2016 Totals:
Number of Books: 38
Pages: 11,097
Audiobooks: 31 hours, 44 minutes
New Favorites: The Emerald Mile (my favorite book of 2016), All the Pretty Horses, El Deafo, All the Light We Cannot See, The Winds of Skilak, A Man Called Ove
Old Favorites: Lost in the Barrens, Anne of Green Gables, Into the Wild, The Book of Mormon
Favorite Vocab: contumacious: stubbornly or willfully disobedient to authority
Number of Books: 38
Pages: 11,097
Audiobooks: 31 hours, 44 minutes
New Favorites: The Emerald Mile (my favorite book of 2016), All the Pretty Horses, El Deafo, All the Light We Cannot See, The Winds of Skilak, A Man Called Ove
Old Favorites: Lost in the Barrens, Anne of Green Gables, Into the Wild, The Book of Mormon
Favorite Vocab: contumacious: stubbornly or willfully disobedient to authority
38. Nimona (2016.12.26)
Written and Illustrated By: Noelle Stevenson
Published: 2015
Genre: graphic novel / young adult / good vs evil / monsters / love / friendship
Pages: 272
Bex Rating: 8.5
Allen bought this graphic novel for me for Christmas and I read it in one sitting. It was utterly delightful, original, and funny. I loved it and now need to look into the other books co-authored by Noelle Stevenson: The Lumberjanes.
By: J.K. Rowling
Published: 2016
Genre: drama / fantasy / stage play script / wizards / good vs evil / fathers and sons / parenting /
Pages: 308
Bex Rating: 9
I got this book for my birthday and have been saving it for five months. I'm so glad I did! Because once I started, I could not put it down.
Twenty years after Harry defeats Voldemort, his son Albus is sorted into Slytherin House at Hogwarts. Albus struggles with feelings of inadequacy and isolation, and resents the expectations placed on him because he's Harry Potter's son.
It was difficult at first, to get into "play-reading" mode. But the action was very fast-paced and dialogue-based, and I was swept up in the wizarding world once again. I think the parent/child relationship was incredibly poignant and realistic--some of Rowling's finest work.
- SCORPIUS: Because you cant see beyond the end of your nose. Because you cant see beyond the stupid thing with your dad. He will always be Harry Potter, you know that, right? And you will always be his son. And I know it's hard, the other kids are awful, but you have to learn to be okay with that.
- DUMBLEDORE: Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.
36. The Light Between Oceans (2016.12.15)
By: M. L. Stedman
Published: 2012
Genre: contemporary fiction / tragedy / marriage / miscarriage / motherhood / fatherhood / WWI / Australia / lighthouses / deception / loss / love
Pages: 343
Bex Rating: 9
I finished reading this book yesterday . . . while I was substitute-teaching . . . in the online learning classroom . . . trying unsuccessfully not to cry, and trying to sneakily get some tissues and blow my nose and wipe my eyes without letting any teenagers see.
It's the story of a young couple, post World War I, who live on Janus Rock, a real island with a lighthouse outpost off the southwestern coast of Australia. Tom Sherbourne is the lighthouse keeper, and he and his wife Isabel, are very happy and very alone as they start their married life together in the wake of The Great War. After Isabel's tragic third miscarriage, both Tom and Isabel are astounded when a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man and a baby girl, who is miraculously alive. Isabel convinces Tom not to report the incident, and claims the baby as her own.
When they have leave to go to the mainland, three years later, they realize that the choice they made has affected far more people than they could imagine.
It's pretty darn tragic, but so well-written and introspective. I especially loved the beginning of the book--it sucks you right in. I had a hard time putting it down and read it in two days.
- astragals: a wooden molding that covers the gap between a pair of doors or casement windows.
35. Anne of the Windy Poplars (2016.12.12)
By: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Published: 1936
Genre: young adult fiction / classic children's literature / coming-of-age / orphans / Canada / Prince Edward Island / humour /
Pages: 258
Bex Rating: 8
The next book in the series, Anne's House of Dreams, was actually written in 1917, before Anne of the Island or Anne of Windy Poplars, but then I guess LM Montgomery went back and filled in the years when Anne was away at college and teaching school. I am expeiencing the books the way my kids experience Star Wars. When they say "the first Star Wars" they mean "Episode One," which I did not grow up with, and which will never be "the first" to me.
- 'Freedom!' Mrs. Lynde sniffed. 'Freedom! Don't talk like a Yankee, Anne.'
- Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.
- Mamma wanted pie because she says every man in the world but Papa likes pie for dessert better than anything else . . . even Professors of Modern Languages.
- An old stone house always looks reposeful and dignified. It fears not what rain or wind or changing fashion can do.
- "Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!
- The Seven Sleepers: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus are legendary people in a story of a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus around 250 AD, to escape a persecution.
- mistral: a strong, cold northwesterly wind that blows through the Rhône valley and southern France into the Mediterranean, mainly in winter.
By: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Published: 1915
Genre: young adult fiction / classic children's literature / coming-of-age / orphans / Canada / Prince Edward Island / humour /
Pages: 244
Bex Rating: 8
Okay, the first two books are the best ones, but that's not diminishing my enjoyment of the Anne books one bit. This one was written six years after the second, but there were as many hilarious characters and antics (Anne-tics?) as ever. I especially enjoyed the character Phillipa.
- Revenge hurts nobody quite so much as the one who tries to inflict it.
- "I adore aunts, but I detest great-aunts."
- "I'm going home to an old country farmhouse, once green, rather faded now, set among leafless apple orchards. There is a brook below and a December fir wood beyond, where I've heard harps swept by the fingers of rain and wind. There is a pond nearby that will be gray and brooding now . . . There will be a little room upstairs over the porch, where old dreams hang thick, and a big, fat, glorious feather bed which will almost seem the height of luxury after a boardinghouse mattress."
- Diana met Anne at the Carmody station the next night, and they drove home together under silent, star-sown depths of sky. Green Gables had a very festal appearance as they drove up the lane. There was a light in every window, the glow breaking out through the darkness like flame-red blossoms swung against the dark background of the Haunted Wood.
- "I was so afraid we'd have a green Christmas and I loathe them. You know, when Christmas is a dirty grayey-browney affair, looking as if it had been left over a hundred years ago and had been in soak ever since, it is called a GREEN Christmas! Don't ask me why."
- Dora was thankful Mirabel was there, at least. She had been afraid she would be alone in a crowd of boys. Mirabel was almost as bad as a boy -- she was so noisy and sunburned and reckless. But at least she wore dresses.
- "The world needs people like me, Anne, just to amuse it. It would be a terrible place if EVERYBODY were intellectual and serious and in deep, deadly earnest."
- "This has been the most beautiful day of my life," Anne said to Phil that night. "I've FOUND my father and mother. Those letters have made them REAL to me. I'm not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves."
- It was November -- the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.
- "But, Aunty, when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook don't you think the brains that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship will also enable me to learn cooking just as well?"
"Maybe," said Aunt Jamesina cautiously. "I am not decrying the higher education of women. My daughter is an M.A. She can cook, too. But I taught her to cook BEFORE I let a college professor teach her Mathematics." - Anne laughed and sighed. She felt very old and mature and wise -- which showed how young she was.
- Anne decided not to continue her duel with Mrs. Harmon. You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with the blow of a battle axe.
- wee sma's: wee small hours
- anathema maranatha: formal act or formula of consigning to damnation
- avoir dupois: a system of weights based on a pound of 16 ounces or 7,000 grains, widely used in English-speaking countries. Humorous: weight; heaviness.
- debts and duns: a dun is a person, especially a hired agent, who importunes another for the payment of a debt.
By: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Published: 1909
Genre: young adult fiction / classic children's literature / coming-of-age / orphans / Canada / Prince Edward Island / humour /
Pages: 276
Bex Rating: 9
It's not as good as the first, but still fun to read. I have started the third installment (Anne of the Island) and am shocked to realize that I have never actually read past the first and second Anne books. Okay, not shocked--thrilled. I am realizing that the other books I read by LMM were the Chronicles of Avonlea and The Story Girl. Anyway, it was fun to re-read the first two and a gift to myself to discover the remaining Anne books for the first time.
- Her advice is much like pepper, I think. . .excellent in small quantities but rather scorching in her doses.
- Anne was a sweet-souled lass, but she could instill some venom into innocent italics when occasion required.
- "Timothy's sitting there, too, coughing and complaining. He's been dying for ten years and he'll go on dying for ten years more. That kind can't even die and have done with it. . .they can't stick to anything, even to being sick, long enough to finish it. They're a terrible shiftless family and what is to become of them I don't know, but perhaps Providence does."
- At half past eleven the lettuce salad was made, the golden circles of the pies were heaped with whipped cream, and everything was sizzling and bubbling that ought to sizzle and bubble.
- "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string."
- "Marilla, look at that apple tree," said Anne." Why, the thing is human. It is reaching out long arms to pick its own pink skirts daintily up and provoke us to admiration."
- I see now that I expected too much of a man. And I was real foolish to mind his bad grammar. It doesn't matter if a man does use bad grammar so long as he is a good provider and doesn't go poking round the pantry to see how much sugar you've used in a week.
