Some Reading Updates

I’m sure very few people, if any, care much that I blog any more, and fewer still probably care if I blog about what I’ve been reading, but I enjoy blogging, so I’m going to do it anyway.

I went over to the soon-to-be-defunct Joseph Beth the other night with my buddy Jacalyn, and we roamed around look at sale books.  I had my iPod out and my PBS Wish List open, and that way I was able to try to find books I had been wanting. 

I’ve ready one serious book and one silly book this week, and considering that only puts my total on the year up to 15, 2 books is a significant amount of reading for one week.  That they were both excellent reads was even better.

One book I found at Joseph-Beth completely by accident is Bill Geerhart’s Little Billy’s Letters.  Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

What do Tori Spelling, the Church of Scientology, and Donald Rumsfeld all have in common?: They -- and many others -- have answered letters from "Little Billy", a grown man with a cache of stamps and far too much time on his hands. Funny, touching, and delightfully quirky, Billy's letters cover a broad range of subject matter:

• Operation Drop-Out: Considering dropping out of elementary school, Billy writes to serial killers and celebrities seeking their wise counsel.
• Billy's Law: Which Supreme Court Justice prefers the Big Mac to the Whopper? Who is Janet Reno's favorite crime fighter? What does Robert Shapiro say is the best defense for being framed for murder? Billy finds out.
• The Making of the Class President: Billy runs for class president and collects "endorsements" from Nancy Reagan, Dick Cheney, George HW Bush, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Ken Starr, and Colin Powell.
• Choosing My Religion: Billy asks representatives from the Catholic, Presbyterian, Mormon, Raelian, Satanic, Scientologist, Hare Krishna and Unification Church (Moonies) what is "cool" or "easy" about their religion.

Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Celebrities, Heads of Corporations, Serial Killers, Robot Makers, and the NesQuick Bunny have all replied to "Little Billy's" scrawled questions.

This book was absolutely hilarious, riveting, clever, and fascinating.  I started reading it while standing at the humor shelf in the store, and couldn’t put it down.  Jacalyn and I were dying laughing over the letter to and from Charles Manson (Jacalyn, if you’re reading, there’s a second letter from Manson that’s even crazier than the first one!), and I absolutely loved that so many of these people took the time to respond to these letters in so many different ways—some just sent a picture, some actually wrote whole letters, you name it, it was done.  The letter from Mr. Rogers will make you cry, unless you have  a heart of stone.

An added bonus is that this book counts towards the What's In a Name? reading challenge, as a book with a size in the title!  Woo hoo! 

The second book I read this week was Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant.  I had previously read 2 books by Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars and Bel Canto, both of which I consumed and adored. I have had The Magician’s Assistant on the shelf for a while now, and I tell you why:  it’s Ann’s books.  I need to take serious breaks in between reading them.  Whenever I think of my favorite authors, I never really remember Ann Patchett, but as soon as I read one of her books, I’m reminded again of how fantastic a writer she really is and I remind myself that I need to include her in my top 10 list of authors I love.  Every book is a beautiful story, so densely packed with characters you love even if you hate them a little bit, a story line that literally has me biting off my nails even if it’s not a taut thriller, and I’m pleased to say The Magician’s Assistant was no different.

I’ve had this book so long, I honestly can’t remember where I got it.  It strikes me that I got it from the library book sale, because I can sort of remember saying to myself, “Oh, Ann Patchett, I think I’ll pick this up.”  This past week with all the nuttiness happening, I’ve been in the mood to just read an excellent story, and I had a feeling this book would deliver.  And somehow, after putting TomTom to sleep last week (SOB!), seeing the rabbit on the front cover of this book was an absolute comfort to me.

The story revolves around Sabine, who has been magician Parsifal’s assistant for more than 20 years and wife for just a few years.  When Parsifal dies suddenly and unexpectedly, Sabine’s attorney finds mention of a family in Parsifal’s will that Sabine never knew existed.  She had lived with the assumption that Parsifal was an orphan with no relatives, but in fact, his mother, sisters, and nephews are alive and well in Nebraska.  She chooses to meet them and learns much about the man she thought she knew, and about herself in the process.

The minute I dove into it, I knew I was in trouble.  I did not put the book down much, I can honestly say.  But Monday, as I got to the bombshell I never saw coming, I literally had to put the book down and walk away.  Just reading the middle section of the book exhausted me.  And yet, within hours, I was ordering Run off PaperBackSwap, and I’m hoping it comes soon. 

Where Patchett shines in The Magician’s Assistant is in not bashing the idea of Sabine’s grief into your head.  The story really is focused on Parsifal’s family, and on Sabine’s discovery of that family, on what she assumed and thought and what they assumed and thought, and how the truth was in that grey area in between.  Exploring all that underbelly stuff could get complicated, but Patchett manages to never let it get messy.  When I began weeping 100 pages before the book was done, I knew good and well I was in deep.  Typically I can’t stand neat and tidy endings, but in this case, I was cheering for Sabine to make certain decisions, and while she did make them, we are left to make up our own mind about how those decisions will play out in the future. 

I felt so deeply for Sabine and for Parsifal’s family, that to close the cover on this book was nearly devastating in itself.  I’ll be adding Ann Patchett to my “must read” lists in the future, and while I may take another lengthy break before investing in her again, I am very pleased to see that she’ll be appearing in DC on June 8th and have every intention of going to meet her and get some books signed…  That is my neat and tidy little ending, and one I’m very excited about! 

I gave Little Billy’s Letters 4 stars on GoodReads and The Magician’s Assistant 5 stars.  I highly recommend both of them!

Percy Jackson

I have completed my first book challenge read, The Titan’s Curse, which is the third book in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series for kids. 

I started reading the first Percy Jackson book last summer, at the behest of my father, who first introduced me to Harry Potter, so I thought I’d take a chance on him and let him lead me to the Jackson books. 

I read the first one and thought it was cute, although I didn’t LOVE it like I did Harry Potter.  But I read the second one, and somehow that lead me to picking up the third one on a recent trip to Walmart. 

Now, I don’t like the winter days that are gray and dreary and depressing, and we’ve had a string of those lately.  And by mid-January, I was pretty much pissed off at everyone and everything in my life.  So I started reading The Titan’s Curse because I wanted to have a book in which a lot of stuff got blown up.  And I was not disappointed.

In The Titan’s Curse, Percy is now 14 and is summoned to help rescue some half bloods at a school in Maine.  Artemis and her crew of huntresses arrive to help and Annabeth disappears.  While a fatal quest is predicted by the Oracle and in which Percy is not invited to participate, Percy goes off in search of his friend anyway and helps the adventurers fulfill their quest.

I think if I knew more about Greek mythology, I would probably get more out of all the actual mythology stuff, but I really enjoy these books regardless.  They are fun, light, and easy to read.  Percy is brave to the point of stupidity.  Grover is a sweet and loveable character who I always cheer for.  And it’s fun that in this book, they went to Washington DC.

I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads, meaning I liked it.  These aren’t the kind of books you absolutely LOVE, but they’re a great deal of fun regardless.   I chose it as my book with evil in the title for the What's In a Name challenge, as a “Curse” is pretty evil.  I like to pace myself and read one of these Percy Jackson books about every 4 or 5 months, so I will probably read one again towards the end of spring or beginning of summer.  If you haven’t read Percy Jackson, I suggest giving him a try sometime!  Especially if you like to see things crushed or blown up by the Gods of the Universe.

First Book Reviews of the Year

I am going to attempt to review most of the books I read this year.  So far, I’ve read 2, both of which I got at the library.  The first is The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson.  This was a book club book and while I was at the library picking it up, they had Alan Brennert’s Honolulu on display at the circulation desk, so I snatched that one up too.

Amy Dickinson is best known for writing the Ask Amy column that took over when Ann Landers died.  She also is a commentator on NPR.  Her book was supposed to be about the town of Freeville NY and the women there who raised her and supported her and her daughter when Amy’s marriage to her husband (CBS reporter Anthony Mason) fell apart.

