What I'm reading this week (6/25/18)

Last week I finished:

Once again, I'm tasked with writing a helpful review of a book I love, and I'm at a loss. This is becoming a theme with Fredrik Backman books. Us Against You, released earlier this month, is the follow-up book to last year's Beartown. Set in a Swedish forest town (though you'd never know it was a "foreign" book), this is the story of a small community that loves hockey and relies on it for economy, entertainment, and raising its young men. It's just a game, and it's also much more than a game. All of the characters from the first book are back (except Kevin's family), and I would advise reading Beartown before this one as no amount of plot review in the new book really steeps you in the story. These are serious books, quite unlike the tone of Backman's previous work, and although I'm a big fan of Ove and even Britt-Marie, these books have a depth to them that his previous books couldn't have. They are masterfully written, and Backman is phenomenally gifted at producing well-fleshed sympathetic characters and presenting us with both sides of every issue without necessarily telling us what to think. At its heart, I believe this is a story about loyalty, about honor and trust, about how communities can be built and dismantled by small acts and words. The plot, essentially is this: after the star hockey player leaves the town after a scandal (Beartown), the hockey club loses its funding to the Hed club and a politician secures funding but also manufactures controversy and orchestrates trouble pitting Beartown and Hed against each other. Maya is attempting to heal from sexual assault; Benji's secret comes to light, people are lost, young boys fight savage fights, and hooligans take care of business their own way. Although it's a heavy book, and your heart will break a little, the humanity of it will put you back together. I cannot recommend this one highly enough, but do read Beartown first. My rating: 5 stars.

I have a shelf of chunky presidential biographies waiting to be read. I want to read them all, but they seem to take so much effort. So often biographies are slow, detailed slogs, and it's hard to look forward to subjecting yourself to one. Occasionally, though, there is a stand-out gem that gets the tone right, that keeps the pace, and that shows a whole, balanced picture of an important person. Jon Meacham created one of these with Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. I decided to listen to this on audio, but at times I felt bad that I hadn't read this one in paper. I like nothing more than sitting on the couch with a good, thick biography or memoir open on my lap. You just never know which doorstops will be fun. The difference, I think, in addition to skillful writing, is the amount of text that can be presented in the subject's own words. In this case, Meacham had access to President Bush's and first lady Barbara Bush's diaries, so you could trust that what you were reading (or hearing) was factual, and you could also get a feel for the president's thoughts and feelings, humor and heartbreak, and personal traits like humility or stubbornness. I feel that I got a more complete picture of President Bush than ever before. Because he never really wrote a presidential memoir like most modern presidents, that picture was missing. Although I loved President George W. Bush's biography of his dad, 41, it was a rather unapologetically fawning portrait of his dad. That didn't bother me, after all, wouldn't most folks present the father they revere in the best possible light? But it's nice to have a little more balanced view, and Meacham presented that. Meacham takes us through Bush's life from his privileged upbringing to his Navy combat missions in World War II, from his oil adventures in Texas to his years in politics: chairman of the RNC, congressman, UN ambassador, envoy to China, director of the CIA, two-term vice president, and one-term president. It tells of the heartbreaks of his life: losing his four-year-old daughter to leukemia and losing his reelection bid in 1992. And it tells of the joys: meeting Barbara Piece, seeing his sons elected as governors of Texas and Florida, and seeing his namesake become president in 2000. It's a full portrait that moves quickly and covers a lot of ground. The audio version is well done, too. I'll not hesitate in the future to read another Jon Meacham book; this one earned my respect. My rating: 4.5 stars.

