What I'm reading this week (7/29/19)

Things have been crazy this summer, and something had to give last week. Therefore, no update last week. Therefore, a big update this week.

What I've finished in the last two weeks:

I believe I have read all of Ruth Reichl's books, and I have loved some and I have not liked others. So, I was a bit anxious about her latest, Save Me the Plums, not knowing which category it would fall into. I put off reading it for weeks. Turns out, I needn't have feared, I liked it quite a bit. This is the story of Reichl's time as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. If you've read her novel, Delicious!, many parts will feel familiar. And if you've read her My Kitchen Year, you'll know what came after Save Me the Plums. Owing, in part, to how busy I was at the time I was reading this, my attention waxed and waned throughout. I had an especially hard time keeping track of who was who, perhaps because I didn't really understand their positions at the magazine. Overall, I enjoyed the book. I did not like the unflattering way she described people--did she think none of them would ever read her book? Also, I don't have a lot of warmth in my heart for the kind of snobby thinking and culture that values Gourmet, so I wasn't particularly heartbroken when it went under (in the book--I never noticed in real life). My rating: 4 stars.

When I saw that my public library system had a copy of Maid on audio, I decided I'd give it a try. I'll try a lot of things on audio I won't in print, owing to the speed with which I can get through an audio. This one was about what I was expecting. It's the memoir of a working-poor single mom. In it she talks about using seven forms or government assistance and still struggling to make ends meet. For me, the book was equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating. I don't like fiction where the characters keep making bad choices, and I really don't like it in nonfiction. I kept wanting to shake her. Let's continue to drill it into our girls that there are three things they can do that will almost guarantee they won't end up in poverty: 1. Get a college degree. 2. Don't have a baby outside of marriage. 3. Marry a man who also works. Let's stop making this theme universal. Let's stop allowing our young women not to take responsibility for their lives. Let's stop the feeling in all of our young people that when their life is hard, someone else should fix it for them or save them from it. At the same time, let's remove some of the government red tape when it comes to getting immediate short-term aid. And let's correct the situation that makes working less lucrative than not working. Lots of blame to go around here, but unfortunately, I felt the book often blamed the wrong things and went for the cheap emotional pull rather than the depth of an honest discussion. My rating: 3 stars. P.S. You wanna know something about this book that irritated me? At one point the author is trying to convince an aid worker that they have to give her food stamps for organic milk because she won't give her daughter skim milk because of all the added sugar that's pumped into it. I was curious about this as I'd never heard anything about skim milk having added sugar. So I checked every brand of milk in two grocery stores, and I didn't find one of them that added anything but vitamins. Fat is removed from skim milk, so the sugars (lactose) will perhaps be concentrated in flavor, but nothing is added to the milk. Fabrications like this should have been eliminated in the editing process, and it made me question every assertion she put forth for the rest of the book.

Traveling with Pomegranates has been on my reading radar since it came out ten years ago. I'm glad I finally got to it, but at the same time, I didn't really miss a lot. Written by mother-daughter writers Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) and Ann Kidd Taylor (The Shark Club), it's the chronicle of their travels together over a number of years. There were things I liked about the book, and there were things I really didn't like about the book. I enjoyed that the pair had a good mother-daughter relationship. There wasn't a lot of guilt and angst and blame and ugliness that so often come up in mother-daughter relationship books. My favorite part of the book was learning how Sue Monk Kidd conceived of and wrote her bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. That was very interesting to me. What I did not care for in the book was the constant naval gazing on Mom's part; the sacred importance of inanimate objects and the odd mixing of Christian beliefs and Greek mythology; and the uninspired writing. This was a fun one to listen to on audio as it's read by the pair. I dare you not to adore Monk Kidd's southern lilt. I did have trouble, though, determining which year we were in on a number of occasions. I never did figure out the chronology of the book. Reading the book would have made that easier, I think. So, I have very mixed feelings about this one, but I certainly didn't hate it. My rating: 3 stars.

After reading Tiger Woods recently, I decided to read Arnold Palmer's A Life Well Played. I know next to nothing about Palmer, and I don't follow golf, but I like reading about guys of a certain age who do one thing well. I'd have to say that this isn't a traditional memoir. We don't get much by way of personal information here, and the numerous short essays are mostly about golf, playing golf, and selling golf. I was hoping for more of a straight memoir. If you're interested in learning about Palmer, this is a start, but there might be more comprehensive biographies (or perhaps some of his earlier books are more autobiographical). My rating: 3 stars.

