In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner (#22)

I am now sad because I've read all of Weiner's novels. A collection of short stories will be released in stores September 5th, but it's anyone's guess when our local library will get ahold of a copy.

Weiner's stories get to me, even though I find myself wanting to discredit them for being such chick-lit reading. Sure, they're chick-lit, but they are bona-fide stories. I can't help but compare them to some books held out as fine literature (Wuthering Heights, I'm looking at you) where the story is so unappealing that I find myself placing small wagers as to how long I can keep my eyes moving across the page (three more lines, I get a coffee...three more pages, I get M&Ms with the coffee...). Take away my Good Reader card if you must, but I enjoy a book where something happens and the something that happens makes me think about my own life.

I like reading about women who are perceptive about their own lives and who are working damn hard to remind themselves that they are not broken. Let's be honest here, who doesn't have to give themselves the occasional stern talking-to in order to get out of bed and get on with the Job of Life. It's easy to shut down, to disconnect, to live in your own head to the point that your own head doesn't make any sense anymore. Weiner's heroines take risks with themselves, holding out hope that the Job of Life might, if faced bravely and with enough feigned aplomb, yield up to us a few Moments of Joy or Knowledge or Love.

So, despite the blue and pink covers featuring legs or ankles only, I think Weiner's books are worth reading because they remind us just how much story there is in our lives. Story that may be valuable only to ourselves, or story that may be shared with friends, family, or ultimately readers in many languages. Story that makes us who we are or who we want to be.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

I know I promised that I was going to finish Wuthering Heights as my personal summer reading challenge, and I'm reading it, really, I am. The more I read, the more I remember why I quit reading it all those other times. I cannot think of less likable characters than Cathy and Heathcliff. Simply can't think of any. As I was slogging through Cathy's marriage to Linton and Heathcliff's anguish about it, I kept thinking, "these two don't deserve to be happy." And I gather that they don't become so (well, Cathy's already dead, which is about where I've always quit reading. I don't know yet what becomes of Heathcliff).

But beyond that, I finished Angle of Repose a day or two ago. This book was a "Read Cheyenne" pick or some city-wide reading rah-rah like that cooked up by the local Barnes and Noble to sell mass market titles. As I was looking at it and paying for it, two different people in the store mentioned that the language Stegner uses is just so beautiful. This did not give me much encouragement as to the quality of the story. In fact it raised my suspicions that "beautiful language" might be code for "boring."

The beginning was a bit boring. But I got absorbed in the story of a fictional marriage that a fictional character is writing, using correspondence, newspaper clippings, and historical events, all fictional as well. The main character, confined to a wheelchair, is delving into the story of his grandparents marriage during the late half of the nineteenth century. The man and woman are not a perfect match, but start out promisingly enough. As they come up against numerous obstacles trying to make a living in the US western frontier, they have more difficulty fulfilling the promises of their marriage contract.

Although I think the ending was not as strong as the rest of the story, I left the story thinking about what can be forgiven between two people who are making a life together. Stenger's narrator juxtaposes his grandparents' marriage of the late 1800s with two relationships in1970, his own marriage in which his wife left him as he became sicker, and the free-love non-marriage of a young woman who works as his secretary. Although the two latter are clearly in trouble, the narrator makes inferences and connects events until he shows that perhaps the former was not as placid as it seemed.

Another thing I liked about this book was its westward expansion setting. Like the Little House books, this book set up problems of surviving in a wild place and then showed how people solved them. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I like it.

Overall, a fine way to spend a few days, engrossed with characters who are young, pretty much in love, and poised to accomplish great things. As they slide toward their angle of repose, their story raised questions for me about what to expect and what to demand of myself and my life.

Now With Titles

Some books I've read since June 29th (date of last post)

1. Goodnight Nobody---Jennifer Weiner
2. Never Let Me Go---Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Some more that I can't remember right now. Clearly, they left a big impression

I would like to read 50 books this year in accordance with various 50 book challenges floating around. I have also instituted my personal Summer Reading Challenge: to finish Wuthering Heights. I've started that dumb thing at least 8 times, but this time it's going to be different. I'm going to grit my teeth and get past the part where Catherine dumps Heathcliff or marries his brother or his cousin or whatever, whoever, whenever, who cares!?! This book has been a bit frustrating to me in the past.

