So I realized that I am off a week on my TTT posts! Opps! 

In case you missed it last week, here is the 

Things That Make Me Instantly Not Want To Read a Book. 

(This week's topic) 

Sorry about that! 

Happy Reading!

Happy 50th Birthday to The Outsiders!

Hi Everyone!

Today is a very special day, it is the 50th anniversary of The Outsiders! I am here to let you know that and tell you a little about the book in case you have never heard of it. 

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Author: S.E. Hinton
 
Summary from Amazon: 50 years of an iconic classic! The international bestseller and inspiration for a beloved movie--now with bonus content.

This special edition of the groundbreaking novel contains:
Never before seen photos and letters from the publisher's archives
Original review clippings and media coverage
Photos from the author’s personal collection
A gallery of covers around the world
New material from the stars and director of the iconic film--including Francis Ford Coppola, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, and others
And much more!
 Celebrating 50 years of the novel that laid the groundwork for the YA genre, this is the ultimate edition for fans of THE OUTSIDERS. A perfect way to honor this impressive milestone and a must-have for fans of all ages.
 
Ponyboy can count on his brothers. And on his friends. But not on much else besides trouble with the Socs, a vicious gang of rich kids whose idea of a goo d time is beating up on “greasers” like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect—until the night someone takes things too far.

Happy Reading!

Reading Recap

Hi Everyone!

It has been awhile since I have done a mini-recap, so I wanted to stop by with a couple of quick updates...

Someone Like You
This is the first Dessen book I have read and I really enjoyed it. I can understand why people enjoy her writing style. The book was easy to read and the characters were vivid for me. I read this as part of the #ReadDessen challenge. I look forward to more!

LumberJanes/Gotham Academy
When I first heard about the cross over, I was really excited. I really enjoyed how the two came together in a unique way! I felt the characters were able to remain true to themselves and I really appreciated that throughout this collaboration.

Searching for Sunday
In this book we get to go with the author as she reflects on her experience with the church and her perspective from the millennial point of view. I really appreciated her candor and the background that she provides on alot of topics that things that I think about. This book made me think and I appreciate the opportunity to read it!

LumberJanes Vol. 6
In the latest the Lumberjanes are back, this time in Sink or Swim. I appreciated this volume very much because of the golden nuggets tucked into it. There were some great panels with advice and information about the world around us. In its true fashion, I loved the illustrations and it had many laugh out loud moments.

What have you been reading lately?


Happy Reading!

Dewey's Third Mini-Challenge

From their blog...


"What is Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-thon? For 24 hours, we read books, post to our blogs, Twitters, Tumblrs, Goodreads and MORE about our reading, and visit other readers’ homes online. We also participate in mini-challenges throughout the day. It happens twice a year, in April and in October.
It was created by the beloved Dewey (her blog is archived at the Wayback Machine).

The first one was held in October 2007. Dewey died in late 2008. We’re still saddened by her absence, but the show must go on. The read-a-thon was renamed to honor its founder in 2009.

Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-thon is hosted by Heather and Andi of The Estella Society, with help from volunteers."

The actual event will be taking place later this month, but in preparation they are suggesting that you spend two hours today reading! 

Will you be joining?

Happy Reading!

Guest Post: The Big Buddha Bicycle Race

Hi Everyone!

Just stopping by today with a guest post from author, Terence Harkin. I had the chance to ask about the inspiration for the book and this is what he shared with me. Thanks for coming by the blog today! 

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The Making of The Big Buddha Bicycle Race

It was rainy season in Ubon, Thailand, late in the Vietnam War.  We were cooped up in the editorial trailer of the 601^st Photo Squadron and Air Force Radio announced an upcoming sightseeing tour to Big Buddha, one of the few sights worth seeing in Ubon Province at the time.  My boss, a former class clown, quipped that a bike race would be more sanuk than a bus trip, but that was the end of it.  That little germ of an idea stuck with me, however.  In 1972, the year after I returned from Ubon, South Vietnam nearly fell and four of the sixteen AC-130 gunships I had been working with—carrying crews of fifteen to eighteen men—were shot down.  It was a shocking reversal.  For two years gunships had operated with impunity, destroying as many as 30,000 trucks along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

I started asking a lot of “why” and “what if” questions, two big ones being “why were the North Vietnamese still able to mount a major offensive after we had decimated their supply convoys?” and “why did I survive and my friends die?”  And I started asking myself, “what if the race had happened?” I started seeing it as an allegory.  The United States went to war with good intentions, but it all went horribly wrong thanks to overkill that turned friends into enemies and thanks to a tragic misunderstanding of Asian culture and history.

