What I'm reading this week (6/5/17)

 Last week I finished:

You guys! I've found my newest number one book of 2017. It's so impossibly hard to write a review about a book you love. I wish I could just say "read this Beartown," and you would, and you've love it too. But I'll try a little harder than that. First, this one might not be for everyone. Perhaps the very sensitive or folks with certain triggers would struggle with this book's subject matter. But for those of you looking for a book that's written better than almost 100% of contemporary fiction today, this is your book. For those looking for believable characters that the author knows exceptionally well, this is your book. For those who need a book that makes you feel by showing you how characters, indeed a whole town, feels, this is your book. For those looking for a book that challenges you, enlightens you, and lets you squirm in the place it puts you, this is your book. For those looking for a masterfully-told story, where the plotting is impeccable, this is your book. For those of you looking for a long book you can sink your teeth into but is also a real page turner, this is your book. For those who need a book that checks all the boxes, a book about hope and redemption, a losing town and a winning team, the dangers of youth, the impossibilities of parenthood, how kids try to protect parents, how parents can't protect kids, this is your book. I can't think of anything I didn't like about this book. I do question this book coming out in time for summer, though, and not just because it's about ice hockey. There is nothing carefree or frivolous about this read. I hesitate to give you a plot synopsis, because the unhurried unraveling of the story is part of the genius of the writing. I'll say this: it's about a small town (I believe it takes place in Sweden, but it could be Anywhere Cold, USA) that is struggling with unemployment and a broken economy. All this town has is their pride and a winning hockey team that they've built from the ground up over the last decade. Hockey is life in this town, and the future survival of the town depends on the team winning. But something terrible happens to tears things apart. I will say that there is a violent act committed against a teenage girl, but it is not graphic. The book is more about the lead-up and after affects of this act. It is such a smart book, deftly weaving a whole towns-worth of characters and their goodness and flaws. If you've read other books by Backman, such as A Man Called Ove or Britt-Marie Was Here, you'll recognize the writing style, but the whimsical tone is not in this one. As much as I loved Ove and Britt-Marie, this departure is the only way he could have told this story. You just have to read this one. My rating: 5 stars.

I also finished Philip Levine's final book of poetry, The Last Shift. I enjoyed it. There's not much to say. Some of the poems I didn't love, of course, but there were a couple that really stood out. Levine is a standby for me. His poetry is honest and straightforward and generally about the working man, which always reminds me of my dad. My rating: 3 stars.

I've also been reading:

My wonderful experience with At Home in the World last month made me hungry for another travel memoir, so I finally picked up Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome. (He's the author of All the Light We Cannot See). I'm enjoying it so far.

And I'm having fun looking through The Dogist, street photos of dogs made popular on the Instagram feed of the same name.

 

 

My audio:

This is your typical contemporary fiction complete with boy somewhere on the autism spectrum (though, true to form, it never uses the word). I'm not loving it.

Next up:

June 2017 reading list

It's strange, the last couple months I've been reading as much as usual, but I still feel like I'm in a reading slump. I abandoned two books last month (plus a third that I had because I'd overreached). Everything I read feels a little bit blah. Plus, I've been dealing with a lot of headaches, which makes reading impossible. I'm praying all of this will clear up in June and I'll enjoy some summer reading. I'm excited about the June lineup, though I do worry it's a little ambitious.

Fiction

I've heard that Fredrik Backman's (A Man Called Ove) newest book, Bear Town, is as well-written as usual, but has none of the frivolity of his previous work. That actually made me want to read it more. His books are fun, but they are somehow over-stimulating.

I'm finally taking Anne Bogel's advice and trying Louise Penny's Still Life, the first in a very long series of detective mysteries.

Nonfiction

 

I want to read Killers of the Flower Moon while it is still new and my interest is at its peak.

 

Memoirs have long been my reading sweet spot, so I've chosen three for June: My Life with Bob (a book about books), Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things, and Four Seasons in Rome (by the author of All the Light We Cannot See).

Poetry

 

I've been saving Philip Levine's The Last Shift and Sharon Olds' Odes for months until just the right time. This is it!

"Other"

I follow The Dogist on Instagram, and I've had this book on my TBR shelf for months. His new puppy book will come out this year, so I need to read The Dogist before that.