Let me catch my breath here. My passion against this book got the best of me.

So, since I can't remember what the heck I've read, I guess I can't count them in my tally. That'll show her, myself says to myself. I've tallied up 20 based on the posts I've made here, including the two above. With five months left in the year, I know I can read 30 books. Whether I can read 30 books, clean the house, harvest the garden, cook the dinners, wash the clothing, and mow the lawn remains to be seen. But, yeah, probably I can.

So here goes.

Little Earthquakes

Author: Jennifer Weiner
Date Finished: 6/28/06

I didn't write about it, but I also read Good in Bed during this early summertime and really liked both novels. I won't weigh in on whether Weiner is writing chick lit and so should be dismissed, but I will say that these books probably won't be on any English major's required reading list in the next 20 years.

But, they are fun. And they are books as opposed to daytime television. A funny (to me) aside here: when I first discovered this here Internet, in late 1994, the first thing I sought out were mailing lists and bulletin boards discussing Days of Our Lives. I know, shameful. A couple of months ago, I had retreated to the basement while the kids were napping and flipped over to NBC to see what the residents of Salem were up to. The answer, and the universal appeal of soap operas (or "so poppers" as I first understood the phrase), is pretty much the same things they were up to fifteen years ago when I watched during my lunch hour my senior year of high school. Of course I would never abuse the Internet for such low brow purposes these days; instead I read blogs. (insert pointed silence here)

What was I talking about? Oh, right. Weiner. She's a good writer. I like her stories. Her books won't change my life, but they will give me a nice diversion and, frankly, I'm okay with that.

The Broker

Author: John Grisham
Date Finished: 6/27/06

I like me some Grisham, even though he can be a bit uneven as a story teller. This was a pretty good one, fast read and sufficiently interesting characters and plot. Although for a person working on an alarming caffiene habit, having the main character spend most of his days looking around Italy for an espresso may be a bit dangerous. I won't say that I brewed a pot of coffee at 8:45 p.m. last night, but I won't say that I didn't.

I took back a huge haul of books to the library this evening after I realized that I have a couple on my in progress stack that are going to require serious concentration if I'm going to finish them. A biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which I've started numerous times but never gotten out of the season of Advent) and Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. What? Oh, the Weiner? Well, concentration is well and good, buta spoonful of sugar (or chick lit) makes the medicine go down.

A Room With a View

Author: E.M. Forster
Date Finished: May, 2006

Catching up on old stuff here. I've been reading a lot, but unsure where I want to go with this blog. I started it mainly to use as a way of keeping track of what I've read and practicing for querying our newspaper about a local book column. Then I lost my nerve a little and became annoyed with myself sitting here thinking pretentious thoughts about what I'm reading. Or writing drivel about what I'm reading, same thing really.

So, A Room With a View. I've read this before. I bought a bunch of Forster books on a spree at my downfall, Barnes & Noble, because it's our main bookstore here in town. We have a local independent and a couple of used bookstores, but B&N is a hangout of mine due to some work I do for my mother in law with packaging up children's books for teachers. This day, I was waiting for them to ring up my (large) order of children's books and went over the the fiction shelves. I bought A Room, Howards End, and A Passage to India.

I remember liking A Room when I read it before. I liked the idea of Lucy waking up and figuring out what she really wanted. In fact, this book probably laid the bones for my three or four year long infatuation with romance novels. What are romance novels but stories about women convincing themselves that no, not at all, most emphatically never, they do not love the man that they in fact love. Same with Lucy. And then she figures it out and is happy. Problem solved, the end.

As a young woman, very much in love with someone, books of this kind validated my love and romance. They showed me that there is such a thing as love so strong that it reverses the direction you thought you were going. Now that I've married and become swarmed with children, some of the romance (okay, most of the romance) of discovering my husband has been siphoned away into the everyday logistics of managing our household and into the delight of watching my children discover who they themselves are. I don't think I could read romance novels again at this point in my life, but A Room was a pleasant reminder of the first plunges into uncovering the man who I will love until I die.

