Numero has ceased publication with the May 2013 issue. Future live chats and discussions will be determined by the participants of the Numéro Book Club. Anyone interested can send an email to numerobookclub@gmail.com Please put "numero book club" in the subject of your email. Thanks!

Monday, July 22, 2013

Great Day for a Run

by Kevin McGuire

This is a limited edition hand-printed and bound book released locally in Peoria, IL.  The author, Kevin McGuire, is a local avid runner.

An article about it appeared in Community Word, a local Peoria newspaper, In November 2012.

The book is available from Gold Quoin Press.


Friday, July 19, 2013

Machine Man

by Max Barry

from Random House:
Synopsis:
Scientist Charles Neumann loses a leg in an industrial accident. It's not a tragedy. It's an opportunity. Charlie always thought his body could be better. He begins to explore a few ideas. To build parts. Better parts.

Prosthetist Lola Shanks loves a good artificial limb. In Charlie, she sees a man on his way to becoming artificial everything. But others see a madman. Or a product. Or a weapon.

A story for the age of pervasive technology, Machine Man is a gruesomely funny unraveling of one man's quest for ultimate self-improvement.

About Max Barry:
Max Barry began removing parts at an early age. In 1999, he successfully excised a steady job at tech giant HP in order to upgrade to the more compatible alternative of manufacturing fiction. While producing three novels, he developed the online nation simulation game NationStates, as well as contributing to various open source software projects and developing religious views on operating systems. He did not leave the house much. For Machine Man, Max wrote a website to deliver pages of fiction to readers via email and RSS. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters, and is 38 years old. He uses vi.


Wired review of Machine Man.  Max Barry’s Crazy Experiment: Machine Man by Jonathan H. Liu.
Lots of reviews on Goodreads.
Be sure to check out Max Barry's website. http://maxbarry.com/machineman/


Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World

by Todd McLeish

Visit author Todd McLeish's blog at http://narwhalslefttooth.blogspot.com/
to learn more about Narwhal whales.

Also, visit the author's website at http://toddmcleish.com/
for more information about the book Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World, author bio, photo gallery, a list of the author's upcoming appearances, info on his other books, and links to other resources.

Book description from the publisher:
Among all the large whales on Earth, the most unusual and least studied is the narwhal, the northernmost whale on the planet and the one most threatened by global warming. Narwhals thrive in the fjords and inlets of northern Canada and Greenland. These elusive whales, whose long tusks were the stuff of medieval European myths and Inuit legends, are uniquely adapted to the Arctic ecosystem and are able to dive below thick sheets of ice to depths of up to 1,500 meters in search of their prey-halibut, cod, and squid.
Join Todd McLeish as he travels high above the Arctic circle to meet:
Teams of scientific researchers studying the narwhal's life cycle and the mysteries of its tusk.
Inuit storytellers and hunters.
Animals that share the narwhals' habitat: walruses, polar bears, bowhead and beluga whales, ivory gulls, and two kinds of seals.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child discussion group questions:
Please beware that questions may contain spoilers for the book.
From BookBrowse.com
From LitLovers

Book reviews:
Lit Lovers
Goodreads
Amazon

Book Addicts discussion of the book on GoodReads

Book description from the publisher:
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Beard on Food: The Best Recipes and Kitchen Wisdom from the Dean of American Cooking

by James Beard

Book description from Amazon:
In Beard on Food, one of America's great culinary thinkers and teachers collects his best essays, ranging from the perfect hamburger to the pleasures of oxtails, from salad dressing to Sauce Diable. The result is not just a compendium of fabulous recipes and delicious bites of writing. It's a philosophy of food-unfussy, wide-ranging, erudite, and propelled by Beard's exuberance and sense of fun.
In a series of short, charming essays, with recipes printed in a contrasting color (as they were in the beloved original edition), Beard follows his many enthusiasms, demonstrating how to make everyday foods into delicious meals. Covering meats, vegetables, fish, herbs, and kitchen tools, Beard on Food is both an invaluable reference for cooks and a delightful read for armchair enthusiasts.

For more information about James Beard, the James Beard Foundation, delicious recipes complete with recipe finder search, James Beard awards and much more visit www.jamesbeard.org


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you. -- from www.simongarfield.com

To read an extract from the book visit Simon Garfield's website.

Monday, July 8, 2013