Friday Fill Ins

I’m looking forward to nicer weather next week.

I don’t handle sitting in traffic very well.

Ice cream is something I could eat every day.

Warmth and sunlight absolutely inspire me like nothing else, they feed my soul.

Bedtime, here I come!

I enjoy on others, but would never get for myself, tattoos.

And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to catching up on LOST, tomorrow my plans include going to a work party, and Sunday I want to read alll day (but I can’t, because I have a lot of stuff to catch up on)!

I hope you all have wonderful weekends

Booking Through Thursday … favorite female character

Who is your favorite female lead character? And why? (And yes, of course, you can name more than one . . . I always have trouble narrowing down these things to one name, why should I force you to?)

Although I realize this may be a popular answer, I absolutely have to say, without a doubt, Hermoine Granger from the Harry Potter series is my favorite female lead character.  She is just so incredibly fierce, courageous, and strong.  Plus, she is just so darn smart, and always knows to look for an answer to any problem in a book (same as me!).  I just think she is SUCH a good role model for younger girls – she truly has a feminist spirit about her, something not many female characters do.  JK Rowling is a genius for writing her into the books, I think.

What about your favorite female character?

6 word memoir

I was tagged by the wonderful Trish and the lovely Chartroose for this meme (this is my first time EVER being tagged for something!  and by two excellent people!  I feel so honored ), and the rules are as follows:

As I read yet another book review of a memoir this weekend, my husband told me that I should write one. I said that my story would be much too short and rather boring so when I ran across the following book I decided it was just my speed. A six word memoir! Written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Expecting: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were- For Sale: baby shoes, never worn. There’s a video on Amazon with examples from the book, it sounds like a fun read! I’d like to start a six word memoir meme and here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 .Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

So as happy as I am to be tagged for something (this means actual human beings are reading my blog… and coming back to read it more than once… seriously guys this is a big deal for me), I am SOO not good at stuff like this.  So after much thought, I finally came up with:

Life is family, books, and love.

Thanks again ladies for tagging me, I really appreciate it.  Since I’m still relatively unknown in the blog world I think I’ll spare myself the agony of tagging people who don’t even read my blog, and say instead if you feel like doing this meme and you read it here please feel free to let me know so I can read your 6 word memoir!

Review – The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

From amazon.com -

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. “To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.” Forty years later the stories and history continue.  With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

My thoughts -

I enjoyed this book immensely.  The portions told by the mothers about their lives growing up in China were fascinating, because Tan crafted a remarkable story for each mother about love, loss and sacrifices back in China.  All four of the mothers had such high hopes for their daughters, that they wouldn’t have to deal with any of the tragedies they themselves survived in their childhoods.  It was so interesting, then, to read about these mothers through their daughters’ eyes – what they thought of their mothers’ old-fashioned, old school Chinese ways, how they felt they could never live up to their mothers’ high expectations, and how they both loved and hated their mothers, creating incredible internal conflicts for all four daughters.  Amy Tan’s writing is fluid and very accessible, this is the first book of hers that I have read, and I really enjoyed the way she wrote it.  The only gripe I have about this novel is that I feel like I didn’t get to know the characters as much as I wanted to.  Perhaps if the book was longer there would have been more substance to each woman, or maybe if Tan focused on two mother-daughter relationships instead of four.  Having said that, I still really loved this book and am happy to recommend it.

Rating: 9/10

Review – Number the Stars

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

From the back cover -

Ten year old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend, Ellen Rosen, often think about the way life was before the war.  It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching in thier town.  The Nazis won’t stop.  The Jews of Denmark are being “relocated” so Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family.  Then Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission.  Somehow she must find the strength and courage to save her best friend’s life.  There is no turning back.

