Author: booknutgirls

booknutgirls http://thebooknutdotcom.wordpress.com I read. I blog. I sell books. I chauffeur my kids. What more do you need to know?

The Higher Power of Lucky

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First. I hate it when people overreact to a single word and then the whole thing becomes a meta-event, and people who have never read the book are passing judgment on it. READ THE DANG BOOK PEOPLE BEFORE DECIDING IT’S BAD! (Okay. Enough soapbox. Granted, I’m a hypocrite, here, passing judgment on many books without reading them. Still. I don’t cause meta-events usually. So maybe it’s the meta-event thing that I’m reacting to. Enough.)

So, what did I think of this book by Susan Patron? Well, not much at first. It’s a quiet little book. (Really little — it’s only 134 pages.) But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It’s not a book that makes you shout: “Wahoo! This is the best book EVER!” It’s more a book that as you mull it over, you find yourself smiling about. Like Miles, the five year old who’s always mooching cookies, except he doesn’t really mooch, because Lucky told him he was a mooch so now he tries to trade things (like allowing Dot to wash his hair) for cookies. But people end up just giving him the cookies anyway. Or Lincoln Clinton Carter Kennedy, who’s mom wants him to grow up to be president, but who just wants to tie knots and get to the International Knot Tiers convention in England.

And then there’s Lucky. I think Patron really got an aspect of being ten here. Lucky’s not quite a child, but then she’s not quite grown up. She wants to find her Higher Power, because she wants to have some sort of control in her life. And she feels powerless right now. I think there’s a lot of 10 year olds who feel that way.

Nothing really major happens in the book. It didn’t make me laugh out loud. It didn’t make me cry. But, you know, it’s a good book.

Cross posted at The Newberry Project.

Booklist Meme

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I’ve seen this one floating around, and every time I do, I think: Hmmm… I wonder how I would fare. So, here goes:

Books I’ve read
Books I want to or believe I should read
Books I wouldn’t touch (again, in some instances) with a ten foot pole
Books on my bookshelves
Books on my TBR list
Books I’ve never heard of
Books I’ve only seen in movie or TV form
**Books I count among my favorites**
Books I’ve heard of, but haven’t or won’t read

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
**2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)**
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) [but it’s been forever; time for a reread]
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
**8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)**
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) [it’s for the Read Outside the Box thing for our library]
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King) [I don’t do horror]
**19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)**
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) [I think I started it once, but I’m not sure I finished it. At any rate, I don’t remember it.]
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
;”>23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
**25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)**
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) [train wreck]
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) [I don’t read Steinbeck, sorry. I had enough of him in high school.]
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) [Read the other one. Hated it.]
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible [most of it, anyway]
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) [see previous Steinbeck comment]
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) [though it’s been too long; time for another reread]
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) [though I don’t particularly like Dickens]
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) [used to own it, loaned it to a friend. It never came back]
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
**80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)**
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) [read it in high school, not especially willingly]
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
**85. Emma (Jane Austen)**
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) [have tried, and failed, to read this one]
**93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)**
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd) [read the Mermaid Chair; have no desire to read this one]
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) [I read part of this in college; that was enough for me.]

The Art of the Common place: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

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Ah, Wendell Berry. The last time I attempted to read him, I, um, didn’t succeed. But then, I wasn’t getting much sleep either. And one thing I’ve learned about Berry is that you really have to focus on what he’s saying. I re-realized that with this book; I found I got the most out of the essays when it was quiet.

So, about the essays — the book is a collection of some of Berry’s essays on from the last thirty years, though I think the most recent was written in 1999. They touch on typical Berry subjects: the environment, place, community, conservation, farming. It wasn’t as extremist as I remember being Sex, Freedom, Economy & Community being (though there are several essays from that book here), but there was still food for thought.

And, as an interesting aside, I felt less guilty than usual while reading this book. I guess I have to back up a bit here: Berry makes me feel guilty. I guess it’s because I actually am persuaded by many of his arguments, and feel bad that I’m not doing more in my life. And since we’ve actually started making changes in our lives (read hubby’s post about that here) to conserve and to treat the world we live in better, I was able to read this book without the huge dose of guilt that has come along with reading Berry in the past.

Some other thoughts. I loved the first essay: “A Native Hill”. They called it a geobiography, and it was just beautifully written. Berry is such an evocative writer.

Perhaps it is to prepare to hear someday the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.

