So very, very cool.  After last week’s post, Elizabeth wrote in to comment on difficulty she had in actually ordering from Penguin UK - the site kept dumping her to Penguin US.  I checked it out, and the Penguin UK web site has shipping info for international orders for this book.  If that doesn’t work, it is also available from Amazon UK.  If you don’t care for international ordering/shipping, you’re stuck with this cover from Penguin US.  Lame.

AND…the Penguin UK blog also reports today that new designs are forthcoming for several classics.

I want to buy shares of Penguin UK and short Penguin US.  Is that possible?

The Way Back Home by Oliver Jeffers

We’ve gotten to the point where we buy all of Oliver Jeffers’ titles as soon as they appear in the store.  Jeffers is an amazing artist (see his work for grown ups), and his stories are great.  We’re especially big fans of last year’s The Incredible Book Eating Boy.  All of the illustrations are drawn on old book pages and covers.  It’s very cool and would probably make a great gift for adult bibliophiles.  For reals.  Check it out:

There’s also a bite taken out of the back cover.  Sweet.

Knuffle Bunny Too:  A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems

Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale was one of our daughter’s first picture books.  When the follow-up came along, and Trixie and Knuffle Bunny had grown up with our daughter, it was a must read.  As a bonus, our good pals moved to the Brooklyn neighborhood that serves as the background for Trixie’s adventures.  It’s almost like visiting.

Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau by Jennifer Berne and Éric Puybaret

OK.  This one was for me.  I grew up a huge Cousteau fan.  HUGE.  When I saw this one on the shelf of The Little Shop of Stories it jumped right into our basket.  The story and the illustrations are fantastic.  And my daughter likes it, too.

Inside the Slidy Diner by Laurel Snyder and Jaime Zollars

Laurel Snyder lives here in Atlanta.  This is her first picture book, and it is very good.  You can check out the whole book via Google preview over here.  But buy the book.  You can also have it read to you by the author at the East Atlanta Library on Dec. 6 at 10 AM.

Update:  The Simpsons remind us that words such as “skedaddle” can be removed from the dicitonary to make way for meh.

…the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable.

Lewis is the author of the upcoming book on modern finacial crises: Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.

This book picks up when Jim is a senior in high school, still in rural Aliceville, North Carolina, on the brink of World War II.  And while there still aren’t any specific things that cause me to relate more closely to our main character, I guess this book resonated even more with me than the first one because of some of the general themes that I think are somewhat timeless — including the idea of the girl that you want but don’t think you can have — as well as my feeling that this book told more of a story than Jim the Boy did (again, no disrespect for that amazing book). I’ve done this before, and I’m going to do it again — here are a few tidbits from the book that I think represent Earley’s gift for language and metaphor:

The weather was still warm — the days mild, the first frost still days or weeks away — but the world seemed bent on practicing for the coming winter.

and

He could feel thousands of words, everything that he wanted to say to her, piled up behind his teeth, waiting for him to open his mouth so they could storm into the light.

and

The fruit trees glittered like fountains whose water had sprung suddenly from the earth, only to freeze before it touched the ground.

I know that’s not much, but those brief snippets, to me, are just examples of prose so perfect that it borders on poetry.  I can’t give this book anything less than two thumbs up, and I’d give it more if I had more thumbs.

Update:  Previously reviewed on BGB here and here.

Black Flies is the story of Oliver Cross, an idealistic graduate of Northwestern University.  He follows his girlfriend from the Midwest to New York City with the hopes of joining her at Columbia Medical School, if he can get in the following year.  Hoping that it will help his chances of admittance to med school, Ollie becomes a paramedic in New York City.  He is promptly given what is described as the worst assignment in the city, Harlem.

The novel is more than just a catalog of medical traumas inflicted on and in a poor minority community.  It takes an honest look at the lives of those who go where we won’t and talks about things that we’d rather not know about.  The novel also exposes the emotional toll placed on those who serve as society’s first responders. Moral relativism is a nice asset to have when the ideals of the “real” world are tested on a practical level on every shift.

The book jacket indicates that Burke served as an EMT in Harlem, and the book carries his stamp of authenticity.  The rawness in the book comes not from shock value (and there is plenty that is shocking) but from its brutal honesty.  Black Flies is an excellent read and was named one of Amazon’s Top 100 Booksof 2008 (#65).

Are you on the fence deciding if your house is the perfect home for this excellent novel?  Check out my glowing review.