I don't mean to diminish A Room by comparing it to a romance novel. I think Forster is onto something with the theme of the novel; using travel and the character of Charlotte Bartlett as a way of showing the boxes we place ourselves into, how suffer when we cling to social delicacy over the wonder and beauty of humanity. I am glad I purchased a copy of A Room; if I ever come into money I will seek out a hardback edition for my imagined library collection. Reminders to embrace love and beauty should be revisited periodically, if only to remember what it was like to change from I don't care for this to this I embrace.

Celestial Navigation

Author: Anne Tyler
Date Finished: 5/28/06

Anne Tyler’s books should come with a warning label that says, “Talk to the people you love or you’ll end up miserable.” Celestial Navigation is one of the more depressing of her novels that I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a few. In this book, told from multiple points of view, a shy artist, Jeremy Pauling, lives with his mother, staying mostly in his art studio on the top floor of their Baltimore row house. When his mother dies, he takes in a boarder, Mary Tell and her young daughter.

Jeremy and Mary fall into what looks like a marriage to all eyes; they cannot actually be married because Mary’s first husband will not give her a divorce (the book is set in the 60s). Jeremy goes from a quiet loner with a mildly successful art career to a completely bewildered father of six, struggling to find a way to interact with his family even as his art becomes successful enough to support his large brood.

In typical Tyler fashion, both Mary and Jeremy come to feel trapped by their circumstances, worried that the life in front of them isn’t the life they were meant to have at all. Tyler is at her best when she is describing the little conversations and miscommunications that tangle up human relationships. In other novels, Tyler resolves the tangles on a more hopeful note; in this one, while there is no tragedy, there is no happy ending.

Reading Tyler is always a lovely experience, sort of like listening to your own brain chatter that has been refined and distilled down to its essential content. Celestial Navigation is lovely, so lovely that you hope and hope for the characters to come to their senses and go forward being lovely together. Although they do not, Tyler's ability to give us a peek into her characters' reasons for acting the way they do is always worth the time spent reading her work.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players
Date Finished: 4/20/06

I've been reading. I've been busy. I haven't been writing.

I read this book because the fantastic Mrs. M-MV mentioned it on her always inspiring blog. The author, Stefan Fatsis, took up Scrabble in a serious way, taking a leave of absence from his job at The Wall Street Journal to memorize words (not just any words, only those from The Official Tournament and Club Word List are acceptable in competitive play), study strategy, and travel to tournaments. There are Scrabble tournaments you ask? Yes. Yes, there are and Fatsis tells you about them, faithful reader. In detail.

Fatsis stretches his experience from meaty-article to book-manuscript length by including stories about the history of Scrabble, both its invention and the evolution of tournaments, as well as the personal stories of selected players. It is frightening to note that most of the players Fatsis profiles are not far from living in a Van! Down by the River! Quitting your job to play Scrabble full time seems awfully odd until you read about other players who don't exactly have jobs. Instead, they live with their mothers or bounce from venture to venture or collect disability and write letters to the Scrabble newsletter complaining about inclusion or exclusion of certain words in the game.

To his credit, Fatsis is clear-eyed about his obsession with increasing his Scrabble rating. He realizes that it is just a game, and yet, he can't shake the desire to become an elite player and compete with the big boys. He even admits that the story book ending would be for him to play in the highest class at the National Scrabble Championship and rally to beat one of the top players who he befriended during his journey. That doesn't happen. Instead, he plays in the second class at the Nationals and finishes 51st out of 105 players. He then goes on to end his story with these sentences from the epilogue, after resuming his job and social life and then playing badly in a tournament, causing his rating to slip: "It's a number I can't live with. The next morning, on the subway to work, I whip out a list of five-letter words, and the cycle begins anew."