My thoughts -

I read this book for purely sentimental reasons.  I LOVED it when I was a little kid, and when I saw someone reviewed it a while back I decided to mooch it and reread.  Obviously, it lived up to my every expectation because I practically had the entire story memorized anyway.  But it was a fun read, curled up in bed one night I read it in one sitting and I’m glad I revisited it.  I’d definitely recommend this book to kids and adults (like I said in another post about kids books, I’m terrible with knowing what books are good for what ages, so when I say “kids” I’m not totally sure what I mean by that).

Rating – 10/10

Booking through Thursday – paperback or hardback?

All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?

Personally, I love books that look like they have been loved, read a lot, dog eared, whatever.  So paperbacks fit that bill much better than hardcovers, which tend to retain their shape through multiple readings.  Paperbacks are also a LOT easier for me to hold (especially when lying down and reading) so I like them for that reason too.  I like the look of certain hardcovers, especially bigger books, so I’d maybe want a few of those too, but generally I prefer paperbacks.  And not mass market ones, I severely dislike the pocket sized books for some reason, so they’d all have to be trade paperbacks.

Review – The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

From Kirkus Reviews -

A vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality, in this case, of Hmong immigrants from Laos. Fadiman, a columnist for Civilization and the new editor of the American Scholar, met the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, Calif., in 1988, when their daughter Lia was already seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. In the Lees’ view, Lia’s soul had fled her body and become lost. At age three months Lia had had her first epileptic seizure–as the Lees put it, “the spirit catches you and you fall down.” Lia’s treatment was complex–her anticonvulsant prescriptions changed 23 times in four years–and the Lees were sure the medicines were bad for their daughter. Believing that the family’s failure to comply with his instructions constituted child abuse, Lia’s doctor had her placed in foster care. A few months after returning home, Lia was hospitalized with a massive seizure that effectively destroyed her brain. With death believed to be imminent, the Lees were permitted to take her home. Two years later, Fadiman found Lia being lovingly cared for by her parents. Still hoping to reunite her soul with her body, they arranged for a Hmong shaman to perform a healing ceremony featuring the sacrifice of a live pig in their apartment. Into this heart-wrenching story, Fadiman weaves an account of Hmong history from ancient times to the present, including their work for the CIA in Laos and their resettlement in the US, their culture, spiritual beliefs, ethics, and etiquette. While Fadiman is keenly aware of the frustrations of doctors striving to provide medical care to those with such a radically different worldview, she urges that physicians at least acknowledge their patients’ realities. A brilliant study in cross-cultural medicine.

My thoughts -

This book utterly and completely fascinated me.  Fadiman did SUCH an excellent job with her incredibly diligent research about the Hmong culture, the Lee family, every single doctor or hospital that ever treated Lia, and medicine in general.  I was actually a little nervous that I wouldn’t enjoy this, because my best friend who is a nurse lent it to me and I assumed she enjoyed it so much because she works in the medical field… and of course, I was all wrong.  I was engrossed in the story up until the very last page.  Fadiman spent a few chapters on the history of the Hmong culture (Hmong people are from Laos, but because of an American sponsored war which they fought for us, they were kicked out of their home country), and those chapters were very enlightening because previously I had no knowledge of the Hmong people and their distinctly interesting culture.  The main focus of the book was the collision of the two cultures – how different Western medicine is from the Hmong’s traditional beliefs about healing – and how these differences can, or should, get resolved in order to treat Hmong people.  In this case, the gap between the two cultures was more like an ocean and for Lia, cultural understanding by her doctors and social workers came too late.  After reading the book, I found myself really thinking about who was right in all this.  Obviously, living in the United States, we are huge fans of our doctors, hospitals, medicines, and general ability to cure diseases and ailments, we believe in all of these things deeply.  But I found myself imagining how I would feel if I went to a country like Laos and they wanted to cure my children using herbal remedies and shamen when I know that what my kid really needs is a cast on his arm or some pain medication.  Thinking about that, I can only feel perhaps a tenth of the frustration and anger the Lees must have felt when their daughter’s doctors did not try to understand their cultural ways of healing and treatment, and continued to give Lia medical treatments and drugs even among her parents’ protests.  But on the other hand, doctors take an oath to save lives no matter what, so in treating Lia they were simply doing their jobs to the best of their abilities.  This book really, really made me think about these questions as well as many others, and I’d highly recommend reading it.