- . . . in Marilla's code of household ethics to sit on a bed after it was made up was an unpardonable offense.
- Mrs. Lynde says there's nothing whatever the matter with him but indigestion. His wife isn't a very good cook, it seems, and Mrs. Lynde says that when a man has to eat sour bread two weeks out of three his theology is bound to get a kink in it somewhere.
- Oh, mind you, Nelson Atkins proposed to Ruby Gillis three weeks ago. Ruby told me all about it. She says she never had any intention of taking him, because any one who married him will have to go in with the old folks; but Ruby says that he made such a perfectly beautiful and romantic proposal that it simply swept her off her feet. But she didn't want to do anything rash so she asked for a week to consider; and two days later she was at a meeting of the Sewing Circle at his mother's and there was a book called `The Complete Guide to Etiquette,' lying on the parlor table. Ruby said she simply couldn't describe her feelings when in a section of it headed, `The Deportment of Courtship and Marriage,' she found the very proposal Nelson had made, word for word. She went home and wrote him a perfectly scathing refusal; and she says his father and mother have taken turns watching him ever since for fear he'll drown himself in the river; but Ruby says they needn't be afraid; for in the Deportment of Courtship and Marriage it told how a rejected lover should behave and there's nothing about drowning in that.
- "Grandma says we should never think anything but religious thoughts on Sundays. But teacher here said once that every really beautiful thought was religious, no matter what it was about, or what day we thought it on."
- Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her. . .the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.
- Nothing ever tasted so delicious as those strawberries and cream, eaten under a great blue sky all curdled over with fluffy little white clouds, and in the long shadows of the wood with its lispings and its murmurings.
- "If they taught you at college how to manage a man there might be some sense in her going."
- Perhaps she had not succeeded in "inspiring" any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity. They were, perhaps, all unconscious of having learned such lessons; but they would remember and practice them long after they had forgotten the capital of Afghanistan and the dates of the Wars of the Roses.
- "Courting's all right in its place, Miss Shirley, ma'am, but if you try to mix it up with cooking and scouring everything's spoiled. That's my opinion, Miss Shirley, ma'am."
- The Helmet of Navarre: an historical novel of swordplay and romantic adventure in old Paris. The hero of the book is a follower of Henry of Navarre in Paris, at the moment when the Huguenot king enters the city.
- lares and penates: the home; in Roman mythology, Lares and Penates were groups of deities who protected the family and the Roman state. Although different, the Lares and Penates were often worshiped together at household shrines.
By: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Published: 1908
Genre: young adult fiction / classic children's literature / coming-of-age / orphans / Canada / Prince Edward Island / humour /
Pages: 396
Bex Rating: 10
Oh, Anne, it has been too long! It’s been probably twenty years since I read the "Anne books," and they are such a joy to re-read (I probably read this particular book five times between the ages of eleven and seventeen). I am reading the entire canon in preparation for the new movie version that PBS is airing the day after Thanksgiving. I am excited to introduce Mollie, who is nine, to one of literature’s best characters.
- There are plenty of people in Avonlea and out of it, who can attend closely to their neighbor's business by dint of neglecting their own; but Mrs. Rachel Lynde was one of those capable creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain.
- "Well, we're not getting a girl," said Marilla, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment and not to be dreaded in the case of a boy.
- "I'm not in the depths of despair this morning. I never can be in the morning. Isn't it a splendid thing that there are mornings? . . . I feel that I have a good deal to bear up under. It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?"
- Anne had made good use of every waking moment of that fortnight. Already she was acquainted with every tree and shrub about the place. She had discovered that a lane opened out below the apple orchard and ran up through a belt of woodland; and she had explored it to its furthest end in all its delicious vagaries of brook and bridge, fir coppice and wild cherry arch, corners thick with fern, and branching byways of maple and mountain ash.
She had made friends with the spring down in the hollow-- that wonderful deep, clear icy-cold spring; it was set about with smooth red sandstones and rimmed in by great palm-like clumps of water fern; and beyond it was a log bridge over the brook.
That bridge led Anne's dancing feet up over a wooded hill beyond, where perpetual twilight reigned under the straight, thick-growing firs and spruces; the only flowers there were myriads of delicate "June bells," those shyest and sweetest of woodland blooms, and a few pale, aerial starflowers, like the spirits of last year's blossoms. Gossamers glimmered like threads of silver among the trees and the fir boughs and tassels seemed to utter friendly speech. - Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation--was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure.
Good Mrs. Lynde, not being overburdened with perception, did not see this. - "Saying one's prayers isn't exactly the same thing as praying," said Anne meditatively.
- Marilla was not to be drawn from the safe concrete into dubious paths of the abstract.
- The Barry garden was a bowery wilderness of flowers which would have delighted Anne's heart at any time less fraught with destiny. It was encircled by huge old willows and tall firs, beneath which flourished flowers that loved the shade. Prim, right-angled paths neatly bordered with clamshells, intersected it like moist red ribbons and in the beds between old-fashioned flowers ran riot. There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet lightning that shot its fiery lances over prim white musk-flowers; a garden it was where sunshine lingered and bees hummed, and winds, beguiled into loitering, purred and rustled.
- "The trouble with you, Anne, is that you're thinking too much about yourself. You should just think of Mrs. Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable to her," said Marilla, hitting for once in her life on a very sound and pithy piece of advice.
- For Anne the days slipped by like golden beads on the necklace of the year.
- "We are rich," said Anne staunchly. "Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we're happy as queens, and we've all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.
- "I don't know that she is as amusing as she was when she was a child, but she makes me love her and I like people who make me love them. It saves me so much trouble in making myself love them."
- Parthian shaft: [alluding to the custom of Parthian archers who shot their arrows backwards while retreating] a sharp, telling remark or gesture made in departing.
By: Susan Cooper
Published: 2013
Genre: young adult historical fiction / colonial America / Eastern Native Americans / Roger Williams /
Pages: 328
Bex Rating: 9
I didn't know Susan Cooper was still alive, nor that she was a British ex-pat living in Massachusetts. She wrote her well-known Dark is Rising series in the early 70s, and forty years later, she is still writing great stuff like this book, Ghost Hawk. (It reminded me a little bit of Gary Paulsen's Canyons, which is one of my favorite young adult books).
This is the story of two boys: Little Hawk, a young Pokanuket boy about to become a man, and John Wakely, a colonial English boy living near Plymouth, Massachusetts. When the two meet, their lives are changed forever.
This was a really vivid story with memorable characters and some great research into the customs and history of the time.
- "Treasure your uncertainty, then," I said. "Wrong choices come out of strong convictions that will not bend."
30. Rodzina (2016.10.29)
By: Karen Cushman
Published: 2003
Genre: young adult historical fiction / orphan trains / Polish immigrants / American West / coming-of-age
Pages: 215
Bex Rating: 8.5
Along with Laurie Halse Anderson, I think Karen Cushman is the finest writer of young adult historical fiction there is. I got this book from paperbackswap a few years aback, and finally decided to crack it open.
As with her other books, Cushman opened my eyes to a piece of history I had never even heard about: the "orphan trains" of the late 1800s in America. Orphans (and even "unwanted children" who had families) from the big cities of the East really were shipped by the trainload out west, where it was thought that the fresh air and wide open spaces would give them a better life. Often they were "taken in" by people looking for free labor or worse--this book is told from the perspective of a Polish orphan girl named Rodzina (pronounced "Ro-zheena") from Chicago.
Now I am going to track down a PBS documentary called "Orphan Trains."
- "All sorrows are bearable if there is bread," Mama said to me once as I handed out her supper.
- The morning has gold in its mouth, Papa used to say.
- But the moony way he looked at his bride and took her arm made my heart twirl around. It was as if she was a treasure made of glass or spun sugar.
- "You need a family--a mama with a soft lap and a papa with big shoulders to carry you on. And a house and a dog and an apple tree."
- mushmillions: mushmelon / muskmelon: a melon closely related to the cantaloupe
By: Cormac McCarthy
Published: 1992
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / National Book Award winner / 1940s / Mexico / Texas / coming-of-age / love story / horses / cowboys /
Pages: 302
Bex Rating: 9
I'm far from the first person to be in awe over Cormac McCarthy's prose. It's unlike anything I've ever read--it's beautiful and flowing and haunting. He doesn't bother with any punctuation but periods, and the very rare comma. This is the first McCarthy work that I have read. I loved it.
I also love reading a book right after Allen reads the same book. He recommended it to me after he finished it a few weeks ago, and it's one of my great pleasures to talk about books with my literature-loving husband. Plus, he is infinitely better than I am at recognizing symbolism and deeper imagery.
John Grady Cole is sixteen when he is, essentially, left to fend for himself. He and his cousin, Lacey Rawlins, decide to leave Texas and head to Mexico to make it on their own. They are joined by another youth, a thirteen-year-old named Blevins, who brings trouble in his wake.
It's a story of love, friendship, a harsh, beautiful climate, and a country's complex identity poised on a needle's head. You can't help but root for John Grady Cole, and you feel his pain along with him.
- They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
- He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.
