Book Addiction

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

From the book jacket -

As a child, Charlie Benetto is told by his father, “You can be a mama’s boy or you can be a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both.”  So he chooses his father, and he worships him - right up to the day the man disappears.  An eleven-year-old Charley must then turn to his mother, who bravely raises him on her own, despite Charley’s embarassment and yearnings for a complete family.

Decades later, Charley is a broken man.  His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret.  He loses his job.  He leaves his family.  He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding.

And he decides to take his own life.

He makes a midnight run to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in.  But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery.  His mother - who died eight years earlier - is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened. 

What follows is the one “ordinary” day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain family secrets, and to seek forgiveness.  Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices.  And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.

My thoughts -

So call me a super sap, but I enjoyed the first two Albom books immensely, The Five People You Meet in Heaven slightly more than Tuesdays With Morrie, but I was very happy with both of them, and of course I cried buckets with both books.  This third installment from Albom was decent, but did not live up to his previous two novels.  I liked the premise of this book, that you could spend just one day with that person who you lost too early and need to say so much more to, but the story kind of fell flat for me.  I think it was just too short; there was plenty of detail about Charley’s time growing up and why he needed to spend more time with his mother, but not enough description of the actual “day” that he got with her.  I wanted to know so much more about the two of them, but their day together felt rushed and nothing was really explained that I wanted to be explained.

I’m still happy I picked this book up, it did rouse emotions for me, as his books never fail to do, and in any case I read it in one evening so it was a nice short book to add to my list.  A decent book, but definitely not one of my favorites, and not exactly what I had expected.

6.5 stars

Well I know I’m a little late on this, but I’ve decided to join Dewey’s Weekly Geeks.  This week’s theme is Discover New Blogs, and here are some of the excellent blogs that I’ve discovered since joining Dewey’s challenge:

Kristi at Passion for the Page - LOTS of interesting looking book reviews, and her blog is very well organized.  I like an organized page.

Adventures in Reading - Many book reviews on this site of books I wouldn’t normally pick up, but that’s a good thing, because if I only read reviews of my favorite books I’ll never broaden my horizons at all!

Katherine at A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore - Love the blog title.  And again, lots of great looking books she’s reviewed.

Just A Reading Fool - It’s a new blog, and my blog is also relatively new, and I think it’s important for us newbies to get our names out there!  Also the writer of the blog’s “name” is Unfinished Person, and, well, aren’t we all unfinished people?  So I like that.

Cara at The Curvature - Ok, I must confess, this is not a new blog for me.  In fact, it’s one of my favorite blogs of all time.  But I just wanted to take this opportunity to promote Cara, because she is incredibly intelligent, funny, and articulate, and one of the BEST feminist thinkers/bloggers out there.  So go check out her blog!

This is so much fun, I’m so glad I joined!  I only wish I had the time to sit and look through everyone’s blogs… in time, hopefully I will.

Harriet the Spyby Louise Fitzhugh

From the back cover -

“When I grow up I’m going to find out everything about everybody and put it all in a book.”

So writes Harriet M. Welsch, who is determined to grow up to be a famous author.  In the meantime, she practices by following a regular spy route each day and writing down everything she sees in a secret notebook.

“Janie gets stranger every day.  I think she might blow up the world.  I once saw Miss Elson when she didn’t see me and she was picking her nose.”

Then one morning, Harriet’s life is turned upside down.  Her classmates find her spy notebook and read it out loud.  Harriet’s in big trouble.  The other sixth-graders are stealing her tomato sandwiches, forming a spy-catcher club, and writing notes of their own - all about Harriet!

My thoughts -

When I was a kid, I probably read this book over 100 times.  No kidding, it was absolutely, positively, my favorite book ever.  I even spent a brief (I mean very brief, like two days) period of time writing in my own notebook throughout the day all of my observations about the world around me.  I never went so far as to create a spy route, but I sure did love Harriet M. Welsch.

I hadn’t read Harriet the Spy in probably ten years at least when I decided to mooch it for the nostaligia aspect, and I’m so glad I did.  Rereading this book was like catching up with an old friend, someone that you know so well and knows you better than you know yourself.  I almost could recite every word on every page, but it was still so much fun to read about Harriet again.  I’m definitely keeping this book around for my own kids (when I have them), and probably to reread again later on.

10 stars.

 Read Valentina’s review here.

