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 The
Odyssey Gallery
Pictures of recent events
The Odyssey Bookshop is one of five independent
bookstores participating in WAMC's Roundtable on Tuesday mornings,
just after the 10:00 news. People from the Odyssey will be on about once a
month, talking about our favorite books.
Click
here to see the list of the books we have talked about.
The Odyssey Bookshop
9 College St.
S. Hadley, MA 01075
413-534-7307
800-540-7307
fax 413-532-3654
email odysseybks@aol.com
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Herman's Picks
Click on any book to order
Back to staff
list
 A
FREE LIFE: A Novel, by Ha Jin
Novel. The latest novel by Ha Jin, National Book Award winner for Waiting,
is his first set in the United States and tells the story of Nan Wu, a
Chinese student in political science who drops out of grad school in
Massachusetts after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After he’s
joined in America by his wife, Pingping, and their son, Taotao, the
three embark on a journey in search of the American dream of a secure
future and a free life. This quiet and lovely epic that spans a dozen
years and ranges from Boston, New York, Atlanta, and China is an
eloquent exploration of sacrifice and duty, isolation and
disillusionment, poetry and devotion.
 JOSEPH
CORNELL: Navigating the Imagination, by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan
Art. Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) is one of my favorite artists. His
whimsical shadow boxes and found-object collages bring together things
common and rare, alike and disparate in order to imbue with newness all
the things that have gone into the making of the assemblage and to force
viewers to find connections between items where before there were none:
a fluted glass cradling a blue-shelled egg; a doll’s head on a
pedestal; an alabaster pipe blowing the bubble of the world; a bird’s
nest; pages from a foreign-tongued book; metal hoops dangling from a
rod; constellation maps; apothecary bottles with butterflies’ wings,
blue rocks, and yellow crystals; owls and cockatoos; postage stamps;
hotel brochures; and photographs of Lauren Bacall. Illuminated by the
Peabody Essex Museum Chief Curator’s essay on Cornell’s evolution as
an artist and filled with 300 color and black-and-white photographs of
the artist’s beguiling work, this book, a companion to the first
Cornell retrospective in twenty-six years, is a real treat.
PSALM:
Poems, by Carol Ann Davis . Poetry. "Come this small
morning, / I want you to, the dawn not yet here, / tell me the secret of
the doves, / not yet awake, the typewriter keys / misspent, my mind
misspent . . ." (from "Invocation Inside a Line by
Orozco") !
From poems mourning the loss of a father and those celebrating a son’s
birth, to odes to paintings, artists, and photographs, this quiet,
beautifully crafted book revels in the world’s questions—life,
grief, art, faith, what poetry wants, and what poetry
inspires—offering small prayers to uncertainty and unknowing, to
wonderment and revelation. Psalm is a generous, precise, and wise
collection.
 White
Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, by Donald Hall
Poetry. "Both of us felt it: That day was an island, / strewn with
rocks and lighthouses and lovers, / in the generous ocean." (from
"Sun")
!
Multi-prize-winning poet Donald Hall is one of the grand masters of the
art, and White Apples and the Taste of Stone gathers over 200 of
his poems from a career spanning sixty years. With poignancy and grace,
earthiness and passion, and often a humor both dark and wry, the former
U.S. poet laureate offers odes to baseball, love poems and laments to
his late wife, purposeful meanderings through the New England landscape,
and meditations on life’s beginnings and its end. This is a volume of
great and illuminating poetry.
 DISTRICT
AND CIRCLE: Poems, by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
$13). Poetry. "If self is a location, so is love: / Bearings taken,
markings, cardinal points, / Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and
distance, / Here and there and now and then, a stance." (from
"The Aerodrome")
!
Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney fills his latest collection
with homages to the everyday and to hard work. Beginning with the first
lines in the book--"In the age of bare hands / and cast iron"
(from "The Turnip-Snedder"), District and Circle
provides a steady stream of labor: turnip farmers, firemen, blacksmiths,
butchers, fathers, and sledge swingers. But also commemorated is the
work of just living: growing up ("A Clip" and "Senior
Infants"), giving due (Neruda, Rilke, Milosz, Ted Hughes),
persevering ("Anything Can happen" and "Hofn"), and
simply appreciating ("Home Help" and "The Blackbird of
Glanmore"). Muscular, blunt, lyrical, and moving, this is poetry to
return to again and again.
 The
Incredible Book Eating Boy, by Oliver Jeffers . Ages 4 to 8.
Henry loves books so much, he eats ‘em up...literally! When he chows
down a word on a scrap of paper, he likes the taste and proceeds to eat
pages, then chapters, then books whole, and he soon finds that the more
books he eats, the smarter he gets! Hoping to become the world’s
smartest boy, he devours books at an alarming rate, until something goes
curiously wrong. Featuring a vibrant and frenetic scattering of print,
lines, textures, and pieces of recycled book pages and covers, Oliver
Jeffers’ illustrations offer lots of quirky pleasures. A terrific
celebration of reading, this is a book kids will want to sink their
teeth into, too.
 Phooey!
by Marc Rosenthal. Ages 4 to 8. When a grumpy little boy kicks a tin
can and laments, "Phooey! Nothing ever happens around here!"
about his boring neighborhood, he unwittingly sets off a series of
farcical catastrophes. So caught up in grumbling, he doesn’t notice
the slapstick carnival of calamities in his wake—the can wakes a cat,
which is chased by a dog into a zoo, which spooks an elephant into
rampaging through the town, which is hopping with pirates and cowboys, a
policeman, a painter on a precarious ladder, and a pie maker whose pies
are sent flying through the air. By the end, the boy is forced to take
notice, reminding us that there’s excitement to be discovered all
around, if only we’d pay attention. The big, boldly colored
illustrations are a delight and remind me of the picture books I loved
when I was a kid looking for escape from boredom.