That is a book I would have loved to read.  Instead, while interesting enough and a good enough read, the book is about her coping with the divorce while making occasional trips back to her hometown.  The book is wildly out of sequence, as we discussed in book club (in one chapter, her cat Pumpkin dies, in the next chapter, Pumpkin is alive and well).  Dickinson herself is likeable, and I found myself cheering for her successes and marveling at how she got through her low points, but in fact, the part I liked most was probably the part she expected her readers to like the least:  the part in which she encounters her wayward dad, Buck, and goes on an adventure in the mud with him.  Buck abandoned Amy’s mother when the children were young, and has infrequent contact with his children thereafter.  Amy’s marriage suffers similarly in that her husband is a globetrotting reporter who is frequently absent.  (Although he turns out to be a good dad to young Emily despite his long travels around the world.)  Still, having grown up in the North Country, to which Amy alludes, I have known many such “Bucks” in my life, and they really are the kind of colorful characters that Amy may have inadvertently portrayed her father as, and they can be lovable in their own way.  But of course, I say that without Buck being my dad.

In the end, Amy packages everything with a nice neat bow, meeting a new love interest and scoring Ask Amy while Emily happily goes off to college.  Life is messy and a “happily ever after” ending to a memoir is rarely satisfying, as is true in this case.  Amy’s story has yet to be written, as has mine, and if I finished writing my memoirs with moving to Virginia, or adopting my daughter, or conquering even some of my personal demons, I would leave out some of the best parts and lead my readers to conclude that life can be tidily summed up in an endpoint, even if it goes on. 

That being said, I gave Mighty Queens 3 stars on Goodreads.  Worth a shot if you need a quick book to pass the time.  The girls in my book club all seemed to feel about the same about it.  Thanks for the pick, Lauren!

Now, if you have been reading my book reviews or my blogs for a while, you will know that last year I was forced to read Molokai for my book club.  This Alan Brennert book was a book I was convinced that I would hate, as a) my best friend Lesley LOVED it and b) I have no interest in the topics of leprosy or Pacific Island type stuff.  Strangely though, I was totally drawn into the story of Rachel and her life in a leper colony and can say without hesitation that it was one of the best books I read last year.

During the book club discussion, it came out that Brennert had written another book called Honolulu and some of the girls wondered if it would be as good.  I mentally resolved that I would not read it, because it is about a young woman from Korea moving to Hawaii as a picture bride and again, no interest in Pacific Island stories and even less in stories about Asia.  (Sorry, but there it is!)

However, when I went to pick up Mighty Queens from the library, there was Honolulu, almost mocking me, from a perch on the circulation desk.  Impulsively, I grabbed it and when I finished my first book, I started in on Honolulu.  And I found it as compulsively readable as Molokai.

Honolulu is a story about Regret, a young picture bride from Korea.  Stifling in her father’s home, she consults a matchmaker and is soon betrothed to a Mr. Noh in Hawaii, who presents himself as a wealthy plantation worker in the Hawaiian islands, painted by Koreans as being paved with golden streets and rife with opportunity.  Regret forces her father’s hand to allow her to go to Hawaii for the marriage, and soon discovers not the wealthy and kind man who will allow her to be education, but a gambling alcoholic who beats her and kills their unborn child.  Regret flees from Mr. Noh’s shack, renames herself Jin (Korean for “gem”), and embarks on carving out a new life for herself in the Hawaiian capital city.

The story is fairly intricate, and you easily find yourself immersed in the story of Jin’s life in Hawaii only to be reminded of the “little sister” she left behind (a 5 year old girl betrothed to Jin’s brother), only to be brought back to Mr. Noh only to go back to Jin’s friends and fellow picture brides and their families.  Each and every story line remains compelling till the end of the book when Brennert gets bogged down in some actual Hawaiian history, which he clearly wanted to include in the book, but which overtook the driving story line, that being the tale of The Massie Affair.  To be honest, while I am typically a true crime buff, I really just wanted to get back to Regret/Jin’s story and so I skimmed much of the 20 or so pages devoted to this whole thing so I could get back to what I considered the real meat and potatoes of the book.

I laughed and cried and cheered and hoped for Regret and her friends and their stories.  I loved how the book concluded, and how the characters struggled with issues bigger than themselves and lived very human lives at the same time.  Alan Brennert is fast rising to the top of my “must read authors” list.  I gave the book 4 stars on GoodReads just because it did get off track with the Massie stuff, otherwise it would have gotten 5.  Check this one out today!

My One and Only Book Challenge this Year

Last year, I signed up for 4 book challenges and managed to complete 3 of them. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, my favorite one was the What's In a Name challenge, and this year I am only signing up for that one. I didn't like feeling the pressure of having to try and cram in the challenge reading. Still, I'm proud I completed 3 of them anyway!



The categories this year are pretty cool too!

Between January 1 and December 31, 2011, read one book in each of the following categories:

1. A book with a number in the title
2. A book with jewelry or a gem in the title
3. A book with a size in the title
4. A book with travel or movement in the title
5. A book with evil in the title
6. A book with a life stage in the title

I'm not even going to speculate what books I might read to fill these in, as most of the books I thought I'd read starting out last year didn't make the cut in the end. Still, it should be fun reading!

If you want to sign up, go to http://whatsinaname4.blogspot.com/search/label/Sign-Up.

Happy reading!

Final Book for Twenty Ten

As the month of November was winding down, I was getting increasingly desperate to find something to read that I could finish quickly and get done with the TwentyTen Challenge.  Finally, I went over to my shelf of TBR’s, the only category I had left, and decided to pick out the absolute shortest book I could find and read it.  That book happened to be a book called something like It’s Not What It Seems or something like that, a book about a brother and sister whose father moves out on their mother to go write the great American novel.  They spend their summer opening and running their own restaurant.  Anyway, it wasn’t that great a book—obviously if I can’t even remember the title—and I wound up tossing the book in my recycle bin.  I went back to the drawing board because I really wouldn’t have much to blog about that book and found Lois Lowry’s Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye.  I had a sneaking suspicion I’d have a lot to say about this book, and I think I was right.

(WARNING:  This review is downright chock-full of spoilers!)

First, I will offer up the summary from the back of the book:

Natalie has everything—beauty, a loving family, a terrific boyfriend, and an entrance to the college of her choice.  But she is haunted by a missing link in her life—who is the mother who gave her up when she was only a few days old?

The summer she is seventeen, Natalie decides to find out who were her natural parents and what has happened to them.  Old newspapers and a high school yearbook yield clues that start to unravel the mystery of her past.  From a small town in Maine to New York City, Natalie’s search leads to anger, hope, even love—and finally a confrontation with her real mother.

Ok.  So of course as an adoptive mother myself, I take issue with the wording that Natalie is off to find her real mother.  But seeing as the book was written in 1978, I’m willing to give it a bit of a pass.  Although people still ask me if I’ve heard from Leah’s real mother even now, so I guess I’m just the artificial substitute.

Anyway, the book was fairly compelling reading, and I’ve ready many of Lowry’s books in my youth and greatly enjoyed them.  I guess this one touched on some of my own fears as an adoptive mother.  If you happen to be new to my blog, here’s a picture of me and my precious daughter, Leah:

She’s African-American, and I’m Caucasian.  There’s no denying the fact, even if I wanted to, that she’s adopted.  (For the record, I wouldn’t want to, I’m proud of the fact that we were chosen to adopt her from all the parents who could have been hers. )

To give credit where credit is due, Lowry’s fictional adoptive parents also make no secret of the fact that their daughter was adopted.  When Natalie approaches them to ask if they will give her information to go on her search, they take months to come to terms with the idea that Natalie wants to go in search of her “real mother”.  I hope and pray that if Leah comes to me, she doesn’t use that terminology.  My husband and I have chosen to have an open relationship with Leah’s birthmother (a phrase which even now, only a year after our adoption has been finalized, is I do believe going out of fashion in favor), and we love her very much, but it would break my heart to hear Leah refer to someone else as her “real mother”.  It’s bad enough when other people ask me that question!

Natalie’s parents finally relent, despite the hurt they feel, and provide Natalie with all the documents they have regarding her adoption—basically a letter from an attorney.  From that point, Natalie is able to go to the town where she was born and piece together her past. 

