Books
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The Gathering
Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains….’I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms. And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all. And I wondered…
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The Bluest Eye
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and…
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Booking Through Thursday
Deb has several blogs, one of which is a weekly book meme. I thought I’d join in this week, though not on Thursday, as I didn’t get to it in time. So for me, it’s Booking Through Friday. What was the last book you bought? Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief, by Martha Whitmore Hickman. It was recommended by a friend of mine, who said that it helped her get through the loss of her mother a few years ago. Name a book you have read MORE than once The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. One of my all time favorites. I’ve also re-read the…
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October is Children’s Magazine Month
Maya receives quite a few magazines. To the question posed to Sarah Palin about what she read, Maya said she would have answered, “I read Cricket, Stone Soup, Discover, Nick Magazine, and National Geographic Kids. Whew. That’s a lot of magazines. We’re pretty willing to spoil her when it comes to reading. It’s hard to say no when she wants a book or a magazine, because we want her to love to read, though of course we have been known to take her to the library quite often, and when she thought she had lost her wallet a few months ago, she was most concerned about the loss of her…
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Possession: A Romance
Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite…
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Buy A Friend A Book Week
Buy a Friend A Book Week takes place the first weeks of October, January, April, and July. The idea is that you buy a friend a book for no reason, except that you like them and would like them to have it. Hey, that’s now! OK, I’m in. Sort of. You remember how we pared down our books last year, after moving our things back into our house, right? You also remember that I’m trying to be financially responsible, right? So, instead of buying a friend a book, I’ve decided to GIVE a friend a book. Guess what? This means you! If you’re interested in any of the following books…
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Will the Circle Be Unbroken
When my mom died back in June, our friends Jeff and Leah sent me a book full of stories of death, full of stories of people’s experiences when their loved ones died, full of stories of compassion and hope. That book was Will the Circle Be Unbroken, by Studs Terkel. I had never heard of Mr.. Terkel before, but he’s a very well known interviewer and used to have a famous radio show in Chicago. He is well known for his interviewing skills, for the honesty and candor he is able to elicit. Perhaps what is most remarkable about Mr. Terkel’s interviews is that the subjects are mainly average people,…
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Book Awards Reading Challenge
I’m already a month late for this challenge, as it started August 1st. Dang. Last year, the rules were to read 12 award winning books in 12 months. This year, the rules are to read 10 award winning books in 10 months. Here are the rules, from the awards website: Read 10 award winners from August 1, 2008 through June 1, 2009. You must have at least FIVE different awards in your ten titles. Overlaps with other challenges are permitted. You don’t have to post your choices right away, and your list can change at any time. ‘Award winners’ is loosely defined; make the challenge fit your needs, keeping in…
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The Thirteenth Tale
I knew how it was for him. It was easier now that I was grown up than when I was a child. How much harder birthdays had been in the house. Presents hidden overnight in the shed, not from me, but from my mother, who could not bear the sight of them. The inevitable headache was her jealously guarded rite of remembrance, one that made it impossible to invite other children to the house, impossible, too, to leave her for the treat of a visit to the zoo or the park. My birthday toys were always quiet ones. Cakes were never homemade, and the leftovers had to be divested of…
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Sightseeing
“…I held my breath because it seemed the only sound left in the world and all around me then was an extraordinary silence. It made me feel light, that silence, as if I might float to the ceiling, as if I might be able to open my arms, flap them, and fly with the sparrows. I don’t know how long I sat there holding my breath in the dark, but I thought then of how loud the world could be, so much clatter and noise, and of how lovely and rare was a moment like this when one need not listen to anything at all.” I read about Sightseeing on…
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In Defense of Food
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is Michael Pollan’s follow up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma. His goal this time out is to answer the question of how to eat in an increasingly hostile landscape, one in which food is becoming more and more processed, and thus less and less healthy, all while nutritionists and food scientists try to make it more healthful. You don’t need to read the entire book to figure out the answer of how to eat. Look at the cover. It says, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The rest of the book goes on to describe why this is the best way to go,…
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The Abstinence Teacher
“I’ve made a few mistakes in my life,” Ruth began. “Some of them have involved sex, and at least a couple have been pretty big. “It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I’d been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I’m not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least they’re an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren’t we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we…
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Purple Hibiscus
Kambili is a 15 year old girl, growing up in Nigeria with her older brother, Jaja, and their parents, Eugene and Beatrice. Eugene is a very wealthy, influential man, one of the few who dares to stand up and tell the truth about the local government by means of the newspaper he owns. Theirs is a charmed life, with Eugene donating richly to the poorer neighbors, to the church, and to the many charities he supports. They live in a compound surrounded by high walls, and they have servants to cook and clean and drive for them. They have cable television and luxurious cars, plenty of meat to eat, and…
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The Great Divorce
The Great Divorce is the story of a man, a man dreaming of an exploratory trip to Heaven. He arrives on a bus with many other riders, all of whom are approached by angels, who are trying to help the people to overcome their issues and fears, so that they can enter the kingdom of Heaven. They are all pretty much given the options of Heaven or Hell, Hell being not so much the fiery pit described by Dante, but more a matter of Not Heaven. The title refers to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which C.S. Lewis refutes, saying “If we insist on keeping Hell (or…
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The Westing Game
I first heard of The Westing Game, I think, in a comment left by my old bloggy friend, Wendy. (She’s not old, just quit blogging, so she’s not a current bloggy friend, right? I miss her writing, actually.) Based on her loving the book as a kid, I bought it for Maya and put it on her bookshelf. It has thus far failed to capture her interest, so it’s just been sitting there, waiting. When I signed up for the Herding Cats reading challenge, I saw this book on the list, and thought it was a good chance to read it. The Westing Game is the story surrounding the…