- The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
- We goin to bust em twice?
What for?
I never saw one that completely believed it the first time or ever doubted it the second. - Because John Grady loved to ride the horse. In truth he loved to be seen riding it. In truth he loved for her to see him riding it.
- He would not think about Alejandra because he didnt know what was coming or how bad it would be and he thought she was something he’d better save. So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.
- And after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.
- Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
- In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
- Scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.
28. The Defender (2016.10.12)
By: Nicholas Kalishnikoff
Published: 1951
Genre: young adult fiction / Newbery / Newbery Honor / wildlife / Siberia / conservation /
Pages: 138
Bex Rating: 7.5
Sometimes you just need to read an easy book. I liked this simple story, even though the writing was only passable. I picked it up because it was a Newbery Honor book that I had never heard of. It's the story of an old man named Turgen who lives alone in the mountains of Siberia and whose life mission is to protect the rare, wild rams (bighorn sheep) that live there. It fits into my unplanned 2016 theme of "wilderness literature."
- The mountains were full of mystery and peace. Because of them he could think of the past without regret.
- "Who can forbid me to choose my own friends?"
- Suddenly a feeling came over him. A feeling of peace and well-being which seemed to promise that though he could no know the answers to all his questioning, they could be revealed in good time. The Great Spirit was on guard and would see to it. So, reassured, he fell asleep.
- kuklianka: outer coat, usually made of animal skin
27. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ (re-read 2016.10. 07)
An Account Written by the hand of Mormon, taken from the plates of Nephi, translated by Joseph Smith, Junior
Pages: 531
Genre: scripture / Jesus Christ / spiritual / self-help / nonfiction / Christian / answers to life's problems / history
Bex Rating: 10 (but of course)
" . . . wherefore, nothing that is good denieth the Christ, but acknowledgeth that He is." (Moroni 10:6)
26. One Second After (2016.10. 07)
By: William R. Fortschen
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
Published: 2009
Genre: fiction / post-apocalypse / survival / modern warfare /
Audiobook Length: 13 hours, 20 minutes
Bex Rating: 8
Allen listened to this book first, then told me I would like it. Even though it took me several months to complete it, I thought about it often and was always wanting to find time to listen to it. It's a survival scenario story about what might happen in the U.S. if it were hit by an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse), which could happen if a nuclear bomb were detonated several miles above the surface of the earth. An EMP would, essentially, wipe out all electricity for months.
The narration was good, with one fatal flaw: the reader COULD NOT do women's voices. I cringed every time he was reading the part of a female character. And the story was good, even though it wasn't the best writing. I am amazed by the power of a good plot--it can cover a host of ills.
That said, I found my eyes watering more than once, kind of against my will. Mostly because this sort of story makes you really put yourself in the shoes of the main characters, and you can't help but think of what you would do if this happened to you, or to your family.
The best part of this book? Makes me want to really buckle down and get my food storage built up.
25. The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science (2016.10.03, book club)
By: Jill Price
Published: 2008
Genre: nonfiction / memoir / super-memory / coming-of-age / neurological condition / psychology
Pages: 247
Bex Rating: 9
I couldn't stop thinking about this book when I put it down. It's the true story of Jill Price, who remembers every moment of every day of her life since she was eight years old. She doesn't have a memory for strings of numbers or languages or facts learned in school--rather, she experiences what scientists call an "autobiographical" memory. She can tell you, on any date of the year, what she did every year on that same date back to 1980. She re-lives days of her life, whether they were momentous or mundane, with total recall of smells, emotions, and conversations.
This is the story of Jill's difficulties living with this condition, and her journey into getting help from scientists, who are currently studying Jill's amazing ability to better understand how memory works, and how loss of memory can be prevented.
One of the best parts about reading this book, for me personally, is that Jill says more than once that she remembers exactly what she felt like as a child, even when she knows that her feelings were irrational or illogical. She said it helps her relate to children in a way that other adults can't, because they have forgotten what it's like to feel scared or worried or anxious in the way that children do. Yikes! It made me realize how many times I "explain away" or discount my children's feelings. It made me want to be a better listener and empathizer to my kids.
Plus, it was crazy-interesting!
- For me, because of the way my memory works, not only do I often return to yesterday, I can never escape it. I live with a constant, unstoppable parade of yesterdays of my life flashing furiously through my mind.
- When I was young, I had a vague sense that I seemed to have a much better memory than lots of other people. I was always correcting my parents about things they claimed I had said to me, which, as you can imagine, didn't go over very well.
- As often as I've realize that other people don't recall anywhere near as much detail about their own lives as I do, I still find it hard to imagine doing all that forgetting. Whenever people ask me to recall something for them--like the month they first met or when they moved into a new apartment--I find myself amazed that they've forgotten those things. I frankly can't imagine life when so much of what you've done and thought and felt has simply vanished.
- Truth be told, I hate the notion of forgetting. I'm happy that I can remember so many episodes of TV shows I've loved through the years; that I can revisit any given day that I may suddenly think about and know what really happened to me that day; and that I know what people really said to me, and I to them, and exactly when. The accuracy of my recall is important to me, and the idea of losing some of my memories, or my recall of dates and days of the week, is actually anxiety provoking.
- Research in the field of positive psychology, often called the science of happiness, has also produced powerful results about the negative psychological effects of ruminating, particularly in the onset of depression. Those who are depressive are more likely to ruminate, and those who ruminate are often dragged into depression. A horrible irony about this finding is that ruminators often think that their intense attention to whatever bad experience they're swelling on will help them gain some valuable insights, when in fact, rumination seems to undermine critical thinking of that sort.
- No one likes a know-it-all, and my insistence on making corrections became a source of quite a bit of friction with my parents. They had no way of understanding what was happening inside my head, and I had no way to describe it. I did start to shock people with the accuracy of my recall, but the true nature of the difference in my memory wasn't at all clear.
- "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" ~Vita Sackville-West Twelve Days
- "Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand." ~Sue Patton Thoele
24. Trail of the Spellmans (2016.09.23)
By: Lisa Lutz
Published: 2012
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / mystery / humorous / dysfunctional families /
Pages: 373
Bex Rating: 9
Oh, Lisa Lutz, you always deliver the hilarious dysfunction I need! This is the 5th book in the "Spellman" canon and it was just as laugh-out-loud funny as the first four. I have read them all this year, and Spellman Six: The Next Generation is on my short-list right now.
- Why are other people's troubles so fun when our own are so tedious?
- "Why don't you shut up and eat some M&M's?"
"Excellent idea. Rae replied, opening her desk drawer to the bag of mealy carrots I had placed in their stead.
"It's really tragic that at your agae a lame prank gives you so much pleasure," said Rae.
"How is that tragic? It means I potentiallyhave a lifetime of happiness to look forward to."
"Eventually, I'll strike back."
"Bring it," I replied. "You're no match for me."
"You got that right. It would be like a shark fighting a puppy."
"Well, if we're fighting on land, which we are, I think this puppy will do just fine." - Another thing I noticed about Mrs. Slayer was that she was in full maekup, which I think is kind of gross if you're going to the gym.
- "Did they go on a second date?" I asked
"No, D said there was no rapport. He said she carried a Hello Kitty purse."
"That would be a deal-breaker for me too." - Even when you slice away the emotional debris and just take in her physical appearance, Grammy still cuts a severe impression. Her short gray hair sits on her head like a helmet, and her frown lines have burrowed so deeply into her flesh that you can’t imagine her muscles can fight the gravity to form a smile. And yet she still possesses an odd streak of vanity, which manifests itself primarily in her physique. I’ve heard at least one hundred and ten times that Grammy still weighs one hundred and ten pounds.
- "We need to talk," Henry said.
One of my least-favorite phrases. Nobody ever says it when they want to talk about something good. - "In my day, you didn't move in with a man until you had a ring on your finger."
"In your day, you also thought you could lose weight by standing still with a vibrating band wrapped around your waist," I replied. - "Have a nice day!" I said cheerily. I found that people who aren't having a nice day really loathe that phrase.
23. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4 (2016.09.21)
By: Sue Townsend
Published: 1982
Genre: coming-of-age, young adult contemporary fiction, Great Britain in the 80s, British, humour, divorce,
Pages: 261
Bex Rating: 7
I got this book from Paperbackswap because I read a recommendation for it in a magazine, by someone who said it was the funniest book they'd ever read. It definitely was funny. But also pretty crude. It's tough for me to read books about teenage-boys-turning-into-men (at least, they think they are turning into men). That said, Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian totally falls into this same category, and is probably just as crude, but it's better writing and perhaps a tad more meaningful. Maybe because Alexie's character, Arnold Spirit, is a bit easier to relate to and a more sympathetic character than Townsend's Adrian Mole.
Crudeness aside, I did enjoy the book and I did laugh out loud several times.
- Eight days have gone by since Christmas day and my mother still hasn't worn the green lurex apron I bought her for Christmas! She will get bathcubes next year.
- [The Guardian] was full of spelling mistakes! It was disgusting when you think of how many people who can spell are out of work.
- And then she said that for some women marriage is like being in prison. Marriage is nothing like being in prison! Women are let out every day to go to the shops and stuff, and wuite a lot go to work. I think my mother is being melodramatic.