 Toy
Boat, by Randall de S
Pye,
illustrated by Loren Long
(Philomel Books, $16.99). Ages 4 to 8. Once upon a time, a boy made a
boat from a can, a cork, a yellow pencil, a twig, and some white cloth.
The boy loved his toy boat, and they did everything together. But the
boat sometimes wondered what it would be like to sail free instead of on
the end of a string. One day, when a storm gusts over the lake, the boat
finds out. Author Randall de SPye’s
powerfully simple words and illustrator Loren Long’s colorful and
expressive pictures create a beautiful little tale about traveling into
the big world and finding one’s way home again.
 Cowboy
& Octopus, by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith. Ages
4 to 8. The author and illustrator of the infamous picture book
classics, The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the 3
Little Pigs, team up again to tell the funny and endearing story of
an unusual friendship. Through wacky collage art illustrations and seven
plainspoken mini-stories, we see how a no-nonsense cowboy befriends a
blue octopus and shakes hands and shakes hands and shakes hands and
shakes hands. Although Cowboy and Octopus don’t always see eye-to-eye
about beans and bacon, knock-knock jokes, Halloween costumes, or even
the weather, theirs is a friendship that endures. A real treat for the
goofy pictures alone, which made me laugh out loud!
 The
Apple Pie that Papa Baked, by Lauren Thompson, illustrated by
Jonathan Bean. Ages 4 to 8. This is a heart-warming and
mouth-watering story perfect for a winter night or for a school-free
summer morning. With a pleasing cadence that hearkens back to The
House that Jack Built and There Was an Old Woman and vibrant,
vintage-toned three-color illustrations, Lauren Thompson and Jonathan
Bean show us the cyclical, connected nature of the world through apples,
juicy and red, baked into a pie, warm and sweet, by a papa for his
daughter and a menagerie of folksy farm animals. Charming and engaging!
 26A
by Diana Evans (Harper $13.95). Winner
of Britain’s Orange Prize for New Writers, this debut novel offers a
magical and heartrending portrait. Identical twins Bessi and Georgia are
daughters of Ida, who still dreams of her Nigerian home, and Aubrey, an
English accountant who often drinks too much. In the refuge of their
attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue, London, the two girls sit purposefully
in their strawberry-scented bean bag chairs, trying to make sense of the
inscrutable and sometimes menacing world. As the two grow into
adulthood, each learns in her own way the liberating, puzzling, and
frightening truth about what it means to be an individual. With sharply
drawn characters and playful and inventive prose, 26A reminds us
of the wonder of childhood and of the pain of leaving it behind.
 BLIND
WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN: 24 Stories by Haruki Murakami
(Knopf $24.95). The follow-up to last year’s acclaimed novel, Kafka
on the Shore, this collection pulls together (despite what the cover
says) 25 stories from throughout Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s
career. Sure to earn him the Nobel Prize some day, Murakami’s work is
enigmatic, surreal, funny, and affecting. His stories inhabit the real
world and are inhabited by real people – a waitress in an Italian
restaurant, visitors to the zoo, cousins on their way to a doctor’s
appointment, a man and his cat, lovers lying in bed – but seem to
capture that odd, uneasy, yet fascinating, feeling between waking and
dreaming. Ethereal, yet plainspoken, they sometimes feel like modern
fairytales—mesmerizing and epiphanic.
Two new books for adults by
Alexander McCall Smith:
 THE
RIGHT ATTITUDE TO RAIN (Pantheon
$21.95). Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics,
returns in this third Sunday Philosophy Club novel, to grapple
with the rights and wrongs of everyday living. Does a wealthy Dallas
bachelor’s fiancée love him for him or his money? Does Isabel have a
duty to say? And what’s Isabel herself to do when Jamie, the former
flame of her niece, Cat, begins to show interest in the ethicist?
ESPRESSO TALES (Anchor
Books $13.95). Begun as a serial novel for The Scotsman
newspaper, the 44 Scotland Street series features a cast of
lovable, if flawed, characters, who live and work in Edinburgh. In the
second installment, full-of-himself Bruce has lost his job as a surveyor
and contemplates a career in wine. Pat, his once-infatuated flatmate,
returns to university. Talented and much put-upon six-year-old Bertie
begins kindergarten. And there are new neighbors to welcome, like
Ramsey, who puts his wife, Betty, to sleep by reading her bits of his
memoirs.
 THE
PLANETS by Dava Sobel (Penguin $13).
The author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter continues
to educate, enlighten, and inspire with this book about the Earth and
the universe around us. With the aid of mythology, Shakespeare, poetry,
the Bible, astrology, music theory, cartography, and personal anecdote,
she tells the story of our solar system and those who looked beyond our
own world to explore it.
BOOKWORM by Rosamond Purcell
(Quantuck Lane $35). If you saw Rosamond Purcell’s art installation at
the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2004, you know how mesmerizing
her work is. If not, here’s another chance: 125 color photographs of
books and other ruined artifacts. Purcell shows us the strange,
exquisite, and profound beauty of decay and disarray: the illustrated
cover of a cloth book turned white with mold, books transformed into
nests for birds, pages ravaged by fire or burrowing bugs and worms,
words gone to mush by water, all literal meaning lost to ink-eating
insects. Who knew the destruction of books could look so beautiful?
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