Category: Books

Ruth is the high school health teacher forced to adapt an abstinence-based curriculum. Tim is a recovering alcohol and drug user trying to hold on to the sobriety he found when he started attending a local evangelical church. The book throws these two characters together at a point of adversity and then examines how their interactions affect their lives.

This book was readable enough, with the well developed characters I am used to from Tom Perrotta. However, I felt that the point at which the book ended was the ideal starting point for the story. All that came before it seemed like a very long set up without a payout.

There’s a certain genre of movies I refer to as the “white men in suits” movies. They are the kind of movies where many of the main characters look alike and not much is done to differentiate them. I’m always slightly confused during these films, because the characters are so interchangeable. So in the third reel when it is revealed that Mr. So-and-so was really a double agent/mafia don/retired baseball player I always think, “Wait, who was Mr. So-and-so?”

This book was much like that. The story of a long time Midwestern Senator had a lot of characters who were sparingly introduced and then referred to later not only by either their first or last names, but also a nickname now and then. “Who is this person?” I kept thinking as I read.

But I kept reading and aside from having little idea who was talking 60% of the time, I enjoyed this book. Charlie, the main character was wonderful to follow through his trials and tribulations. He really wanted to do the right thing, which was difficult in the changing political landscape of the early 90s. His father was a fun character who would wander in and out and I enjoyed a few of the staffers too.

I enjoy politics (though not so much these past years) and it was fun to have a fictional window to a Senate campaign. There were story threads that could have been more developed and story threads that wandered on forever, but overall this was a pretty okay book.

Alice turns 10 at the beginning of this book. She leans out the window at her birthday party and as she leans, we are introduced to her five older brothers, her professor father and the house keeper Elizabeth who came to work when Alice’s mother died one month after her birth. We also meet other sundry characters including Theo, the grandchild of Alice’s neighbors Helen and O’Brien, who is staying with them for the summer. Theo and Alice become friends and together they befriend Kenneth, an older neighbor.

The book is best when describing Alice’s feelings and emotions. There are so many great examples of being 10 years old. I especially loved the friendship that developed between Theo and Alice and this was another book I didn’t want to finish. The closer I got to the ending, the more I set it down.

On an unrelated side note, the author’s picture fascinated me. It may have been because her hair was pinned up, but her steely expression to me seemed to be straight out of a frontier photograph from the 1850s. And I mean that as a compliment.

I finished seven books this month, which, considering that there was a week of vacation in there, doesn’t really seem like very many. Still, this month’s take was three more than the average American read last year. (And yes, one was a picture book which I read in 10 minutes, max, but it still counts.) Interestingly, this month, I finished almost every book I started. Four of the books were fiction, so I’m still going through a pretty big non-fiction period. I would guess that normally I read one nonfiction book for every ten fiction books I read, though I have no statistics to prove it at this point. I could throw together some data, but I’m a bit busy right now. Also, except for Bad Haircut I really enjoyed every book I read. I think Goodreads is coming in handy that way. In fact, I think I’m going to wander on over to Goodreads and take a look at my “to-read” list so I can request a few things.

Finished
The Buffalo Soldier
Chris Bohjalian

Terrific
Jon Agee

Body Drama
Nancy Amanda Redd

New Kings of Nonfiction.
Ira Glass, Ed.

Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies
Tom Perrotta

Looking Back: A book of Memories
Lois Lowry

North River: a novel
Pete Hamill

Started but didn’t finish.
Meditation Now or Never
Steve Hagen
A good step-by-step guide, but if the title is to be believed, it is “Never” for me. I’ll read it again when I’m ready to take on the practice in earnest.

Didn’t even start.
The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress
Bruce Olds

Delaney is a neighborhood doctor during the depression, struggling to make ends meet in a time when people have no money to pay the doctor. One spring morning he arrives home to find his estranged daughter has left his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep while she runs off to try and find the boy’s father. Coping with the arrival of his grandson changes his life.

I’ve liked every book I’ve read by Pete Hamill and this was no exception. Delaney was a terribly sympathetic and likable main character and Hamill injects humor and warmth into his story while supplying an underlying tension that kept me reading. This was a book I kept putting down as I got closer to the final pages, because I didn’t really want to finish it.

I’ve enjoyed every other book I’ve read by Tom Perrotta, but not this one. I kept putting it down and picking up other things. The plot follows a normal teenager from age 10 to college, but I never really took to the main character.

After seeing Lois Lowry in Portland, it was fun to read this book. Her talk followed the same format as the book: a photo from her life followed by a short essay telling the story behind the photo and how that story inspired her writing. A quick read, but very captivating and moving.