There is one essay that hurt (I really can’t think of how else to put it). I was having a really bad day, as a mother, and I sat down to read “The Body and the Earth” and I got to a section entitled “Sexual Division”. And I read this:

This determinations that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. But the assignment to woman of a kind of work that was thought both onerous and trivial was the beginning of their exploitation… Women had become customers, a fact not long wasted on the salesmen, who saw that in these women they had customers of a new and most promising kind. The modern housewife was isolated from her husband, from her school-age children, and from other women. She was saddled with work from which much of the skill, hence much of the dignity, had been withdrawn, and which she herself was less and less able to consider important.

That’s exactly how I was feeling. Isolated. Like my life was a drudgery. It was emotional to see my feelings there on the page.

It was a good read. It is good to be reminded that nature is there and it is good, and an integral part of our lives, whether or not we live on a farm. That the real things in life: community, the growing season, nature, are what really matter. That technology and business isn’t the total sum of existence (and in fact, it just might do more harm than good). And if it takes an old crank from Kentucky to remind us of that, so be it.

A Growing Up Story

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Once upon a time, there was a girl who just knew that she wanted to be a Sports Reporter when she grew up. She was on her high school yearbook and newspaper staffs, and even had a subscription to Sports Illustrated. Then she got to college. She decided, fairly early on, that what she really wanted to be was Music and Art Critic. She took numerous music, art, theater and dance classes and worked for the campus newspaper. But never on the lifestyle desk. After a while, she decided what she really wanted to be was a Newspaper Photographer. But while that was a lot of fun, it was a short-lived dream.

After graduation, she decided that she’d had enough of Journalism (this decision was spurred on by her husband getting an arts reviewing job for the local paper), and thought she’d try Graduate School. She even took the GRE. And didn’t do so well. So much for that decision.

They move to Washington, DC, and the girl decided that she liked Writing, but since she wasn’t good at it, maybe she could be an Editor. But the competition was tough. Really tough. She didn’t get any of the jobs she applied for. She bailed and took a job at a little company which allowed her to read most of the time (while she waited for there to be work for her to do). A Reviewer was born (though she didn’t know it yet). Because she read so much, she started keeping track of all the books, writing little reviews of them.

She left the cushy job after three years, and became a Nanny. She realized very quickly that while she loved and enjoyed her children, taking care of other people’s kids was a headache and a chore.

She moved from Washington, DC (sigh), and spent the next five years in small towns in the South and Midwest. She helped out in her daughter’s kindergarten class, and thought being a Pre-School Teacher might be fun. But, after thinking about it some, realized it wasn’t that much fun. She thought she might be a Children’s Book Writer, and even took a class, but discovered that while they said she had talent, without the class she had no drive (or creativity) to write stories. She moved again — this time to a bigger city in Kansas — and thought she might want to be a Cake Decorator or Baker. Then she discovered that she liked eating the cake and frosting too much. Working around food is not a healthy option.

Then Heather posted that the editors of Estella’s Revenge were retooling the webzine to be a book publication. And they were looking for contributors. Ah, the girl (woman, now, I guess) thought, this is what I want to do. I want to read books and write about them. But wait, her husband said. That’s what you’re already doing! And she realized he was right. She’d been a book reviewer for over two years now, gathering a small but fairly faithful audience. And it’s been fun. So, she took a leap and branched out, sending in a contribution to the March issue of Estella’s Revenge. And while it’s not a brilliant piece of work, it’s a start. She’s even got an author interview lined up for (hopefully) the April issue.

So, I guess this story has a happy ending. She found out what she wants to do when she grew up, and is actually doing it. I like stories with happy endings, don’t you?

The Last of the Mohicans

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I tried.

Really, I did. I wanted to finish it — it’s my last book for the Classics Challenge.

But… I just couldn’t. And I can’t see why this is supposed to be a classic. The back said it was “Tragic, fast-paced, and stocked with the elements of a classic frontier adventure — massacres and raids, innocent settlers, hardened soldiers, renegade Indians, and a doomed love affair.” I thought it was plodding, confusing, violent and irritating. I bailed soon after one of the “good” Indians, Chingachgook, brutally killed an innocent French soldier, and Hawk-eye said this: “‘Twold have been a cruel and unhuman act for a white-skin, but ’tis the gift and natur [sic] of an Indian and I suppose it should not be denied! I would wish, though, it had befallen an accursed Mingo (slang for the “bad” Indians) rather than that gay, young boy, from the old countries!” I guess I’m just not the audience James Fenimore Cooper had in mind.