I wrote a fifty-page movie treatment for a professor at USC who had served with the OSI—the forerunner of the CIA—in Southeast Asia during WW II.  He urged me to do more research on Asian culture and flesh out the Asian characters.  I couldn’t do much at the time because I had just gotten into the camera union and was working sixty-hour weeks.  And then in 1976 an actor friend introduced me to the head of one of the top agencies in Hollywood.  The agent assured me that Vietnam was box office poison.

Apocalypse Now!, Deerhunter, and Platoon proved the agent wrong.  But my professor was right—those films were strangely provincial, all viewed through an American prism.  There were no Asian characters, just dark shadows shooting from the jungle.  And there was little sense of what I saw every day putting together briefing films—American air power devastating much of Southeast Asia while three million Asians died.

Big Buddha wouldn’t go away.  The story demanded to be told because we kept repeating the same mistakes elsewhere in the world.  It became a novel when I saw the direction the film industry was heading—toward feature films based on comic books and body-function humor.  Big Buddha also became a novel because once I returned to Thailand and started developing the story and characters, it took on a life of its own. It was no longer going to fit into 90-120 minutes of screen time.

I went back to Thailand for the first time in1987—mostly staying in Buddhist monasteries, but also meeting legendary CIA operative Tony Poe, Flying Tigers crewmen who had been in Asia since the 1940s, air controllers at Udorn and Ubon trained by the US Air Force, a restaurateur in NKP who started out as a base cook, and a Lao royalist officer in Nong Khai just released after ten years in a re-education camp.  I can still see his haunted eyes.

1987 turned out to be an important year in other ways as well.  Back in the States I was able to meet and interview Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Anando and Joseph Kappel.  The year I was stationed in Ubon they had been training as monks under the revered forest master, Ajahn Chah.  And they ended up bringing Vipassana (Insight) meditation to the West. 

I also started meeting other veterans, joining a couple of groups and learning that Vietnam veterans were dying of suicide and self-destructive behavior at a shocking rate.  Today, more Vietnam veterans have killed themselves than were killed in action.  And a similar thing is going on with veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia.

The thing I couldn’t do in 1987 was get a visa to cross the Mekong River into Laos.  I finally got there in 2005—thirty years after the war ended.  Landlocked and traumatized by what they called the American War, Laos was still devastated—major bridges still down, highways and countryside still pockmarked with B-52 bomb craters.  Th big change was that US and Aussie teams were now diffusing unexploded ordnance. 

When I settled in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2014, I thought the book was in the pipeline to be published by Texas Tech University Press, their first work of Vietnam-era fiction.  But when they changed directors, overextended, and went into hiatus, they forgot to tell me.  Luckily, by the time I figured out I needed to get back to work pitching the book I had met a former comedy writer for National Public Radio living in Chiang Mai.  He pointed me to a group called Writers without Borders, and a wonderful string of coincidences began. 

One member was the daughter of a doctor who had headed USAID’s team in Laos during the Vietnam War and had grown up around larger-than-life characters like Tony Poe.  I’d done a lot of the writing back in the States, and she was able to catch a few lapses in my memory (like rice fields being golden not “emerald” in hot season).  Most important, she announced that Trasvin Jittidecharak, publisher of Silkworm Books, would be speaking at Alliance Francaise, the former French consulate. 

I knew Silkworm as a quality publisher of non-fiction—I had ten of their books in my library.  But my ears perked up when Khun Trasvin said that because of rapid changes in publishing, largely a result of Amazon’s ascendency, they were thinking about venturing into English-language fiction.  Needless to say, I was first in line to chat with her that night.  Big Buddha ended becoming Silkworm’s first English-language novel.    

Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller described the trauma of modern warfare brilliantly.  But I believe those writers suffered from what we now call PTSD.  The main treatment for more than a century was self-medication with drugs and alcohol and doomed relationships. But thanks to Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Sumedho, and their teacher, Ajahn Chah, I’ve been able to explore Vipassana meditation as a more effective means of healing.   Jack Kornfield became a clinical psychologist, writer, and meditation teacher when he returned to the States and has had a major influence on modern psychotherapy.  And now “mindfulness” is being widely applied to aid cancer and heart patients and other survivors of trauma in their recovery.

