Books
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Sprout
I have a secret. And everyone knows it. But no one talks about it, at least not out in the open. That makes it a very modern secret, like knowing your favorite celebrity has some weird eccentricity or other, or professional athletes do it for the money, or politicians don’t actually have your best interests at heart. Sprout is the story of Daniel Bradford, a kid who decides that if he can’t fit in, it will at least be on his own terms. He’s a gifted writer, something that his English teacher figures out pretty quickly and moves to hone in time for the state essay-writing contest. The teen years…
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Three Cups of Tea
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. ~ Margaret Mead In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time — Greg Mortenson’s one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding…
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The Help
KarenMEG recommended The Help over on her blog, so I thought I’d put it on hold at the library. I did, but then I found out I was number 258 in line for it, and decided that maybe I’d buy it myself. So the next time we were at the bookstore, I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it in the fiction area. I asked the helpful person behind the information desk, and he said they should have it, they had 5 copies an hour earlier, but it was downstairs on the ‘Best Sellers’ shelf. Down we went, where he scooped up the very last copy and handed it…
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This World We Live In
For the first time ever I hoped there was no Baby Rachel. I don’t know what happened to Dad and Lisa, if the baby was ever born. It must be so hard now to have a baby. Lisa could have miscarried or had a stillborn baby. Horrible though that is, it might be for the better. I tiptoed out of the sunroom and through the kitchen to the bathroom. It smells of fish and bedpans and ocean breeze air freshener. I curled up on the cold tile floor, and I rocked back and forth, glad it made my body ache even more, like I deserved the punishment for what I’d…
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The Bride’s Farewell
“On the morning of August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and fifty something, on the day she was to be married, Pell Ridley crept up from her bed in the dark, kissed her sisters goodbye, fetched Jack in from the wind and rain on the heath, and told him they were leaving. Not that he was likely to offer any objections, being a horse.” Pell knows far more about horses than she does about men, or women, or the workings of the human heart. She understands horses, can look at a horse and see into its spirit, and know whether it will be a good worker, a good companion, a safe…
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The Night Listener
I know how it sounds when I call him my son. There’s something a little precious about it, a little too wishful to be taken seriously. I’ve noticed the looks on people’s faces, those dim, indulgent smiles that vanish in a heartbeat. It’s easy enough to see how they’ve pegged me: an unfulfilled man on the shady side of fifty, making a last grasp at fatherhood with somebody else’s child. That’s not the way it is. Frankly, I’ve never wanted a kid. Never once believed that nature’s whim had robbed me of my manly destiny. Pete and I were an accident, pure and simple, a collision of kindred spirits that…
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The Good Thief
Ren is a twelve-year old, one-handed orphan, living in 19th century New England. He was left at a Catholic orphanage as an infant, pushed through a wooden door in the gate one rainy night, and spends his time wondering who his parents are, why they left him here, and if he will ever be adopted. The gate was hinged to open one way – in. When Ren pushed at the tiny door with his finger, he could feel the strength of the wooden frame behind it. There was no handle on the children’s side, no groove to lift from underneath. The wood was heavy, thick, and old – a fine…
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Breaking Her Fall
One summer night in July of 1998, Tucker Jones drops his 14-year-old daughter, Kat, off with her (slightly older) friend, Abby, in front of a movie theater. But the girls meet up with a group of older boys, one of whom is Abby’s boyfriend, Jed. Jed’s parents are out of town, and he invites the girls back to his place for a party. The party is big and gets out of control, and a few hours later, Tucker receives a phone call from the parent of another girl, telling him that Kat has been drinking shots, has gotten naked, and gone into the pool house to give oral sex to…
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Day After Night
The nightmares made their rounds hours ago. The tossing and whimpering are over. Even the insomniacs have settled down. The twenty restless bodies rest, and faces aged by hunger, grief, and doubt relax to reveal the beauty and the pity of their youth. Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them or orphans. Their cheeks press against small, military-issue pillows that smell of disinfectant. Lumpy and flat from long service under heavier heads, they bear no resemblance to the goose-down clouds that many of them enjoyed in childhood. And yet, the girls burrow into them with perfect contentment, embracing them like teddy bears. There…
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Healthy Choices
I recently read a book that I thought might be good for the parents of any teen. Especially girls, but boys as well. It was recommended to me by a friend, who was particularly impressed by the section on how dieting does NOT work, and that especially in teens who are still growing, it usually leads to the body ‘resetting’ at a higher weight. So teens who diet are likely to end up weighing more than they might have otherwise. Any teen thinking about going on a diet might think twice if given this information. This books appears to be mostly common sense, but completely against what the consumer culture…
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People of the Book
(page from the Sarajevo Haggadah found here) From Wikipedia, where you can also read the fascinating history of this beautiful book: The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the illustrated traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world, originating in Barcelona around 1350. The Haggadah is presently owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where it is on permanent display. The Sarajevo Haggadah is handwritten on bleached calfskin and illuminated in copper and gold. It opens with 34 pages of illustrations of key scenes in the Bible from creation through…
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Read’N’Review Challenge
Here we are, it’s almost the end of January, and I’ve finally gotten off the fence and decided to take a reading challenge this year. I tried to muster some enthusiasm for it back in December, and I just couldn’t do it. But I’m reading nonetheless, and I like having the list of book reviews over there on my sidebar, so I decided to sign up for the Read’n’Review Challenge, hosted by MizB, which is an easy challenge, because there’s no lists of award winners or particular genres that you have to look for. Just list the books that you want to read, read them, and review them on your…
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The unnamed narrator of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a writer, who has recently moved into a Manhattan Brownstone inhabited by a cast of characters, most prominently Holly Golightly, who lives below him. Holly nicknames him ‘Fred’, after her brother, who is away in the army. Fred is a writer who can’t publish what he writes. Holly is a lonely party girl, who makes her money by spending her time with wealthy men who give her $50 every time she has to go to the powder room in a fancy restaurant. As the story takes place in the 1940’s, $50 was a lot of money. The average employee in 1949 brought…
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Friday Randomness
Thanks everyone for your kind birthday wishes. I had a lovely birthday, and a lovely time off from work. One of Maya’s Christmas gifts was tickets to go see Wicked, which was a lot of fun. I’m not a huge fan of the musical as a play, but this one was really fun and interesting and kept your attention the whole way through. Excellent gift, Ted! Btw, Ted wrote a great review of the show for Popdose, and he included a couple of YouTube clips that are pretty great. Along the theme of gifts that are not things, we also received tickets for dinner on the Napa Valley Wine Train,…
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The Road Home
Lev looked at the cloth. He was indifferent to it. He felt indifferent to all that was untrue. Behind him, somewhere, he could hear a tennis game start up and he envied the players. He thought how, in his life in England, he never ran anywhere anymore, but only stood at his sinks or crept into bus shelters or wandered the streets with slow steps, like the steps of a n old man. And this realization wounded him the more because he knew suddenly – as he stood and stared at the shining holly so ridiculously festooned- where he wanted to run to. He stood very still, gazing at the…