What I'm reading this week (6/18/18)

Last week I finished:

I love a good mystery, and although I tend to avoid thrillers, it's not to say I don't like them. So every now and then I try something that I very well might not like just to try something different. The Perfect Mother was one of those wildcard reads. I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I think it was on the Modern Mrs. Darcy website. Luckily, my library had the audio available right away, kind of amazing considering how new it is. Did I end up liking it? Yes, much more than I'd anticipated. This is the story of a mommy's group, a girls' night out, and a child abduction. The characters are pretty good, their imagined lives and relationships true to form, and the twists and turns kept me listening. The ending I anticipated along the way did not come to pass, and frankly, I think I prefer my ending to the actual book ending. I could have done without some parts, and there was a fair amount of strong language that was rather unnecessary, but overall I enjoyed the book. My rating: 4 stars.

I've long thought of William Stafford as my patron poet. His style and mine are similar, and his quiet poems are full of grace and patience and a gentleness of spirit. Way, way back I read Writing the Australian Crawl, if not for a poetry workshop I took in college, because it was mentioned in the poetry workshop. It has long been a touchstone book for me, one that survived every book purge since the mid-90s--even though I'd long forgotten what was in it. So I decided to re-read it and refresh my writerly self. And this time around, it fell kind of flat. It's made up of several short essays by Stafford on writing and poetry and the nature of creativity and the writing life, and it ends with three interviews with Stafford in the 1970s. The essays were frustratingly...I don't know...dense? vague? I had a hard time keeping my mind from wandering off the page. I didn't enjoy them. They were just too slippery. The interviews I liked much more. It was interesting to hear Stafford's voice as he responds to the interviewers' questions. It was jarring, however, to hear him talk about his poet contemporaries very frankly. His words didn't fit my view of his graciousness, likely somewhat idealistic. Overall, I came away from the book knowing that I no longer can tolerate discussions on aesthetics and the nature of writing, topics so pedantic and pretentious. I suppose at one time I, like most undergrad writers, was into that, but I just have no taste for it anymore. Things are much more black and white for me now. There's more joy and wonder and less worship and esoteric naval gazing. I did come away with a few nuggets of writing advice that are very helpful (e.g. lower your expectations and you'll write a lot more), so my stroll down memory lane wasn't for naught. My rating: 3 stars.

I love a good decorating book, especially ones that show every room of a single home rather than the best rooms of several homes. William Yeoward's William Yeoward at Home is that kind of decorating book. It shows his two homes, one the city, the other a county retreat. There is a lot of emphasis on garden spaces and entertaining options. These sort of felt like filler to me, but they were lovely nonetheless. Yeoward is an Englishman, and I don't remember where his homes are (if he said) other than they're in England. In fact, my main issue with the book is there wasn't enough context. I'm unfamiliar with Yeoward, his work, his decorating career, or his decorating philosophy, and the book didn't give me any information about these things. The prose seemed to just be there to fill the white space, and although I do like decorating books that focus on photos of spaces and rooms, I do like the text to have some depth. All in all, this wasn't a bad book, but it could have been better. My rating: 3 stars.

This week I'll be reading:

I had a hard time last week settling on something to read, so I moved this one up. It's SO good. As good as expected.

Last week I abandoned:

Last week I abandoned The Devil's Mercedes almost 100 pages in. It's not bad, but I just wasn't interested enough.

And I reluctantly abandoned The Way It Is. I enjoyed it, but the way it was put together really affected my reading of it. To save space, there were several poems on a page, and there was no natural pause between the poems. I just wasn't enjoying it for that reason. Weird, but true. I'm glad I don't run upon this very often. It really does a disservice to poetry.

My Kindle book:

I am currently doing a HUGE decluttering project at home. I have a friend from work who's agreed to sell things on eBay for me, so I'm putting together boxes and boxes and boxes of things to purge. This book is very helpful.

My evening reads:

I started And Short the Season by Maxine Kumin last week. It's fine, but not stellar.

I hope to kick up my reading speed of The Antelope in the Living Room this week.

