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.
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