept you are (that would be me) you get the whole electricity thing. Very cool 3D illustrations accompany the text, should appear in my December NF feature for Bookslut. Oh - and my 7 year old LOVED this and has been explaining transformers and all the rest to everybody he meets ever since!

Proud as a Peacock, Brave as a Lion is a picture book about a little boy celebrating his WWII veteran grandfather and attending a parade and memorial. The title comes from his grandfather's explanation of how he felt during the war but the text also includes remembering like an elephant as he mentions a friend who was lost. It's a quiet book, as to be expected by the subject matter, but I couldn't help but think with war ever present in our lives now that it would be a perfect choice for read alouds on Veteran's Day. It explains why we honor veterans very succinctly and makes perfect sense - a serious but easily understood title. Should be in the November column.

For something just laugh out loud funny, look no further than The Jungle Grapevine by Alex Beard (nephew to Peter Beard). It's a take on the telephone game set around a watering hole in Africa (no idea why "jungle" is in the title). You have all the kinds of crazy brought on by not carefully listening and some very excellent artwork that is more about facial expressions on the animals than anything else. A great one for reading to groups of kids and will certainly make the listeners happy. This will be in the October issue of Eclectica with a round-up of nature-inspired titles.

I was a little bit familiar with 19th century naturalist Mary Anning before reading Shelly Emling's The Fossil Hunter but I have to say that the book completely realigned my understanding of her and what she accomplished. Anning is known for several major fossil finds near her coastal home in England and how those fossils changed the way scientists viewed the world. (They literally made the concept of extinction a possibility whereas before it was not believed.) There's a lot in here about finding fossils and the men who publicized Anning's discoveries and were also great scientists and thinkers as well but mostly it is about a girl whose father hunted small fossils for cash and then died young, leaving her and her brother with no choice but to get out there in all kinds of brutal weather and keep the cash coming in or the family would simply starve to death. Anning's life is as much about what it was like to be a poor woman in the early 1800s as it is about science. She was self-taught, incredibly talented, unbelievably determined and she changed the course of scientific history. Have you ever heard of her? What an amazing person. This one should be in a standalone review in the October Bookslut.

Other somewhat bookish news gathered from magazine reading on the way back from the east coast:

Jane Campion (The Piano) has a new movie due out, Bright Star, about John Keats and his muse Fanny Brawne. All I remember about Keats is that he died young (at 25 from consumption) but we never learned anything beyond that in school. While I have no doubt the relationship will be romanticized for the film it still looks beautiful and I am eager to give it a look. (From Vogue's review: "Graced by [Abbie] Cornish's radiant performance, Bright Star suggests that it's the fashionable young woman, not the famous Romantic poet, who proves the truer romantic."

Vogue also reviewed Evie Wyld's After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (that's the kind of title that always makes me look twice). It's largely about a family that has long struggled under the weight of post traumatic stress (which no one talks about) although there is also a contemporary story about the disappearance of some local girls. This "inheritance of trauma" seems to have come from Wyld's own experience:

A harrowing childhood discovery brought her down to earth: a wartime photo album belonging to her mild-mannered uncle, a Vietnam veteran. "He was nineteen when he was conscripted, and the first person he killed in combat was the same age. He found snapshots of the man's family in his wallet. And so he began taking pictures of the men he killed to keep record, to remind himself that he was experiencing something extraordinary and awful." [from the Vogue article]

I can't remember the last time I heard about a movie on Lifetime I really wanted to see but Georgia O'Keeffe - starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons - about the painter's life and marriage sounds amazing. I am trying not to get my hopes up too high...if it was on PBS I would be delighted but Lifetime makes me very nervous. We shall see. (And yes, I know this was not really bookish at all but I had to share.)

[Post pics: Top pic from Georgia O'Keeffe, middle from Bright Star, bottom pic of Claudia Stevens in the one woman play about Mary Anning: Blue Lias. All books provided by pubs.]