Saturday Snapshot: Quick Vacation

Saturday Snapshot is a weekly meme hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. The guidelines are to post a photo that you or a friend or family member have taken and then link it back to Alyce's original post for the week. Photos can be old or new and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see.

I took a head-clearing trip to Victoria, BC last week. I find it so relaxing to visit this city, and it was just what was needed. A moment of forgetfulness resulted in leaving my BB charger at home which meant a relatively technology-free vacation as well. How nice it was to be unencumbered of that item! I did manage to snap one shot, taken from the room at the resort. The room looked out over a school academy grounds to the left and a church on the corner. (And beyond that, the hazy gray at the horizon, represents the coast of another country.)

Book Mark: Minimalist Posters for Children's Books

Designer Christian Jackson has come up with some very cool 'hyper-minimalist' designs for a poster series based on children's stories. He has a bunch, but as a sample the following are two of my faves. Be sure to check out the rest!

Saturday Snapshot: Home Repairs

Saturday Snapshot is a weekly meme hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. The guidelines are to post a photo that you or a friend or family member have taken and then link it back to Alyce's original post for the week. Photos can be old or new and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see.

It has been am interesting couple of weeks around here, with numerous calamities according on a near daily basis. Tuesdays calamity came in the form of a broken toilet lever. Hearing the 'snap' was not a pleasant sound for the evening.

I have never done much in terms of home repairs, etc. but decided this was going to be a good learning project. How hard could it be after all? I did a little sleuthing and determined that the handle likely broke because the seal for the flush valve needed replacing. I contacted a friend who has loads of experience in renovations and off to the Home Depot we went. There I learned that my toilet is an oddity because there is no chain on the toilet flapper. The salesperson didn't believe me, so we looked it up on the iPhone. I never would have thought I would know something more than an 'expert' but bonus for me!

Anyway, got the necessary parts, went home, followed the instructions, and happy to say that within 15 mins all is well again. This may not seem like a big deal--and it really isn't--but this is the first plumbing-related fix I've ever completed on my own. It feels really good to have done repair; gives me confidence for the next calamity coming my way!

Adaptation: Payback

A new documentary based on Margaret Atwood's bestselling book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. The documentary offers a look at debt as a mental construct and traces how it influences relationships, societies, governing structures and the fate of the planet. Will definitely check this out once released. Though, Atwood's emphasis on over-enunciating 's' drives me crazy!

Book Beginnings on Friday

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Gilion from Rose City Reader. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

 This week's entry - Dave Bidini's On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock

I was nothing but a pimply little question mark on the day my sister and I first walked into Ken Jones Music in Etobicoke.

And so a semi-finalist in this year's Canada Reads content begins. I haven't read a music biography in quite awhile so am looking forward to the quick read this one promises to be.

Book Mark: Man Asian Literary Prize

From CBC.ca:

South Korea's Kyung-sook Shin has become the first female winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize for her bestselling novel Please Look After Mom.

Organizers named Shin as winner of the $30,000 US honour in Hong Kong on Thursday. Though Please Look After Mom is Shin's first novel published in English, she is an established, prize-winning writer in her native South Korea. Chi-Young Kim, who translated the book into English, received $5,000 US.

"Please Look After Mom is an incredibly moving portrait of what it means to be a mother, but also of the tradition and modernity of the family in South Korea," jury chair Razia Iqbal said in a statement. "The novel is a sensitive exploration of the inner life of the family with a very dynamic narrative structure. The story is surprising in its complexity yet has a beating heart at the centre of it."

The book shifts narrators, moving between members of a family searching Seoul for their missing matriarch. It is now slated for publication in more than 30 countries.

"Please Look After Mom is a deeply moving, humane and intricately wrought book, at once culturally specific and universal. It is a book that will be loved everywhere," said David Parker, board chairman of the literary honour.

Founded in 2007, the Man Asian Literary Prize celebrates the previous calendar year's best work of fiction by an Asian author, written in or translated into English.

Book Mark: Blue Metropolis Literary Festival Awards

From CBC.ca:

Montreal’s annual Blue Metropolis literary festival is luring American novelist Joyce Carol Oates in 2012 by honouring her with the International Literary Grand Prix. The $10,000 award recognizes a lifetime of literary achievement by an internationally acclaimed writer.

Oates published her first novel in 1963 and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times – for Black Water, What I Lived For and Blonde. She has often been a controversial voice, exploring themes of violence, class tension and sexual abuse in contemporary America.

The Blue Met Arab Prize goes to Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif, known for her lyrical novels and her journalism pieces in The Guardian. Her new book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, analyzes the political upheaval in Egypt.

Edoardo Nesi is the winner of the Blue Metropolis Strega Prize, which promotes Italian literature, for his novel Storia della mia gente.

The Blue Met festival plans to focus on the writing of Cuba this year, bringing crime writer Leonardo Padura, poet Wendy Guerra, and the novelist Eduardo Manet to Montreal for readings and discussions of the Cuban literary scene.

Crime writing will also be in the spotlight, with Quebec writers Alain Chaperon Trevor Ferguson, Florence Meney, Jean-Jacques Pelletier and Chrystine Brouillet talking about their approach to the genre.