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?

One book (Youth Fiction style)

2 Comments

I thought the idea of this meme was fun so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I also thought, since youth fiction is what I enjoy most, that I’d limit myself to that.

1. One book that changed your life: Beauty, by Robin McKinley. It was the first youth fiction book I read as an adult, being recommended to me by a close friend. A close second is the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Both convinced me (granted this was more than 10 years ago) that the best writing out there is for youth, not adults.

2. One book you have read more than once: Oh, lots. Though I try not to read books more than once — too many to get through to spend too much time re-reading. The newest book I’ve read that stands up well to re-reads is The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: Anything by Lois Lowry. And The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, though they’re techinically not youth fiction.

4. One book that made you laugh: Ah, I’m at a loss for a youth fiction book that was hands-down funny. Any suggestions? (The funniest book I’ve found is I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by Bill Bryson. I laugh no matter how many times I read it.)

5. One book that made you cry: Trite but true: The Bridge to Terabithia. I cry every time. I also bawled at the end of Half-Blood Prince, but only the first time.

6. One book you wish you had written: I think if I were to write a book it would either be like The Penderwicks, by Jeanne Birdsall or Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli. If I were to write a book.

7. One book you wish had never been written: Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot. The movie is better, and that’s saying a lot.

8. One book you are currently reading: The Man Who ate Everything, but that’s not youth fiction. Next up, Fly by Night, by Frances Hardinge. I’m excited about that one.

Enna Burning

3 Comments

Ah, normalcy. It allows me to actually get back to what I really enjoy. 🙂 I gave our library’s “hold” system (what they call inter-library loan) a whirl; for 25 cents a book I could have whatever I want from any library. And so, for one whole dollar, I came home with four books which are mine for a month. Not bad. Especially when you factor in that I spent NO time wandering the stacks with a two-and-a-half year old and an almost-five month baby. Sounds like money well spent to me.

So, Enna Burning, by Shannon Hale. While I like Hale’s writing, this one just didn’t quite gel for me. The basic plot picks up where Goose Girl left off, and develops on some of the ideas Hale played with in the first book. Enna — Princess Isi’s friend — returns home to the forest. After her mother dies, her brother — Liefer — comes home with a piece of vellum and some new-found abilities with fire. Soon, Bayern is at war, Liefer dies, Enna discovers how to work fire, and the rest of the book is spent with her dealing with it. Some of the ideas are interesting: if one could speak a “language” of nature, what would happen? Would it totally overwhelm you? What would it demand from you? What would it take to control it? Especially something like fire.

In the end, though, Enna just didn’t captivate me like Goose Girl did. I can’t really put my finger on it; Hale is an excellent storyteller, and it’s not a bad story. Maybe it just wasn’t all I was hoping it could be.

Gap Creek

11 Comments

I need to focus and actually write this. It’s been a busy week — M and C started school; it’s going well and it looks like we may become the proud parents of a cello (player) — and I’ve been meaning to get down to write this (shoot, we have DSL now; you think it would be easier) all week.

So. Gap Creek. By Robert Morgan. One of those Oprah books (I’ve yet to have a good experience with them.) Actually, it was for my church’s bookgroup (yay! a book group!) that I read it. And, it’s not bad. I kind of liked it. The story: Julie lives in the North Carolina Appalachian mountains in the late 1800s. She watches her brother and her father die. She works hard. She meets Hank, falls in love, moves to Gap Creek, South Carolina. Where she proceeds to Live Life. All sorts of trials happen: the man they live with is crumudgeony, he dies, they get swindled out of money, Hank is moody, the mother-in-law is cranky, the house floods, she delivers a premature baby, baby dies, and they Move On. There. Now you don’t have to read it.

I shouldn’t make fun of it. It really wasn’t a bad sort of time spent. It’s just that I’ve read similar stories that were written much better. And resonated much better. Which I think is the real problem here. Morgan put Julie through the paces, but I’m not sure if he ever really felt her. (Which begs the question: can men really write women well? Conversely, can women accurately write men?) If he did, I’m missing something, because I sure didn’t. But then, as we know, I often miss the boat on these Meaningful and Moving books.