It does not hurt that Natalie is a spitting image of her birthmother.  It does not hurt that this was taking place in the 70’s and Natalie was able to phone people and say, “I’m an old friend of Julie’s!  Can you tell me where to get in touch with her?” and she was given tons of information and phone numbers.

What really got me is that Julie, Natalie’s birthmother, is a fashion model who lives in a fabulous home on New York City’s Upper East Side with her husband and two sons.  I genuinely would have preferred a book that touched on a more realistic scenario and not one that somehow indicates perhaps that giving up an infant when you are a child yourself will somehow allow you to catapult into a world of wealth and fame.  (Props to Lowry for making Julie a pregnant teen—in today’s world of MTV’s Teen Moms, it would be refreshing to see more teens selflessly giving their children a life that ultimately they have little hope of being able to provide during their own adolescence.)

Julie reluctantly agrees to meet Natalie at the Russian Tea Room and attempts to get Natalie to join the world of high fashion modeling.  Then abruptly, she stands up and strolls out of their lunch, only to call Natalie the next day and have her over to the house to meet her half brothers.

For all that she wanted to find and all that she did find, Natalie is ultimately glad that her family is her family, but that she did uncover the secrets of her past.

What Leah will discover when she asks us about her own background is very different from Natalie’s discoveries.  I hope that like Natalie, Leah will remain true to herself and follow her own dreams, whether they be to know her family of origin or not to, whether they be to have some sort of relationship with her birthmother or not.  She will always have me there for her, no matter what she chooses and how it turns out.

Here are a few of my “rules” for people inquiring about our adoption.  I hope they come in handy if someone in your life is adopting or has been adopted.

1.  Please don’t ask about an adoptee’s “real parents”.  As I’ve said before, this is insulting to us.  We have bandaged her scrapes, we have gotten up with her every night, we have fed her and clothed her, we’ve tickled her and tucked her in, we’ve hugged and kissed away the tears and aches and pains, and celebrated every milestone in her 19 months with her.  To indicate that we are somehow not her “real” parents does us a disservice.  In having to defend ourselves about being her “real” parents, we feel we must then do a disservice to the beautiful and brave young woman who made what I can assure you was a heart-breaking choice to ask us to parent her child for her in a way she could not. 

2.  Please do not ask an adoptee or their family why his/her mother “did not want her.”  I can assure you that wanting her never was a factor in the equation.  Leah was wanted by her birthmother very much.  The reasons she chose to give Leah up for adoption and the reasons she chose us to parent her are intensely personal for her and for us.  I can tell you that she loves Leah with every fiber of her being.  She did what she felt was best at the time, and it was never an issue of “wanting”.  I feel confident that for 99.99999999999999% of birthparents out there, it is the same.

3.  Please do not inquire about an adoptee’s family of origin’s background, but if you do, do not expect to get all the minute details.  On our part, our families and close friends know as much as we care to share.  There are some things I wish I hadn’t shared, I can say honestly.  We know as much of the story as Leah’s birthmother chose to share with her, and we shared as much of that with our loved ones as we felt comfortable.  It would be unfair to share everything. It is not our story to tell.

4.  If you do have information that a family has disclosed to you or that you may have gleaned from other sources somehow, please do not give that information to the adoptee unless asked.  Again, using our family as an example, we will let  Leah make her own choices about what and how much she wants to know, and she will do it in her own time.  She may choose to know everything, she may choose not to know one single thing.  It is only right and fair that she should hear it from us and from her birthmother, and from no one else.  Even a slip of the tongue could cause unintentional pain if Leah were to overhear words that were unkind, untrue, or she didn’t want to know certain information.

5.  Finally, be loud and proud of the adoption, the adoptee, and the adoptive family!  Don’t treat the adoptee any differently.  Truly no better and no worse.  When I look at Leah, I see my daughter.  I do believe that when my parents and my husband’s parents look at her, they see their granddaughter.    I don’t think she gets any preferential treatment to my nephews or my niece, and I don’t think she is treated less well than they are.  This is all I could hope for—her true acceptance into our family.  Help make that a reality in your home too!  Don’t whisper, “he’s adopted” when you think you’re out of earshot of the adoptive family—it sounds like something you’re ashamed of or something that should be kept quiet or secretive.  When you hear others expressing doubt over adoption, share your family’s positive experiences, whether you are an adoptee, you have adopted, or a member of your family has adopted a child.

Ok, stepping off my soapbox now.  So I am DONE DONE DONE with the TwentyTen Book Challenge.  For the record, here are the books I read and each of the categories they fit into:

Young Adult:
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnston
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

TBR:
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye by Lois Lowry

New in 2010:
Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich
Miss Julia Renews Her Vows by Ann B. Ross

Shiny and New:
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

Bad Bloggers
Moloka’i by Alan Brennert
Found II by Davy Rothbart

Charity
When Katie Wakes by Connie May Fowler
Leftovers by Laura Weiss

Older Than You:
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susanne
Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse

Win! Win!
Secrets from the Vinyl Café by Stuart McLean
Never Change by Elizabeth Berg

“Who Are You Again?”
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Riegler
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian

Up to You!
Crackhouse by Terry Williams
Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin

Found II

In my continuing quest to finish these book challenges, I have had a slight problem with the “Bad Blogger” part, as I only read one book blog regular, my BFF Lesley’s.  (Well, ok, now I read Melissa's as well.)

Anyway, I had some listed that I thought I’d get around to that I’d read from Lesley’s blog, but on a recent trip to the bookstore-that-shall-not-be-named because I had to get a gift card for a friend, I found a copy of the book Found II in the $1 bin.  I have been a fan of Found and it’s attendant website (www.foundmagazine.com) for several years now, so for $1, I swallowed my pride and bought the book.

I’m glad I only spent a dollar, honestly.  I think Found might work better as a “blog” type thing.  By about halfway through, I was tired of reading people’s dropped lists, letters, notes, emails, papers, etc.  I put it aside for a few days and completed it a bit later on and that helped me to get through it.

I love the voyeuristic nature of Found, and the letters, pictures, and whatnot in this particular book were no exception.  Recently I was walking with Leah down the street and we found a letter that I thought immediately of sending into Found, only Leah got her hands on it and ate it.  Pity!  It would have been perfect.

Nonetheless, I do and will continue to read the Found site/blog occasionally and catch up on new finds.  But I don’t see myself reading it in book form any more!  PostSecrets keeps my attention a bit more easily, maybe because it’s shorter.  Some of the stuff in Found II went on a bit long!  I’ll give it 3 stars on Goodreads.

And thus am I finished with one more book for the TwentyTen Challenge, leaving only the TBR category and one more book left to read, before I’ll have completed 3 of the challenges I signed up for.  I am sure I’ll get it done before the end of December and am super-proud of myself for getting it done!  WOO HOO! :-D

The Home Stretch

I am in the home stretch, polishing off the final book challenge I signed up for this year.  This week I finished several books, but only one of them can I count.  Darn it!  This week’s selection is Galahad at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse.  I read it as part of the TwentyTen Challenge, and am submitting it for the “Older Than You” category, as it was published for the first time in 1965, a full 10 years before I was published.

I first was introduced to Wodehouse by an online acquaintance who sent me a copy of Luck of the Bodkins and later by my father, who loves to read the Jeeves series.  I have never gotten into those books, but having remembered the name and thought well enough of Luck, I was browsing at the Acton Library when we lived there (in 2003!) and found Galahad at Blandings as an audio book.  I checked it out and read it and enjoyed it very much.  The reader was fabulous.

Several years ago, I picked up a print copy and fully intended to read it again, but it has languished on my TBR shelf ever since.  This seemed like a perfect opportunity to launch into it, as it is a fairly short book, which is my current criteria for getting these challenges read!

The story revolves around the setting of Blandings Castle, home of Lord Emsworth, a peaceful, pig-raising man earl whose home is overrun by his meddling sister Hermione, a new secretary named Sandy who is cleaning up his mess so he cannot find anything, and his brother Galahad, quite the man about town.  “Gally” is a man never without words, he can literally talk his way into or out of anything and can convince others to do whatever he cares to.