A fabulous collection of nonfiction writers. It turns out I’m a somewhat “king reader of nonfiction” as I have read three of the pieces in the book in various sources. (Dan Savage’s Republican Journey, Michael Pollan’s Power Steer and James McManus’ World Series of Poker.) Ira Glass, my radio boyfriend, says in the introduction:

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re living in an age of great nonfication wiritng, in the same way that the 1920s and 30s were a golden age for American Popular Song. Giants walk among us. Cole Porters and George Gershwins and Duke Ellington’s of nonfiction storytelling. They’re trying new things and doing pirouettes with the form. But nobody talks about it that way.”

I loved almost all of the pieces in this collection and reading it, I lamented that I don’t have time in my life right now for a subscription to Harpers and Atlantic Monthly where I used to read great nonfiction like this all the time. I can still remember reading the World Series of Poker article. I was completely absorbed and not only do I not play poker, I don’t really understand the rules of the game. The way the article was written, however, pulled me in. How far would James McManus make it in the World Series? From that point on, any reference to poker in my life was immediately linked to that article.

In this book, I particularly enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s titled “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg.” Do you know Lois? I wouldn’t be surpised. I also liked “Losing the War” by Lee Sandlin. In 50 pages Lee Sandlin gave an overview of World War II and challenged me to think differently about the D-Day invasion. I’m ashamed to say that “Host” was only the second or third piece I’ve read by David Foster Wallace though I have read a lot about him. I love his footnotes (see rant in the review of “The Year of Living Biblically”) and his footnotes within footnotes were particularly delightful. I think his writing style most emulates how people read things on the internet.

Great short nonfiction informs people without the time or inclination to immerse themselves in a subject, for it provides enough information to get them asking questions. When done right, it successfully transports the reader to another world.

Lois Lowry spoke tonight at the First Congregational Church. The lecture was sponsored by the library. I was excited to go, as I loved a lot of Lois Lowry books growing up, especially A Summer to Die and the Anastasia series.

I did not properly realize that a lecture by a children’s book author would be attended by so many children, but of course they were there in droves. I arrived later than I planned, because I was trying to load a spreadsheet into Google Docs for the other blog, so when I got there, the only seat I could find was waaaaaay in the very back of the balcony. Here was my sitting down view.

And here is my standing up view. There is Lois, down there on stage. And doesn’t she look great? I know, I couldn’t see her very well either. I hoped that she wasn’t going to make a lot of use of that screen, as I had to sit straight up and lean to the left too get a view of it.
But she did. And I was glad she did as she gave a nice lecture about how she gets ideas for her books. She used photos from her life to illustrate the lecture and it was delightful. Those of you who don’t have access to a Lois Lowry lecture can get the book Looking Back: A Book of Memories, as it covers a good amount of what she said.

I was very interested to lean that she based A Summer to Die partially on her sister’s death. Also, that she had four children before she was 26. She also told a delightful story of the strange meeting between her and author Allen Say.

I also had no idea that Lowry is a photographer and her images appear on some of her books. We got to see the picture that is on the cover of Number the Stars. Lowry used to do portrait photography especially of children, and when she contacted the parents of one of her subjects to see if she could use the image on the cover of the the book, the parents told her that she would have to ask the child, who was all grown up by that time. We also got to see the picture she wished she could have used for the cover of The Giver (there was a band aid problem) and the pictures she took for the covers of Gathering Blue and Messenger.

When she got to the question and answer part, I learned the reason why the same edition of a book will be released with more than one cover, thanks to an observant child in the audience. It turns out that the publisher will put different covers on if it is going to put the book in two categories, say adult fiction and young adult fiction. Fascinating.

I. Love. This. Book. Nancy Redd has written a book with “Real Girls, Real Bodies, Real Issues & Real Answers” as it says on the front cover. The book is divided into five sections: shape, skin, down there, boobs, hair and nails. Each chapter covers several different “dramas” such as “My face is a zit factory” or “It’s bumpy or lumpy down there.”

Aside from very informative text, there are also photos. Many photos of actual women. In the back there is a two-page layout of front and back naked views of several different women. There is also a spread (hee hee) of 24 different women’s vulvas. Nothing is airbrushed, and the constant message is that your natural body is wonderful. It’s like a more direct “Our bodies, ourselves,” but with pictures.

I’m pretty savvy in the body department, but I learned a lot too. Third nipples? There is a picture and explanation. Pubic lice? Yep. Stretch marks? Picture. The pictures were my favorite part though I also enjoyed the true confessions from the author. Now that I’ve devoured this book, I’m waiting for the boy’s version.