- I asked Mr. Vann which O levels you need to write situational comedy for television. Mr, Vann said that you don't need qualifications at all, you just need to be a moron.
22. The Rent Collector (book club, 2016.09.07)
By: Camron Wright
Published: 2012
Genre: contemporary fiction / Cambodia / redemption / power of literature / quest story / Asia / hope
Pages: 266
Bex Rating: 9
This was a great book for book club--there was a lot to think about and discuss when we met. It's the story of a woman named Sang Ly who lives in a municipal dump in Cambodia. She and her husband scrape together just enough to survive by picking through the garbage and selling recyclables. But Sang Ly wants more for their son, who is always sick.
When Sang Ly discovers that the rent collector (a horrible old woman who collects rent from everyone living at the dump) can read, she strikes a bargain in exchange for reading lessons. The story of Sopeap Sin, the rent collector, becomes intertwined with both Sang Ly's life, and with the lives of characters from the world's great literature.
- "Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside--and even if you don't find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said , "They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
- "We are literature--our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow.
- "Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil witrh your knife."
- "I believe the message of the story we just read anchors deeper than our doubts."
- "If every story ended with a handsome prince, there wouldn't be anyone lieft in the kingdom to stand around and cheer."
- I had read essays describing the horrors of genocide committed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I had lectured on Jewish literature detailing the atrocities carried our by Hitler. I had read the words in my head but never comprehended their depth in my heart--until I lived them. Only later would I realize that there areno words harsh enough, no paragraphs wide enough, no books deep enough to convey the weight of true human sorrow.
21. A Man Called Ove (2016.09.05)
By: Fredrik Backman
Translation by: Henning Koch
Published: 2012
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / old age / love story / curmudgeons / redemption / humor
Pages: 337
Bex Rating: 9.5!
Cori climbed a mountain while she was vacationing at Lake Powell, just so she could get cell service long enough to give me her amazon password and tell me to order this book for myself.
So I did.
It was just as sweet and well-written as she described. And I read the first chapter of another novel of his in the back of this book--I think I am a Fredrik Backman fan!
This is the story of Ove, a very grumpy, unapproachable old man, who wants nothing more than
to be left alone. When a loud Iranian family moved in next door and backs over his mailbox, it sets off a chain of events that put Ove in the thick of human interactions--his most dreaded place to be. The flashback chapters are especially poignant and sweet. It makes you think twice about judging others or making assumptions.
I loved it, from beginning to middle to end.
- The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. What he can't understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. Is it really necessary to dress up as a 14-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team?
- People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.
- Even men at train station ticket desks have been in love.
- "You have to love me twice as much now," she said.
And then Ove lied to her for the second--and last--time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn't possible for him to love her any more than he already did. - She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as though his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.
- Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of that generation do. As if they stood in the doorway every morning, determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom.
By: Johanna Spyri
Translated by:Helen B. Dole
Illustrated by: William Sharp
Published: 1881, y'all
Genre: classic literature / children's fiction / moral tale / friendship / grandparents / mountain life / Switzerland / caring for the elderly
Pages: 327
Bex Rating: 9.5!
I love discovering a classic when I am in my late thirties! ;) I can't believe I have never read Heidi before, but I absolutely loved it. It was fresh and different and a wonderful surprise. Though the story is fairly simple and straightforward (the author's subtitle is "A book for children and for people who love children"), it was all the better for its plain truths and homely morals.
The perfect read to go along with the "outdoor adventure story" theme that I seem to have going on this year.
And now I want to watch every movie version . . .
PS- Did you know that Heidi is described as having short, dark, curly hair? Never blonde with two braids, as is so often depicted.
- She drank in the golden sunlight, the fresh air, the delicate fragrance of the flowers, and desired nothing more than to remain their forever. A good while passed this way, and Heidi gazed so often and so long at the lofty mountaintops that it seemed as if they all had faces and were gazing down quite familiarly at her, like good friends.
- She always spoke to him in a particularly friendly way, whenever she met him, but then hurried away, in order to not be drawn into conversation with him, for his manner of expressing himself was rather annoying to her.
- She had forgotten the splendor, and never seen it in her dreams like this--the rocky peaks on Falknis flamed up to the sky, the broad snow field was all aglow, and rosy clouds were drifting high above. The grass all round on the Alm was golden; from the heights it glimmered and gleamed down, and below, the far-reaching valley swam in a golden vapor.
- But if thy sure faith stays thee
When thou art most perplext
He will appear and raise thee
What time thou least expect’st.
He will remove the burden
That presses thy heart down,
And thou shalt have the guerdon
And thou shalt wear the crown. - "There is nothing that can so strengthen one's belief in a good Fatherin Heaven who will not forget even the lowliest, as to learn that there are such people, full of goodness and pity for a poor, worhtless woman such as I am."
- guerdon: a reward or recompense
By: Lisa Lutz
Published: 2010
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / mystery / humorous / dysfunctional families /
Pages: 390
Bex Rating: 8.5
Back-to-back summer reading of books in a hilariously witty series? Yesssssssss, pleeeeeeeease!
- But it's important to note that I've come a long way. Therapy helped, and I'm big enough to admit it was court-ordered.
- OLIVIA: What exactly are you planning on wearing?
ISABEL: Remember that periwinkle bridesmaid's dress from cousin Sandy's wedding?
OLIVIA: There's no way it will still fit you. Just remember to err on the conservative side.
ISABEL: Don't you worry Mom, I plan on erring. - Judging purely by the scowl on her face, the housekeeper wasn't pleased to see me. Since that's a phenomenon I am not unfamiliar with, I wasn't offended. Otherwise I might have taken issue with the scones she served, which I'm pretty sure were scrounged from the back of the freezer and probably baked when I was still in my twenties. In the interest of full disclosure, I ate them anyway because I was starving.
- Mr. Winslow was old, as I expected, and dressed in a mismatch of evening wear, business clothes, and something that I can only assume is called a smoking jacket, but my familiarity with that fashion statement was limited to viewings of Masterpiece Theater (or maybe it was parodies of Masterpiece Theater from reruns of The Muppet Show).
- I knocked on his door and he answered wearing several layers of cotton T-shirts in various sleeve lengths, topped with a navy blue short-sleeved shirt that had a skater logo on it, although there was no skateboard in sight. Rae would call him a poser. I would call him a moron. My mother would call him useless. My father would call him a dropout. Grammy Spellman would call him a good-for-nothing, which seems to be the most accurate description. Less-judgmental folk would say that he was finding himself, but some people have the luxury to look; others don't.
- It seemed fascinating to me that a man in prison could find more joy in life than a woman who was free to roam the streets. Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.
18. Revenge of the Spellmans (2016.07.24)
By: Lisa Lutz
Published: 2009
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / mystery / humorous / dysfunctional families /
Pages: 375
Bex Rating: 9
My friend Debbie recommended this series to me when we were backpacking in Canyonlands. I had already read the first book, The Spellman Files, but didn't know there were sequels. I have thoroughly enjoyed them and am on my way to the library right now to get the fourth.
This installment sees Izzy struggling with her identity and trying to decide if she wants to be a private investigator for the rest of her life. I think the character I am consistently delighted by is Izzy's demanding and intractable little sister, Rae. Mostly, I am laughing out loud at the snappy dialogue and hilarious inner monologues and footnotes.
- Rae: I know there are Red Vines hidden around here somewhere. Have you seen them?
Isabel: No (1.)
(1.) Lie. - Over dinner David was caught up on the latest goings-on in this ball of deceit we call a family.
- I pulled out onto Van Ness, cutting off a tan PT Cruiser (not a deliberate choice, but a pleasant bonus).
- My "Dear Mom and Dad letter" touched on all the issues that I knew were the roots of their disappointment. It even included a wholehearted apology for all of my past misdeeds. I would include the letter in this document, but it was too sincere to make for decent reading material.
- I looked up both women on classmatesdotcom (1.)
(1.) A website dedicated to uniting people with their painful past.
17. El Deafo (2016.07.12)
By: Cece Bell
Published: 2014
Genre: young adult / graphic novel / coming-of-age / deafness / Newbery Honor / humor / children's lit / special needs / bullying /
Pages: 248
Bex Rating: 9.5
I love when a Newbery award winner deserves the award without question. This is a book EVERY YOUNG PERSON should read. And it's a totally charmingly illustrated graphic novel! Every kid will WANT to read it!
Cece Bell, the author, really does have partial deafness, and grew up with a gigantic hearing aid box strapped to her chest in the seventies. She chronicles her own painful childhood experiences with humor and grace in this book, and it gives incredible insight into the world of deafness. It was especially poignant to me because my brother's little girl, Harper, was born with partial deafness and has cochlear implants that help with her hearing. I'm glad we've made advances in both technology and (hopefully) understanding since Cece Bell was a little girl. I absolutely loved it!
16. The Curse of the Spellmans (2016.07.10)
By: Lisa Lutz
Published: 2008
Genre: contemporary adult fiction / mystery / humorous / dysfunctional families /
Pages: 409
Bex Rating: 9
This is a sequel to a book I read three years ago, The Spellman Files (2013 book reviews, #16). I laughed maybe more than I did in the first book, and promptly checked out the third, Revenge of the Spellmans, from my library.