Galahad at Blandings is the 9th book in the Castle Blandings series that Wodehouse wrote.  I have only read one other book in the series, but enjoyed reading about The Empress, Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, who has a minor role in this story.

This particular book centers around young love—many engagements are broken due to various and sundry misunderstandings, the Empress is found drunk in her sty, a young lover is hiding out under an assumed name at the castle having popped a policeman in the eye and stolen his bike, Hermione is attempting to get Lord Emsworth married off to Dame Daphne Winkworth.  Through it all, Gally is running around spouting stories of his wayward youth and attempting to reconcile all the young lovers while helping his brother rid himself of Hermione’s meddlesome guest and restore order to the Empress’s sheltered life.

I have to say that I didn’t enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed listening to the story on audio.  The story was vastly entertaining, but I think there is something in the acting-out by a gentleman with a properly clipped accent that lends itself well to “reading” Wodehouse. The twists and turns that the story takes are uproarious, to be sure, and I highly recommend reading this book or other Wodehouse works to anyone who wants a good laugh.  A slice of England, a good dose of humor, and an unbelievable plot that even in its complexity is easy to follow.  I give this one a solid 3 out of 5 on GoodReads.com.

All I have left for the TwentyTen Challenge are TBR and Bad Blogger.  And I’m almost done with Bad Blogger. :-D  Hooray!

W.W.W. Wednesday

MizB of Should Be Reading sponsors WWW Wednesdays.  I doubt I will participate in this one as often since my reading doesn’t change all that much from week to week lately.  However, I’ll enjoy participating when my reading selections do change.

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

* What are you currently reading?
* What did you recently finish reading?
* What do you think you’ll read next?

1.  I am currently reading two books.  The first is The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.  It is a book club selection, a book I had never heard of before it was chosen for book club.  So far, I’m enjoying it.  Hopefully this is a good sign for the rest of the book club year!  The second book is Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.  It was an impulse buy when I recently had an hour to myself in the local bookstore and a gift card from my birthday to burn.  I am enjoying it a lot and am glad I picked it up (Thanks, Wendy, for the gift card!)

2.  I recently finished the first book in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Lightning Thief.  It was a fun read, quick and easy and engaging.

3.  I have the next Percy Jackson book, which I may read next.  I was also plowing through Galahad at Blandings and The Great American Typo Hunt before I put them aside for the two books mentioned in Question/Answer #1.  This is a common problem I have, actually.  I’ll be happily reading along in a great book, and then other great books come along, so I put down the first books to start the new ones.  I need to develop some kind of follow through!  Anyone else do this?

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. 

Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

At present I am reading 2 books, so I’ll post a teaser for each.

“The walls seemed to sag around us.  The toast wavered in the air.”

                                         --The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
                                            (Aimee Bender)

“What of religion itself?  Clouds, tornadoes, sins awhirl before some imagined but necessary altar—a Perfect Storm of jingoism!”

                                        --Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
                                           (Rhoda Janzen)

Many thanks to Sarah at Run, Bake, Read for a fun new Tuesday something-to-do!

Miss Julia Renews Her Vows

I have long been a fan of the Miss Julia books.  Recently, however, I was disappointed with the last book, Miss Julia Paints the Town, and so when I heard there was a new Miss Julia on her way, I felt like maybe I’d hate it.  I’ve been shucking off series here and there that haven’t kept my interest (for instance, I haven’t read a Diane Mott Davidson mystery in a long time, nor did I make the leap to Jan Karon’s new Father Tim books despite enjoying the Mitford series immensely until the last couple).  Still, I never flat out quit reading a series until I give it a fair shake, so I decided that I would read the latest Ann B. Ross offering, Miss Julia Renews her Vows, and see if Miss Julia was worth continuing.

***SPOILER ALERT:  If you are just starting out with this series, you may find information contained herein that will tell you what happens later on in the books.  Be forewarned that you may want to stop if you don’t want to know what happens with the characters in future novels.

I started the book earlier this year, snagging a copy on sale at a local bookstore as soon as I saw it was out.  I read the first chapter and thought, “Oh jeez” and put it aside.  The book begins with Miss Julia breaking the news to her considerable social circle that Hazel Marie and Mr. Pickens have gotten themselves hitched.  Hazel Marie is embarrassed to have the word come out at the same time that she has to announce she is pregnant with twins, as she knows the town gossips’ tongues will be wagging about her eloping and being in a family way.  Miss Julia arranges to have a luncheon and concocts a story to cover Hazel Marie and JD’s “extra-curricular activities.” 

As I started reading all this, I was like, “This is so unnecessarily complicated!”  The charm of the Miss Julia books, for me, come in thinking about a very proper old lady who gets thrown into circumstances in which she has to act against a lifetime of rules she has invented about what good breeding entails in one’s behavior.    But let’s face it, Hazel Marie is Miss Julia’s dead husband’s former mistress.  No one expects that Hazel Marie is necessarily a paragon of virtue, no matter how she acts now that she is somewhat “reformed”.  Add to that the fact that Mr. Pickens is married 4 times now and there’s really not much to worry about.

Fortunately, however, Ross strays away from this story line as Miss Etta Mae Wiggins calls from the police station and pleads with Miss Julia to come down and bail her out, as she is being interrogated, suspected of bashing in the head of one of her clients.  Meanwhile, Miss Julia’s pastor has invited Pastor Fred back to conduct marriage enrichment classes, which Miss Julia’s husband, Sam, agrees to attend in support of the church.  Both these events send shockwaves through Miss Julia’s household, and she does her best to help Etta Mae and avoid Pastor Fred at all costs.

Both of those parts of the book showcase Miss Julia at her finest.  This was not even close to my favorite Miss Julia book, but it was good enough that I was inspired to continue reading the series for now.  I’ll be glad in the next book to find out if Hazel Marie gives birth to two girls named Lillian and Julia, as I suspect she will, or if Ross has something else up her sleeve.  3 out of 5 stars on GoodReads.com

Miss Julia Renews her Vows also fulfills my last requirement for the What's In a Name? Challenge by giving me a title with a title in it, the title being “Miss”.  To sum up, I read:

Body of Water:  Your Oasis on Flame Lake (Lorna Landvik) (review here)
Food: Leftovers (Laura Wiess) (review here)
Music: Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe (Stuart McLean) (review here)
Place Name: Moloka’i (Alan Brennert) (review here)
Plant: Columbine (Dave Cullen) (review here)
Title: Miss Julia Renews Her Vows (Ann B. Ross)

There is not one book I read for this challenge that I did not like.  I think I got lucky with this challenge, since ever single one of them was excellent and I was able to use many of them to cover other challenges as well.  Many thanks to Beth F. for hosting the challenge and I’m pleased I was able to complete it, although I’m not sure I used a single book in my sign up blog entry as I planned to!

It also is my second selection for the TwentyTen Book Challenge as a “New in 2010” title selection.  I have only 3 books left, 1 each in the categories of To Be Read, Bad Blogger, and Older Than You, and I have roughly 3 months to complete it!  I think I’ll get there.

Moloka’i

It’s been a while since I did a book review.  This is for two reasons.

1. I haven’t felt like reading much.
2. I’ve had a book hanging over my head for book club that I Did. Not. Want. To. Read.

Every year when the calendar ticks over on a book club year, I make a solemn vow that I will read every single book.  And every year I fail miserably.  Someone always picks a book about a topic that does not interest me, and this year was no different with 2 books focused on Asia.

Then Melissa joins the book club and due to her attendance record in her early membership and someone else dropping out, I let her pick the September book.  And she chose Moloka’i by Alan Brennert.  She chose this based on the fact that Lesley liked the book so well and blogged about it in 2009.  She seems to like the books that Lesley reads and she spends a lot of time not liking the books that I like to read.  This is hilarious.  Lesley and Melissa are both two of the best friends a girl could ask for, and neither one of them has any taste in literature.  Haha  I say this because I hate everything either one of them loves.  It’s a wonder we’re friends.