I admit that I considered buying a Scrabble set after reading this book. I also admit that the story bogged down for me in the middle when Fatsis spent several chapters discussing the evolution of competative play. What interested me were the stories of the players and why they felt compelled to do Scrabble the way that they do. Fatsis's willingness to explore his own reasons for his obsession kept me going with this book, as I waited to see whether he would emerge from the tiles and word lists and pick up his "normal" life again. As the ending of the book reveals, he did and he didn't. And that, faithful reader, is something I like in a story.

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales

Author: Valerie Paradiz
Date Finished: 4/11/06

This is one of the few non-fiction books I've had the staying power to finish in my reading career. As I mentioned before, I have just awful taste in non-fiction. I choose books that seem promising but cause me to fall asleep within fifteen words or hokey self-improvement books that change my life for about fifteen seconds. This time, neither was the case and I thought Clever Maids was interesting and well written.

The premise of the book is that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's travels through the countryside collecting folk tales for their collection is completely made up. Instead, their sources for the tales were their sister's friends and other women of their acquaintance. For the most part, the women were educated (they could read and write at least) but were still captured in the societal expectations of the time...to serve family and throw in their economic lot with a kind husband if they were lucky.

Ms. Paradiz does a nice job of telling a few of the stories the women collected and connecting the tales to the women's role in families and society at the time. Another influence on the Grimm brothers was Napolean's occupation of Germany during the time they were working on the collection. Paradiz shows the subtext (is there a subtext to oral stories? sub-voice? sub-telling? I don't know) of many of the tales related to current political events as well as the traditional roles of men and women and the not-quite-bourgeois German people in the early 19th century.

I liked this book a lot and because of it I will probably put the Grimm collection on my list of to-be-read. And perhaps a toned down version (not so many hands hacked off or eyes gouged out) to read to the kids. Although we modern women have learned that we aren't living in a fairy tale and we can't count on Prince Charming whisking us away, the appeal of "happily ever after" remains strong, even if we have to create the ever after of our dreams on our own.

The Ice Cream Maker: an inspiring tale about making quality the key ingredient in everything you do

Author: Subir Chowdhury
Date Finished: 4/8/06

Having broken through my reading slump, I'm showing my complete lack of taste when it comes to reading non-fiction. I'm a sucker for any kind of rah-rah business motivational or personal philosophy, i.e. Seven Habits or my new obsession, Getting Things Done (which I have read at least three times while soaking in the bathtub, an irony that is not lost on me). Ice Cream Maker is the worst kind of that genre, a cute little tale about an ice cream factory faced with financial failure and an executive who turns things around by modeling the leadership strategies of his mentor.

What rings completely hollow (other than the general putting-off-the-real-world-nature of reading motivational books in the first place) is that the narrative is in the first person, told through the eyes of the CEO of the company, "Pete". Ummm, is "Pete" the new nickname for Subir? Just wondering.


On the other hand, the book does bring up a good point, albeit not the ultimate solution to all problems of all organizations, everywhere. That is, thinking about the quality of your activities can bring about some pretty amazing results. Thinking about my own life (because it's my blog and it's all about me), I struggle with this question all the time. What is the quality of my decision not to work in order to be home with our kids? On the days they watch television from dawn to dusk while I pitch a fit about all the cleaning I'm doing....not so good. On the days we walk around the neighborhood for no particular reason, go to the park after school just because it's a brilliant spring day or read ten books at bedtime instead of our customary three....it's better.

Here's a link from a home-schooling mom and freelance writer that ties into these thoughts a little: It All Begins With Me. Mrs. M-mv talks about her need to set a quality example in order for her family's homeschooling enterprise to succeed. I highly suggest following up with some of the thoughts on education and parenting at the bottom of this entry; this family's approach to learning is fascinating and inspiring. In short, you could skip the hokey fable of The Ice Cream Maker and find much of its message in the family M-mv's true story.

Life of Pi

Author: Yann Martel
Date Finished: April 5, 2006

I finished a book! It's been a long month since the last time I could say that. I've started many books, but this past month nothing much held my interest long enough to ignore everything else I needed to do and keep on reading.

I'm late to the table for Life of Pi; it won the Man Booker prize in 2002 and many people on and off the Internet were talking about it at that time. I thought it started out slowly but then became completely fascinating in that can't-put-it-down sort of way that is such a satisfying read.

