I was looking at the calendar and realized that I had three blogs to do before Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 9) so I thought why not do some suggestions for “Yer Momma ‘n Dem”!!  These book suggestions hopefully will be a big hit with someone’s mom, grandmother and/or wife out there….

Savannah Style by Paula Deen and Brandon Branch

With its lush gardens, stately town houses, and sprawling plantations, Savannah is the epitome of old Southern style, and who better to give you the grand tour than Paula Deen, the city’s most famous resident and anointed Queen of Southern Cuisine?

In this gorgeous, richly illustrated book, Paula Deen shares a full year of Southern living. Whether it’s time to put out your best china and make a real fuss, or you’re just gathering for some sweet tea on the porch at dusk, Savannah style is about making folks feel welcome in your home. With the help of decorator and stylist Brandon Branch, you’ll learn how to bring a bit of Southern charm into homes from Minnesota to Mississippi. For each season, there are tips on decorating and entertaining. In the spring, you’ll learn how to make the most of your outdoor spaces, spruce up your porch, and make your garden inviting. In the summer, things get more casual with a dock party. Sleeping spaces, including, of course, the sleeping porch, are the focal point of this chapter. In the fall, cooler weather brings a return to more formal entertaining in the dining room, and in the winter, attention returns to the hearth, as Paula and her neighbors put out their best silver and show you how they celebrate the holidays.

Paula loves getting a peek at her neighbors’ parlors, so she’s included photographs of some of Savannah’s grandest homes. From the vast grounds of Lebanon Plantation to the whimsically restored cottages on Tybee Island, you’ll see the unique blend of old-world elegance and laid-back hospitality that charmed Paula the moment she arrived from Albany, Georgia, with nothing but two hundred dollars and a pair of mouths to feed. And she isn’t shy about giving you a window into her own world, either. From her farmhouse kitchen to her luxurious powder room, you’ll see how Paula lives when she’s not in front of the camera.

Packed with advice and nostalgia, Paula Deen’s Savannah Style makes it easy to bring gracious Southern living to homes north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Roses by Leila Meacham

East Texas, 1916 When precocious 16-year-old Mary Toliver inherits cotton plantation Somerset from her father, the first seeds of familial discontent are sown. By becoming the new mistress of Somerset, Mary betrays her mother Darla and her brother Miles, and the Toliver dynasty will never recover. And when Mary and timber magnate Percy Warwick decide not to marry, though fiercely in love, it is a decision which will have sad and tragic consequences not only for them but for generations of their families to come. Set against a panoramic backdrop, Roses is a heartbreaking love story of sex, scandal and seduction. It covers 100 years and three generations of Texans.

In the Green Kitchen by Alice Waters

Alice Waters has been a champion of the sustainable, local cooking movement for decades.  To Alice, good food is a right, not a privilege.  In the Green Kitchen presents her essential cooking techniques to be learned by heart plus more than 50 recipes—for delicious fresh, local, and seasonal meals—from Alice and her friends.  She demystifies the basics including steaming a vegetable, dressing a salad, simmering stock, filleting a fish, roasting a chicken, and making bread. An indispensable cookbook, she gives you everything you need to bring out the truest flavor that the best ingredients of the season have to offer.

Contributors:  Darina Allen, Dan Barber, Lidia Bastianich, Rick Bayless, Paul Bertolli, David Chang, Traci Des Jardins, Angelo Garro, Joyce Goldstein, Tanya Holland, Thomas Keller, Niloufer Ichaporia King, Peggy Knicherbocker, Jim Lahey, Deborah Madison, Clodagh McKenna, Jean-Pierre Moulle, Joan Nathan, Scott Peacock, Cal Peternell, Gilbert Pilgram, Claire Ptak, Oliver Rowe, Amaryll Schwertner, Fanny Singer, David Tanis, Bryant Terry and Anna Lappe, Poppy Tooker, Charlie Trotter, Jerome Waag, and Beth Wells.

Caught by Harlan Coben

17-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before, and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.

Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission, to identify and bring down sexual predators via elaborate—and nationally televised—sting operations. Working with local police on her news program Caught in the Act, Wendy and her team have publicly shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target. Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.

In a novel that challenges as much as it thrills, filled with the astonishing tension and unseen suburban machinations that have become Coben’s trademark, Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the community stunned by her loss, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can’t trust her own instincts about this story—or the motives of the people around her.