The Twilight Zone

1 Comment

The last couple of nights I’ve woken with a start at 12:30 a.m. to find Baby K in bed with me, nursing. I get up after a while and put her back down in her room and go on with the rest of the night. The kicker: I have absolutely no memory of how she got in the bed in the first place. None. Nada. Can’t remember a thing. In fact, when I wake up, I think, “How did she get here?” (I know. I didn’t mean in that sense.) And the past couple of mornings, hubby (who likes to rehash the night, as if to emphasize just how bad it was), has insisted I got up and got K out of her crib and brought her back into bed with us.

What’s next, sleep driving?

Look Homeward America

3 Comments

The business of moving is a royal pain, and incredibly time consuming. I have spent the last two weeks running here, there, everywhere. Getting driver’s licenses, the farmer’s market (we’ve found local providers for meat and eggs, yay!), a bank, finding the library (which is better than Macomb, but not as good as Jonesboro), figuring out where everything is. The kids are sick of the heat and the car. Thankfully, the place we rented is in a neighborhood that has a pool (there are two houses for sale in this neighborhood, and the pool is a big incentive to stay) and we’ve visited every day this week. Without that, we’d all be grumpier than we are. I’ve realized that over the five years we’ve lived in smaller towns, I’d become accustomed to that pace of life. Sometimes I’ve felt overwhelmed; swamped by the sheer size of things around here. Then there’s just having four kids around all day at the end of the summer. It’s time for school to start (and thankfully, it does, next week) — they’re at each other’s throats for the littlest things.

Perhaps all this influenced my opinion of Look Homeward America, by Bill Kauffman. I found it grumpy, sarcastic, and downright mean. I don’t mind sarcasam, and at times Kauffman was funny, but too often I thought he dissolved into arrogance and meanness. His basic philosophy is the same as Crunchy Cons, but where Dreher was doing his best to convince readers that his ideas were worth something, Kauffman holds contempt for those who don’t agree with him. Or, at least that’s the way it read to me. He may have been trying to convince people to be “front porch anarchists and reactionary radicals” but fell way short of the mark.

There was one chapter that I liked: the anti-war, Wendell Berry one. But then, it’s probably because I like Wendell Berry and am a pacifist already. So, it really wasn’t a stretch for me to appreciate his point here. But the rest of the time…

Then again, I could be giving this book the fuzzy end of the lollipop — it has been a stressful couple of weeks.

Next stop: Kansas

3 Comments

It’s upon us. The moving truck will be dropped off tomorrow and the LDS Moving Co. (aka guys from our church) will arrive Saturday morning to load up our stuff (and there is so much STUFF!). The upside of using ABF to move, rather than U-Haul (which has served for all our many other moves) is that I don’t have to drive to Wichita with four kids in the car all by myself while hubby drives the truck. The downside is that we’re without our stuff for a week.

Moving is so stressful — not just for me, but for the kids. A’s collapsed in tears many many times over the littlest things. Yesterday, it was because we sold our extra refrigerator. I deal with it by craving (and caving in occasionally) cake. Note to self: next time, I should make a moving cake and eat a bit every day rather than inhaling the store-bought stuff in desperation. I’ve given up (only temporarily) on reading anything serious (I was trying to get through a follow-up on Crunchy Cons) in favor of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’d rather be reading the sixth, but we haven’t gotten it in paperback yet, and the hardback copy is packed. It’s amazing what Harry can do to make the boxes disappear, if only temporarily.

I think the stress isn’t just the act of moving but also the facing of something new. I know I’ll love Wichita (I loved it when I visited last month), but still there’s so much that’s new: church, school, friends, stores. And learning where things are: a grocery store that has all the things we need and like, the library, a bank…

Still, I have hopes for Kansas. Hopes that hubby will really like this job, and that he’ll get tenure and we can stop moving. Hopes that we’ll find good friends there (but we’ve always managed in the past). Hopes that we’ll find a house of our own that we can afford.

One last story: when I was 11, my family moved from Utah to Michigan. On the way, we drove through Kansas, which, through an 11-year-old’s eyes, was very flat and very boring. My mom, because she is my mother, played John Denver’s “Matthew” as we drove into the state. We were listening to the song the other day as we drove to Nauvoo (one of the many things we’ve been trying to do since we’re moving away from here), and the chorus struck me (and hubby’s miffed that I got around to writing my post first, so I get to use the song!):

Joy was just the thing he was raised on
Love was just a way to live and die
Gold was just he windy Kansas wheat field
Blue was just the Kansas summer sky

So, here’s to Kansas! See y’all there.