Izzy is arrested four times within three months, all because she cannot keep her nose out of the "suspicious" behavior of her parents' new neighbor. She reveals the chain of events to Morty, her 80-something-year-old lawyer as the book unfolds. It was a delightful read, and a totally original take on the private investigator genre.
One of my favorite things about the whole book (and the first one) is the footnotes and appendix, with lists of things like "Ex-boyfriend statistics" and a "checklist for potential dates" given to Izzy by her mother as a Christmas present. It's hilarious.
- My first opinion of the unknown male as he lay on the ground . . . was that our new neighbor had a certain something, enough of a something for me to contemplate Ex-boyfriend possibilities. Not that he was really my neighbor; I didn't live at home anymore, but perhaps it was time for more regular visits.
- I have yet to discover a single individual who can relay the events that facilitated the end of a relationship without getting into the minutiae. Why can't people keep it simple?
- I like to reward innovation, so I arrived at my appointment at 3 PM sharp (footnote 1). 1- Just a figure of speech. I never arrive at anything sharp. It was around 3:15 PM.
- "The whole grown-up thing is a myth. Whatever is wrong with you now will probably be wrong with you in twenty years . . . If people really grew up, there would be no crime, no divorce, no Civil War reenactors."
15. Into the Wild (Re-read, 2016.07.06)
By: Jon Krakauer
Published: 1996
Genre: nonfiction / survival / investigative reporting / social misfits / adventure / the open road / wilderness / philosophy /
Pages: 204
Bex Rating: 9
I chose this book for book club, so I re-read it before passing it around to my friends. It's the first book Allen recommended to me, and the first book that he read when he came home from his mission to the Philippines in 1999. It's incredibly well-written and researched, and I had just as much trouble putting it down this time as I did when I read it sixteen years ago.
You know right from the beginning that the "main character" of this true story is dead. After graduating from college, donating all his savings to charity, and disappearing to tramp around the United States for 2 years, Christopher McCandless was found dead in the Alaskan bush. Jon Krakauer pieced together McCandless' story from the countless people around the US who met him and stayed in contact with him during his two-year odyssey.
It's an interesting story to me because I think at one time or another, many people think about (if not fantasize about) leaving everything behind and trying to go it alone--and this is the true story of someone who actually did it. Krakauer draws parallels between McCandless and other young American males throughout history who have done the same thing--sometimes the comparisons are eerily similar.
I think it'll be an easy book to have a discussion about, because there were such mixed, extreme reactions at the time it happened back in the early nineties . . . and you experience that same mix of reactions as you read it.
- You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in anything and everything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. [Letter Christopher McCandless wrote to his elderly friend, Ronald Franz].
- All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.
- I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of twenty-three, personal mortality—the idea of my own death—was still largely outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Boulder for Alaska, my head swimming with visions of glory and redemption on the Devils Thumb, it didn’t occur to me that I might be bound by the same cause-and-effect relationships that governed the actions of others. Because I wanted to climb the mountain so badly, because I had thought about the Thumb so intensely for so long, it seemed beyond the realm of possibility that some minor obstacle like the weather or crevasses or rime-covered rock might ultimately thwart my will.
- contumacious: stubbornly or willfully disobedient to authority
- lumpen: adjective 1.(in Marxist contexts) uninterested in revolutionary advancement. "The lumpen public is enveloped in a culture of dependency" noun 1. the lumpenproletariat.
- hegira: 1. Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, prompted by the opposition of the merchants of Mecca and marking the consolidation of the first Muslim community. 2. an exodus or migration.
- eremitic: hermit; especially : a religious recluse.
- atavistic: relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral. "atavistic fears and instincts"
14. Theodore Boone: The Scandal: Theodore Boone, book 6 (2016.07.03)
By: John Grisham
Published: 2016
Genre: young adult fiction / mystery / crime / law / coming-of-age / school story /
Pages: 212
Bex Rating: 8
I really enjoy this series from John Grisham. I haven't read any of the author's "new" books for adults (and by new, I mean, post 2000--everything he wrote in the 90s was consumed with great zeal while I was in high school), but I thoroughly enjoy these young adult adventures--they are light and fun and I usually learn something.
This installment sees Theo and his friend April in the middle of a scandal involving teachers changing test scores on standardized tests in order to A) help their school and B) help their students. It's an interesting take on the debate surrounding standardized tests, and I was particularly interested in the topic, since I recently became certified to be a teacher.
- So much of his life was geared to pleasing his parents, his teachers, even [Uncle] Ike. Why couldn't he just do him homework, do his best on all his tests, and let his life run its course without worrying about the adults?
- Theo said, "I'm not feeling to well. I think I have an upset stomach."
Mr. Boone said, "What a surprise. It's Sunday morning, time to get ready for church, and you don't feel well. This seems to happen a lot."
By: Jenny Colgan
Published: 2014
Genre: chick lit / fiction / love story / um, rags-to-riches? / Cornwall
Pages: 424
Bex Rating: 7
They can't all be nines and tens.
I was in need of a light read, and I liked the beginning of this book . . . but it spiraled ever downward, with a final steep plunge at the very end. I didn't know it was going to be a romance novel.
Still, I did learn some interesting British things. Like, do you know what Brits call telephone poles? Phone masts. And I also enjoyed many of the quaint descriptions of the Cornish coast and of the bakery and baking. But it was kind of dumb. There are books that are "light reads" that are not dumb. That's what I'm shooting for next time.
By: Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows
Published: 2016
Genre: young adult fiction / fantasy / alternate history / British monarchy / comedy /
Pages: 491
Bex Rating: 9
Oh my, I laughed out loud several times while reading this book. It doesn't hurt that Cindy Hand is a dear high school friend of mine and that I got to spend a lovely evening with her the week before this book came out.
I like alternate histories anyway, but this one takes the cake for not only entertaining me and making me wish that this magical version was true . . . but for also actually inspiring me to look up some information about what really happened. The best of both worlds.
This is the fictional version of what really happened to the Lady Jane Grey, who was the queen of England for a very short nine days. Some magical poetic license is taken (and taken well!), and her betrothed, Gifford Dudley is an edian--someone with the ability to change from human form to animal form.
I love how each of the three authors wrote each of the three main characters: Kind Edward, Lady Jane, and Gifford Dudley. And I love all the asides where they speak to the reader--always a fun literary device. It was light and charming and witty and I highly recommend it!
Yay, Cindy! I look forward to more of the "Jane" books!
Favorite Excerpts:
- Edward was a master of smirking. It was his most finely honed royal skill, really.
- You might have noticed that Edward was a bit of a sexist. You can't blame him, really, since all his young life he'd been greatly exalted for simply having been born a boy.
- All she needed was to check on the nose situation.
- At this point, Lady Gertrude moved her hand from her husband's shoulder and placed it on the back of his neck, as if to prove a showing of such ardent affection was indeed possible in forced marriages.
- She'd always known she'd have to get married, of course. The string of destitute ex-fiances could not continue forever.
- "Was that a horse joke?"
"Neigh."
"Was that a horse joke?" - The worst part about her new chambers was that all these wardrobes and vanities and drapes meant that there was no space--none at all--for a bookcase. Who on earth could feel comfortable enough to sleep in a room with no books? [my favorite excerpt of THE YEAR and a hearty "amen!"]
- "I gathered all I could find. They're Dorset berries. They're safe. I read about them in Poisonous and Nonpoisonous Berries of the Wild: the Joys of Surviving England on a Budget."
By: Anthony Doerr
Published: 2014
Genre: contemporary fiction, WWII, Nazi occupation of France, blindness, coming-of-age, radio, Pulitzer Prize winner
Pages: 530
Bex Rating: 9.5
This was a very compelling read. I wasn't super satisfied with the ending, but probably just because it ended realistically--with people dying or never being found.
Marie-Laure went blind when she was six. Her father, a museum employee, constructs an elaborate scale model of Paris so that Marie-Laure can learn how to get around the city, first with her fingers, and then on her own. But when Paris is invaded, Marie-Laure and her father escape to St Malo, a French coastal town, to live with Marie-Laure's great-uncle Etienne. But someone is tracking their movements, because Marie-Laure's father has been entrusted with one of his museum's greatest treasures.
The story goes back and forth between the story of Marie-Laure, and the story of Werner Pfennig, a brilliant young German boy who reluctantly joins the Hitler Youth Corps and is caught up in a cause he does not understand.
The culmination of the novel happens when the paths of these two young people intersect--I was racing through the middle chapters to see what would happen.
There's no question but that this book is Pulitzer-worthy. Not only was it fabulously researched and carefully detailed--the writing was beautiful and heartbreakingly sweet. I especially enjoyed the love between Marie-Laure and her father, who saved all his money to buy her Braille copies of Jules Verne books.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea figures prominently in this book, and it doesn't hurt that it was my favorite book for about three years of my childhood :).
- Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children’s House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.
- What is blindness? Where there should be a wall,
- her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.