So when I found out that Melissa chose it due to Lesley’s glowing review, I immediately knew I was going to hate it.  I went to Lesley’s blog and read her review and thought, “Well, crap.”  And reading a summary of the book induced similar thoughts.  Because, a) I have no interest in the history of Hawai’i and b) sweeping epic novels of any sort of history just turn me off almost immediately.  That’s why I’ve been unsuccessfully attempting to read Gone With the Wind for 3 years now.  Moloka’i spans something like 70+ years. 

Still, I went over to a local bookstore and picked up a copy when a search of my local library proved fruitless and the list on Paperback Swap wasn’t getting any shorter.  I figured I could always swap it for something else.  I read the first several chapters in early August and then put it aside.  There was something about it that was already way too sad and I couldn’t bear the thought of reading about Rachel being torn from her family and forced to live in a colony far away from the people she loved.

Before I get any further ahead of myself, Moloka’i is the story of Rachel Kalama, a 7-year-old living in Hawai’i with her mother, sister, and two brothers.  Her father is a sailor and is away from home for months at a time, but is a devoted family man.  Hansen’s Disease (commonly known as leprosy) has broken out in Hawai’i at the same time the government is being deposed, and young Rachel contracts the disease.  She is found out as being a leper and sent off to the leper colony at Moloka’i, far from her family and home and beloved father.  The book is a testament to Rachel’s strength from the beginning to the end of her life, as I say from age 7 to well into her 70’s.

On Sunday, with book club looming on Monday, I decided to re-visit Moloka’i.  I wanted to at least give it an honest effort.  As I  first began to read, I was totally overwhelmed with sadness.  I literally cried every 2 or 3 pages.  But I was also increasingly captivated by Rachel’s story.  I can’t tell you why exactly.  As I went along, my tears dried up, and in fact, I became almost numb to the death and destruction that was apparently commonplace in a leper colony. Even when my favorite character, Henry, dies later on in the book (I’m really not giving anything away, given the span of time the book covers and the subject matter, you can bet most people will be dead by the time you close the back cover), I felt strangely removed from the grief I felt early on in the book.  I started to think maybe something was wrong with me.

Anyway, I didn’t get the last 70 pages read in time for book club.  We had an amazing meeting, literally laughing and crying together, renaming the club B*tches with Books, and just had one of those magical meetings I will remember for a long time.  As member Lauren put it, “There was definitely something in the air tonight.”  But when I got home, I was more determined than ever to finish Moloka’i.  I picked up in bits and pieces what happened at the end, but in fact, I didn’t feel like the discussion ruined anything for me.  I still felt pretty surprised by what went on.  And when I read the Endnote, the floodgates opened, and I had myself a good cry.

Moloka’i is, God strike me dead, an amazing book that Lesley may have been right about.  Hey, it was bound to happen sooner or later!!!  I did tend to skim the Hawai'ian folk lore sections and the mythology, but I loved reading the character’s reactions to modern inventions like airplanes and movies when they were brought to Moloka’i.  This was a great book and I highly recommend it.  Just have a box of tissues handy at the beginning and the end.  Five Stars on GoodReads.com

Book Challenges:

This book  counts as a “Bad Blogger” book for the Twenty-Ten Challenge and as my Place Name book for the What's In a Name challenge.  I need to read 2 more for WIAN? and 5 more for Twenty-Ten.  Woo hoo!

Book Reviews

I have gotten a LOT of reading done lately.  I think it’s because A) I can’t sleep with this stupid brace on and B) I have happened to pick up some really compelling books as my reading selections. 

I am continuing to chip away at my reading challenges.  This past week, I read 2 young adult novels, both of which count towards different reading challenges, and 2 adult fiction books.

First, I read Laura Wiess’s Leftovers.  I had read Laura’s book Such a Pretty Girl quite some time ago (maybe 2 years?) and loved it, so I was excited to read Leftovers.  I got a copy on PBS and then I got very nervous, since people scrawled some rather uncomplimentary reviews about the ending in the inside front cover.  Still, it was important that I read it since I needed a book for the What’s in a Name challenge that had a food in the title.  This was my selection!

Leftovers tells the tale of Ardith and Blair, two girls trapped in families that seem to have abandoned them for totally different reasons.  Ardith’s parents are aging hippies who never left the drug and alcohol scene and whose son is following in their wasted footsteps.  Ardith copes by being a straight arrow, excelling in school, keeping her nose clean, all in a quest to someday become a podiatrist.  Blair, meanwhile, is being overshadowed by a mother who’s career as an attorney and ambition to become a judge cause her to completely change her family’s life, abandoning home, a beloved dog, and even her marriage in search for a seat on the bench.  Blair’s friendship with Ardith is a lifeline in a sea of change, until her mother attempts to even undermine that.  Ardith and Blair manage to stick together in the face of a number of bad situations and survive their family crises by sticking close.

I loved reading this book.  I loved how it ended and how the girls manage to resolve their family issues to their own satisfaction.  Of course, it was so calculating that I was also glad neither was my daughter, but I genuinely felt for both girls and wanted both of them to succeed.  The book bounces between Ardith and Blair as they both tell their story to a mutual friend.  At the end you find out exactly who that person is and why they do what they did.  It was really a great read, and I had a very difficult time putting it down.  I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads.

The other YA book I read this month is Gabrielle Zevin’s Elsewhere.  Again, several years ago, I read Zevin’s book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, which I greatly enjoyed.  I got Elsewhere via PBS some time ago, and just put it aside as one of those things I would get there.  I decided to read it as a selection for the Twenty-Ten challenge as my second Young Adult book choice (the first was Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes).

Elsewhere is the story of Lizzie, a fifteen-year-old girl who wakes up to find herself on a cruise ship, dressed in white pajamas.  She discovers that she was in fact the victim of a hit and run accident on earth and has died, and the ship is taking her to “Elsewhere”, where all the dead go.  In Elsewhere, she is met by her grandmother, Betty, a woman she never met, as Betty died before Lizzie was ever born.  In Elsewhere, everyone ages backwards until they are again an infant, and then they are sent back to Earth to live another life.

The story chronicles Lizzie’s struggle to acclimate to life after death, missing her family and friends, coming to grips with what has happened to her, missing out on things like getting her driver’s license, and yet still learning of the opportunities to reach her potential in the afterlife.

This was another book that I had a real hard time putting down.  I only gave it 3 stars on GoodReads, because I didn’t feel it was a great read, but it was definitely a good, solid read.  I related to Lizzie’s struggles and could see myself making similar choices (for instance, spending a lot of time at the Observatory, where you can witness your loved ones back on Earth).  There was so much to love about the characters that Lizzie encountered as well, from Thandi, her cruise ship bunk mate, a tough cookie from DC who had been shot in the head, Owen, the man of her dreams who ages backwards at a near rate that Lizzie does, and Curtis, a rock star who has died of a drug overdose and becomes a kind of guru to Lizzie when she needs guidance and advice.

Eventually, as is no surprise, Lizzie ages backwards far enough to be returned to Earth as an infant, and I shed some tears as her grandmother lovingly lets her granddaughter go.  If Heaven is like Elsewhere, I suppose we could do a lot worse.

Turning to adult fiction, the first book I read was Elizabeth Berg’s Never Change. Elizabeth Berg is an author I absolutely love, but I read her books rather sparingly as I find that they tend to cause me to weep rather hysterically.  I have read Talk Before Sleep exactly once, and I dare not read it again, as it just wiped me out.  I figured Never Change would be similar.  It follows the story of Myra Lipinsky, a visiting nurse who is suddenly assigned to care for Chip Reardon, her high school crush, who has chosen to forgo treatment for a brain tumor.  Myra was a quiet and reserved student and while Chip spoke to her once, she always admired him from afar.  She does not know what to make of their being thrown together, and becomes even more confused as their nurse-patient relationship develops into friendship.

Chip decides to spend much of his time reading.  He wants to learn about things and spends hours in the library, hoping to cram in as much knowledge as he can before he dies, although he recognizes the futility of being able to learn everything there is to know.  He and Myra discuss books and literature often.  I mention this as I am going to count this book towards the BBC challenge. :-)    Back earlier in the month when I had my scare with the blood clot in my arm, I spent my time reading books, and I even had the thought that if I knew it was time for me to go, I supposed I would spend my time reading my favorite books and feeling great comfort in being surrounded by stories and characters that I love.  Consequently, while this book did not touch me in a way that most of Berg’s previous titles did, I cannot deny that it was a book that impacted me on that level.

