2012

Rules of Inheritance

2012, Books in Bed, Favorites, Non-Fiction /

Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith is one of the BlogHer Book Club books – but I did not receive a review copy and am not blogging about this as part of the book club. I’m reading it because it sounds good and because I’ve read Claire’s blog for YEARS.

I was a little nervous about reading Rules of Inheritance. I knew Claire was an amazing writer from reading her blog but I don’t always love books written by bloggers. And then there was the whole non-chronological thing – that made me nervous. I shouldn’t have been. It was excellent, in fact, I don’t think I would have enjoyed the book as much if it had been written chronologically.

I also love that this was truly a memoir without any self-helpy stuff tossed in, which often happens in grief and loss memoirs. Claire’s not preachy. She’s just really honest about how screwed up she was, how horrible it was, and how she came out on the other side.  Beautifully written, as expected.  I loved it.

(Side Note: I don’t know if she never blogged about her trip to the Philippines or if I missed that but her telling of her trip made me smile (while yelling YOU ARE CRAZY) – having lived there, it doesn’t surprise me that she found people who were kind to her along the way but it also would not have surprised me had some truly horrible things happened. That’s how it is/was there.)

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Spend-A-Little-Save-A-Lot Home Improvements

2012, Books in Bed, Non-Fiction /

It happened again – I got sucked into reserving a book that appeared on the “explor” spinny thingy on my library’s website. Spend-A-Little-Save-A-Lot Home Improvements was interesting enough, not that I’m planning on replacing any shingles or anything like that. Though I did find a toy that I think TW needs, if I can bring myself to giving it to her and then dealing with the mayhem that will follow as she begins a home improvement project. And also – she’s right, our water heater needs a blanket.

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2 Cybils Picture Books

2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

The Princess and the Pig was kind of cute –I liked the “It happens that way in books” refrain throughout the story. Very cute, though the youngest of children may not get it if they haven’t been exposed to all of the traditional fairy tales.  I was pretty troubled by the queen dropping her baby out the window and not realizing it – I mean, I know queens are dumb but that was pretty bad. Sheesh.

I wasn’t sure I’d like Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow but the illustrations and the foldouts really worked.  I would add this one to Johnny Mac Pippins reading list. Definitely.

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A Month of Books – February

2012, Books in Bed, Reading Lists /

Let’s see how I did in February – pretty darn well, I think. Maybe?

Starting with my Challenges:

Audiobooks – 3 (Finally finished The Marriage Plot and then listened to Dexter and finished up with  A Monster Calls, which was amazing but read the full post before you decide to read it.)

Steampunk – 3  (Which means I’ve pretty much exceeded the initial goal I set for myself for this challenge – too easy, particularly when the Souless series was too good not to read. Let’s see if I can do 9 total this year.)

Adoption – 0 (Sheesh. I need some recommendations.)

Queer – 1 (Gah, seriously? We need more gay fiction.)

From the Stacks – 1 (Two for one! Chasing Lightning from the stacks and queer – sweet!)

Cybils – 8 (Mostly graphic novels but I’ve made a good start.)

Nancy Drew – 0

Total Books Read – 24

–          YA 2 (Really? Just 2? That’s crazy)

–          Non-fiction 2 (Really? Gah! I thought it was more.)

–          Graphic Novels 4 (Now we’re getting somewhere)

–          Children’s books 4 (Ah hah, now I remember what I read in February)

–          1 eBook

Books Quit – 1, though I don’t consider it a quit since I read one paragraph and put it down. I didn’t even know whether I wanted to read it – I just plucked it from the shelf without looking to see what it was.

Books in Progress – 2 (One print, one eBook.)

Shoot. Maybe I didn’t do quite as well as I thought?

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A Monster Calls

2012, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Favorites, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Lord. This book, A Monster Calls, should teach me to reserve books without paying any attention to a) who wrote them b) what they are about.

Patrick Ness. That should have given me at least a clue as to what we were in for when we started listening to the book on audio. But, I didn’t know he wrote it. I didn’t pay attention. It was a Cybils Shortlist and that’s all I knew.

Gah.

It started off nicely. Really nicely, actually. With a tribute to a YA author who had died. The name of the author sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it – so I looked it up when I came home that first day of listening to it and discovered … Siobahn Dowd, the author of The London Eye Mystery (which I loved), had died. I didn’t know that. So sad – but a super wonderful tribute to her starts this book off nicely.

And then there’s a Yew tree monster, which makes perfect sense and TW was nodding her head along with the story and I was smiling.

There’s a lot about stories – the power of stories – how they’re wild things and hold a lot of power.

See, great start, right?

