Tag Archives: Friday Finds

Bookish Talk

Friday Finds: How to Paint a Dead Man

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How to Paint a Dead Man Book Cover

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall

 Friday Finds is hosted by Should Be Reading.

Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of four disparate characters, How to Paint a Dead Man is Hall’s fierce and brilliant study of art and its place in our lives.

The lives of four individuals—a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator—intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, “one of the most significant and exciting of Britain’s young novelists” (The Guardian), delivers “a maddeningly enticing read.

This book was a Man Booker Prize finalist. I had planned on pitching it to my book club last night, for this year’s reading list but one of the requirements that we have is that the book must be available from the library and this one isn’t! I will read it on my own though.

Bookish Talk

Friday Finds: Impatient with Desire

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Impatient with Desire by Gabrielle Burton
(March 2010)

Friday Finds is hosted by Should Be Reading.

Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed to California on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives out West. Everything that could go wrong did, and an American legend was born.

The Donner Party. We think we know their story—pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive—but we know only that one harrowing part of it. Impatient with Desire brings us answers to the unanswerable question: What really happened in the four months the Donners were trapped in the mountains? And it brings to stunning life a woman—and a love story—behind the myth.

Tamsen Eustis Donner, born in 1801, taught school, wrote poetry, painted, botanized, and was fluent in French. At twenty-three, she sailed alone from Massachusetts to North Carolina when respectable women didn’t travel alone. Years after losing her first husband, Tully, she married again for love, this time to George Donner, a prosperous farmer, and in 1846, they set out for California with their five youngest children. Unlike many women who embarked reluctantly on the Oregon Trail, Tamsen was eager to go. Later, trapped in the mountains by early snows, she had plenty of time to contemplate the wisdom of her decision and the cost of her wanderlust.

Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In Impatient with Desire, Burton draws on years of historical research to vividly imagine this lost journal—and paints a picture of a remarkable heroine in an extraordinary situation. Tamsen’s unforgettable journey takes us from the cornfields of Illinois to the dusty Oregon Trail to the freezing Sierra Nevada Mountains, where she was forced to confront an impossible choice.

Impatient with Desire is a passionate, heart-wrenching story of courage, hope, and love in hardship, all told at a breathless pace. Intimate in tone and epic in scope, Impatient with Desire is absolutely hypnotic.

I am so excited about this one!! I received it from Library Thing which is thrilling because I was offered a book by them months ago, it never came, and even though I told them this, and they promised not to blacklist me, I think they did. This means that I am no longer questionable. I think.

Anyway, doesn’t this look good? And you can’t really see it here but this cover is soooo lovely. That leaf pattern is sort of like a watermark. So subtle, yet so beautiful.