Mailbox Monday…01.17.11

Mailbox Monday is where other bloggers write about the books they received the previous week. The Mailbox Monday is now going on a blog tour with the host this month being Rose City Reader. Visit her blog to see what books made it her way and check out the others who are participating like me in the Monday Mailbox Meme.

The Case for Falling In Love by Mari Ruti – Are you tired of reading book after book and playing game after game, trying to avoid heartbreak? It seems impossible, and maybe that’s because you can’t lock up your heart like that-not if you want the real thing. And maybe that’s one of the best things about love.

We’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Our culture’s insistence that women need to learn how to catch and keep a man is actually doing much more harm than good. The more we try to manipulate our relationships, the less we are truly able to experience love’s benefits and wonders.

Love is a slippery, unruly thing, and trying to control and manage it robs us of its delicious unpredictability.

Sure, letting go of the reins a bit might mean a broken heart, but heartbreak, in fact, offers a wealth of possibilities-creativity, wisdom, and growth-that we need in order to make the most of our lives.

Liberating for women who are frustrated by the idea that they just need to learn the right “formula,” The Case for Falling in Love shows that there isn’t a method to mastering the madness of love. But that might be exactly what’s so wonderful about it.

It Happened One Bite by Lydia Dare {Historical/Paranormal Romance} – From a castle in the rugged Scottish Highlands to the glittering salons of Edinburgh high society, the playground for the rich, titled and undead will never be the same when ultra-correct gentleman vampire Lord Kettering and feisty witch Blaire Lindsay make sparks fly.

Unprotected Texts by Jennifer Wright Knust (Religion/Biblical Criticism & Interpretation) - From top scholar Jennifer Wright Knust comes the definitive statement that – despite popular claims to the contrary – the Bible cannot, and should not, serve as a rulebook for sexual morality. As Knust reveals, the Bible’s books, written over the course of two thousand years, offer many conflicting versions of sex, marriage, desire, and gender roles. From the Song of Songs’ lyrical eroticism to the rigid sexual rules of Leviticus – and everything in between – Unprotected Texts parses the Bible’s contradictory, often surprising, messages.

Knusts addresses the big question people continue to ask when it comes to sex and the Bible: Is premarital sex a sin? When, and in what contexts, sexual desire appropriate? With whom can one legitimately have sex? Are same-sex relations permissible? In an era where the phrases and words “the Bible says,” “God says,” and “sex” are so often exploited, it is time to consider what the Bible actually does – or does not- say about sex and sexuality.

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich - “Here is the most telling fact you wish to possess me. Here is another fact I loved you and let you think you could.” When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and her marriage, while turning her Red Diary hidden where Gil will find it into a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping read. When the novel opens, Irene is resuming work on her doctoral thesis about George Catlin, the nineteenth-century painter whose Native American subjects often regarded his portraits with suspicious wonder. Gil, who gained notoriety as an artist through his emotionally revealing portraits of his wife work that is adoring, sensual, and humiliating, even shocking realizes that his fear of losing Irene may force him to create the defining work of his career. Meanwhile, Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children fourteen-year-old genius Florian, who escapes his family’s unraveling with joints and a stolen bottle of wine; Riel, their only daughter, an eleven-year-old feverishly planning to preserve her family, no matter what disaster strikes; and sweet kindergartener Stoney, who was born, his parents come to realize, at the beginning of the end. As her home increasingly becomes a place of violence and secrets, and she drifts into alcoholism, Irene moves to end her marriage. But her attachment to Gil is filled with shadowy need and delicious ironies. In brilliantly controlled prose, Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and one family’s struggle for survival and redemption.

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