And I'm excited to read the next Calpurnia Tate installment, Counting Sheep, as my June children's book.

Audiobooks

There are a couple novels on my TBR that I just don't seem to be getting to, so I've decided to "read" them on audio: Be Frank with Me and Rules of Civility. I'm excited for both. (Plus, look how well they match!)

What do you plan to read this summer?

 

May 2017 wrap-up

I finished 10 books in May with several days left over at the end of the month to start on my June reading list (I'll post that tomorrow). This was a pretty good month reading-wise. I enjoyed most everything I read, though I did abandon a couple of books. Ratings and one-word reviews below with links to the full review.

irritating

**1/2

 

good

***

 

cute

***

excellent

****

unemotional

***

charming

****

 

beautiful

*****

 

wonderful

****

superb

*****

shallow

**1/2

 

Top Ten Tuesday (2017 2nd half releases)

This week the ladies at The Broke and the Bookish are asking for our top ten most anticipated books for the second half of 2017. Here are the books I'm most excited about right now, but who knows what will be released later!

Link your post up here.

I love Jen Hatmaker's work. Her new one, Of Mess and Moxie, is due out August 8.

The third in the Kopp Sisters series, Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions, is due out September 5.

Gretchen Rubin's newest, The Four Tendencies, detailing her personality framework, is due out September 12.

Michael Perry has two books releasing this fall. The first, Danger: Man Working, about writing, is due out September 12.

Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard's newest in their Killing series, Killing England, is due out September 19. (No cover yet.)

The next in the Calpurnia Tate series about a girl scientist at the turn of the 20th century is due out October 3. It's titled Who Gives a Hoot?

Another Pioneer Woman cookbook is set to release October 24. It's titled Come and Get It!: Simple, Scrumptious Recipes for Crazy Busy Lives. (No cover yet.)

The second in the Waylon! series by Sara Pennypacker (known for her Clementine series and Pax) titled Waylon! Even More Awesome is due to be released October 31.

 

The second Michael Perry book of the fall is Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles through Philosophy, due out November 7.

And last but not least, a long-awaited book by A. J. Jacobs, It's All Relative, due out November 14.

What I'm reading this week (5/29/17)

Well, it's the end of the month, and one reading list is coming to a close while another begins. I finished five books over the last week (the three-day weekend certainly helped). Here's what I finished last week:

While I was reading Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve earlier this month, the chapter on clichés in modern literature really resonated with me. It struck me that they might be one of the biggest problems I have with contemporary fiction. Being so tuned into clichés in writing by that book, though, nearly ruined my listening experience with the fourth in Jan Karon's Mitford series, Out to Canaan. I don't know that it is worse than any of the other books in the series, but it seemed like nearly every paragraph or conversation between characters contained at least one cliché. It was driving me nuts. I felt bad that I was reading something so riddled with formula and platitudes. Until. One morning while listening I realized that clichés are one of the things I like about the Mitford books. I grew up in a very small town (pop. 419) like Mitford, and I'm here to tell you, folks in small town talk in clichés. Not necessarily because they're uneducated, but often because that's part of the shared culture of a small place. I've noticed that in a small town, people often see big ideas different and distill them to their essences. They ignore nuance and skip directly to a logical conclusion. That's what happened in Mitford, and that's what happened in my hometown. I was able to enjoy Out to Canaan quite a bit after I stopped listening for the clichés and looking for the wisdom behind them. In this novel, Father Tim announces his retirement 18 months hence, his wife Cynthia is working on another Violet the cat book for children, and the town is looking at a lot of possible change including a nasty mayoral election. I liked this one, and I recommend the series to anyone looking for fiction without sex, drugs, infidelity, and drama, and with a heavy dose of faith and old-fashioned values. My rating: 4 stars.

