MY PICKS FROM THE BOOKS I READ IN 2005

I read 43 books in 2005 and have selected 8 as my favorites of the 43 I read. As you can probably tell right away, I was on a Jodi Picoult reading marathon when I first discovered her work. Excellent stories and writer! There is always a good twist to her stories.

And, if you keep up with reading my blog, you already know that Gilead is one of my all-time favorite books. (Only beaten by To Kill A Mockingbird). However, after having read her next book recently (Home), it may have taken over second place, moving Gilead to third. I will have to re-read Gilead again!

Gilead-Marilynne Robinson *****

Strange Fits of Passion-Anita Shreve

Cavedweller-Dorothy Allison

Blackbird House-Alice Hoffman

Shoot The Moon-Billie Letts

Vanishing Acts-Jodi Picoult

My Sister’s Keeper-Jodi Picoult ***

Mercy-Jodi Picoult

I almost always like books by Anita Shrive and am a big fan of Dorothy Allison’s writing. I am kind of hit and miss with Alice Hoffman, but I like her work enough that I will always try her newest books. I really liked Blackbird House.

So there you are. I have noticed from other blog about books that I follow that many of the blog authors have reading 100 books a year as their goal. Do this people work? Have a home? Have a life? I may aim for that goal in retirement, but for right now, just not going to happen! Wouldn’t you love to be able to have the time to do that??

Memory

Memory by Philippe Grimbert

Memory is an interesting book. It apparently is the fictionalized true story of the author (a psychoanalyst) who was born in post WWII France and raised by his parents there. The parents had a small shop and in the same building was their good friend Louise, who was like a close aunt to the boy. The first line of the novel is “Although I was an only child, for many years I had a brother.” And so begins the story.

The author’s family history was hidden from him for many years until at age 15, he learned the truth from Louise, who could no longer keep it from him. While reading the book, I kept thinking of collective memory and how at some level this boy knew that there had been another child. When he was young, he had been in their attic with his mother and found an old stuffed toy that he would carry around with him. He must have gotten pretty clear messages from his parents not to ask questions about the past. He invented an older brother while he was young and established quite an imaginary life for the brother, who was all that he was not. And when the truth was revealed, none of the imaginary life was imaginary…it was real.

From Amazon:

Product Description
Twenty years after his mother and father jumped to their deaths from a balcony, Philippe Grimbert has written a gripping novel about the hidden memories that dominated their lives. A colossal bestseller in Europe, Memory is the story of a family haunted by the secret of their past: an illicit love affair, a lost child, and a devastating betrayal dating back to the Second World War.

The day after my fifteenth birthday, I finally learned what I had always known...Growing up in postwar Paris as the sickly only child of glamorous athletic parents, the narrator invents for himself a make-believe older brother, stronger and more brilliant than he can ever be. It is only when the boy begins talking to an old family friend that he comes to realize that his imaginary sibling had a real predecessor: a half brother whose death in the concentration camps is part of a buried family secret that he was intended never to uncover.

A spare, erotic, and ultimately cathartic narrative, Memory is a mesmerizing tale of coming to terms with one's shameful past through the unraveling of a series of dark desires.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

The book only took a couple of hours to read. It is a very small book, but quite intriguing. I recommend it.

Home

Home by Marilyn Robinson

This book almost broke my heart. It is a very simple and complex story. I know that sounds contradictory, but it isn’t in the book. The story is set in the town of Gilead and concerns the Boughton family. Marilyn Robinson’s last book, Gilead, was about the Rev. John Ames family. (It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005). Home is about Rev.Robert Boughton’s family. Rev. Boughton and Rev. Ames are life-long friends. Rev. Boughton is retired, and physically not well. His wife had died sometime before and none of his children had settled in Gilead. His daughter, Glory, is single and comes home to care for him, as he begins to settle into old age. Soon, messages come announcing that his son, Jack, is coming home. Jack had not had contact with the family for the past 20 years. Even when his mother died, no one heard from him. No one knew what had become of him. He had always been a mystery to the family, kept to himself, etc. Yet there was something about Jack that everyone loved, cherished and missed terribly when he was gone.