In an effort to get more reading time I’ve asked my son to step it up around the house and do some yard work. I’ve blogged about what I’ve been reading here and then again two weeks ago here. Of the dozen or so books I’ve written about I’ve finished the Chang-rae Lee, The Male Brain,  the Stewart O’Nan book, Matterhorn, several Harlan Coben books, the Brad Watson book, a couple more Lee Child books, and the parenting book about raising boys. I was planning to complain about not getting to read enough but… Anyway, I’ve not been able to even crack the Ian McEwan or the gifted child book although I plan on starting that one tonight. I think I feel like I’m not getting to read enough because I’ve reached one of those ebbs where I was trying so hard to finish a couple of things that I was really committed to that now I feel like I’m not sure where to start next. Here are a few things I’m thinking about getting into:

Morkan’s Quarry by Steve Yates

This is the first novel by a really good friend of mine and of the store. Steve works for the University Press of Mississippi, but most of all he’s a really great guy and really fun to talk with about books. I respect his opinion and am really looking forward to digging into this – I’ve read the first couple of pages, but have been waiting until the signing was a little closer. Plus I’ve been reading on Matterhorn every night for a month.

Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels by Barry Gifford

I’ve read the first Novel, Wild at Heart, and didn’t realize that I’m a fool if I don’t keep reading. I’ve met Barry a couple of times and he’s truly a treat to get to hang out with – he’s somehow like hanging out with a beat writer, a historian, and your best buddy all at the same time. He’s always read something that you want to read or hung out with someone you wish you could. But more importantly he’s a really good writer which is what we’re looking for isn’t it?

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

This is supposed to be the big hot book at the end of the summer. It’s published by Knopf and edited by Gary Fisketjon. The author, Adam Ross,  is coming to Lemuria the week after the book comes out. It may very well be our July First Editions Club pick, but I’ve got to read it first. It looks really good, violence, love, and death, but I guess we’ll find out – more on that later.

War by Sebastian Junger

I really enjoyed A Death in Belmont, it’s hard to believe that was four years ago. I felt like I would probably read this book about Junger being embedded as a journalist in Afghanistan, but when I read his review of Matterhorn in the Times I knew that I would read Junger’s book. After reading his review I’ll probably never talk about Matterhorn without referencing Junger.

Echo Burning by Lee Child

This is where I am on my Lee Child reading project – it’s his fifth book. I’m almost done and will start Without Fail in the next couple of days. It looks like a really good one – Jack Reacher is the man.

by Kelly Pickerill

This year’s Pulitzer prizes were awarded today! Congrats to the winners!

Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press) won for fiction; the judges called it “a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”

Definitely a surprise win, Harding’s novel was published by a small, non-profit publisher affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine.  It originally sold 15,000 copies.  It’s now in paperback, but Bellevue plans on reprinting the hardcover.

The last time a small publisher’s book won the Pulitzer for fiction was in 1981, when Louisiana University Press’s A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole won.

For history, the winner was Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin).

In the Sunday NYT Book Review, Joe Nocera reviewed Ahamed’s book about the four bankers who effectively triggered the Great Depression but ultimately transformed the United States into the powerful financial leader it is today, calling it “a grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, describing a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.”

For biography, the winner was  a book that’s been on my radar for some time now, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Knopf). I’ve always been fascinated by Vanderbilt’s life, how in a pre-financial-regulation America he made the rules up as he went along, ending up one of the richest, most influential men of the 19th century.

The Pulitzer judges called Stiles’s book “a penetrating portrait of a complex, self-made titan who revolutionized transportation, amassed vast wealth and shaped the economic world in ways still felt today” (Pulitzer.org).

The winner for poetry was Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press).

I’d never read any of Armantrout’s poems before today, but after picking up a copy of Versed and reading a poem here and there I have to say I really like it.  I went through an E. E. Cummings-obsessed phase in early high school — I loved the way his poems were a physical picture of their content.  Armantrout’s poetry affects me in a similar way — her imagery is furthered by the style of her poems, which are by turns whimsically simple and existentially weighty.

And for general nonfiction, the winner was The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday).

“In the first full account of how the arms race finally ended, The Dead Hand provides an unprecedented look at the inner motives and secret decisions of each side. Drawing on top-secret documents from deep inside the Kremlin, memoirs, and interviews in both Russia and the United States, David E. Hoffman introduces the scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies who saw the world sliding toward disaster and tells the gripping story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and many others struggled to bring the madness to an end. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the danger continued, and the United States began a race against time to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states” (thedeadhandbook.com).