 

My audiobook:

I started Jon Meacham's Destiny and Power, his amazing biography of President George H. W. Bush. It really is wonderful and engaging.

What I'm reading this week (6/11/18)

Last week I finished:

As you know, I love to read about the Kennedys, and since there are so many of them, the books are endless. Never before, however, have I found a biography of Eunice Kennedy Shriver alone. From my previous reading, I'd decided she was a unique character within the Kennedy family, and Eunice by Eileen McNamara tells us why. The fifth of the nine Kennedy children, Eunice was raised as the others to be tough, competitive, and Catholic, to realize that "to whom much is given much is expected." Joe Kennedy, however, true to a father of his times, directed the majority of his paternal energy to his sons, Joe Kennedy Jr., and then Jack Kennedy, then Bobby and Ted, to rise to the highest positions in the land. Jack, of course, became president, Bobby was Jack's Attorney General and ran for the presidency, and Ted became a senator, a job he kept for nearly 50 years. But some say that of all the Kennedy children, it was Eunice Kennedy who had what it took to become a great president. But this was not something that was considered in the 1950s and 1960s, so Eunice put her enormous energies into social causes, especially helping juvenile delinquents and the mentally retarded (I'm using the terms of the times here) and fighting for the rights of the unborn and against the spread of abortion. Likely due to her feelings for her older sister, Rosemary, who suffered some sort of mental retardation (and later a botched lobotomy), she made mental abnormalities her cause. She established Camp Shriver on the expansive yard of her family's home, and her children spent their summers with mentally retarded youth who were learning to swim and ride horses and just generally run and jump and play freely. This idea became what is now Special Olympics, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary next month. Eunice was a good look at the remarkable woman who never took no for an answer and changed many lives with her tireless work. It examines her place in the family without ever losing focus and becoming a biography of her more famous siblings. And it takes us through the years Shriver spent advocating for the less fortunate. She pushed her agenda to the forefront of JFK's presidency, and the last legislation he signed into affect before his assassination was the Community Mental Health Act which changed the lives of scores of Americans with mental health issues. Reading this book made me hope that someone will soon write a biography of Sargent Shriver, Eunice's husband, who supported his wife without question, who gave up his own political ambitions again and again for the Kennedy brothers, and who brought a little bit of humanity to the way his children were raised, reminding them their last name was Shriver, not Kennedy. Parts of the book were rather slow, and overall I had a hard time reading this book at the pace I normally read, but I never felt the book was anything other than fair, showing Shriver's faults and strengths in equal measure. I learned a lot. My rating: 3.5 stars.

I'd had Capital Gaines on my TBR pile since it came out last October. I finally picked up my Kindle copy (I also have a paper copy) and finished it last week. I'd expected it to be good, to be fun, to have some good advice, but I didn't expect it to be as good as it was. Chip Gaines, married to the style maven, Joanna Gaines, and one-half of the design team behind Fixer Upper and the Waco, TX, Magnolia enterprise, delivers a handy, heartfelt, and humorous account of some of his failures in business, how he and Joanna listen for divine guidance to drive their business decisions, and what he hopes we all can learn about chasing dreams and being good people. Part business book, part self-help book, I actually found the book inspiring. Gaines is someone with capital-V Vision. He is a dreamer who acts on his dreams quickly and welcomes the growth that failure brings. He's unfailingly optimistic, unabashedly trusting, and radically bold. I love reading books by people like this because I am definitely not these things. He talks about how different he and Joanna are, how she likes to plan, run the numbers, and feel completely at peace with a decision before moving ahead. He likes to jump in and deal with issues as they come up. I have the same dynamic in my marriage. I'm married to a capital-I Idealist, an impatient (and I mean that in the best possible way) man who does his thinking and doing at the same time. Me, I often let "perfect" get in the way of "done". It's a classic Mars/Venus scenario, and I loved reading about how the couple deals with it. Chip touches on a lot of things in the book, including two things I've always admired the couple for: their fidelity to Waco, Texas (just think of all their Magnolia businesses have done for the place!), and their fidelity to following God's lead. This one really surprised me, and I think it would be a great book for college grads and others who are set to make some work or business changes. My rating: 4.5 stars.