Jack finally shows up and is reluctant to make himself part of their little family. He still tends to keep to himself and carries around the feeling that he is not worthy of these people. It appears that Jack’s drinking is the scourge that Jack carries around, but I think that the real scourge is his feeling of never fitting in with the family. At one point he makes a comment about remembering when he was young watching the others (his siblings) going in the back door like they belonged there and how envious he was of that feeling. As soon as he arrived at home in Gilead, he talked about when he would be gone again, leaving no doubt in Glory’s mind that he would not be staying for long.

Meanwhile, the book is also examining the Rev. Boughton’s struggle with dying and his struggle with forgiveness for his most beloved son. At one point, Glory tells her father that it was hard for Jack to come back to them and he should be kinder to him. Her father responds: “Kinder to him! I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow-and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was-. It’s like watching a child die in your arms.”. A little later, Rev. Boughton is talking about seeing Jack’s mother in heaven and says “I was hoping I would be able to tell her that Jack had come home.” , to which Jack whispers, “I hope you will give her my love.” Heartbreaking.

Another theme running through the book is watching Glory struggle with the awakening knowledge that this has become her life. She will never have the husband and children that she dreamed of, but will live the rest of her life in Gilead in the home where she was raised. Probably always waiting for Jack to reappear.

This is a book of great sadnesses. Yet, it also a book about great love.
And I loved the book.

A Night Without A Good Book.....

you might as well shoot me. After I finished The Stand (outstanding book), I was left with that awful dilemma of needing a really good book to read. It is so difficult to find a really good book when you just finished one. I started reading Lake of Sorrows by Erin Hart a couple of nights ago. Just hasn't grabbed me.

So, back to the bookstore today and, of course, in my panic for a really good book, I bought 3 new books:

Out Stealing Horses
The Plain Sense of Things
Home

Never mind that I have 6 non-fiction books sitting by my bed waiting to be read, and 3 non-fiction books that I am in the midst of.

If you are a reader (and why else would you be reading this blog? for the outstanding pleasure of my prose?), then you will understand that I have to have a good novel to be reading at all times. And by that, I mean, that I am never without a novel of some sort that I am reading. I'm afraid that I would lie awake in bed all night if I didn't read first.

Anyway, I am very eager to start a new novel tonight. Which will I choose? Easy, I will be reading Home by Marilyn Robinson. She wrote my second favorite book, Gilead, so I have great expectations for this book!

The Stand

THE STAND by Stephen King


I know that you must think that I had either dropped off the face of the earth or had quit reading altogether, but it’s not so. As stated in an earlier blog, I decided to read The Stand by Stephen King in 1978. SO?, you say. Well, for starters, I picked up the complete and uncut edition (of course, what great reader would choose a digested version?) and guess how many pages the uncut edition is? Yep, 1141 pages of the smallest print probably possible! I mean, we are talking a BIG book.

Was it worth it? Did I complete it? Oh, my goodness, what a good book! Yes, it was worth it and I did complete it. Now, I am kind of eager to watch the video version just to see how well (or not) they cover the book.

It is an amazing book. I have always thought that Stephen King was a master of character development (although that is based on just the couple of his books that I have read), and he really came through with it in this book.

The premise of the book is that an accident occurs in a government facility in California and a “superflu” is released. Everyone at the facility dies of it, except for one man who was able to escape the facility before it was locked down. He grabbed his family and headed east. By the time he reached Texas, he and his family had already infected others and the original source family died in Texas. But the superflu is well on it’s way to destruction. About 99% of the country ends up dying of it.

However, 1% of the population appears to be immune to it. Those people began having dreams. They dream of an old, old lady called Mother Abigail living in Nebraska who seems to be calling them to her. They also dream of a “Dark Man” whose face can’t be seen, but he seems to be an evil force.

Several groups of people from the East coast set out seaparetely to go to Mother Abigail and thus, the journey begins. The people aligned with Mother Abigail end up in Boulder, CO and begin remaking society. Meanwhile, there are also groups of people who decide to join forces with the Dark Man in Las Vegas NV. It is classic good and evil.

What I found to be “scary” about the book was the actual possibility of 1) a superflu actually existing and 2) being exposed to the superflu. The first couple of weeks that I was reading the book, everytime I was out in public and someone coughed or sneezed, I froze for the briefest moment. It became that real to me!