The premise is that a young boy named Pi is alone on a lifeboat after the ship carrying him, his parents and animals from the zoo his parents operated in India, sank in the Pacific Ocean. Complicating his survival at sea is the fact that a tiger named Richard Parker also made his way to the lifeboat, giving Pi an additional obstacle to surviving, but also a reason to persevere as Pi promises Richard Parker that he won't let him die. The story is part documentary about the art and science of zookeeping and part magical realism, but overall is an amazing description of the mechanisms, physical, mental and emotional, a human being can devise in order to survive in a hopeless situation.

My sense of hope has never been seriously challenged. Sure, I have the normal thirty-something feeling that maybe some of the more interesting opportunities are closing for me, but in general I feel completely optimistic that if I think about it enough and work hard enough, I can get pretty much whatever I want out of this life of mine. It's all about balancing what I'm willing to do in order to achieve what I want. While reading this book, I couldn't help but wonder how I would respond in a similar situation. No matter how clever or determined Pi remained during his ordeal, it didn't help him get closer to land or rescue, other than that he remained alive long enough for his boat to drift to Mexico. Would I have the inner grit to keep fishing, keep making fresh water out of sea water, keep myself the boss of the tiger on board?

I've read that this book is being circulated among the YA crowd, and I really like to think that middle school kids would open themselves up to this kind of reading experience. Like the mirage in front of you while driving down the highway on a hot summer's day, the meeting of fantasy and reality shimmers more vibrantly than either alone. Books like this give me hope that reading will never become something that I just can't find the time for; like a hungry tiger, I swallowed this story and with my belly still full, begin to look around for more.

House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live

Author: Winifred Gallagher
Date Finished: 3/3/06

I haven't been reading much lately and I have only one excuse: We've moved. Moving is a huge hassle, in case you didn't know. My books are packed, my booklight is still missing and I can barely sit still to read to the kids without looking longingly at the boxes in the family room that still need to be processed.

But, as I was leaving Barnes and Noble last week, this book on the front table caught my eye. Gallagher wrote a series of essays about different rooms of the house, discussing what functions they served historically and in current times and relating information from environmental psychology about how our rooms affect our quality of life. As I look at the mostly empty rooms in the house we've moved into, this book supported my sense that we need to think carefully about what we want to happen in this house before we fill it up with furniture and the always proliferating stuff of our lives.

I confess that I think about houses a lot. I look at the real estate ads and wonder if the houses in the pictures would be the perfect place to organize our lives. Our new house is a very happy place for me. It has enough room to separate the functions of our family, so that we aren't competing for the same space. But still, there is nagging doubt, because the linoleum is cracked, the grout in the tiled hallway is coming loose and there aren't wood floors or granite countertops anywhere to be seen. When I say nagging doubt, I guess I mean competition because I like the look of these things and I sometimes believe that these things affect your happiness. "If only we had a beautiful kitchen with stainless steel appliances, then I could be happy..." So I get anxious about choosing stuff, fearful that I might make a mistake. And on our current budget, mistakes won't be fixed for a very long time.

So as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I don't want to go down that road of equating a pretty house with a happy house. Rison noticed that our house doesn't have very much "fancy stuff" and he's right, it doesn't. I'm not sure if I want "fancy stuff" but I do want stuff that looks good and more importantly, serves a good purpose. I want a rocking chair in the kitchen alcove where I can sit in the sunshine with a fussy baby and look out into the backyard. I want curtains in the bedrooms with street facing windows that pull shut to give us privacy, and I want table lamps so that I'm not reading bedtime stories under the glare of the overhead light fixture. I want a house where brownies are baked regularly, books are read and talked about, kisses and hugs are the normal morning greeting and sunshine fills the rooms.

House Thinking opened my eyes a little more to the possibilities of making this house a home. I may not actually read it again, but I will think about it as I plan and execute and implement the furnishing of this home where I hope to live a calm and satisfying life.

On Beauty

Author: Zadie Smith
Date Finished: 2/9/06

The author blurb in the jacket of this book says only this: "Zadie Smith was born in northwest London in 1975 and still lives in the area. She is the author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man."