- The world seems to sway gently back and forth, as though the town is drifting lightly away. As though back onshore, all of France is left to bite its fingernails and flee and stumble and weep and wake to a numb, gray dawn, unable to believe what is happening. Who do the roads belong to now? And the fields? The trees?
- “Oh, the town is absolutely stuffed,” Madame Manec is saying in her fairy-tale drawl as she moves about. She seems short; she wears blocky, heavy shoes. Hers is a low voice, full of pebbles—a sailor’s voice or a smoker’s.
- Her great-uncle seems kind, curious, and entirely sane. Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.
- There is pride, too, though--pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane
- Madame Manec’s energy, Marie-Laure is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts bisques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.
- Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. Madame Guiboux, mother of the shoemaker, has left town. As has old Madame Blanchard. So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.
- extirpation: to remove or destroy totally; do away with; exterminate. 2. to pull up by or as if by the roots; root up: to extirpate an unwanted hair.
- tephra: fragmental material produced by a volcanic eruption regardless of composition, fragment size or emplacement mechanism.
By: Victoria Aveyard
Published: 2015
Genre: young adult fiction / dystopia / apocalyptic society / fantasy
Pages: 394
Bex Rating: 8
It's not a dystopian apocalypse unless there's a love triangle. This book takes it one step further by having THREE guys in love with the heroine. Love square?
In spite of that, I liked the story, and the writing. And though you could compare it to The Hunger Games or Divergent, I think it's actually pretty original. The world of the elite "silvers" and the proletariat "reds" is interesting and diverse. It was a good choice for book club.
If this kind of book is your thing, the best of the genre is, in my opinion, Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone series (The Grisha Trilogy). And if you want to go one step above that (and a little deeper into fantasy), you can't go wrong with Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy.
9. Woodswoman (2016.05.06)
By: Anne LaBastille
Published: 1976
Genre: outdoor nonfiction / nature writing / survival / Adirondacks / living off the land / Ecology / homesteading /
Pages: 277
Bex Rating: 9!
This book has been in my amazon wishlist for only a few months, because it was linked to Winds of Skilak and We Took to the Woods. So I was TOTALLY elated when I found an old copy of it at the D.I. last week! Other books were put on hold so I could escape into the Adirondack wilderness with Anne.
When the author goes through a divorce, she decides to realize her lifelong dream of living off the land in a cabin in the woods. She buys a parcel of land in the "Adirondack Park" (largest tract of wilderness East of the Mississippi) of Upstate New York and starts to work on a cabin.
My only problem with the entire book is that she repeatedly talks about the cabin she "built herself," but she had some serious help building it, then help again MOVING IT when it was discovered she had built it 38 feet from the lake shore instead of the required 50 feet. She did do a ton of work herself--just not all of it ;).
Anne kind of leads a dream-life as a freelance writer and photographer (she has a PhD in wildlife ecology), backpacking all over the Adirondacks whenever she takes a notion. She wrote many popular articles for some of my favorite magazines, including National Geographic and Backpacker. I like to think that we would be friends. This picture of her makes me think that we would have been:
- Such decisions are always made in favor of helping one's fellowman up here in the North Woods.
- I watched icy slivers and darts, fingers and bridges, projections and connections forming and joining and congealing on the water's surface. The ice was creating itself, spreading and hardening with incredible speed. I acknowledged for the first time the utter precision and cruelty of cold. I was witnessing the final freeze-up in all its awful, relentless, primal strength. I will never forget the phenomenon and how vulnerable a warm-blooded creature can be in its grip.
- Woodcutting is homemade insurance against winter cold, costs nothing, and generates a flush of physical fitness.
- Camping has become one of my most beloved pastimes. I take a fierce delight in swinging a pack on my back or into a canoe and heading for the hills or lakes. In my opinion, camping can be the greatest expression of free will, personal independence, innate ability, and resourcefulness possible today in our industrialized, urbanized existence.
- My tent flaps faced west into a glorious sunset. As the swollen sun lowered, its rays turned my tent into a translucent scarlet balloon, my pack into a burnished copper-orange sack. The small campfire flickered with hot orange flames. Now the sun sat on the jagged edge of purple-black mountains. The world was orange and purple for a moment, before the sun was swallowed. I took a last look around the horizon. Never before had I sensed so keenly the immensity, grandeur, and wildness of these mountains.
- Never had I been more conscious of the functioning of the human body, especially the constant and predictable flow of wastes. These were not items to be flushed nonchalantly down a white bowl to pollute the nearest river. They were parts of me that had to be conscientiously disposed of in an ecologically sound manner.
- When the temperatures really dropped, I used two pails, a saucepan, and a plastic dishtub filled with piping hot water. Carrying these right outdoors onto the snow, I stood in the tub which kept my feet warm and poured the scalding hot water over my head and body. Steam rose from every inch of skin. I had approximately one minute to shampoo and soap down before the cold penetrated. Another hot saucepan full and I'd be warm again. Pour. Rinse hair. Scrub hands and feet. Pour. Rinse. Two buckets exactly did the job . . . I've taken many baths this way at minus ten degrees and felt absolutely marvelous afterward.
- As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in April 1888, while a resident at Saranac Lake, "The grayness of the heavens is a circumstance eminently revolting to the soul."
- Is the Adirondack climate truly so inhospitable to crops? The very name of our mountains suggests it--Hah-dah-ron-dac. "They Who Eat Trees" or "Bark-Eaters." This name, apparently, was applied derisively by the Iroquois to the Algonquin Indians who were forced to eat tree bark and tips in order to survive the long, butter winters here.
- On this particular date and on this particular full moon, two astronauts were walking over its surface [July 20, 1969]. They were collecting rocks, taking pictures, setting up an American flag for posterity's sake. I had chosen my seat and row well. From the warm sand point I gazed across two miles of smooth water with nothing to obstruct the view. millions of people on earth sat indoors before TV sets, but I preferred my vantage spot to watch this most incredible feat in man's history. The video tapes would be around for a long time and would be shown again and again . . .
But this moon, this night, this view was only happening here and now. - epilimnion: the upper layer of water in a stratified lake.
8. The Death of Mary Russell (book 14) (2016.04.21)
By: Laurie R. King
Published: April 2016
Genre: contemporary fiction / mystery / crime novel / Sherlock Holmes /
Pages: 359
Bex Rating: 9!
Thank goodness for Mary Russell. I have written on this blog several times about how my favorite librarian in Fayetteville introduced me to The Beekeeper's Apprentice when I was lamenting the end of the Harry Potter series back in 2007. I have had many a delightful hour with each of the books in the Mary Russell series since then. I have read the first seven books twice, and enjoyed each of the latest installments as they have been released. Don't stop, Laurie R. King! You have surpassed Conan Doyle and made me love Sherlock as I never could have without "Russ" at his side!
This installment is all about Mrs. Hudson, the background character who "keeps house" for Sherlock Holmes. King has outdone herself with her gift for backstory--I shall never see Clara Hudson in the same way again. I loved every second of it from the thrilling opening!
- She thought long and hard about her wardrobe for these three days: conservative, but lovely; well-made but not costly-looking; of sufficient variety so as to not elicit disdain, but not so profligate as to appear a threat to their son's household accounts.
- "Why do women find relief a greater burden than fear?"
- In nearly half a century of of life together, two people build a vocabulary of glances and tones, permitting entire conversations that go unspoken. In the end, he rose, and said only, "Yes, I am finished with it."
- "Holmes, I have been lounging about here for three days listening to Mycroft discuss whether or not the chairman of the electricity commission should be made a Knight Grand Cross or a Knight Commander, whether or not the Minister Plenipotentiary to His Majesty the Shah of Persia has served long enough for his KC, and whether a youthful indiscretion should keep the retiring head park-keeper at Holyrood from an OBE. If I have to stay here any longer, I shall vote Socialist in the next general election."
- termagant: a harsh-tempered or overbearing woman.
By: Kevin Fedarko
Narrated by: Paul Michael Garcia
Published: May 2013
Genre: nonfiction / adventure / American exceptionalism / Colorado River / Grand Canyon / conservation / dam-building / river running / wooden dories / record-setting /
Audiobook Length: 18 hours, 24 minutes
Bex Rating: 10!
Holy cow, I loved this book.
The very beginning caught my interest. I was excited to learn about the exploits of John Wesley Powell, and then move on to the beginning trickles of river conservation and dam-building. I was completely enamored with the descriptions of the evolution of river-guiding in the Grand Canyon. The crisis of the 1983 snow pack was totally engrossing--there was so much run off that the Glen Canyon Dam was LITERALLY bursting at the seams. And then! Just when you thought it couldn't be more adventurous! . . . the actual record-breaking journey of The Emerald Mile, a wooden dory illegally piloted by three men down the Colorado at its highest, fastest, most dangerous level ever . . .
WHEW!!!
Allen and I listened to this together (though I feel bad he missed about three hours of the river-guiding section, which was probably my very favorite, because I listened to it on several trips to Pocatello), mostly on our 11-day family trip to California and back. It totally made I-80 bearable. And it totally made a Colorado River trip a must-do adventue--as it will to all who read it. So be prepared.