Rating: 10/10

Read Andi’s review here and Jeane’s review here.

The Novella Challenge

So I decided today to join another challenge, mostly because it is going to be pretty easy and will definitely help me reach my goal of reading 100 books this year.  The challenge is The Novella Challenge and it is hosted by Trish over at Hey Lady!  The challenge is to read 6 novellas from April to September 2008.  A novella is defined as a short novel between 100-250 pages (well that is Trish’s definition anyways and it works for me just fine).  My list is as follows:

1.  Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

2.  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – Dai Sijie

3.  Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

4.  Shopgirl – Steve Martin

5.  The Pearl – John Steinbeck

6.  Maggie: A Girl of the Streets – Stephen Crane

I will get started reading these as soon as April hits, so wish me luck!

Review – Bridge to Terabithia

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

From the back cover -

Jess Aarons’ greatest ambition is to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade.  He’s been practicing all summer and can’t wait to see his classmates’ faces when he beats them all.  But on the first day of school, a new kid, a new girl, boldly crosses over to the boys’ side of the playground and outruns everyone.

That’s not a very promising beginning for a friendship, but Jess and Leslie Burke become inseparable.  It doesn’t matter to Jess that Leslie dresses funny, or that her family has a lot of money – but no TV.  Leslie has imagination.  Together, she and Jess create Terabithia, a magical kingdom in the woods where the two of them reign as king and queen, and their imaginations set the only limits.  Then one morning a terrible tragedy occurs.  Only when Jess is able to come to grips with this tragedy does he finally understand the strength and courage Leslie has given him.

My thoughts -

I actually never got around to reading this one as a child, so when I saw that they were making a movie about it a few months ago, I mooched it just in case I ever saw the movie I’d have read the book first, and I finally read it the other day.  I can see why this book won the Newbery Medal (in 1978) because it sent a great message to kids and was very well written.  I think the topics are a little heavy for littler kids, but still ok to read about, in my opinion.  I don’t know, when I was in fifth grade I was reading like high school age appropriate books so I’m never sure what types of books are good for what age kids now that I’m an adult.  But I really liked this book, I’ll be sure to pass it along to my niece when she gets older (a LOT older, she is 5 months now haha), and will be recommending it to my future children as well, it’s definitely one of those timeless books that will never grow out of style.

Rating – 9/10

Review – Cane River

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

From amazon.com:

Lalita Tademy’s riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable “bleaching of the line” as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area’s white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.

The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.

When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.

In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman, she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma ‘Tite (short for “Mademoiselle Petite”). She resented her great-grandmother’s skin-color biases, which were as much a part of Tademy’s memory as were her great-grandmother’s trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune 500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors.

My thoughts:

Typically, I do not enjoy family saga type stories.  Every one I have read just seemed too long and drawn out, I never end up liking the characters, and it seems like everyone I pick up I fail to enjoy the writing style of the author as well (two good examples – Fall on  Your Knees and We Were the Mulvaneys).  And honestly, this book fell into all those categories too.  It simply was not my type of book.  I tried to like it, and some parts I breezed through, finding myself caring about the characters and curious about what would happen to them, but generally I was not overly impressed with it.  The cool thing is, however, that I didn’t realize until midway through the book that Tademy wrote this about her actualfamily lineage.  The last third of the book is the story of Tademy’s great grandmother.  When I understood the painstaking work that must have gone into her research about her own family to put the book together, I appreciated Tademy a lot more.  I still didn’t love the book, but I think it’s pretty amazing how much work went into it (and probably crazy emotions, can you imagine learning actual facts about ancestors that were slaves?).  I do think this book was very good, it just was not my cup of tea personally.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Read Eva’s review here.