1975. 1975! Perhaps I'm taking this a bit too personally (I was born in 1973), but I read between the (three) lines of the blurb this: "Zadie Smith is smarter than you ever will be as evidenced by the fact that in a life of just 30 years, she has already published three novels, so why don't you just delete that word processing program and spare us all. Hmm???" I mean, really. Out of 26 words to give us a sense of who wrote this book, we need to know when she was born?

Okay, I'm through with that. The fact is that On Beauty was a pretty good book. Smith tells us that she modeled the story after E.M. Forster's Howard's End (which I will be rereading in the near future) and she does a good job delivering a story about a group of people whose way of coping with the world affects what happens to them and the people they love.

After finishing the novel, I turned to the trusty Internet to read more about Smith. This article from The Guardian argues that the intellectual deconstruction of a novel may sometimes miss the point; Smith suggests here that there may need to be a language to talk about "loving" books or books that "do us some good". I see a parallel to On Beauty with this line of thinking. Smith's characters in the novel put on their armor of intelligence and analysis and then find themselves weighted down and stepping clumsily on the toes of beauty, love or loyalty. The most satisfying moments in the story for me came when the characters faced up to the inadequacies of their approach to relationships--relationships with art and literature as well as with other people.

For example, Zora, a professor's daughter in the story takes on a cause: keeping a non-student, a street poet/rapper named Carl in a poetry class at the college. She writes letters, delivers arguments to the faculty, circulates petitions and has her heart broken when she sees Carl kissing a thinner, prettier (and I must mention, as this is a crucial plot point, sluttier) girl at a campus party. Zora is a star within her college; professors and students alike admire her and are a little scared of her, but she fails in the context of a romantic relationship. In Zora's mind, her work on Carl's behalf shows her feelings and proves her worthiness; ultimately when he shows his sexual attraction for another girl, Zora loses her footing. Her prior experiences winning the admiration of others are of no use to her here; her superior intellect doesn't lessen the hurt in her heart.


Almost One Month Later

I'm finally finishing and posting this, since February 9th when I finished the book and started writing about it, we've moved, rented out our old house and I've spent approximately sixteen bazillion hours fretting about the state of our lives. None of these things have given me any further insight into this book, so in short, I liked it on an intellectual level and an emotional level. Smith is a fine craftswoman of the novel and I will read more by her.

Garner

Author: Kristin Allio
Date Finished: 1/29/06

This book was the winter Read This! selection of the Litblog Co-op. I was lucky enough to find a copy on the 7 day rack at the local library (in fact, I found copies of four of the five contenders for winter Read This!--is someone at the library wired into the LBC?) and took it home among a rather large pile of books I'd been wanting to read, but could never remember to pick up in the three minutes I have to select books between the end of Story Time and the mad dash to the library's toy room.

Anyway. I read the first LBC Read This! selection, Case Histories and liked it, and got about a third of the way through the second selection, The Angel of Forgetfulness, before deciding that life is just too short. Garner almost met the same fate as The Angel of Forgetfulness, because the opening scenes gave me a dizzying sense of "What's going on here?" This isn't a sense that I have much patience with as a reader. But after putting it aside for a couple of days, I picked it back up, thinking I'd better get to it if I was going to get it back before the shortened due date.

It turns out that the uncertainty of the first few pages continues throughout the novel. The story is of a New Hampshire farming community in 1925; people are losing money on agricultural pursuits and one family takes in boarders from the city for the summer. Their daughter, Frances, is found dead in a stream. What happened? Each narrator has his or her own take, suggesting a range of events from tragic love story to a malicious murder. This story was not a quick fun read; instead, it was a quick read that kept me on my toes as I compared one section to another, looking for a coherent story of what truly happened. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure the novel answered the question, as I thought the ending ambiguous. This is the kind of book that I read reluctantly, but that I think about often. A little challenge to the brain along with an amazing sense of life in rural New Hampshire equaled a fine way for me to spend a few January hours.