Belong to Me  by Marisa de los Santos

From the book jacket -

In Belong to Me, we meet charming, insightful Cornelia Brown as she struggles to forge friendships with the women in her new town and discovers that even the most joyful marriage can encounter unexpected, and sometimes frightening, hurdles.  Across the street lives Piper Truitt, a blond, imperious queen bee whose complex inner self breaks to the surface of her picture-perfect life as she cares for her best friend, recently diagnosed with cancer.  And then there is Lake, the feisty mother of sensitive, whip-smart Dev, who has moved to Cornelia’s town so her son can attend a school for gifted students, but who actually harbors a deeper motive.  As their stories unfold, these characters become entangled in a web of trust, betrayal, love, and loss that challenges them in ways they never imagined and that ultimately teaches them what it means for one human being to belong to another.  With wit and charm, de los Santos explores the accidents both big and small that magically converge to make up a life, delivering to us a wonderfully luminous and enchanting story.

My thoughts -

As many of you know, I recently read de los Santos’ first novel, Love Walked In, and fell completely in love with it.  Well this novel was no different in my reaction, I LOVED it.  I loved how my favorite characters from the first novel starred in this one too, and I loved how de los Santos incorporated new characters so seamlessly it felt like they truly belonged from page one.  The woman has a way of writing about people’s lives that is so incredibly spot-on, she writes thoughts exactly the way people think them, and she writes interactions between characters exactly they way they would happen in real life.  Not only that, but her characters are so darn REAL.  Definitely with flaws, but nothing so crazy out of the ordinary that it doesn’t really occur in real life.  I don’t know really what else to say, except to say read these books.  Like I said before, they are not the most literary or elegant books ever, but they are touching, sweet stories, told from very realistic characters’ points of view.  Highly recommended.

10 stars.

Read 3M’s review here.

So this is Renay’s challenge, which I just decided to join, called 342,725 Ways to Herd Cats.  Why she is calling it that, I haven’t a clue, but I love the idea of the challenge.  The point is to recommend 10 books that you love, she will create a master list of everyone’s recommendations, and then you must pick at least 3 books from that list to read for the challenge.  Fun, right?  Well, here is my list.

1. The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell

2. Love Walked In - Marisa de los Santos

3. An Inconvenient Truth - Al Gore

4. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

5. Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld

6. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

7. House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III

8. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood - Rebecca Wells

9. Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson

10. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

I will let you all know when I decide which three recommendations I plan to read! (I’m hoping to find three that I already have in my massive TBR pile.)

I am officially joining Joy’s NonFiction Five Challenge.  I am a person who enjoys nonfiction as much as, if not more than at times, fiction, so this challenge is particularly exciting for me.  I have at least 15 or 20 nonfiction books currently in my TBR pile, so it was really hard to choose just five.  In fact, I was unable to choose just five, so I’m going with six (I would have liked to go with ten but I restrained myself).  Here is my list:

1. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools - Jonathan Kozol

2. Class Matters - correspondents of the New York TImes

3. Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion - edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont

4. The Assault on Reason - Al Gore

5. We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists - edited by Melody Berger

6. Dispatches From the Edge - Anderson Cooper

Hi everyone, so I’ve been using Google Reader for so long now that I just realized many of my favorite blogs are not on my blogroll.  So I spent the last hour or so adding and updating, and I think I’ve remedied the situation. 

If you read my blog and have one yourself, or even if you don’t read mine and just want your blog promoted, and it’s not on the blogroll, PLEASE let me know and I’d be happy to add it.  My apologies if I missed anyone!

Coming up later today: a post on Belong to Me and the possible joining of one, maybe TWO more challenges! Stay tuned.

The Pearl  by John Steinbeck

From the back cover -

Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the Gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence.  Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull’s egg, as “perfect as the moon.”  With the pearl comes hope, the promise of comfort, and of security…

A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man’s nature, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.

My thoughts -

This is the second Steinbeck I’ve read (the first being East of Eden, one of my all time favorite books), and I must say, the man has serious talent for putting words on a page together in such an incredible, flawless way.  This novella is tiny, only 90 pages, but it really packs in important observations about human nature and really amazing passages of literature.  I’d highly recommend The Pearl, especially since if you don’t like it, well it’s only 90 pages so you couldn’t have wasted too much time!

10 stars.