I come from a long line of flower-obsessed women--on both sides of the family. My mother's mother grew African violets with blooms the size of silver dollars. She could coax most anything to grow in her red, sandy soil. My great-grandmother was known for her gladiolas (her name as Gladys, Glady for short, so that makes sense). Her daughter, my grandmother, would rather spend her time mucking in her garden than anywhere else on earth. My mother has the bug, too. From these women, I inherited a great deal of plant knowledge which includes identifying a plant I've never seen before. It's a spooky blessing. I guess some things are just born into you and locked away until you're walking through a plant nursery. But while I enjoy flowers, I don't really enjoy gardening. Keeping flowerbeds weeded is the bane of my existence. I love looking at flowers and learning about gardening, but I don't want the work that comes with them. Enter Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden. This fabulous book breaks down how to grown dozens of common varieties of flowers (e.g. irises, chrysanthemums, dahlias, etc. etc.). The author takes you through her huge cutting gardens season by season, telling you what to plant when, how to get more blooms, when to cut flowers for arranging, and lots more. Each season chapter is broken down into chapters on the flowers flourishing during that season, and there are loads of photos of different varieties of each flower. The information is comprehensive but not overwhelming. The tone is friendly and helpful. And the photos are to die for. I loved this book. And I'm going to order a copy for my mother, who I know will love it too. My rating: 5 stars.

I love memoirs. And I especially love travel memoirs. I'll read about anyone's trip anywhere. Armchair traveling is one of my favorite bonuses of reading. So in early April, when I kept seeing At Home in the World pop up on other author's blogs and in their Instagram photos, I decided to pick up a copy. I'm so glad I did. This a wonderful book. The author and her husband, Americas who met in Kosovo, decide to take their three young children (ages 9, 7, and 4, I believe) on a nearly yearlong journey around the world. They stop in China, Australia, several African countries, Turkey, Italy, Germany, France, England, just to name a few destinations. They carry everything they need in a backpack each, stay in real homes, visit with expat friends, and see some of the great wonders of the world. The book isn't exactly what I've come to expect from travel memoirs. They often focus heavily on where they went and what they saw, but this book focuses more on how the places felt. Throughout the book, the author talks about the equal longing in her for both adventure and for home. When she's traveling, she wants to be home; when she's home, she imagines herself halfway around the world. It was an interesting frame for the story of their year abroad. I noticed time and again that wherever they were, they tried to make it a home. Not to say they resisted the culture they found themselves in, they did, after all, choose to be there. But the family did look for the stability of home in places like Beijing and Nairobi. This made the book much more real than other travel books I've read. At first I was disillusioned because it focused so much less on the cities and sites than I'm used to from these books, but I finally got over this preconceived notion and was able to enjoy floating along with them. I recommend this book highly. My rating: 4 stars.

Encyclopedia Of an Ordinary Life is one of my favorite books on the planet. There, how's that for an opening line of a nonbiased review? I read it for the first time in 2005, shortly after it came out, and returning to it now was so familiar and, just, wonderful. I love the way Amy Krouse Rosenthal's mind works. I love that her books have such unconventional narrative styles. I love how she collects coincidences and everyday experiences and displays the baubles of her mind in such a fresh, openhanded way. Her books have a very generous spirit, fun, self-aware, and superficial yet deep. They're just so wonderful. And this is the one that started it all for me. It's Amy's memoir written as encyclopedia entries. It's a fun book to dip into and out of. It's so witty, and I defy you to read it and be unable to do two things: (1) share at least one quote or anecdote from it, and (2) want to write your own encyclopedia memoir. My all-time favorite moment: when she describes how her brother, who grew up with three sisters, was a grownup before he realized he didn't need to wrap the bath towel around his chest. If you haven't read this book, pick up a copy. You're in for a treat. My rating: 5 stars.

I also finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Very much like her previous little book on feminism, We Should All Be Feminists, this was a long essay explaining how to raise a feminist daughter in Africa. I'm a little confused by the popularity of these books. There's nothing here I didn't encounter in my high school sociology class in the early 1990s. (And that was in a tiny Wisconsin town.) Her suggestions are so pat and simple, things like reject the notion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, be a role model of what you want her to learn, etc. Some suggestions are just plain questionable: teach her that sex is good and never immoral. Never does spirituality enter the picture; how does a woman live a whole life without taking care of her spiritual needs? Perhaps this book and its predecessor are intended for the African audience, as the examples of gross patriarchal overreach are all African, and apparently Africa has not progressed past 19th century American culture when it comes to issues of gender and equality between them. I just find these books much to simple and uninteresting for the American woman. My rating: 2.5 stars.