This book to me felt like Berg was trying to cram in a lot of thoughts about life and death that she felt were profound and would make a good book.  I thought the story of Myra emerging from her emotional cocoon into a world brightened by Chip’s friendship was a great one, and the story of Chip’s choice to end his life on his own terms was also compelling, but I could have done without the pontificating on life and death.  I gave it 2 stars on Goodreads.  It was Ok, but I didn’t totally love it.  This also counts as a Win! Win! on The Twenty Ten Challenge, since I am counting it towards the BBC Challenge as well.

Finally, I read the book When Katie Wakes by Connie May Fowler.  This is the true story of Fowler’s life lived under near constant abuse at the hands first of her mother and then of her abusive boyfriend.  Fowler was a young woman living in Florida and working as a bartender at a Bennigan’s after graduating with a degree in English.  She lives in near constant fear after meeting the man at her bar.  He talks her into the idea that only he can help her meet her potential as a writer, and that together they can take over the world and write amazing things together.

In fact, the man physically and mentally abuses Connie for years.  He drains her of her finances, what little self esteem she had, and constantly has her in fear for her life.  What keeps her sane is the love of her dog, Katie, and her emerging career working for a magazine.  She adopts Katie as a wormy and neglected puppy, and brings her home, against the wishes of the man she is with (he is never given a name, although often she writes as if she is speaking to him directly “You don’t come home” etc).  One night when the man gets particularly violent with her, Connie barricades herself in her bedroom with Katie, and they listen in terror while this man rages until he finally falls asleep.  That night, Connie makes the decision to leave him “when Katie wakes” up.

I learned so much from reading this book.  Often those of us who have not been in such a situation ask, “Why doesn’t she just leave him?” but the cycle is so much more complex than that.  I appreciated Fowler’s bravery in sharing her story so that others may find the courage to leave or that they may understand and perhaps help those attempting to leave as well.

I am also going to count this book towards the BBC Challenge, as Connie writes of her love of books and writing and how that helped her through many difficult times with this man.  I was inspired to think of the books that have helped me through challenges in life, and I was able to name quite a few.  I have spent much of my current convalescence deeply enthralled by these books and others.  Reading is great escapism for those of us who occasionally need it!  I am also counting it as a charity book for the TwentyTen Challenge, as I picked this up in a library’s used book store.  And four stars on GoodReads, although I could probably have easily given it 5.

So, if you’re keeping track of my reading challenges, here’s my latest tally on the Twenty-Ten Challenge:

Young Adult:
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnston
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

TBR:
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

New in 2010:
Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich

Shiny and New:
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

Bad Bloggers
(None yet)

Charity
When Katie Wakes by Connie May Fowler

Older Than You:
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susanne

Win! Win!
Secrets from the Vinyl Café by Stuart McLean
Never Change by Elizabeth Berg

“Who Are You Again?”
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Riegler
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian

Up to You!
Crackhouse by Terry Williams
Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin

14/20 down!

BBC Challenge:

Ruined by Reading (Lynne Sharon Schwartz)
Confessions of a Jane Austin Addict and Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict (both by Laurie Viera Riegler)
Places I Never Meant to Be (Judy Blume, Editor)
When Katie Wakes (Connie May Fowler)
Never Change (Elizabeth Berg)

At six books, I am officially a Lit Lover.  I don’t know if I will make it to Bibliomaniac, but I am still hopeful!

What’s In A Name Challenge

Body of Water:  Your Oasis on Flame Lake (Lorna Landvik)
Food: Leftovers (Laura Wiess)
Music: Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe (Stuart McLean)
Place Name:
Plant:
Title:

Three books to go!!

I am abandoning ship on the British authors challenge, as I haven’t managed a single one yet.  C’est la vie!  Life gets in the way!

I have only managed to read 28 books total this year, and since I read 4 of them in the past 2 weeks, that’s kind of scary!!!  But I’m plugging away and we’ll see what happens.  I’m not exactly sitting on my rear end!

Two Book Reviews

I have read more this week than I’ve read in a good while.  I’m still reading!  It has been a great way to keep my mind off things going on with my health and whatnot.  Consequently, I have completed two more challenge books. 

The first book is for the Twenty Ten Challenge’s New in 2010 category.  I was so excited to find out Janet Evanovich had a new book coming out and when I saw Sizzling Sixteen at Target for 30% off, I had to have it.  I was really excited to see what would happen to Vinnie (as the casting news rolls in from the movie, I keep hoping and praying they get Steve Buscemi to be Vinnie—he’d be PERFECT), and to of course get more of the Ranger/Morelli love triangle. 

While I am of the opinion that the book itself was fine and the story moved along nicely and contained a decent mystery, it lacked something quintessentially Plum for me.  I didn’t laugh out loud.  I am so bummed that Lula and Tank seem to have completely forgotten the other one exists.  Even Mooner’s entrance, which is usually enough to get any of the Plum books going, didn’t do a thing for me.  I read through it in less than 2 days and enjoyed it well enough, but I just didn’t love it.  3 Stars on GoodReads, and here’s hoping #17 delivers.  I am presently working on the new Miss Julia book by Ann Ross, but it seems to have gotten misplaced by someone who has been in or out cleaning the house at some point or other in the past 2 1/2 weeks.  I know where the cover is, and that’s as good as it gets.  I will find it, however.

On the other hand, I was thrilled to receive an email from Paperback Swap (PBS) that a copy of Stuart McLean’s Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe was winging its way towards me.  The Vinyl Cafe books have become beloved favorites of mine, right up there with Philip Gulley’s Harmony.  This edition of stories was no exception.  From the hilarious illustrations on the covers (inside and out), to the fun cartoon strips inside, to the many stories included, Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe had me absolutely weeping with the first story about Dave’s mom and laughing out loud  when 11-year-old Sam thinks his mother has become a shoplifter and he is the only one in his family who is walking the straight line.

Dave, the owner of the Vinyl Cafe, is a kind of Everyman who gets himself into trouble for doing the craziest things.  He always has good intentions, but things always go terribly wrong.  I love Dave as a character most of all.

But Dave’s family is not the only one showcased in the book.  Many beloved characters from previous books make an appearance here as well.  Carl of the Breadstarter, Kenny Wong of the Scottish Meatpie restaurant, and more all show up to lend hilarity and gravitas as warranted.  I gave this one 5 Stars for evoking sheer joy and emotion from this reader.  If you haven’t read this one, you surely should.

As for the reading challenges, I am counting this one towards the What's In a Name 3 challenge as a title with a musical term in it.  Vinyl refers to vinyl records, which Dave sells in his Vinyl Cafe.  I’m also counting it in the Twenty-Ten Challenge’s Win Win section for a book I used to complete another challenge!  I’m whipping right along again. :-)  Let’s hope I can keep some momentum going.

The Leisure Seeker

On Mother’s Day, my one true wish was to go to our new bookstore in town and spend the afternoon by myself, perusing, reading, and purchasing a few items.  I had probably close to 30 books stacked around me at one point, but I made notes of a few titles and put most of them back.  One book I could not leave behind, however, was Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker.  It tells the tale of John and Ella, a couple of octogenarians facing the end of life’s road.  John is afflicted with Alzheimer’s and Ella has terminal cancer.  They are being pressured by doctors and their children to accept certain treatments and living situations which are unacceptable to them.

Thus, John and Ella pack up and sneak off in their old camper, The Leisure Seeker.  John still holds a valid driver’s license and has not lost the ability to get into the driving groove.  They head to Chicago and decide to follow the old Route 66 as much as possible and to head to Disneyland in Anaheim, CA.  Along the way, they encounter lots of different and interesting people, reminisce about the old days, and see the sites the road had to offer. 

Driving the old Route 66 is something I have long thought of doing.  I think it would be a lot of fun to drive “the Mother Road” across country someday and have some of those memories to share with my daughter when she is old enough.  So this was a great book to read just because I enjoyed hearing about John and Ella’s experiences during the actual travel portion of their stay.