It was narrated well, but I think I may have enjoyed reading it better. The descriptions were both thorough and enchanting. I am totally amazed by the narrative that Kevin Fedarko was able to weave. He did use the phrase "as ____ as the river itself" and "as ______ as the Grand Canyon itself" a lot . . . but it seems totally unavoidable with this subject. And he really has a superb gift for metaphor.
I loved it. I felt like I was rowing up and down the canyon and was dashed upon the rocks and was hurled through foamy, terrifying rapids myself while I was listening to it.
- . . . an abiding American truth: the notion that the canyon stands as one of our most important touchstones—a kind of roofless tabernacle whose significance is both natural and national. It is our cathedral in the desert, and the word our is key because although the canyon belongs to the entire world, we, as Americans, belong particularly to it.
- The canyon and her dories embody and elusive riddle. It is a paradox rooted in the dream that many of us share of immersing ourselves so deeply, so inextricably, into a pocket of landscape, or a stretch of river - anything that seems to embody the wildness we have lost - that we may somehow take possession of those places and make them ours. Yet the truth, like an eddy, runs in the opposite direction.
In the end, it is they that claim us. And we who belong to them.
By: Bonnie Rose Ward
Published: 2013
Genre: nonfiction / memoir / Alaskan frontier / survival / marriage / faith / adventure / homesteading / DIY
Pages: 390
Bex Rating: 9.5!
After I read We Took to the Woods last year, I was sure to check out what books were "similar" on Amazon. This book has been on my wishlist for nine months. Finally, during a particularly stressful day last week, I bought it for myself. Shopping for books online is NOT a healthy way to cope with stress, but we all have our weaknesses. Aaaaaaand . . . pushing the "proceed to checkout" button did improve my mood drastically . . .
Reading the actual book has also been a soul-soothing experience. I am sensing a trend with my wilderness-literature choices in 2016 . . .
Enough with the ellipses.
This book outlines the first two (of fifteen) years of Sam and Bonnie Ward's experience homesteading on Caribou Island, in the middle of Skilak Lake in Alaska. It was 1980 when the couple left their jobs in Ohio, sold their house and belongings, and moved to Alaska to live off the land. The first chapter gives you a sense of how sudden it was:
“What do you mean you put the house up for sale?”
Sam set down his briefcase. “I listed it with the realtors.” He turned to me with his brightest smile. “I handed in my resignation today.”
My mouth gaped open. I stared at my husband as if he’d grown a second head.
Before I could articulate a response, he grabbed me in his arms and twirled me around. “We’re going to Alaska, Bonnie. We’re going to Alaska!”
He finally set me down, but my head continued to whirl. “You mean, just like that, we’re going to Alaska?” Maybe I hadn’t heard him right. “When did we decide all this?”It was a delightful read, from beginning to end. And though I pride myself on being tough and loving to "rough it," I especially enjoyed reading it in my electrically-heated house with a fridge full of store-bought food to hand :). I hope there will be more installments to come!
Here are some of my favorite excerpts:
- We eventually learned to slow our pace to nature's speed. Coming from civilization, we were accustomed to operating in high gear at all times. We'd lived by a watch, rushing here and there, always with a deadline to meet. Jump in our vehicles and go, go, go! On Skilak, time was measured by the seasons, by the wind and the lake. They were the bosses now, and our comings and goings were no longer our own to schedule.
- After counting all the jars and divvying them up, we had close to a hundred quart jars each. Occasional melodic pings sounded in the kitchen as the jars cooled and sealed.
- I don't know how anyone could live in the wilderness and not believe in God. His presence is everywhere. His miracles endless. He was--and still is--my strength, especially when Sam was away.
- When we finished unloading the boat with the feed, mail, and supplies, Sam had a chance to warm by the stove. He pulled a bag from his backpack and handed it to me. Tears welled, and I couldn't keep from crying as I pulled out the complete set of The Little House on the Prairie books. I had asked for the set when I saw it in a store on one of the rare occasions I went to town with Sam. It had been a luxury we couldn't afford--one I was sure we still couldn't afford.
By: The Arbinger Institute
Published: 2000
Genre: nonfiction / self-help / relationships / business management / self-deception
Pages: 171
Bex Rating: 7.5
It's weird to read a book by a "collective," but I was already familiar with The Arbinger Institute because one of the best books I have ever read is called Bonds That Make Us Free by a founder of the group, C. Terry Warner. A member of our book club chose Leadership and Self-Deception because she was reading it for work, and I think it's a great book club choice, because you can apply the philosophies used in this book to every relationship, not just ones in the workplace.
The best thing about both books is that they are totally introspective--you really do come to a realization of how YOU yourself need to change/grow/improve, instead of thinking about how other people in your life could benefit from the philosophy. And I for sure can (and want to and need to) improve my own way of thinking about and behavior toward others.
It's weird to read a book by a "collective," but I was already familiar with The Arbinger Institute because one of the best books I have ever read is called Bonds That Make Us Free by a founder of the group, C. Terry Warner. A member of our book club chose Leadership and Self-Deception because she was reading it for work, and I think it's a great book club choice, because you can apply the philosophies used in this book to every relationship, not just ones in the workplace.
The Arbinger Institute is a management training and consulting firm and scholarly consortium that includes people trained in business, law, economics, philosophy, the family, education, and psychology. Together, the members of Arbinger work to apply the sweeping implications of self-deception and its solution to all aspects of organizational, community and family life.This was a much shorter book than Bonds That Make Us Free, and it is written in a 'story format' which makes it a little cheesy, but also more accessible: it's easier to follow a narrative than to be taught a new philosophy point-blank. It's pretty much a conversation between a new employee and his superiors at a fake company called "Zagrum," in which he learns about self-deception (being in the box) and how to overcome it (getting out of the box). The phrase "in the box" is overused to the point of nausea, but I did LIKE this book and it made me want to, not only go back and re-read Bonds That Make Us Free, but also improve my relationships with family and friends.
The best thing about both books is that they are totally introspective--you really do come to a realization of how YOU yourself need to change/grow/improve, instead of thinking about how other people in your life could benefit from the philosophy. And I for sure can (and want to and need to) improve my own way of thinking about and behavior toward others.
- Certainly it's good to think of others, but who am I thinking of when I'm thinking of myself as the sort of person who thinks of others?
- I think that in some cases, discipline--even harsh discipline--is what a child might need. But my problem has been that when I disciplined Bryan, I wasn't doing it because it's what Bryan needed. I was doing it because I was mad at how he was making my life difficult . . . I haven't been seeing my own son as a person to help, but as an object to blame.
- It's as if we said to each other 'Look, I'll mistreat you so you can blame your bad behavior on me if you'll mistreat me so I can blame my bad behavior on you.' Of course we didn't even say that to each other . . . but our mutual provocation and justification seems so perfectly coordinated it looks like we did. For this reason, whenever two or more people are in their boxes toward each other, mutually betraying themselves, we call it "collusion."
- Helpful skills and techniques [communication, subtlety, technical training] aren't helpful if they're done in the box. They just provide people with more sophisticated ways to blame.
- We live insecurely when we're in the box, desperate to show that we're justified--that we're thoughtful, for example, or worthy or noble. It can feel pretty overwhelming always having to demonstrate our virtue. In fact, when we're feeling overwhelmed, it generally isn't our obligation to others but our in-the-box desperation to prove something about ourselves that we find overwhelming.
4. Mr. Tucket (2016.3.02, book club)
By: Gary Paulesen
Published: 1995
Genre: young adult fiction / adventure / Old West / pioneers / mountain men / Native Americans / American frontier / historical fiction
Pages: 192
Bex Rating: 8
I love Gary Paulsen. This was a great short story--it ended rather abruptly, I thought, but apparently there are five books in the series. They could probably all be combined into a regular-sized adult novel.
3. Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2016.2.28) I love Gary Paulsen. This was a great short story--it ended rather abruptly, I thought, but apparently there are five books in the series. They could probably all be combined into a regular-sized adult novel.
By: Mindy Kaling
Published: 2011
Genre: nonfiction / comedy / memoir / humor / television / Hollywood
Pages: 222
Bex Rating: 8.5
This was a fun read. And I read two books this month! Hopefully I will be back to 4/5 per month soon :).
Mindy Kaling plays Kelly Kapoor in the television show The Office, but I had no idea she was also a WRITER for the show, and a very talented comedienne and playwright. This book was a lot like Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan, which I read last year (2015 Book Reviews, #9) and Seriously, I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres (2014 Book Reviews, #33)--a lot of hilarious observations and personal anecdotes from the author, strung together in a sort of memoir.
She is hilarious and fun, and I especially love how devoted she is to marriage and family and monogamous relationships--something that other Hollywooders would do well to emulate.
She is hilarious and fun, and I especially love how devoted she is to marriage and family and monogamous relationships--something that other Hollywooders would do well to emulate.
One chapter is entitled "Best friend Rights and Responsibilities." I thought these quotes were hilarious and reminded me of my friendship with Cori:
- IF YOU ARE DEPRESSED, I WILL BE THERE FOR YOU
As everyone knows, depressed people are some of the most boring people in the world. I know this because when I was depressed, people fled. Except my best friends.