Sure, it was obvious that this was going to be a tough read, Connor’s mom has cancer and that never ends well. His dad moved to the US and is never around, either. He’s got some bully problems at school. Pretty typical of a YA novel – throw in a story telling Yew tree monster and you’ve got one hell of a book.

And then the pain starts. The emotional and physical pain of listening to the story play out – the horrible, horrible nightmare of a story. The pain starts slowly, and works its way into your head first. And then it grabs hold of your heart and twists and does not let go until you’re a bloody, sobbing, mess.

This book – horribly wonderful. Really. Ness is a master storyteller. He is. And when he tells you a heartbreaking story, you literally feel your heart break.

Be careful with this book. If you’ve lost someone recently. If your child has lost someone or is terrified of losing someone she loves – she may not be ready for this one. Hell, it’s possible that nobody, ever, is ready for this book.  But, it’s too good to NOT read.  I would also suggest careful thought to the age of the child reading. This is on the Cybils shortlist as Middle Grade fantasy/science fiction, which in my house tends to mean 8-12. But, I’m not sure that’s right – it feels older, deeper and a whole lot scarier than some 8 year olds are ready for. It’s not the story of sex between the prince and the farmgirl, that’s tame. But it is very, very violent. And heart-wrenching, I mentioned that painful, heartbreaking horror – right?

There are books that stay with you for your whole life – this is going to be one of those books.

*Note: We listened to it on audio so we didn’t see the illustrations others speak so highly of – there is a bonus DVD in the audio book but I’m not sure I want to SEE those images. Listening may have been enough for me… We’ll see.*

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Press Here

1 Comment / 2012, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

Funny. I was going to hold off blogging about Press Here because I didn’t have a lot to say – mostly because I couldn’t decide whether I loved it or thought it was stupid. I figured I’d toss it off to Elly (she’s 13) and see what she thought.

She loved it. She did it all. Every single thing. And she said “IT WAS AWESOME, BEST BOOK EVER.”

And still I wasn’t going to blog it yet because, well, I figured it was just a weird Elly thing and maybe the book is stupid.

But just now, RJ, (who is 16, remember), came down to wait for her papers to finish printing and she picked the book up. RJ does not generally give two glances to the children’s books I check out at the library but I sat here and watched her go all the way through it – doing every single thing the book said to do. And as she was doing this, TW walked in and said, “you’re doing it wrong, you have to press down all of the dots at once…”

I looked at her in surprise. TW belittles my reading of children’s picture books ALL. OF. THE. TIME. And yet she had picked that one up, without me mentioning it to her – and she too, went all the way through the book and just said, (sheepishly), it’s kind of cool.

So. I guess it’s not stupid?

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Chasing Lightning

2012, Books in Bed, Fiction, From the Stacks Challenge, Queer, Women /

We bought Chasing Lightning during our little adventure day trip a few weeks ago where we went into the city and visited three Indie bookstores that we hadn’t visited before – we always buy at least one book when we visit such stores and when possible we buy queer lit in order to support the cause. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, except TW read it first and said it had a lot of sex in it. It did, but not graphic sex (at least not graphic sex when you compare it to straight lit of a similar type, lol.)

I liked the book but it covered a lot of ground in a very short amount of time – short chapters, which can be a little disconcerting but also made it an easy read. It almost feels like it was intended for “new” lesbians because of the explanations about what life was like for queers in the 60’s and 70’s took up a lot of room in the book, considering how short the chapters were. Those “non-fictiony” type sections felt off and were a bit of a distraction from Scarlett’s story because some of them didn’t feel like they fit very well into the story.  

It was a nice, easy read during a busy weekend.

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A Non-Fiction and a Cookbook

2012, Books in Bed, cookbooks, Favorites, Non-Fiction /

I thought Eating with Uncle Sam might be interesting for TW, retro food blog and all that. She was sort of ho hum about it but I liked it. There sure were a lot of recipes from Nixon and Bush. And General Eisenhower’s recipe for chicken soup was fabulous, not that I like soup or anything.

And then there’s Where Children Sleep, a book I kept thinking I would buy but never did. I just happened to walk down the last row of shelves of new arrivals (a row I never really walk past) and it caught my eye. I figured what the heck, I’ll get it. I’m glad I did and I still think I want to buy it. As Elly said just now – that book is really depressing. But it’s interesting and it makes you think.

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The Garden Intrigue

1 Comment / 2012, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Favorites, Fiction, Women /

Damn Lauren Willig – she’s in the suburbs this evening and I can’t be there. So not fair, since I just finished The Garden Intrigue and she made me forget to be grouchy about the name of the book, made me like bad poets and bad poetry more than I should, and be grouchy that we have to wait for the next book. Thankfully, it’s a Miss Gwen book – that will be worth waiting for, since we have to wait. Almost as good as a Turnip book.

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