MAILBOX MONDAY!

Mailbox Monday is a weekly bookish meme originally hosted by Marcia over at The Printed Page, but this month it is hosted by Rose City Reader! 

Sooo, I actually did get a couple of books in the mailbox this week!  With the exception of this one:
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese which I ordered from an Ethiopian website for adoptive parents.  It came just before Christmas and I haven't started it yet.  But low and behold I am seeing it EVERYWHERE in the book blogosphere!  So I guess it must be pretty good!  I love the cover, and the story just sounds beautiful:
A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel — an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.



Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics — their passion for the same woman — that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him — nearly destroying him — Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.


An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.


And I have to send a HUGE THANK YOU to Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me the two following books!  The first on is a  memoir that I had read about a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to reading it:

BIRD CLOUD by Annie Proulx
"Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.




Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.


Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.


And the next one I am WEIRDLY excited about!  I actually laughed my ass off when I pulled it out of the box...

A SHORE THING by Snooki
(I'm reading it so you don't have to! Ha!)

Okay, for REAL... this is just too good in the worst way not to read!  The only thing that had me slightly disappointed was that it was not her memoirs, I was totally hoping for juicy tid bits about GTL (gym, tan, laundry) and some awesomeness about her ba-donk. 

I have never ever watched an episode of Jersey Shore, but when I saw her on Letterman, despite myself I found her hilarious.  Stupid Snooki.

DON'T MAKE ME LOVE YOU!


And an added bonus, here be a brilliant reading of an exerpt from Ms. Pollizi's book by a comedian pretending to be Morgan Freeman. (and quite well I might add!) from a recent episode of Craig Ferguson.