But it was also a great story in general, a story of love, the failings on the human body, family, friendship, memories, and time.  I deeply loved both John and Ella.  Ella was a no-nonsense kind of broad who kept her husband well in hand when his condition made him seemingly unmanageable.  While you never know the pre-Alzheimer’s John, the glimpses you get of him make you love him anyway, and his “addledness” was deftly described to give you a real picture of life with Alzheimer’s.

I’m thrilled I bought this book.  I gave it 4 stars on GoodReads and I know it’ll be on my shelf for some time to come.  It also counts towards the Twenty-Ten Book Challenge under the “Who Are You Again?” category, which I believe fulfills my requirements for that category.  Here’s what I’ve accomplished on that challenge so far:

Young Adult:
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnston

TBR:
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

Shiny and New:
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

Bad Bloggers
(None yet)

Charity
(None yet)

Older Than You:
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susanne

Win! Win!
(None Yet)

“Who Are You Again?”
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Riegler
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian

Up to You!
Crackhouse by Terry Williams

Almost half-way done with this challenge.  I need to get moving on some others!

Valley of the Dolls

I am somewhat breaking my cardinal rule of not discussing book club books before book club on account of I just finished this month’s selection, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, and I simply must write a (brief) review now!  Valley of the Dolls is the perfect summer beach read.  In fact, I’m kind of disappointed I didn’t save it for my upcoming trip to Myrtle Beach.  While I probably won’t have a whole lot of time to read while I’m chasing Leah around the beach, it’s just the kind of book that makes you think “beach read!”.  I suppose now I’ll have to go buy some cheap but trashy romance novels somewhere!!!

Valley of the Dolls is the story of Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, three unknowns who arrive in New York City and climb the show biz ladder to fame and fortune.  Neely arrives with a traveling vaudeville act and becomes a Broadway star which leads to movie stardom, Jennifer starts on Broadway and moves to European art films before returning to the US to become a major star, and Jennifer works as a secretary for a talent agency and eventually is discovered and becomes a TV star in her own right.  All three women find out it’s not so much fun at the top, their paths littered with broken hearts and bottles of pills, which they call “dolls”.

I must say, I enjoyed the hell out of this book, probably to an embarrassing degree.  I was sure I would hate it, it seemed from the description rather superficial and uninspired, but it was compelling and interesting.  It was a bit voyeuristic, and I could only imagine the headlines today if these women and their men had been real people.  No doubt we’d see them splashed across the cover of People and Us and OK with alarming regularity.

I rated it 4 stars on GoodReads, although I based that on my enjoyment of the book rather than on its merits.  It also counts for the TwentyTen Book Challenge, in the “Older Than You” category, since it came out in the lat 60’s, and I am of mid-70’s vintage.

A Couple Quick Reviews

I have not been reading terribly prolifically since Lent ended and I’ve been able to go back to gaming and Facebooking, plus my wee one is ever more on the move and more and more to keep up with.  Add that to new activities, and I’m probably pretty lucky I’ve done any reading at all!

I did finish one challenge book and wanted to comment on this month’s book club book as well!

For my Twenty-Ten challenge “pick your own category”, I chose books on addiction.  I decided to start out reading Terry Williams’s Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line, since it was pretty short.  Well, short it may have been, but man did it take me FOREVER to read.  Terry Williams apparently had already written a book about the dealers in NYC and what their lives were like, so he decided to go to the demand side and see what it was like in a crack house, looking at the lives of the users.  The house he selected was run by a guy named Headache, who at some point was quite successful as a businessman, and whose friends in the business world were still attempting to pull him out of the crackhouse, get him clean and sober, and help him get back to work and being a respectable business and family man.  In addition, Williams profiles several other members of the crackhouse “family” and what they do to get high, including unsafe sex.

I really did not care for this book at all.  I thought it was just totally boring.  It was dry and dull and hard to read from my perspective.  I didn’t care a thing about any of the “characters” in the book, and I just wanted to get to the end as quickly as possible.  I gave it 1 star on Goodreads.

On the other hand, this month my book club read Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.  This is a book that has been languishing on my “to be read” shelf for at least a year and a half, if not longer.  I was really excited to be able to get to it, especially when I started it.  Now, I was sick all last week, I’ve been sick now for 10 days.  But the first day I wasn’t feeling well happened to be the day I started reading this book.  My excuse the next day for staying up till 2AM was that I wasn’t able to breathe when I laid down, but in actuality, this book was so compelling, I read until I literally could not keep my eyes open any longer.

The story details Anna and Trudy. Anna is a young woman living outside a concentration camp in Germany, who does what she needs to do to survive and provide for her daughter during WWII, namely taking up with a high ranking SS officer whose eye she has caught when he comes to the bakery where she works one day.  After the war, she marries an American GI and leaves Germany for good, refusing to answer any of Trudy’s questions, despite the fact that Trudy has a good many questions about her past.  Trudy, who is now a college professor, begins interviewing German citizens to find out what their experience of the war was, and eventually is able to get some answers about who she is, who her mother is and what she did, and help her mother come to grips with her own fears and guilt about the past.

In book club, I think everyone liked the book, although with varying degrees of liking it.  I found it compelling and exciting and interesting and horrifying by turns, and while I have no desire to read it or any other Holocaust-related books for quite some time now, I have to say that this is one of very few five star reads from the past year.  I’m going to count it as one of my TBR selections so that I can get another one off the list.  That has me having read 6 out of 20 books on that challenge for the year.  Hooray!  I’m getting there for sure.

Olive Kitteridge

One of the books I selected for the Twenty Ten Book Challenge was Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.  I wanted to get through our club discussion of the book before posting here.  It counts as my second “Shiny and New” book and finishes off that category of the challenge.

Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize and tells the story of a small town in Maine and its inimitable retired math teacher, Olive Kitteridge.  According to the jacket notes, the story centers around Olive, but in fact, to me, that doesn’t seem the case.  In several of the stories, Olive is a mere mention in passing.

I’m really split just about 50/50 on whether I like collections of short stories where a narrative is attempting to be woven through the stories to create a novel.  In some instances, it works well and I love it, such as Philip Gulley’s Harmony series and Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe series, both of which I adore.  Books like Olive Kitteridge, however, fail to meet the mark for me.  In most cases, I feel as though I want to know more about a particular set of characters and nothing at all about other sets.  In this case, the book was supposed to revolve around Olive herself, but in fact it was her husband Henry I found to be a more compelling character.  I would have loved to know more about Heather, the young woman in the first story who goes to work for Henry and ultimately endures a series of tragedies.  I did not care much at all for the tween, for the guy with the mother who killed herself, or for many of the other characters. 

The book was OK, when I was interested in it, I was really interested in it, but for the most part, it was a bit of a chore to work my way through and left me dissatisfied.  I generously gave it 3 stars on GoodReads—didn’t love it, didn’t hate it, it just was.

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict

Hot on the heels of reading Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, I went to PaperbackSwap.com and grabbed a copy of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.  I wanted to read how Courtney Stone made out trapped in the body of Jane Mansfield, Regency England girl and fellow Austenite.

In this story, which was actually written before Rude Awakenings, Courtney Stone wakes up to find herself in the body of Miss Jane Mansfield, a proper English society girl in the early 1800’s.  Jane is dealing with the affections of Mr. Edgeworth, who may or may not be a libertine, and Courtney steps into Jane’s life shortly after she believes she has caught Edgeworth having a dalliance with a servant girl in the stables of his estate. 

In addition, Courtney must learn to deal with life in the 1800’s—the medical treatments, the filth, chamber pots, family expectations, servants, fashion, and more.  In as much as Jane struggles to deal with life in modern-day L.A., Courtney’s struggles are just as difficult.

For me, I am glad I read Rude Awakenings first, as I liked it much better.  Confessions was a good book, it certainly kept me flipping the pages, but perhaps because of the restrictions placed on the character in going backwards in time, I just felt the book was not as compelling.  Courtney was not as likeable a character as Jane, she didn’t experience the wonder and joy of discovery and spent more time being negative about the limitations her new surroundings imposed upon her instead of trying to make the best of the situation.  Jane did her best to fully participate in life in L.A., but Courtney more than once sat out from some of the goings on, and the things she chose to do often caused problems for the people around her.