 

 

 

This week I'm reading:

My audiobook:

 

 

What I'm reading this week (5/22/17)

Last week I finished:

I was excited to read Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant's new book, Option B. It's the memoir of Sandberg's first couple of years after her husband passed on unexpectedly. More than memoir, though, it's about how to deal with grief (your own or others') and how to foster resiliency. It's a short, quick read, told in straightforward, honest prose. I was interested in the book even though I'm not dealing with grief, and my recent experiences with grief have been much different from Sandberg's. I did gain some tips on what to say and what not to say to someone in the throes of grief, what's helpful and what's not. I didn't feel that the adversity, resilience, and joy parts of the book were nearly as interesting or helpful as Sandberg's narration of her experience, but then I'm a memoir junkie. In all, I liked the book, and I'd recommend it to someone who is dealing with grief, but it may not appeal a lot to folks who aren't presently dealing with great loss. I didn't feel that the resiliency information was all that transferrable to non-grief situations. My rating: 3 stars.

I also finished Beezus and Ramona last week. I'm sure I read at least a couple of the Ramona Quimby books when I was little, as I sort of remember the Ramona-like antics. Although the book is dated, the overall themes of sibling rivalry and irritating younger sisters still resonate. Cleary has a good grasp on the spunky child, her imagination, and the irritation she causes others. I liked the reunion with the girls, found Ramona's antics amusing, and I'd probably read another book in the series for kicks. And by the way, as a child I was so completely a rule-following, tightly-wound, don't-draw-attention-to-oneself Beezus, it's not even funny! My rating: 3 stars.

 

Since I abandoned My Italian Bulldozer on my lunch break at work, I had to find another book from my TBR that my library owned to read on afternoon break (oh the perks of working at a library!), so I chose Michael Perry's Roughneck Grace, and I loved it. It's a collection of short essays originally written for a newspaper, and they're fabulous. Hilarious as always. My favorites were about ground moles and how folks of a certain age can use selfie sticks to put enough distance between their eyes and smartphones to actually read their darn text messages. Brilliant! Perry does an amazing job of balancing self-deprecating humor, oddball antics, and truly touching moments of fatherhood. I highly recommend all of his nonfiction work (my favorite being Coop), and this one is no exception. My rating: 4 stars.

I spent a lot of time on the couch reading this weekend. I needed that. In addition to finishing Roughneck Grace, I finished Poems That Make Grown Women Cry. I felt like I'd spent too much time with it, and I'm glad to have it done. I didn't necessarily dislike it, but it really didn't have the same punch that Poems That Make Grown Men Cry did. Oddly enough, I found the Men poems were much more emotional than the Women poems. The Women tended to cry over social injustice, whereas the Men tended to cry over children growing up, parents dying, and things of an interpersonal nature. I have a short list of poems that have ever made me cry (maybe I'll share that someday), but my list tends to match up well with the Men's list of poems. I'm not big on books about social justice as I don't enjoy the preachy-ness of them, and this book often bored me. It felt lackluster and somewhat robotic. Although a highlight was Sharon Olds' introduction of Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," a poem that is on my short list of poems that actually have made me cry. My rating: 3 stars.

 

Last week I abandoned:

I'd been looking forward to Alexander McCall Smith's My Italian Bulldozer for months, but when I finally sat down with it, I was bored and disappointed. As you know, I have trouble with contemporary fiction, and this one felt like all the others. I could have pushed myself to continue, but I decided to jump ship and move on. Oh well, I still have his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

This week I hope to finish:

 

I'm making good progress with all of my nighttime reads, and I hope to finish all or most this week. I'm loving my re-read of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, and now I'm thinking like Amy Krouse Rosenthal again, coming up with odd tidbits that I "should" compile in a book.

I am absolutely adoring Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden. I'm learning so much about growing flowers. I think I'll buy a copy for my mother. It would have been a great Mother's Day gift.

 

Up next:

My last books to begin this month include At Home in the World (which I subbed in for Worst. President. Ever., which I abandoned earlier this month) and Dear Ijeawele, of a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (subbed in for a second audiobook I won't be able to finish).

My audiobook:

I'll be finishing Jan Karon's Out to Canaan this week. I find such comfort in these Mitford books.