Books
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Happy Easter!
Happy Easter to all of my Easter Celebrating friends! Whether you celebrate the Resurrection as part of your faith, or the return of spring, as symbolized by bunnies and eggs, I hope you have a wonderful day, and have some chocolate. 😉 This is my favorite Easter book, bar none. It’s about the Country Bunny, who wants to try out to be an Easter Bunny, but as she is a single mom, the old Easter Bunny doesn’t think she will be able to manage. But, like good single moms everywhere, she has taught her little bunnies to do all of the chores around the house, which they demonstrate by cleaning,…
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The House of Mirth
I’ve fallen terribly behind in my “Winter Classics Challenge”. I had vowed to read 5 classics during the months of January and February, and here we are, almost at the Ides of March (BEWARE!), and I’m just now finishing my 4th classic. I’m going to spread the blame out here, because East of Eden was kind of slow for the first 100 pages, and it was a mighty long book, too. Then there was the time I spent trying to get into Tell My Horse, which didn’t go very well, due to a regrettable lack of interest on my part. Add to these factors the return of Lost, Battlestar Galactica,…
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A Meme for Monday
I saw this meme at my mom’s blog, Maya’s Granny. You’re tagged if you read it, though of course, you can choose to play or not. I’m in, nice for a Monday, right? BOOKS I’VE READ MEME *Look at the list of books below. *Bold the ones you’ve read. *Italicize the ones you want to read. *leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in. *If you are reading this, tag you’re it. 1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) 2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) 4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) 5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King…
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Tell My Horse
The third book in my “Winter Classics Challenge” was Tell My Horse – Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, by Zora Neale Hurston. I picked this book up because I enjoyed reading, Their Eyes Were Watching God several years ago. Because that book was a novel, I (wrongly) assumed that this was as well. Rather, it is a travelogue delving into the world of superstition and voodoo. Ms. Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti herself in order to write this book, which is detailed in three parts. The first part is about life in Jamaica, and talks a lot about the culture, and the superstitions revolving around the ‘duppy’,…
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Are You a Re-Reader?
Are there books that you’ve read so many times, you can open them to any page, randomly, and know exactly where you are in the narrative? I am definitely a re-reader, though as I write this, I’m realizing that the books I’ve read and re-read so many times are all books I had read by middle school. Sometimes, I’m just sitting somewhere, minding my own business, and one of these books will call out to me. I wonder, is it the writing itself, or the simplicity of the story, that makes it so easy for me to return, again and again? What is so comforting about these books, that is…
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Henry and June
I finally finished the second book in my Winter Classics Challenge, Henry and June. I vaguely remember watching the film when it came out, and we own the soundtrack, which is lovely, but I don’t remember a lot about the movie, other than that I liked it. If you’re not familiar with Henry and June, it’s the journal of Anaïs Nin, written in France during a year of sexual awakening, in which she becomes involved with writer Henry Miller and his wife, June. In the beginning of the book, Anaïs finds herself drawn to June, and they share a kiss. June leaves France and returns to New York and the…
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Misc. Friday Stuff
I was at an all day meeting at work yesterday, and it was interesting and fun, but I don’t talk about work on my blog, so that’s that. But, since I usually write my post the evening before, and post in the morning, I don’t have a lot of time to post much now. Gotta shower, get ready for school, walk the dog, etc. What to do? Just miscellaneous stuff, I think, is the way to go. Some of this stuff could easily be flushed out into long, serious posts of their own, but not today. 1. A piece of advice. If you don’t keep your glasses in the SAME PLACE…
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East of Eden
I finished East of Eden last night. Whew, what a story. I can’t believe it took me almost a month (started on the 1st), but I guess that’s what makes it a Chunkster…that it takes awhile to read. What makes it a Classic, though, is not only the fact that it’s over 50 years old, but also that it’s famous, and accepted in literary circles as a great work. In case you haven’t read East of Eden yet, I’m going to highly recommend that you take a month out of your schedule and do so. This is a wonderful book, full of hope and love, pain and death, sex and…
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Chunkster Challenge
I decided to participate in the Chunkster Challenge, but I don’t know if I mentioned it in my blog more than in passing. Silly me. The time frame is January 1st through June 30th, and the guidelines are pretty free flowing. Bookfool from Bookfoolery and Babble decreed that all participants should read as many or as few (but duh, at least one) ‘chunksters’ during this time period. What, you may ask, is a ‘chunkster’? Well, as it has nothing to do with the size of my waist OR my thighs, I’ll be happy to tell you. It’s a book that is daunting in length, or, if you must be specific,…
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The Memory Keepers Daughter
I’m about 2/5 of the way through this book. Reading this has been a difficult task for me…not that it would be for everyone, but it was for me. Those of you who have read my blog for awhile know that I didn’t know my father or my sisters growing up, that I met them when I was 21 (dad) and 22 (sisters), so I missed out on a lot of their lives, as they did mine. One thing that I missed out on was that I had an uncle, Bobby, who had Downs Syndrome. He was my father’s older brother, and he died before I had a chance to…
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Winter Classics Challenge
Now that I’ve finished the From the Stacks: Winter Reading Challenge, I’m ready to start another one (Am I crazy? Perhaps). This challenge is to read 5 classics during the months of January and February. A classic is a slippery thing to describe, so I’ll just say it has to be a renowned book, and the person who started this challenge said it should be at least 50 years old. I came across the challenge on Lotus Reads, but it was started at A Reader’s Journal So, without further ado, here are my 5 classics: The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton. This seems a fitting choice for this challenge,…
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Julie and Julia
OK, here I am…I just finished the last of the 5 books for my From the Stacks Winter Reading Challenge. I had saved Julie and Julia for last, figuring it would be a light, fun, breezy read, which might suit me well after some of the heavier topics I had thus far covered. I was right. To be honest, I knew very little about this book/blog/idea before the book was given to me as a gift last Christmas. I knew that the author, Julie Powell, lived in New York, that she decided to make every recipe in Julia Childs’ famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking, 524 recipes, in…
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Year of Wonders
Last night, I finished the 4th book in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, Year of Wonders. This is the tale of an English village beset by Plague in 1665-1666. The protagonist of the story is a young widow, Anna. Anna’s husband was an Iron miner, and died in a mining accident, leaving her to support and care for her two young children. In addition to working as a servant at the rectory, she takes in a boarder to supplement her income. Her boarder is a tailor, and they get along very well. He enjoys her children, and brings laughter back into the home. There is the start of a romance,…
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The Jump-Off Creek
Sunday night, after Ted and Maya had gone to bed, I was considering watching a DVD, perhaps Out of Africa. But then I decided that I didn’t want to stay up that long (it’s a long movie, and it was already 9:00), and that I was enjoying my book, so I would read instead. I made the right choice. 🙂 I read the concluding chapters to book three in the Winter Stacks Reading Challenge, The Jump-Off Creek, by Molly Gloss. This is a book by a local Portland author, which I picked up while we were in Oregon this summer. I read maybe a chapter of it then, and then…
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My Sister’s Keeper
“What do parents look like?” “You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he’s really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.” I recently finished the second book in the From the Stacks reading challenge. The book was My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The premise is this: A young girl, Kate, is terribly ill. She has leukemia, and the only thing that can save her, maybe, is donated umbilical cord blood. So, her parents have another child, Anna, a child that they select from several embryos because she…