Book Review: A Year Of Mornings

One of my favorite things about our Lincoln City Libraries is the Interlibrary Loan Service. This program lets you request any book/magazine/article/etc. from any library in the country willing to send it to you. Most of the time, it's free, too! Why bother buying off Amazon at a discount, if you might not even like it? Just use ILL, and you can really narrow down your own collection.
I have recently requested 3 books, and within two weeks, have got two of them, the other request is still floating around in the big "library database" whatever and where ever that may be!
One of my favorite blogs from last year was this photo blog done by two women living 3191 miles apart--Portland, OR to Portland, MA. They wouldn't discuss their photos before they uploaded them, and they would just be pictures of 'the morning'. Such a cool concept, that they got a 2-book deal out of it! (Their second, A Year of Evenings, will come out in 2010, I believe). Check out their blog--their pictures are absolutely breathtaking in their simplicity and clarity.
The book I checked out from ILL was A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart by Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes.

I was actually quite pleased with this book in the fact that there are no explanations, just the photographs from their year, and that the pages were matte instead of really glossy. These pictures, in my opinion, are so subtle and clear that the matte print captivates the image better. However, I was shocked at how small the book is! I was expecting a 'coffee table size' book, with each page being 1 picture: 1 on the left, 1 on the right. The pictures truly do speak for themselves and the small 'comments' section (taken from the blog) was really neat to see. The only downside to this book was, because of the size, a lot of pictures were 1 1/2 in by 1 in.--WAY to small to make out the fine detail that these two women are so good at creating. The design of the layout condenses the page totals (right around 200) but a lot of the picture pairs are so small--you just can't see them well enough to appreciate them!

I'm glad I borrowed the book for the eye candy, but with so many of the pictures so tiny, I don't think I would buy it.
****

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