What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg

From Publisher’s Weekly -

“I don’t like my mother. She’s not a good person.” So declares Ginny Young on a trip to California to visit her mother, Marion, whom she hasn’t seen in 35 years. Ginny is only making the trip as a favor to her sister, Sharla, who has called to say she’s awaiting the results of a cancer test. In flashback, Berg (Talk Before Sleep) revisits the events of the girls’ childhood and the moments when their mother’s problems began to reveal themselves. One night, Ginny and Sharla overhear their mother screaming at their father about her unhappiness and telling him that she never wanted children. Then she walks out with no explanations, returning briefly a few months later to explain that she’s not coming back. The following years bring occasional visits that are impossibly painful for all concerned and so full of buried anger that the girls decide to curtail them altogether. When Sharla meets Ginny (now a mother herself) at the airport, and the two see their mother again, there are surprises in store, but not especially shocking ones. The reader, in fact, may feel there is less here than meets the eye: Marion’s flight is never made psychologically credible. Berg’s customary skill in rendering domestic details is intact, but the story seems stitched together. Crucial scenes feel highlighted rather than fleshed out, and Ginny’s bitterness disappears into thin air as she reaches a facile, sentimental conclusion about her mother’s needs.

My thoughts -

Well I am not quite sure what to say about this book.  The first third is a build up to what really happened to Ginny and Sharla’s mother; Ginny makes plenty of references to the fact that her mother is a horrible person, but why she is so horrible is not explained until about a third of the way through.  When that finally surfaces (the fact that she walked out on Ginny, Sharla, and their father without a reasonable explanation for a few days when they were children, and subsequently was no longer allowed in the girls’ lives by their own choice for the next 35 years), it is not shocking in any way, nor is it the least bit understandable why the girls couldn’t accept the fact that their mother was a human being with needs just like them.  I mean, I realize this was probably the 1950’s, but seriously, they were like twelve years old and they couldn’t have SOME compassion for their mom’s needing just a little break from housewifery?  It honestly just annoyed me that they shunned their mother for the rest of their lives because of this one small “mistake” she made. 

When the girls (now adult women now, in their forties) finally reunite with their mother, it is somewhat anticlimactic.  I won’t give anything away, because there are a few small (but predictable) surprises here, but the way the three of them interact after so many years apart is hard for me to accept.  The whole book just didn’t seem all that believable to me, even though I was sucked into the story and was very interested in finding out what REALLY happened to make their mother leave so suddenly, and what would happen when they finally saw each other again.

6 stars.

Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith  by Jon Krakauer

From the back cover -

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits.  He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy.  Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God.

At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl.  Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith.  Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

My thoughts -

I found this book to be fascinating.  I’ve done some research in the past about Mormon Fundamentalism, and it has always left me sad, scared, and mostly angry.  Pure and simply, it is a disgustingly patriarchal culture of chronic misogyny and horrific physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to women and children.  The God I subscribe to does not tolerate any of the above behaviors, and it makes me very sad to read about people who are raised their entire lives thinking that this is the way God thinks.  So because of that, this is a difficult book to read; there is a lot of information and anecdotes by practicing Mormons that made me sick to my stomach and VERY angry. 

Beyond that, the book is full of the history of Mormonism (the world’s fastest growing religion, and the only religion that was created and developed in the modern world) and the differences between the Fundamentalist group and the non-Fundamentalist group.  While that section of the book was interesting, truthfully I was bored in parts and I ended up skipping pages here and there.  It definitely added to the story, but I am just not a person that enjoys reading about wars and battles, and there were at least two chapters fully devoted to the battles that the earliest Mormons fought to keep their religious freedoms alive.  Some people may love those sections, while personally they were my least favorite parts.

And interspersed with all of this is the story of the Lafferty brothers’ brutal murder of one innocent woman and her even more innocent baby.  The parts devoted to this read very much like In Cold Blood  (which I read not too long ago, check out my review) - reading like a novel but a completely true story.  Krakauer even spent a good chunk of the book examining the killers’ mindsets and upbringings, very similar to what Capote did in his true murder account.  I was definitely kept interested in the Lafferty brothers’ story, but just like earlier in the book, I felt completely sad and disgusted by their lives and by their thought process. 

Under The Banner of Heaven  is a very good book, meticulously researched and very well thought out, but it is also very, very sad and may make you want to punch a hole in your wall.  So I’d recommend reading it, but I’d also recommend doing so with caution.

8 stars.