I will be there for you during your horrible break-up, or getting fired from your job, or if you're just having a bad couple of months or year. I will hate it and find you really tedious, but I promise I won't abandon you. - IF OUR PHONE CONVERSATION GETS DISCONNECTED, THERE'S NO NEED TO CALL BACK
I get it. You get it. We take forever getting off the phone anyway. This was a blessing. - NO TWO PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN US
We freaking rock. No one can beat us.
- I guess I find [the song] "Jack and Diane" a little disgusting. A child of immigrant professionals, I can’t help but notice the frivolity of it. Why are they not home doing homework? Why aren’t they setting the table for dinner? Who allows kids to hang out in parking lots? Isn’t that loitering?
I wish there were a song called “Nguyen & Ari” about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandma’s old-age home. They meet at Princeton Review. They study together for the SATs and AP courses, and then, after months of studying and mountains of flashcards, they kiss chastely upon hearing that they both got into their top college choices. This is a song teens need to inadvertently memorize.
In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs; watching movies with my friends; learning Latin; having unrequited crushes on guys who didn’t know me; and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only 18 years to spend with them full-time, and that’s it. So, yeah, it all added up to a happy, memorable time. Even though I was never a star.
The chorus of “Jack & Diane” is: “Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”
Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life. - One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong.
- Once Internet Inventor-Marrying Mom gave me an unopened bottle of Clinique Happy that someone had given her and she knew she'd never use. "It's not fancy or anything," she said sheepishly, as though she were handing me a bottle of Lady Musk by Walmart.
What is this world? I thought. Clinique isn't fancy anymore? - I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake."
- The Office is a big chapter in my life, so that is why it is a big chapter in my book. It's what i'm best known for and what people ask me about the most. I'd like to be cool enough to say i'm sick of talking about it, the way Jennifer Lopez doesn't want to talk about her butt anymore, but The Office is still a significant part of my life, and I think it is awesome.
- Here’s my incredibly presumptuous guide to being an awesome guy, inside and out (mostly out, for who am I to instruct you on inner improvement?). (Let me say here that if you’re some kind of iconoclastic dude who goes by the beat of your own drummer, you will find this insufferable. I totally respect that. But why are you even reading this book at all? Shouldn't you be out hiking the Appalachian Trail or something?
1. Buy a well-fitting peacoat from J.Crew. Or wait until Christ-mas sales are raging and buy a designer one, like Varvatos or something. Black looks good on everyone (Obvious Cops) and matches everything (Duh Police), but charcoal gray is good too. You can always look like a put-together Obama speech-writer with a classy peacoat.] - C’MON, MARRIED PEOPLE
I don’t want to hear about the . . . work it takes to plan a date night. I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun. I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.
I guess I think happiness can come in a bunch of forms, and maybe a marriage with tons of work makes people feel happy. But part of me still thinks … is it really so hard to make it work? What happened to being pals? . . . And I’m not saying that marriage should always be easy. But we seem to get so gloomily worked up about it these days. In the Shakespearean comedies, the wedding is the end, and there isn’t much indication of what happily ever after will look like day to day. In real life, shouldn’t a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends? A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can’t wait to talk about gardening with for the next forty years…
Married people, it’s up to you. It’s entirely on your shoulders to keep this sinking institution afloat. It’s a stately old ship, and a lot of people, like me, want to get on board. Please be psyched, and convey that psychedness to us. And always remember: so many, many people are envious of what you have. You’re the star at the end of the Shakespearean play, wearing the wreath of flowers in your hair. The rest of us are just the little side characters.
By: Tim Herd
Published: 2010
Genre: nonfiction / do-it-yourself / history of tree syrup / Native American history / American history
Pages: 143
Bex Rating: 9
Bex Rating: 9
Maybe this will be the year that I read only one book a month. But if they're all as good as my January and February books have been, I don't mind. Plus, hello--this book is beautiful:
I ordered it on Amazon last week, along with my spiles and tubing, because I am TOTALLY going to make my own syrup from my own tree! Did you know that the box elder tree is in the maple family? It is. My dad told me about it last summer, because he had a taste of some box elder syrup and raved about how delicious it was. And we have a big ol' box elder tree! From the book:
The sugar maple, with its highest content of sugar, is the first preference for the sugar farmer or backyard do-it-yourselfer when it comes to making syrup. The black, red, and silver maples, can be used, as can the box elder. (Box-elder is the odd-looking member--there's one in every family!)There were lots of books on Amazon about making syrup from sap, but I am so glad I got this one--it's informative and fun and whimsical, with exactly the right amount of information for a novice. I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to make some syrup, and I think I ordered my spiles (the "spigot" that you "tap" into the tree, which allows the sap to come out) just in time!
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| A great example of the deliciously-designed layouts |
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| I love graphics like this in a nonfiction book--it was reminiscent of one of my favorites from 2013: Farm Anatomy, review #36 |
- "Can it be that thou art so simple as to ask me such a question, seeing that the Master of Life has imparted to us an instinct which enabled us to substitute stone hatchets and knives for those made of steel by the whites; wherefore should we not have known as well y how to manufacture sugar? He has made us all, that we should enjoy life; he has placed before us all the requisites for the support of existence - food, water, lire, trees, etc. wherefore then should he have withheld from us the art of excavating the trees In order to make troughs of them, of placing the sap in these, or heating the stones and throwing them into the sap so as to cause It to boll, and by this means reducing It to sugar?" - Kickapoo Chief Jose Renard, upon being questioned whether Indians had made maple sugar prior to contact with white men, 1824.
- If any harmless mold develops on a batch of syrup that's been stored for several months, simply skim off the mold, reboil the syrup, and repackage into a sterile container.
- Before you bottle up all that hard-won syrup, pour some of it directly onto a bowl of clean snow . . . it will stiffen into a delectable taffy-like confection that can be picked up with forks or fingers and enjoyed immediately. This treat has been part of the sugaring-off process for hundreds of years and is described in many accounts of pioneer life. Traditional accompaniments include donuts, with dill pickles to cut the sweetness.
- One certainly cannot appreciate the lore, romance, and results of converting raw tree sap into an unparalleled delicacy without imbibing the final product.
- Maple syrup is a pure, all-natural sweetener, and other than honey and agave nectar, the only one in a naturally liquid state. It has no fat, no animal products, no artificial colors, and no preservatives. Maple syrup is packed with vitamins, minerals, amino acids and antioxidants. A little daily dose is like downing a good-tasting multivitamin pill.
By: Farley Mowat
Published: 1956
Genre: young adult fiction / classic fiction / adventure / tales of the North / Native Americans / survival
Pages: 244
Bex Rating: 10!
If you would like an easy way to gauge my mental health . . . just look at how many books I read monthly. January 2016 was a doozy, and I only read one. single. book. It was a book I have read a dozen times before, because I only had energy for a treasured classic. February looks like it won't be quite as stressful, but I have yet to pick up a second book for the year.
At least I have magazines! I got several $3 subscriptions this year when they were on sale on Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Terabyte Tuesday or something. These are the ones that come to my house every month: Backpacker, Runner's World, Real Simple (my top three faves), Martha Stewart Living, Everyday with Rachel Ray, and Better Homes and Gardens. I also pick up stacks of magazines at the library when they clear out old issues. No matter what my stress level or mental state, I can always squeeze in some magazine reading. And, judge me if you will, I love how a glossy new magazine smells: the inky aroma of escapism.
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| With the jacket and without. I love this book! |
Lost in the Barrens was published the year my dad was born. Which is fitting, because it is his very favorite book. When I first read it (I was 11 or 12), it became my favorite book, too. I think it may be the reason why my "default genre" is "adventure-books-for-12-year-old-boys." Yep. That is invariably the type of story I reach for.
The book was actually made into a pretty decent movie, but of course they changed the whole story and it's not nearly as good. I may have exaggerated above, but I know I have read Lost in the Barrens at least five times before. It's been a good 15 years since the last time I read it, and it was the perfect fictional escape I have been needing. And I want to formally thank my dad for giving me a love of this "adventure tales." He bought us a reprint of this book for Christmas almost 10 years ago, and it's one of my favorite gifts I've ever received.
Where do I even begin? It's exciting, and dangerous, and cold, and hungry, and hopeful and so adventurous! Jamie and Awasin are stranded in the "barrenlands" of Northern Canada, and must find a way to make it through the merciless winter. It's a survival story at its best.
I love the pen-and-ink illustrations by Charles Greer! I love when they find a hidden a valley and build a tiny cabin. I love fighting off wolverines and wolves and grizzly bears and the terrifying weather. Why can't I be lost in the barrens??? Hahaha--I highly recommend this book to everyone.
- The edge of the sun tipped a distant ridge and light flowed over the darkened plains like a flood of yellow metal. The sky faded from blood red, through yellow, to a vivid green. A single goose beat heavily out of the grass-colored sky and its sad cry echoed over the wakening world. Flights of old squaw ducks got up hurriedly from tundra pools and winged off to the big lakes. It was morning.
- Awasin: "My people know differently. If you fight against the spirits of the north you will always lose. Obey their laws and they'll look after you."
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