Today's Kindle Deal of the Day is Welcome to the Monkey House ($1.99), by Kurt Vonnegut. I grabbed this last year when it was on sale (and at twice this price).Book Description
This short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) incorporates almost completely Vonnegut's 1961 "Canary in a Cathouse," which appeared within a few months of Slaughterhouse-Five and capitalized upon that breakthrough novel and the enormous attention it suddenly brought.
Drawn from both specialized science fiction magazines and the big-circulation general magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, etc.) which Vonnegut had been one of the few science writers to sell, the collection includes some of his most accomplished work. The title story may be his most famous--a diabolical government asserts control through compulsory technology removing orgasm from sex--but Vonnegut's bitterness and wit, not in his earlier work as poisonous or unshielded as it later became, is well demonstrated.
Two early stories from Galaxy science fiction magazine and one from Fantasy & Science Fiction (the famous "Harrison Bergeron") show Vonnegut's careful command of a genre about which he was always ambivalent, stories like "More Stately Mansions" or "The Foster Portfolio" the confines and formula of a popular fiction of which he was always suspicious. Vonnegut's affection for humanity and bewilderment as its corruption are manifest in these early works.
Several of these stories (those which appeared in Collier's) were commissioned by Vonnegut’s Cornell classmate and great supporter Knox Burger, also born in 1922.
The Kindle Deal of the day for those in the UK is Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places ($1.53 / £0.99 UK) and Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination ($1.53 / £0.99 UK). US editions are $12.99 and $13.99; really out of sight, though, is his treatise Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, which is $60 and published by Oxford University Press, USA (it isn't much less less for those in the UK, at just under $53).The Wild Places
The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places.Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones - recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, it is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.Mountains of the Mind
Why do so many feel compelled to risk their lives climbing mountains? During the climbing season, one person a day dies in the Alps, and more people die climbing in this season in Scotland than they do on the roads. "Mountains of the Mind" pursues a fascinating investigation into our emotional and imaginative responses to mountains, and how these have changed over the last few centuries. It is rich with literary and historical references, and punctuated by beautifully written descriptions of the author's own climbing experiences. There are chapters on glaciers, geology, the pursuit of fear, the desire to explore the unknown, and the desire to get to the summit, and the book ends with a gripping account of Mallory's attempt on Everest. "Mountains of the Mind" is a beautifully written synthesis of climbing memoir and cultural history.
Charred & Scruffed ($14.71 paperback, $3.99 B&N), by Adam Perry Lang, is the Nook Daily Find, no Kindle edition. This PagePerfect NOOK Book requires a NOOK Color or NOOK Tablet with software version 1.4. or the NOOK Study app (I have it on my desktop in addition to the nook app).Book Description
New ways to grill from the master
With Charred & Scruffed, bestselling cookbook author and acclaimed chef Adam Perry Lang employs his extensive culinary background to refine and concentrate the flavors and textures of barbecue and reimagine its possibilities.
Adam's new techniques, from roughing up meat and vegetables ("scruffing") to cooking directly on hot coals ("clinching") to constantly turning and moving the meat while cooking ("hot potato"), produce crust formation and layers of flavor, while his board dressings and finishing salts build upon delicious meat juices, and his "fork finishers" - like cranberry, hatch chile, and mango "spackles" - provide an intensely flavorful, concentrated end note.
Meanwhile, side dishes such as Creamed Spinach with Steeped and Smoked Garlic Confit, Scruffed Carbonara Potatoes, and Charred Radicchio with Sweet-and-Sticky Balsamic and Bacon, far from afterthoughts, provide exciting contrast and synergy with the "mains."
A Monster Calls ($9.34 Kindle, $2.99 B&N), by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay (Illustrator), is the Nook Daily Find for Families.Book Description
At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting— he’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd— whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself— Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.
Grade Level: 7 and up