New Moon

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It is very difficult, as a sequel, to live up to the expectations created by the first book. You have expectations for the characters, and those expectations are not always what the author perceives is best. It’s the author’s book, after all, and you, as a reader, are at the mercy of the author’s imagination.

All that said, I don’t know if I had expectations for New Moon. I knew people liked it, people hated it, people resented reading it… So, I think if I did have expectations, they were pretty low.

And in one way, I was pleasantly surprised. (Spoilers, sorry.) I liked that Edward left Bella. It was sad, but I could see Edward doing something like that. (Maybe because a similar thing happened to me when I was 18, though not with a vampire. Dang.) I really liked the next 1/3 or so of the book with Jacob. I liked that Bella was moving on, I liked the relationship she was developing with Jacob. I even liked the rough patches and while the werewolf thing was a bit of a stretch, it was tolerable enough.

Then the book derailed on page 378 (it has 563 pages…). Alice shows up. Edward’s going to be rash and kill himself because he thinks Bella is dead (think Romeo and Juliet). Bella rushes with Alice to Italy to save him. And then — okay, this is true love, but sometimes true love doesn’t work out, right?! — they get back together. AGH! NO! What about Jacob? Well, we never find out about Jacob. Not really. Bella still wants to be friends. Right. Not happening. Suddenly, I don’t like Edward so much. I’m annoyed at him for coming back and interrupting Bella’s life and making her at his mercy again. And I spent today reading this. It’s frustrating. And cloying. And annoying.

And, yes, I’m just a little bit put out that I will probably get the book when it comes out later this year just to find out what happens to Bella and Edward. Grrr.

Mrs. Mike

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I hate Valentine’s Day.

Oh, I’m sure I liked it as a kid — decorating valentine’s boxes (there would always be a competition, and I would never win), handing out store-bought valentines. But sometime in high school (during my mismatched earrings, torn-jeans, hairy-legged feminist stage) I grew to loathe this holiday. Why do we need a day when we get chocolate and flowers? I don’t especially like red or pink or white, and while roses are pretty, I think I prefer them on a bush. Cheryl wrote about her friend’s anarchist fiance who boycotts major holidays. While I don’t subscribe to it during the month of December, anarchism in February sounds just about right.

All that said, Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, is a perfect Valentine’s Day book. (It’s also book number four for the classics challenge.)

The story is simple enough: It’s 1907 and Kathy, an Irish immigrant living in Boston, is sent to Edmonton, Alberta, because of her pleurisy. Once there she meets Mike Flannigan, a Canadian Mounty, falls in love and marries him. She follows him to his post in the Northwest Territory, where she’s pretty much the only white woman. And they experience life. Fires, bears, babies, death, mutilation, festivals, friendship, love. It’s a quiet little book, but a tender one. Kathy learns to cope with a husband who belongs not just to her, but to the whole community. She makes friends, she deals with loss. She finds strength in community and in her husband.

I can see why it’s a classic.

Twilight

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I don’t read vampire books, as a rule. I’m not usually one who likes being terrified (just ask Hubby… I don’t do scary movies!). So, I tend to shy away from the whole vampire-monster-horror genre. Still when this book started popping up with positive reviews all over the blogs I usually read (like here, here and here) and when Inkling gave me a huge push, I put in on hold at the library. (It took me a while to get around to it, because I was several people down the list and because of the three copies the library has, only one is in circulation right now.)

So, what did I think?

First, this book obsessed me. I tend to lose myself in books, but for the most part I can put them down, walk away and look forward to coming back while I go on with my every day life. Exceptions occur, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this one. I was drawn into it, and fascinated and haunted by it. But why? The writing is middling, more pulp fiction than really good fiction. The story borders on the harlequin; it’s first love, forbidden love, obsessive love. Yet it struck a chord in me (and probably most readers). I have a first love, forbidden love, obsessive love in my past. I was 17 once. Granted, it wasn’t with a vampire, but still.

And that’s where I think Stephenie Meyer was brilliant. Why not take the whole vampire lore, turn it on its head, and make them sympathetic? Why not make a stubborn girl, human girl, willing to sacrifice herself for the vampire, the monster? That’s where the fascination of this book truly lies.

As an aside, I’m using the book for this “Read outside the Box” challenge they’ve got going on at the library. The question I have is: Does this fall under romance or horror?