What makes Big Buddha different from other wartime love stories that have gone before it is the interplay of Eastern and Western cultures.  There is plenty of love and war in Big Buddha and the sequel, The Bronze Begging Bowl, but both books are also filled with the possibility of healing and redemption.

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LINKS:

Web site: taharkin.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taharkin

Amazon Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3PL6SC/

BIO:

Terence A. Harkin earned a BA in English-American Literature from Brown University while spending weekends touring New England with his band, Stonehenge Circus, opening for The Yardbirds, the Shirelles, the Critters and Jimi Hendrix. His play, Resurrection, produced during his senior year, was a winner of the Production Workshop Playwriting Contest. In the US Air Force, despite editing and writing for two underground GI newspapers—Pro Patria Mori and The sNorton Bird—he was asked to write the 1971 history of the combat photo unit he served with at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand.  He won a CBS Fellowship for his screenwriting while completing an MFA at the University of Southern California and went on to spend twenty-five years as a Hollywood cameraman. His credits include Goodbye Girl, The Legend of Billy Jean, Quincy, Designing Women, Seinfeld, Tracy Ullman, MASH, and From Here to Eternity. Working as a cameraman on MASH and the six-hour mini-series of From Here to Eternity had a powerful effect—in both style and scope—on the writing of Big Buddha, a wartime love story filled with the possibility of healing and redemption from the traumas of both love and war.

SYNOPSIS:
Brendan Leary, assigned to an Air Force photo squadron an hour from L.A., had it made—until the U.S. invades Cambodia and he is shipped off to an obscure air base in upcountry Thailand, but even then Brendan figures he’ll be working in an air-conditioned trailer editing film for the 601st Photo Flight, a useful detour on his way to Hollywood. Only Brendan is wrong… 

He soon finds himself flying at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a secret air war that turns the mountains of Laos into a napalm-scorched moonscape. He realizes he is trapped, his heart and mind divided between awe at the courage of the warriors he flies with and pity for the convoys of Vietnamese soldiers he sees slaughtered on the ground. As his moral fiber crumbles, he is seduced by a netherworld of drugs, booze…and a strung-out masseuse named Tukada. The Big Buddha Bicycle Race is a last gasp of hope, a project he dreams up timed to match Nixon's arrival in China that can win over hearts and minds in rural Thailand—and make him and his underpaid buddies a pile of money.

As always! Please let us know of any questions - and I'd love to share the link with him once it goes live.

Adopt a Greyhound Month

April is National Adopt-a-Greyhound Month! 

This article from 2015 is worth sharing again. I know this is not a book topic, but it is one that is very important to me. I hope you will check it out!  If you ever know of anyone who has any questions on the topic, please feel free to send them my way! 

Adopting our dog was one of the best decisions we ever made. He is the most gentle, kindest puppy. I feel very fortunate every day for the fact that he is part of our life. :) 

Even if you cannot adopt, there are lots of ways to still get involved! You can volunteer or help get the word out about the breed. When they come off the race tracks, they need good homes. 

Thanks for your attention! 

Waiting on Wednesday: No Saints in Kansas

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. This week I am excited to feature a book that looks interesting to me. 


No Saints in Kansas
Author: Amy Brashear
Release Date: November 2017
 
Summary from Goodreads:
A gripping reimagining of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the brutal murders that inspired it

November is usually quiet in Holcomb, Kansas, but in 1959, the town is shattered by the quadruple murder of the Clutter family. Suspicion falls on Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, the last one to see them alive.

New Yorker Carly Fleming, new to the small Midwestern town, is an outsider. She tutored Nancy, and (in private, at least) they were close. Carly and Bobby were the only ones who saw that Nancy was always performing, and that she was cracking under the pressure of being Holcomb’s golden girl. The secret connected Carly and Bobby. Now that Bobby is an outsider, too, they’re bound closer than ever.

Determined to clear Bobby’s name, Carly dives into the murder investigation and ends up in trouble with the local authorities. But that’s nothing compared to the wrath she faces from Holcomb once the real perpetrators are caught. When her father is appointed to defend the killers of the Clutter family, the entire town labels the Flemings as traitors. Now Carly must fight for what she knows is right.

Have you heard about this book?


Happy Reading!