I was floundering with reading again this month, when I decided to give myself a pass and just read the next thing that came to me that I really wanted to read. While doing a project in the library, I ran across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal (I'm still not sure if this is the title or if the title is simply Textbook....). I read this when it came out in 2016, just months before she passed on. I'm still not comfortable living in a literary world that does not include her. She was one of a kind, and her books were so unique and generous and humorous and charming. While I probably prefer her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Textbook is a wonderful book as well. I don't always feel that the arrangement of this one makes as much sense as her Encyclopedia, but it's a minor quibble. The book is hard to explain. It's a memoir in textbook form, if by textbook you mean something rather lose and freeform. It's also interactive, and it has a ton of white space. I plan to put it in my library's Popular Reading Collection as I think it will appeal especially to burned-out college kids who need a break from textbooks where the words go "all the way across the page." It was wonderful returning to this book, and I'm glad I allowed myself to do it. It misses nothing on re-read (my original review here). I miss Amy. Her way of seeing and interacting with the world was so refreshing. My rating: 5 stars.

You know I love my No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and book eight of the series, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive was as good as the others. In this installment, Mma Ramotswe's husband, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, asks to take on a detective case to fight off a case of job stagnancy, Mma Makutsi quits for a day, and Mma Ramotswe handles a case where three hospital patients have died in the same bed on the same day of the week. As much as I enjoy the cases and how they're solved, I really like the quiet, explanatory writing about life and relationships and Botswana national pride. This one I may have enjoyed even a bit more than some of the recent books in the series. My rating: 4 stars.

I do not have the patience for gardening. In other areas, I have the patience of Job, but gardening is just really not my thing. On a list of things to do, pulling weeds is just above poking my eye out, and just barely. But, like most folks, I love a beautiful garden, and I'm so glad we all have different passions. After reading Beryl Gordon's wonderful biography Bunny Mellon, I've wanted to see some of the gardens she created, so I bought the big, beautiful book The Gardens of Bunny Mellon. This one has gorgeous photographs of the various gardens she created for her properties and for others, chief among them the Rose Garden and Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at the White House as well as President Kennedy's gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery and his Presidential Library and Museum. The photos outweigh the text, and the author and publisher have struck just the right ratio. There's enough context and explanation of the different gardens' inspirations and designs to bring understanding to the photographs. I enjoyed this book, though I'll never have so much as a meticulously tended square-foot of garden myself any year of my life. (I do have a few un-meticulously tended square feet currently...) My rating: 3 stars.

Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford was one of my top books of 2017, and when I was looking for more re-reads this year, it was at the top of my list. In college, my poetry was often compared to his (high praise indeed), and I've always felt a kinship with his poems that I've not felt with others. Perhaps a bit of the magic of my first read was diminished this time around, or perhaps I read the book too quickly, but overall, it still made me feel the same weighty lightness his best poems always do. I did feel that the poems got better as they went along (I'm unsure if they are presented in chronological order or not). He's a remarkable poet, and I hope you'll read this book some day. My rating: 4 stars.

 

 

This week I'll finish:

I'm loving this one. Worth the wait.

Last week I abandoned:

I read 50 pages, but I got sick of the husband loving his apple trees more than his family and the wife sabotaging his trees and then the husband retaliating by beating her and the children. Enough was enough.

My current audiobook:

Well-written. Not bad at all.

What I'm reading this week (7/15/19)

Last week I finished:

I love a good atmospheric novel, where the setting is a character, and where extreme weather helps drives the plot. Burial Rites is one of those novels. This is a book I saw all over the place when it came out, but I never even looked into it, because the cover made me think not for me. So if you've had a similar reaction to the cover, try to put that aside. This was a rather impressive historical novel, not to mention the only one I've read set in Iceland. Based on a true story (and soon to become a motion picture), this is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, accused with two others of murdering two men and then setting fire to the home in 1828 Iceland. A farm family is tasked with lodging Agnes until the date of her execution (by beheading). As grim as the plot is, this is also a story of empathy and the human condition. Bonds are formed, and complicated feelings come to light. I enjoyed this book very much. The writing is nuanced, the plot slow-paced, the characters believable. Give this one a try if you enjoyed Emma Donoghue's The Wonder or Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World. They have similar feelings, if not similar plots. My rating: 4 stars.

