In My Mailbox 36

In My Mailbox is a meme created by Kristi of The Story Siren, where bloggers share the contents of their mailbox that week - books bought, borrowed, received... It's a great way to see lots of new books all at once, and leads to great coveting and more buying!

From the Library:

Raising Wrecker, Summer Wood

Wrecker is born in 1965 in flower-powered San Francisco, but by his third birthday, his mother has landed in prison and he's been taken by the state. Up among the California redwoods, a clan of eccentrics will come together to raise one remarkable child, and feel themselves transformed.

Kindle:

The Declaration, Gemma Malley

In the year 2140, it is illegal to be young.

Children are all but extinct.

The world is a better place.

Longevity drugs are a fountain of youth. Sign the Declaration, agree not to have children and you too can live forever. Refuse, and you will live as an outcast. For the children born outside the law, it only gets worse – Surplus status.

Not everyone thinks Longevity is a good thing, but you better be clear what side you’re on. . . . Surplus Anna is about to find out what happens when you can’t decide if you should cheat the law or cheat death. 

From the Publisher:

The Uninvited, Liz Jensen

(January 8, 2013)

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh's Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father. Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

Life! Death! Prizes! Stephen May

(December 11, 2012)

Billy's mother is dead. He knows-because he reads about it in magazines-that people die every day in ways that are more random and tragic and stupid than hers, but for nineteen-year-old Billy and his little brother, Oscar, their mother's death in a bungled street robbery is the most random and tragic and stupid thing that could possibly have happened to them. Now Billy must be both mother and father to Oscar, and despite what his well-meaning aunt, the PTA mothers, social services, and Oscar's own prodigal father all think, he feels certain that he is the one for the job.The boys' new world-where bedtimes are arbitrary, tidiness is optional, and healthy home-cooked meals pile up uneaten in the freezer-is built out of chaos and fierce love, but it's also a world that teeters perilously on its axis. As Billy's obsession with his mother's missing killer grows, he risks losing sight of the one thing that really matters: the only family he has left.

Bought:

A Distant Dream,  Levi Kaufman

A Distant Dream by Levi Kaufman, a historical novel, is set against the vivid backdrop of Medieval Europe and the religious hostility that was its hallmark. In the year 1290, England's twelve thousand Jews became the continent's first community to face expulsion. Despite oppressive and unfair taxes and restrictive living conditions, the Jews had somehow managed to survive and even prosper. Now they were to be forced to abandon their homes and belongings. Where should the uprooted families go? Would any other Christian nations welcome them? Would they be allowed to remain in any one place for more than a few years? Perhaps some tired and idealistic English Jew dreamed of breaking away from Europe and the ever-deepening anguish of his exiled people. Perhaps he spoke to others around him and, together, they make plans. Perhaps there were some who dared to set out for some new land where they could live their lives as Jews. Where they could live undisturbed by the outside world.

The Grounds of English Literature, Christopher Cannon

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, Cannon shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is given credit for the first time in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call 'romance'. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature-a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain, Patricia Clare Ingham

During and after the Hundred Years War, English rulers struggled with a host of dynastic difficulties, including problems of royal succession, volatile relations with their French cousins, and the consolidation of their colonial ambitions toward the areas of Wales and Scotland. Patricia Ingham brings these precarious historical positions to bear on readings of Arthurian literature in Sovereign Fantasies, a provocative work deeply engaged with postcolonial and gender theory.

Ingham's study suggests the nuances of the insular identity that is emphasized in this body of literature. Sovereign Fantasies shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

Okay, so I know I included books that are not usually included in these IMMs, but I'm excited about them and I wanted to share them! As to the rest - I've started a couple already, and I can tell you, I got a really good haul this week! I actually think I've read The Declaration already, but if I did, it was a great book and I'll enjoy reading it again!