Where Rivers Change Directions

Author: Mark Spragg
Date Finished: 1/25/06

This book was on the table at the entryway of our library and since I said I'd give Spragg another chance, I picked it up. This is a collection of essays about Spragg's boyhood running a dude camp with his family near Cody, Wyoming. The essays begin when Spragg is about twelve and continue until he has grown, graduated from college and become an adult watching his mother die of emphysema.

The earliest essays are the most powerful; Spragg remembers and describes a beautiful and wild time and place. In many ways he is given more responsibility and respect than many men ever acquire; he and his brother lead guests on hunts without any additional supervision, responsible for the guests, the pack animals and all the equipment necessary to live in the mountains for a week. Yet, these pieces are filled with a sense of yearning for more. He senses his powerlessness as a child and longs to grow, to cease becoming a man and finally arrive at adulthood.

The essays at the end of the book convey a sense of disappointment with adulthood. Spragg's ideal of manhood described in the early essays is so powerful and larger than life, that it is almost inevitable that his reality will disappoint him. My impression of Spragg through these essays is that he lost his way for a while as a adult, unsure whether the boy that he was has a place in the world where he finds himself.

I often hate these kinds of essays and memoirs with their "if only we could go back to the good old days" longing. Perhaps I'm too pragmatic or even cold-hearted, but my first reaction is often to roll my eyes and mutter, "Oh, grow up," as I finish reading. This book was so beautiful that much of that reaction was tempered, but it is still there. Yes, being an adult involves replacing our childhood sense of anything is possible with a sense of everything is fleeting. But, we were put here to be beautiful, whether we are blossoming into full bloom or withering down to a faded seedhead. To long so palpably for the past is to deny the present. Read Spragg's essays for the beauty of the past he has captured, then go out and live in the present you have been granted.

The Grrl Genius Guide to Life

Author: Cathryn Michon
Date Finished: 1/22/06

It's embarassing to admit that all I've managed to read this year is a children's novel, a made-into-a-movie novella and this chick-lit (if you could call it lit, it's really more like chick-musings) book. And, I really don't have much to say about Grrl Genius except that it passed the time.

I have high hopes for next month though. For one thing, we won't be buying or selling a house, so I should be able to refocus all of my fretting and stewing time toward reading. Also, I'm going to the library today hoping to score a couple of novels from the Lit-Blog Co-op's winter nominee list.

An Unfinished Life

Author: Mark Spragg
Date Finished: 1/8/06

Insomnia struck and I woke up at 3:30 with little hope of sleeping again. I looked over my shelf of TBRs* and found this short novel my father-in-law had given me. So I made a cup of tea and curled up on the couch and visited rural Wyoming for a couple of hours.

This was a pretty good read. It was quick and satisfying and had a happy ending. Unfortunately, I was reading the version with the movie poster on the cover and the character of Mitch sounded an awful lot like Morgan Freeman in my head, making parts of the story a little annoying. The Robert Redford and JLo characters weren't as strongly present in my personal movie, but still intruded from time to time. Spragg wrote the screenplay for the movie, and the novel seems like he wrote it with a movie in mind. The scenes are easily visualized and the characters are made for a movie.

Overall, a fun read for a sleepless night. I would give Spragg another look.

*To Be Read

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Author: Barbara Robinson
Date Finished: 1/1/06

I don't think I've ever read this before, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the movie. This little story about the rough and tumble Herdman kids who take over the church Christmas pageant is short and sweet. Reading it as mother instead of as a child, I liked the idea of Mary as played by Imogene Herdman

sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby.

I checked this out planning to read it to Rison before Christmas, but never got around to it. I will definitely put it on my list for next year.

What is this? Well, it's yet another blog about books. Wherein I will write about what I've read in the past week or day and my thoughts.

Why is this? Well, because I want to do two things. First, keep track of the books I read in 2006. A half-hearted attempt last year showed that I read about 35 books, but I know that it was more than that. This year, I'm going to shoot for 100. Second, sometimes I just need to think about something I've read a little more. I don't really want to join a book club because of time issues, but I'd like to process my opinions a little more before I reach for the next book.

So here it goes: Wherein, I tell whether I've read Anything Good lately?