Which story is more honest?  I would say they are both equally true.  Which character is more likeable?  Jane.  Which love story is more interesting?  Seeing as they are roughly parallel, I’d call it a draw. One thing this book had over it than Rude Awakenings was that in either case, I thought, “Gee, if I were so and so, I’d do this and take full advantage of the situation!” and in Confessions, Courtney actually does what I think I would do.  You’ll have to read it to find out what that might be.

Yesterday at lunch, I posed the question to friends, “Would you rather wake up and find yourself 200 years in the future or 200 years in the past?”  We were split.  One friend said he’d rather go backwards, become a brilliant inventor and thus ensure his millions.  Another thought going forward would be more interesting.  Then we attempted to imagine life in 2210.  A lively conversation ensued.  Which would you rather do?  Wake up in 1810 or in 2210?  Knowing that no one you know has ever been born yet, that perhaps you could affect the future in the right circumstances?  Or knowing that everyone you know and care about is long dead and everything is new, a whole world to re-learn?    I think I would prefer to go forward, but I can’t say that with 100% certainty.  It’s tempting to go backwards—at least I’d know what I was getting into just a bit!  Let me know what you’d rather do and what you think you might do if you got there! 

Three stars on GoodReads and this also counts for the BBC Book Challenge.  Unexpectedly, I am at 4 books on the challenge now.  I’m dubbing myself BookWorm+ :-)  Two more books and I’ll be a LitLover!  Woo hoo!

13 Little Blue Envelopes

Well, I have been an absolute reading fiend lately, with little else to do apart from housework, baby care, and seeing friends.  The latest entry into the book challenge scene is Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which I read as a young adult choice for the TwentyTen Reading Challenge.  After reading Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, I wanted something similarly fun to read, and picked up several different books, but nothing really appealed to me.  A voice in my head kept saying “13 Little Blue Envelopes” which I had tried to read several times in the past, but couldn’t get into.  I listened to the voice and devoured this book in a scant two days!

From Maureen Johnson’s website comes this synopsis:

Aunt Peg, the New York artist and the person Ginny Blackstone depended on to make her life interesting, took off to Europe without a word three years ago. Aside from a few postcards, Ginny hasn’t heard much. Then she gets a horrible phone call that changes everything.  Soon after, Ginny receives one little blue envelope from Aunt Peg containing a thousand dollars and some very strange instructions… And with that, she is sent off to pick up a package containing twelve similar envelopes, which she can open one by one, as instructed. Each letter contains a task that Ginny must perform.  Soon, the mild-mannered and quiet Ginny (who’s barely made it out of New Jersey before) finds herself running from London to Paris to Rome, and beyond. Along the way, she collects a number of new friends, including: a manager from Harrods department store who runs errands for the rich and famous, a handsome but maddening thief-turned-playwright, a celebrity painter who tattoos the names of her dead pets on her body, and the angriest vegetable salesman in all of France.   As time goes on, Ginny realizes that her aunt has sent her on a mission, and that there is something big waiting for her in the thirteenth envelope. All she has to do is make it from place to place and complete all of the tasks that have been set before her.  As if life is that easy.

I thought that this was a great book for teen girls to read.  Who among us didn’t dream of taking off to someplace amazing and living out of a backpack for a summer while visiting all the crown heads of Europe (or maybe in your case it was Asia or Africa or South America?).  I know I certainly did, and for three weeks in 1991, I got to live that dream.  But my adventure was mild compared to the adventure Aunt Peg sends Ginny on as she scours Europe for a starving artist, a man named Piet, a Parisian cafe decorated with garbage, and so on.  I really related to Ginny in many ways and I think I would probably have been very similar to her had someone set out this adventure for me.

She learns a lot about herself and about her missing aunt, about the world, and about people.  It was a sweet little book, hardly the best one I’ve read, but I would definitely recommend it and would read it again someday if I find myself in the mood for a travel fantasy.  I’m rating it 4stars on GoodReads, but I’m getting concerned I have a lot of 4 star reads!!!  Still, this book made me very happy, so I hope you’ll enjoy it as well!

First Five Star Read of 2010

I am pleased to say that I have found my first 5 star rated book of 2010:  Jerramy Fine’s enchanting Someday My Prince Will Come.  This is a book I absolutely devoured over the past week, sneaking in reading time wherever and whenever I could get it (seriously, I brought this book to my WW meeting this morning just to get in 10 pages without the baby crawling around on me).

Fine is one of the original Anglophiles.  As a little girl, she comes to the conclusion that she will some day marry Peter Phillips, Queen Elizabeth’s grandson and son of her only daughter Princess Anne.  She scrupulously studies how other women have gone on to marry their princes, what schools they went to, how they met their match, clothing, manners, you name it, she studied it, and began to pattern her life after such role models as Princess Grace, Princess Diana, and Jackie Kennedy.

Eventually she finds herself at the University of Rochester in New York State (as someone who grew up not far from Rochester, I was impressed she decided to go there—impressed at her nuttiness!!!  I wanted to get as far the hell away as I could!), and during her junior year she does a semester abroad, heading to London to work at Parliament.  Sound the trumpets, because during that experience she meets Princess Anne for the first time!

Eventually her semester abroad ends, she returns to NY to finish her degree and then enrolls at the London School of Economics, thus charting her course to be in England full time.  She rubs elbows with Earl Spencer, Princess Anne, and the Duchess of York, in addition to plenty of English guys, and grooms herself to be the perfect addition to the royal family.  She travels the country sightseeing, and just lives the Anglophile dream.  Her dream.  My dream.

I came away from the book just loving Jerramy.  We have a similar sense of humor, so parts of the book were laugh out loud to me.  For instance, her parents are kind of new-age types who move the family to a small town (as in the size of the town I grew up in, 300+ people or so) to get in touch with nature.  As she talks about her royal dreams in contrast with what her life is actually like, she writes, “Meanwhile, life with the hippies was not improving.”  Just this one line made me giggle--the sense that they are not Mom and Dad, but are seen as “the hippies”, it just cracked me up.  I love subtle humor like that.

I won’t give away whether or not she and Peter Phillips ever meet up, but if you love England, you must read this book.  This book served two purposes in my life:

1.  To further enhance my love of England.  I loved reading about her travels around London, her meets and greets with the hoi polloi of English society, her knowledge of the rules of how proper people behave, it made me wistful.  I wanted to hop a plane immediately and immerse myself in the culture as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

2.  To give me some closure to a long festering wound.  You see, Jerramy was bowled over by a number of men in England, men who dazzled her and were never heard from again.  They gave her an amazing, romantic evening, took her number, swore they’d call, and didn’t.  She came to realize that there was a certain class of Englishmen who did exactly that and then went on to feel that all men were “guilty until proven innocent”.  Well, you see, in the late 90’s, a dewy-eyed Susan went to England to meet just such a chap.  We had an amazing week together, seriously mind-blowing, traveling England and seeing the sights from York to London (he took me to Kensington Palace to pay my respects to Diana—I mean, this guy was GOOD!) to Canterbury to Birmingham and even to Wales, culminating in some serious action at home.  I was sure we were soulmates—I have never, ever in my life connected with someone like that immediately and completely.  But when I returned to America, he promptly fell off the face of the earth, resurfacing months later only to tell me that he wasn’t the type of guy to get on with a girl and then dump her cold, and then he disappeared again, this time for good.

Well, Martin, if by chance you’re out there reading this, let me tell you something:  Yes, you are.

So thank you, Jerramy, for giving me a whole lot of healing on that issue.  That has been a painful thorn in my side for 12 years and your book has cured me of any notion that it was anything to do with me.  If I ever get the chance to meet you, I’ll thank you personally.

Seriously, read this book.  If you have known heartache, if you love England, if you have dreams of finding your handsome prince, this is the book for you.

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This book counts towards the Twenty Ten Book Challenge (Shiny & New Category).