The other day my husband reminded me that I have a couple knee-high stacks of books in my study (which we call Grandma's Room) that have no home. "It's not a storage room," he gently reminded me. Yet, I often feel that I'm at the place in my book culling that I cannot get rid of one more book or I might as well get rid of them all. Perhaps that makes sense to some of you bibliophiles out there. I sometimes wish I was the kind of person who could get everything from the library and not need to own the books I read and love, but I am not that girl. As we were talking about the problem, the conviction arose in me that what I really needed to do was undertake a huge decluttering project throughout the whole house. Creating space elsewhere, I was sure, would make the book problem seem more manageable. We've been in our house for seven years now, and you know how houses get in seven years of things coming in and not as much going out, how you get used to seeing certain piles or areas of clutter (how I hate calling my things "clutter"), how you get used to frustratingly packed closets because "you need all that stuff." I knew I had way too much packed away in our basement storage area, stuff I packed up shortly after we moved in that hasn't seen the light of day since. And if it isn't being enjoyed, what good is it to anyone? So I began going through everything (saving books for last), and I'm at about the halfway point. Maybe. As I began the process, I also began Dana White's Decluttering at the Speed of Life (I read it on Kindle), and it was tremendously helpful. White uses what she calls the "container method" which forces you to see your house and the shelves and drawers and closets and boxes in it as containers. Once a container is full, no more can go into it, and if you want to add to your container, something from it must go. Not an earthshattering view, but helpful nonetheless. The problem is when most folks fill up a bookshelf or china hutch or Christmas tote, they add another bookshelf or china hutch or tote. She stresses that this is not a book about organizing. She also has two questions to ask while decluttering: Where would I look for this object if I needed it?, and Would I know I had this item if I needed it? I didn't find these questions helpful at all. I knew what I had (at least 97% of it), and I knew where it was. My problem was the amount of stuff I had. At any rate, once I started going through things, I hit my stride. This isn't my first rodeo. I've done similar whole-dwelling decluttering projects before, but this one should have been harder as much of what I was forced to go through were family items: dishes from my grandmothers, sentimental collections, a box of baby clothes I was saving for a baby I never had. But I was going through things, I realized several things: 1.) you really do reach a point (I remember this from past purges) where keeping things doesn't feel nearly as good as letting them go and gaining the space they occupied, 2.) that the woman who packed these things away isn't the same women who unpacked them this month, 3.) this isn't my mother's life, my mother's house, or my mother's life--if I never use my AirBake cake pan, I can get rid of it without shame, even though my mother uses her cake pan at least once a week, and 4.) you don't have to keep everything from your grandmother's house just because it was your grandmother's; after all, she might not have liked that blue glass fruit compote any more than you do! So, the project continues though the book is read. I've read lots of decluttering books over the years, and this one was quite helpful, though I might prefer the way Peter Walsh's books force you to deal with the emotions you have toward your stuff, and I kind of liked how Marie Kondo addresses the joy you should feel toward your possessions. Case in point: the other day I realized that even though all of my blouses fit on the "container" (i.e. closet rod) allotted them, and even though I wore them all, there were many I didn't love, and a lot I didn't even like. Maybe White thought I was smart enough to know those blouses should be donated, but until this week, I was not. Kondo would have told me that. My one complaint is that while White took us through each room of the house, she never talked about those spaces that are meant for storage like the attic, basement, garage, etc. These spaces by definition have lots of room for lots of containers, but how do you decide what's reasonable? I would have liked some guidance on this. All in all, I found this book helpful, and I recommend it to others trying to get rid of things for a happier life. I'll end with two of my favorite quotes from the book: "I made a conscious choice to live in the phase of life I was in." and "Treasure, don't store." My rating: 4 stars.

P.S. I've packed 22 boxes worth of stuff to get rid of. Anything anyone needs? I probably have it! :)

 

I believe And Short the Season is the second book of poetry I've read by Maxine Kumin. While I generally enjoy her poems and find them approachable and varied and sometimes charming, I don't enjoy how many of her poems become bully pulpits of liberal agendas. I skipped those poems in this collection (there were a handful of them), and while I enjoyed the rest, and marked a couple to return to, I wasn't blown away with the collection. I wonder if poetry books of 100 pages or less are just too short to enjoy. It's like entering a tunnel and exiting it a few seconds later--you can't remember anything about the tunnel other than you went through it. So while I complain about the length of some poetry collections (huh-hem), there is a happy middle ground of say 200 pages that seems perfect. At any rate, I'd call this one about average. My rating: 3 stars.

 

This week I'll be reading:

I've read so much great advance press for this book, and I'm so excited to begin it. I could go for a nice family saga right now.

Last week I began:

 

Joe Biden's Promise Me, Dad went on Kindle sale on Father's Day, and I 1-clicked it and started it as soon as I finished my decluttering Kindle read. It's not really what I expected.

I also began Billy Collins' Picnic, Lightning, and it is fabulous. So far I've read a lot of poems I'm familiar with.

This week I'll finish:

This book, only 200 pages, is taking me so long to read. I'll need to pick up my speed on it to finish it this week.

 

My audiobook:

With Fiona Davis's third novel coming out soon, I decided to read the first two first. This week I'm starting The Dollhouse on audio.

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.