I've gotten better this year at quitting books that I don't like or that don't meet my standards in writing or morality, but every now and then I still finish a book that I really shouldn't have. The Alice Network was one of those. I did not like this book. I felt the author's plot was above her writing ability, and I didn't care for the characters (I've met them all in other authors' books) nor many of the situations in the book. The plot follows Eve, a spy in World War I, and Charlie (Charlotte), a pregnant teen in 1947 who's looking for her cousin, Rose, presumed dead in World War II. Charlie enlists the help of cantankerous Eve to help her find her cousin, but Eve is also in search of someone herself because she has some scores to settle. I'm not used to the amount of foul language and immoral situations that this book suffered from in my historical fiction. Generally, historical fiction is pretty clean and any nastiness must only be hinted at; it's kind of the unspoken rule of historical fiction. This one used all the four-letter words you can think of (including the one Samantha Bee recently called Ivanka Trump), the three main female characters all were pregnant without being married, there was an abortion, there was violence, there were sex scenes. It made me sick to my stomach. The plots did resolve into a neat package, but the writing was not masterful, which made the book feel cheap. I have no problem with war situations that are real and honest, but here they felt like misunderstood backdrops for a much simpler plot of romance, sex, and revenge. Maybe that was my biggest problem here: it wasn't serious enough about the history, a very real and horrific history was just a prop. I love history and hate to see it trivialized. I can't recommend this one, but it has been very popular and well-received. To each her own. I guess you just need a tougher stomach than mine for this one. My rating: 2 stars. 

 

Next up:

Finally, finally, finally.

I'd planned to read The Last Castle next, but I just couldn't get into it, so I settled on another from my TBR.

My Kindle read:

I'm not far in yet, but I'm working on clearing out some storage in the basement, and I need a boost.

 

 

I continue with:

Due to serial headaches and no nighttime reading, I haven't gotten far on any of these. I'd like to finish Writing the Australian Crawl soon, as that's the one I'm having the most trouble sitting down with.

My audiobook:

I just began The Perfect Mother, and it's quite engaging.

 

 

June 2018 reading list

I read so many novels in May that I was ready for a good dose of nonfiction in June. Plus, my TBR is getting a little lopsided toward nonfiction again. So if you have any fiction titles to try, I'd love your recommendations! A number of these have been on my list for a long time, and I'm so excited to finally get to them (Capital Gaines, The Last Castle, Destiny and Power). I also lucked out on some audiobook holds at the library (The Alice Network, The Perfect Mother). But the book I'm most excited to read this month is Fredrik Backman's Us against You.

Memoirs & Biographies

Nonfiction

Fiction

 

Poetry

 

Decorating

 

 

What I'm reading this week (6/4/18)