I definetely recommend this book, but again, it is really long! Well worth it, but long!

Note: It was interesting to read this after reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy earlier this year. Very similar themes about survivial after the country's holocaust occurs.

Rush Home Road

Rush Home Road by Lori Lansens

Rush Home Road is another first novel book. I am SO amazed at the number of really good first authors out there. Gives me great hope for wonderful reading in my retirement!

Rush Home Road is the story of a five year old little girl, Sharla Cody, who is dumped off at Addie Shadd’s small trailer in Chatham, Ontario Canada by her mother. Addie is about seventy years older than Sharla and is fearful that she cannot keep the young girl for long. When Sharla comes to live with her, Addie begins to enter the stage of reliving her life in her mind often, including talking out loud to some of the people in her life who have passed on. Although she has not returned to her home town of Rusholme since she was herself a child, she remembers all that happened to her there and why she thought that she could never return. The author, Lori Lansens is from Chatham and reported in her Reading Group Guide that the southern part of Ontario was a terminus on the Underground Railroad. In the book, Rusholme is a town settled by fugitive slaves from the US seeking freedom.

There are a lot of different themes in this story, and the author tied them all together well. It is basically a book about love and forgiveness, but there are also significant themes of “lost children”, racial attitudes, and death, as Addie tells her story. It is a good story and a book worth reading. I did feel like the end tied up a little too neatly and quickly, but overall, I recommend the book for light reading.

World's Oldest Blogger and AOL's Top 10 Books

A couple interesting items that I saw today and just thought that I would share.

First of all, the World's Oldest Blogger died at age 108 today. Here’s the story from Reuters:

updated 11:06 a.m. CT, Mon., July. 14, 2008
CANBERRA, Australia - An Australian woman renowned as the world's oldest blogger has died at the age of 108, with her last posting talking about her ailing health but also how she still sings a happy song every day.
Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.
The physically frail but mentally alert Riley won an international audience with her blog, The Life of Riley (www.allaboutolive.com.au), and series of videos posted on YouTube with her talking and singing.
‘It kept her mind fresh’
Riley was said to be the world's oldest blogger as she was 12 years older than the previous titleholder, Spain's Maria Amelia. She was born in 1899 and would have turned 109 in October.
"She enjoyed the notoriety -- it kept her mind fresh," her great-grandson Darren Stone of Brisbane told local newspapers.
"She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while."
Riley had posted more than 70 entries on her blog -- or "her blob" as she jokingly called it -- since February last year. She set up the site with the help of a friend who entered her posts for her.
In her last and 74th post (http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com) on June 26 she spoke of moving into a nursing home and of her ill health, saying: "I still feel weak and can't shake off that bad cough."
She spoke about singing "a happy song" with a visitor to the home as she did every day and said she had "read a whole swag of email messages and comments from my internet friends today, and I was so pleased to hear from you. Thank you, one and all."
She died in the nursing home on Saturday.

So now that means that I have to continue this blog for over 50 more years to beat the record and become the world’s oldest blogger. I accept the challenge!

On an unrelated note, today AOL listed the Top 10 Books to Read Before You Die. I have no idea who actually thought up the list, but I sure question some of their choices. See what you think:

Gone with The Wind-of course, a good book, but in the Top 10 to read before you die? Come on!

Lord of the Rings-I have not read any of this series; someone, what have I been missing? Right now, I am still not convinced that I need to read them.

Harry Potter-being in the Top 10? goes without saying. They are destined to be classics.

The Stand-I haven't read it, but it may be my next read. The books that I have read by Stephen King (not many) have been outstanding writing, so I may have to give this one a try.

The DaVinci Code-again, a good book, but Top 10?

To Kill A Mockingbird-My All-Time Favorite Book. It should be required reading for everyone beginning at age 12 and every couple years thereafter.

Angels and Demons-that’s a crazy choice. I did think that it was better than the DaVinci Code, but still….

Atlas Shrugged-may be my 2nd All-Time Favorite Book. Good choice!

Catcher In The Rye-never read it…have I missed anything with this one?

The Holy Bible-a good read.

So, that’s the list that AOL came up with. I can’t even imagine figuring out my top 10 list, but maybe after I am retired I will work on that. It will be hard! I am not sure that I could ever limit my list to 10.