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

1 Comment

One week left. Then I’ll renounce the state of Illinois (probably forever; it was good to us, even if the university wasn’t), and become a Kansasan. That still sounds weird. But then, so did being an Arkansasan, and I got used to that after a while.

(I told Julie when I had lunch with her in Ann Arbor that I’d try and put a little more of my life on the blog rather than just reviewing books… one has got to start somewhere, right?)

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (by Dorothy Gilman) was pretty much the last book to be packed; it was loaned to me by someone in Wichita, so it doesn’t go in the usual book boxes, having the disinction of being left out so I don’t accidently not return it. There really isn’t much to say about the book. It’s fluff. But nice fluff. In short: Mrs. Pollifax (I kind of liked that she was always referred to as Mrs. Pollifax rather than her given name; gave it an English touch, I think.) is a retired widow without much purpose in life until she decided to fly to Langly and apply at the CIA for a job. (“No one just walks in here looking for a job!” says one of the characters, or something like that.) She ends up getting hired for a courier job (just pick up a package and bring it back), but it goes wrong (of course), and the rest of the book is how she gets out of a sticky situation. Compared to more recent action/adventure books (of which I read a lot — NOT!), it’s not all that exciting (it was written in the 60s). But still, it was fun.

And since I’m still in the market for fluffy books, it works for me.

Crunchy Cons

2 Comments

I wouldn’t recommend going on vacation for three weeks and then turning around and moving 10 days (well, 8 and counting) later. It’s not exactly stress-free. Though it does reduce the OCD-induced depression I get from being surrounded by boxes. That was not fun last year.

I had a pile of books to read on vacation, and only got to three. Something about talking to friends and talking to relatives and being lazy and it being hot.

The other downside of reading on vacation and then not posting, is that I can’t remember all the insightful and pithy things I was going to say about this book by Rod Dreher. Sigh.

In a nutshell: It’s a book written for members of the Republican party (which annoyed me at time; I am not nor will ever be a member of the Republican party), but mostly to convince them of some very reasonable ideas. I should define the terms, first. Crunchy: i.e., granoly, flaky, left, hippy, etc. Cons: conservatives, primarily social. The ideas are presented in a series of interviews and stories (though my husband insists it doesn’t hold together theoretically, but that’s not my forte). Some are great: buying local, mostly organically grown food, for example. Or choosing to live closer in the city in older homes rather than bigger, newer McMansions. The education chapter made me feel guilty (homeschooling is best), but then I feel guilty easily about my kids schooling (and I get it frequently, as most of hubby’s family homeschools). There was a chapter about religion (it’s good) and something else, which I don’t remember right now.

It’s not a great book, but I think it’s an important one, especially if it can get die-hard, big-business, money-grubbing, free-capitalist conservatives to think twice about their lifestyles. The question is, will any of them actually read it?

Book Backlog

3 Comments

Vacation will do that to you.

The first book: Ella Minnow Pea (say it out loud…) by Mark Dunn. It was almost too clever for its own good. Still, I liked it. The basic plot: Ella lives with her family on the fictional island of Nollop, where they revere Nevin Nollop, the guy who penned “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” There’s a statue of Nevin, with the sentence, and when letters begin falling off the statue, the High Council of the island decide that it’s a sign from Nollop (whom they end up worshipping in the end) to stop using those letters. The book is written in letter form, and as the letters fall from the statue, they stop appearing in the book. By the end, it’s pretty amusing. (although difficult to read, especially after the High Council decides that phonetic spellings could be used for written correspondence. I ended up reading pages aloud so I could figure them out.)

The second book: Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I was less impressed with this one. Fun, but kind of limited in it’s excitement. It was missing… something. Don’t know what. I liked that it was an origin story for Peter Pan, and I liked the world they created. And some chapters were really quite amusing. But, in the end, it just didn’t grab me the way some other books have.

Now to read the rest of the vacation pile.