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Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy edited by H.L. Hix

Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy edited by H.L. Hix is a collection of short essays about items writers have in their possession that they neither bought nor would they sell because they hold a value not measured by the marketplace.  The book pays homage to all that is held dear in today’s society from a time long past waiting to be recaptured in memories to places you can revisit, though the light will be slightly off or the wind will blow harder.  Hix has culled together a series of short essays that demonstrate the beauty we find in the most mundane things from flags to typewriters to playing cards found on the ground.

Contributors to the collection range from writers and poets to bricklayers and flight instructors, among many others.  The book also is broken down into more than 30 sections with titles like “emotionally pervaded,” “moral transactions,” and “No Ideas.”  While the book is in itself a collection, Hix has asked readers to keep the dialogue open and fluid in an open invitation to readers and reading groups to contribute their “object lessons” to his blog; find out more about that project from my previous post.

Since I’m a contributor to the project, I cannot call this a review due to the potential conflicts of interest it would present.  However, I can tell you that I’m pleased that this nonprofit project is published through a nonprofit publishing house, Serving House Books, and H.L. Hix has said he will donate 100 percent of any royalties he receives from the sales of the book, since he simply seeks to spread “wisdom and joy.”

Mailbox Monday #168

Mailbox Mondays (click the icon to check out the new blog) has gone on tour since Marcia at A Girl and Her Books, formerly The Printed Page passed the torch. This month’s host is Diary of an Eccentric.

Kristi of The Story Siren continues to sponsor her In My Mailbox meme.

Both of these memes allow bloggers to share what books they receive in the mail or through other means over the past week.

Just be warned that these posts can increase your TBR piles and wish lists.

Here’s what I received this week:

1.  Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy edited by H.L. Hix, which I received from Hix since I am a contributor.

Made Priceless presents snapshots of objects that their holders treasure: a 1950s swivel rocker, a fortune-cookie fortune that reads “The rubber bands are heading in the right direction” a marble with a world map painted on it, a bread-baking pan, a bar of soap, crocheted doilies, a masonry trowel… Each object has its own story, each its own meaning. The book’s contributors include artists, a banker, a retired career military officer, secretaries, a pilot, stay-at-home mothers, students, professors, and others, each with a testament in praise of something priceless. The result is a remarkable collection that honors what money can’t buy, and celebrates the extraordinary significance in an ordinary things.

2. Restoration by Olaf Olafsson, which the Literate Housewife passed on to me. Thanks so much!

Having grown up in an exclusive circle of wealthy British ex-pats in Florence in the 1920s, Alice Orsini shocks everyone when she marries the son of a minor Italian landowner and begins restoring San Martino, a crumbling villa in Tuscany, to its former glory. But after years of hard work, filling the acres with orchards, livestock, and farmhands, Alice’s growing restlessness pulls her into the heady social swirl of wartime Rome and a reckless affair that will have devastating consequences.

Her indiscretion is noticed by careful eyes—those of Robert Marshall, a renowned dealer of renaissance art. In exchange for his silence, he demands Alice hide a priceless Caravaggio, a national treasure that he has sold to the Germans, at San Martino. As the front creeps toward Tuscany, sending a wave of orphans, refugees, and wounded Allies to San Martino, Alice trusts that the painting she’s hiding will keep the Germans at bay. What she doesn’t know is the truth about a brilliant young artist she harbors named KristÍn, a prodigy who can restore any painting, and whose secrets may ruin them all.

Trapped between loyalists and resistors, cruel German forces and Allied troops, Alice and KristÍn must withstand the destruction of everything around them while painfully confronting the consequences of their past mistakes.

3. The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel, which came from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly; the economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s drifting toward bankruptcy and is in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes.

Eilo recently paid a visit to a home that had a ten-year-old child in it, a child who looks very much like Gavin and who has the same last name as Gavin’s high school girlfriend Anna, whom Gavin last saw a decade ago. Gavin—a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives—begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who have been on the run all these years from a drug dealer from whom Anna stole $121,000.

What did you receive?

I’ve Been Keeping a Secret, But It’s Out Now….

Last year, a poet I interviewed for 32 Poems, H.L. Hix, asked if I would contribute to his blog about objects that are made priceless by how and why they are received/given for his blog project at IN QUIRE.  He published my little “object lesson” in 2011.  I know that some of you may have read it already, but the secret I’ve kept is that H.L. Hix had told me that he had hoped to create a book out of these lessons.  I wasn’t hopeful because it includes something I wrote, and I thought who the heck would want to read that.  But now, I’m coming clean.  The secret and the book are out!

Something I wrote in tribute to my nana (Aune Mullen — 1915-1998) has been published in a book, Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy.

I hope that you will buy this book to support not only this blog and my writing, but also the charities to which H.L. Hix will contribute.

I cannot begin to tell you what this publication means to me and how I feel it honors nana’s memory.  It is more than I could have ever dreamed of or asked for in my lifetime.  I’m glad that it has arrived in my home.  I hope to buy a few copies for my parents and aunts.  I urge you all to do the same because not only is this book important to me and the memories I’ve shared, but to all the other contributors.

Thanks to all of you who continue to support the blog, my writing, and everything I try to accomplish here.

***Updated at 11:40 AM***

If you want a signed copy, you can send a payment to my paypal account savvyverseandwit AT gmail DOT com and I can send you one.

I can get a discount as a contributor from the publisher, so it would $17 with shipping for those of you who are interested!