Last week I finished

I've always been interested in the press corps that follows presidential candidates around the country for months, even years, prior to a presidential election. I'd always wondered  how it worked, exactly. How much access did they have to the candidate? Did they personally support the candidate or did that even matter? How much of their lives did they have to put on hold in order to chase a story that would become history? Chasing Hillary answers these questions. In this journalistic memoir, Amy Chozick of the New York Times gives the inside scoop on her years following Hillary Clinton's two bids for the presidency. I had several takeaways from this book, including the answers to my basic questions about the life of an inbed (or as Chozick calls them, "travelers"), but also about Hillary Clinton's campaign and the traveling press's role in reporting it. The thing that struck me most was just how surprised the liberal media (including newspapers and cable news) were by everything that happened (just this week it was reported that President Obama as "blindsided" by the election results). Nothing unfolded without flabbergasting the candidate, her staff, and the press. All of us here in "fly-over country" were just shaking our heads while folks on the coasts were scratching theirs over the fact that Trump was surging and establishment candidate hopefuls like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were dropping out one by one. The travelling press never seemed to know which stories were big stories (the email scandal, the "deplorable" comment, etc.). Hillary seemed to loathe the press as much as Donald Trump, but at least Trump still played ball. He showed up the tell the press he didn't like them. Hillary didn't give press conferences for weeks, months. She didn't trust even the mainstream liberal media, so she didn't connect. She miscalculated, and she didn't make her way to states like Wisconsin (ahem) which handed the election to President Trump. The campaign never seemed to realize an unconnected candidate is sure to lose, a candidate with a "likability" problem needs to reevaluate the way she is connecting with "the everydays" (as the American electorate were called inside her campaign). The Clinton camp relied too much on old sense data from their previous campaign and "knew" they had certain groups in the bag. But they didn't. They seemed to have no vision. They didn't see Bernie Sanders as a threat until he started pulling the rug out from under them in key states, and then they scrambled to maintain their lead in others. And no one seemed to see Donald J. Trump as a threat (except for us adorable deplorables in the middle). They didn't understand that independent women would not vote for Hillary just because she was a woman, because those of us in the middle states realize that is the very definition of sexist. In short, the book offers no new insights regarding the shortsightedness of the campaign or the press. It's basically just a play-by-play of high and low points of Secretary Clinton's candidacy. I was hoping to come away with a more sympathetic view of Hillary as a person, but while there was no gushing here, there was also very little good to say about the democratic nominee Chozick saw day and night for months, the candidate who did not seem to like her at all. If you were not someone who followed the race closely, watched a couple hours of news coverage each night, or kept abreast of the minutiae of the campaign, this isn't a book for you. It's an account written in such a way as to not explain or remind the reader of these events, but just to recall them as they happened. That didn't necessarily bother me, I definitely spent enough time watching the race to keep here, but it does limit the audience that will get much out of the account. My rating: 3 stars.

If you are like me and enjoy a good historical mystery without a lot of violence and bloodshed, you'll be happy to know about The Mitford Murders, the first in a new mystery series by the woman who puts together the Downton Abbey companion books. (I believe she's the niece of Julian Fellowes.) In this book, we meet Louisa, who grew up poor in London and is escaping a tyrannical uncle. Louisa takes a job as nursery maid for the titled Mitford family. She and the eldest Mitford daughter, Nancy, are fascinated by the murder of a World War I nurse, Florence Nightingale Shore (a niece of the famous nurse), on an English train. Together with a young railway officer, they launch their own investigation where the official investigation left off. This is a long book, over 400 pages, and I think in print it would have dragged, but I "read" this one audio, and it was a nice listen. The writing here is expository, one declarative sentence after another. I find that kind of writing serviceable for mysteries (though undesirable in other fiction), but unengaging. That made the audio a good choice for me. Beyond the rather uninspired writing, my only real complaint is that I just didn't understand why the Mitfords had anything to do with the book. Why choose them? Why choose any real family? Why not just write a straightforward mystery and make up a family for Louisa to land employment with? I guess it was fun for the author to imagine, but it really made me scratch my head. But overall, I did enjoy listening to this one, and I look forward to others in this cozy British series. My rating: 4 stars.

Next up

Next in my unofficial mission to read all the Kennedy books...Eunice, a biography of Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

I continue with...

This really is a wonderful book.

Last week I began

 

I started four of my five evening reads at once last week because I like variety. :) The Antelope in the Living Room is a light memoir about marriage. Writing the Australian Crawl is a re-read from my college poetry workshop days. The Way It Is is a re-read of William Stafford poems. And At home is a decorating book by William Yeoward.

 

 

My audiobook

This isn't quite what I expected, but I think I'll stick with it.

May 2018 wrap-up

My May reading encompassed everything from fundamental Mormonism to World War II code breaking, from marriage to a first lady's fictionalized lesbian love affair, from nature poetry to the history of Camp David. Most of my ratings this month were a little low, perhaps because I read a number of "hot" books that appealed to me more out of their timeliness than because of their plots or subject matter. One-word reviews are linked to full reviews below. 

fascinating

4 stars

charming

4 stars

tedious

3.5 stars

annoying

3 stars

difficult

4.5 stars

well-written

4 stars

wonderful

4.5 stars

serviceable

3 stars

average

3 stars

long

3 stars

sweet

4 stars

fantastical

3 stars

 

depressing

3 stars

 

uplifting

5 stars

 

yummy

5 stars

low-key

4 stars