There are some books I kind of dread reviewing, and Eleanor and Hick is one of those. I had such a problem with the author's lack of objectivity that I could not trust her book. For many years there has been an assertion that Eleanor Roosevelt had a long-time lesbian relationship with Lorena Hickok ("Hick"). I have yet to see one convincing piece of evidence that confirms that assertion to me one way or the other. Although certain correspondence can certainly be read in such a way to give credence to the theory, there is certainly nothing blatant that hints at anything of a sexual nature. The letters that exist are intimate, they talk about love and missing each other when they're apart, but they do not confirm a lesbian affair. Now, this was close to one hundred years ago, and homosexual relationships were not as open as they have become. Also, Eleanor was a high-profile individual who would have known the importance of keeping such a relationship from the public. Certainly, it was possible, but I cannot say it was definite. Yet, many writers, such as the author of this book, do. I think this kind of reinterpretation of history and re-envisioning of past events is so damaging to the first lady's memory and reputation, and they do a disservice to scholars and young people who don't know how to separate possible from probable. As for the book, if you've read anything about Eleanor and President Roosevelt (I'd suggest Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time or Kathryn Smith's The Gatekeeper), there is nothing new here. The book is not so much about the relationship between the two women as a duo-biography of the women. I did not care for this one. I found it intellectually dishonest, written to capitalize on identity politics because LGBTQ issues are in the forefront of the national consciousness right now. It is not an objective look at the relationship. My rating: 3 stars.

Shortly after my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the late 1990s, I read Sharon Olds' The Father (from 1992), which is a sequence of poems about her father's death. I'm not sure if one thing led to the other or if it was coincidence, but this book will always be very personal to me as I used it to work through what I thought of at the time as my father's mortality. And yet, I have not read the book since, that I can remember. It's an excellent collection. Still, I wonder if I've kind of outgrown my fondness for Olds' poetry. So many of her poems--even poems about her father--are sexual in nature, and it just doesn't always make sense to me. I don't believe you could pay me enough to write about my dead father's penis, for instance. I find a lot of it gross and over the top (all of her recent Odes is like that). But, uncomfortable father-sex imagery aside, this is an excellent collection from beginning to end. The poems stand on their own, but reading them in chronological order adds up to a strong collection. My rating: 4 stars.  

Last week I abandoned:

I have to have likable characters, and there were too many in this one that just weren't. There was too much heaviness here, and I gave up.

This week I'm reading:

I'm anxious for this one--in both definitions of the word.

My evening reads:

I'm making steady progress on each of these. I hope to finish one or two of them this week.

And while processing this one at work, I decided I really wanted to re-read it, so I started it that night.

 

As for this re-read, no progress, so I'm switching to audio.

My current audiobook:

This is not really what I was expecting. I'll put up a review of it next week.

What I'm reading this week (7/8/19)

Last week I finished:

I had kind of a rough readcation last week. I didn't feel well for much of it, plus there was a lot of family drama going on, which sapped my energy and joy. I didn't get to a couple of organizing projects I was hoping to begin. Still, I did finish three books, so I guess I did accomplish something.

There is almost nothing I love more than sitting down with a Flavia de Luce mystery. I only have two more to go until I'm caught up, and I'm not exactly looking forward to the day that I do. But, at that point, you can be assured that I'll just begin the series again. Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd is the eighth in the series. In this installment, 12-year-old Flavia has just returned to Buckshaw from her short-lived stay at a girls school in Canada to find that her father is in the hospital with pneumonia. Never at a loss for things to do or ways to comfort herself, she agrees to deliver a letter to the local woodworker for the vicar's wife, when she happens upon his lifeless body strung up on the back of his bedroom door. Thus begins a journey to discover what happened and who done it. The murder in this one and the meandering search for clues isn't my favorite of the Flavia plotlines, but the actual murder cases have almost become secondary to me at this point. I think I like each book in the series more than the last. Flavia is always the same, but I grow to love her more with each book. This one ends with a bang, which I anticipated but which shook me up nonetheless. I can't wait to read the next book to find out what happens next. I recommend this series with all my heart. Just don't ever tell me if you don't love it, too. I would feel too bad. My rating: 5 stars.

To be honest, I bought Gretchen Rubin's Outer Order, Inner Calm because I buy all of Rubin's books, but I had low expectations. I have not enjoyed her last couple of books, and I find her overbearing approach more and more annoying. Still, I will read any decluttering book you put in front of me. And frankly, if my home can look as beautiful as Rubin's, I'll put up with a little annoyance by way of delivery. Well, I have to say, this ended up becoming one of my favorite of her books. It's a somewhat new approach to the genre. Instead of insisting the person overrun by clutter and disorganization follow a prescribed A to Z method of handling and clearing it, she knows folks aren't the same, and a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. Instead, she gives dozens and dozens of practical ideas from which you can take what works for you and your particular clutter issues. Each idea has its own page, and the book practically reads itself. It may be coincidence, but while reading this book I was finally able to jettison a stack of boxes and large items that had been taking up an entire corner of our basement for over a year (a project begun with Decluttering at the Speed of Life). I found the entire book helpful, and I didn't have the usual negative reaction to her bossiness that I have with her more recent work. I found this one very useful, and I can see myself returning to it. My rating: 4 stars.  

Years and years ago, before I got so disgusted with contemporary fiction that I decided to stop reading fiction forever, the last book I read that impressed me was Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and little did I know it was my introduction to what would become a favorite author upon my return to fiction decades later. I remembered next to nothing about the story when I picked it up last month, so I essentially got to read it again for the first time and decide if my fondness for it was deserved. This is the story of charming Irish-Catholic Billy Lynch who has just died. The action of the story takes place all in one day--the day of Billy's funeral. There is a lot of looking back, of course, to the days when Billy wasn't yet an alcoholic, before he married his wife of 30 years, Maeve, and when he was working to save money to bring his Irish girlfriend back to America to marry him. As all of McDermott's stories, this one is quiet. The characters are folks you could have known all your life (especially if you lived in a New York City borough in the 1950s and were Irish-Catholic). Her plots never seem to wander very far from Irish characters in New York City in the 1900s (of course, I haven't read them all...). I love that about her work. I liked this book, but I did find it a little slow and draggy in parts. Her books seldom have much by way of plot, excelling instead in characterization. This one just felt a little long to me. But I still think my younger self was on to something, and stopping her search for good fiction after this one wasn't a bad move, although I'm very glad to have found her The Ninth Hour and Someone upon my return to fiction. My rating: 3.5 stars.

 

This week I'll be reading:

I've really gotten into this one.

My evening reads:

 

I'm enjoying all of these, but progress feels a little slow.

My current audiobook:

 

Not quite what I was hoping for. I'll post a review next week.

 

 

 

 

July 2019 reading list

It's been difficult putting together monthly reading lists lately. Not only have I been fickle in my choices, but there's been a high demand for audiobooks because it's summertime. I think a couple of these books were on my June reading list, but since my holds didn't come in, they were pushed to July. So we'll see which of these books I'm able to read (and listen to) this month. I'm taking some time off early in the month, so I'll be starting off the month reading the eighth Flavia de Luce book.

Fiction

 

Memoirs & Biographies

 

 

Nonfiction

Poetry (both re-reads)

 

 

 

 

June 2019 wrap-up

June was a frustrating month reading-wise. I had trouble settling on books, had trouble with library holds, had trouble with finding many of my reads rather "meh". I re-read three books this month, and I tackled some things that have been on my TBR for awhile. I did score six books 4-star or above, but I still end the month feeling like I'm not loving much of what I'm reading. Hopefully July will be a bit of a revamp. As always, one-word reviews are linked to full reviews.

whiney

3 stars

forgettable

3 stars

desperate

3 stars

fun

3.5 stars

interesting

4.5 stars

hateful

2 stars

beautiful

4 stars

outstanding

5 stars

exceptional

4 stars

wonderful

5 stars

fascinating

3.5 stars

excellent

4.5 stars

charming

3 stars

"cool"

2.5 stars

good

4 stars

quiet