good english
to read makes our speaking English good.
Read The Fault in Our Stars on the way to Myrtle Beach. Finished it in one six-hour stretch. I didn't cry too much -- even though I am a notorious softie and a book like this is basically built to make you cry -- because I was in the car which makes crying pretty inconvenient, but I expected to cry because Hazel is a fantastic character and Augustus overcomes the nickname "Gus" once you get past all the LINES and you have to know by the time you make your way through the opening chapters that it's not going to end with bunnies scampering through a forest. Back to The Fault in Our Stars! I loved the way Hazel's parents were written; they were whole, sympathetic characters which is SO REFRESHING since I feel like a lot of YA parents end up being cardboard stand-ins. I like that this is a novel that heavily features both teens and cancer without turning into a Lurlene McDaniel story. I like the dialogue, even though it doesn't seem realistic at times, because it's snappy and smart and funny. There are way more lolzy moments than you'd expect in a book that everyone raves about sobbing over.
Anyway, it's not a perfect book, but there are many perfect moments in there.
1
Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries
The entire time I read Tune in Tokyo, I was wondering why I wasn't enjoying it more. It would have made a good blog, probably, and I can see it working as a series of email updates to friends, but as a book it's disjointed and feels repetitive.Really, I think the main problem here is that I don't click with Anderson's style. He makes sweeping generalizations and uses strange turns of phrase ("Yasuko's eyelids dim") and talks about drinking and recreational drug use but somehow makes both boring. It just all made me want to roll my eyes a lot! And then I felt mean because he seems like a decent enough dude underneath it all, but comes off as self-involved and spoiled in Tune in Tokyo. That's probably a hazard that comes with publishing something that IS essentially a diary, after all.
If you enjoy Anderson's sense of humor and voice (maybe try the Kindle sample first?), you'll probably enjoy this book, as long as you don't go into it expecting a travel memoir: this is a book about Anderson, not about Japan.
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TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FAVORITE TYPO: "Stationary" instead of "stationery," more than once. This is always one of my favorite typos, but it made me giggle more than usual when Anderson discussed a washi paper store . . . "For me, it's a big pile of 'meh,' but those who are into stationary had better fasten their seatbelts."
This and All in a Day both came home with us thanks to Nikki McClure's instantly recognizable artwork -- I have been in love with her style for a long time and was excited to share these books with Peaches. I'm just going to review them both together because every time we read one of them, we read the other one, too. The prose is simple and pretty: Summer is full of a boy asking if it's summer and his mom answering him, teaching him signs of the seasons. It's charming, although Peaches gets a little confused because there are so many "no" answers and she can't figure out the cue for "yes."
The other book, All in a Day, is an illustrated poem, although I didn't realize that until we were finished because the first part's stretched out over too many pages. It's a reflection on the potential each day has, and I love the last bit:
"The past is sailing off to sea, the future's fast asleep.
A day is all you have to be, it's all you get to keep."
We have a lot of fun looking through the illustrations in both books, finding hidden squirrels and giggling about silly chicken antics. Peaches told me the other night that she "had great reading with these books," and I think part of it is that she picks up on how much I enjoy them, but also they're just right for reading before bed: quiet and lovely without being dull.
I don't know! I don't know what to say about this one. I loved it so much that I don't want to talk about it.I'll try, okay. I'm in the middle of another book, but I picked Jellicoe Road up last Wednesday and read the first handful of pages and couldn't stop thinking about it so I found ways to "have to sit down" to rip through the whole thing Sunday. The baby won't take a nap in her crib? What a shame, guess I'll have to sit with her, maybe read a book. Oh, I have to do laundry? So sad! Maybe I can just prop my book on the bed and hold the pages down with the teevee remote and read while I fold?
It's a coming-of-age story, and there's a story within the story, and I had so much fun unraveling it as I read along, and everything was just THE BEST, and I'm going to be reading Marchetta's other books soon. I mean, OBJECTIVELY I know it's not perfect, but I love Taylor and Griggs and The Brigadier and the Jellicoe Road and it's exactly what I needed to read this weekend. It's just a perfect little jewel of teenage moods and territory wars and the past bleeding into the present. I'll read it again.
Your Home Organized: A 31 Day Guide to an Organized Home
So, judging by the title of this book -- Your Home Organized: A 31 Day Guide to an Organized Home -- would you expect a structured day-by-day (or week-by-week, whatever, I'm not picky) guide to organizing your home? HAHAHAHA, FOOLED YOU.This is a short little e-book full of common-sense stuff like "put the pots and pans you use the most within easy reach," "hang your bikes up," and "maybe put your DVDs on a shelf instead of leaving them on the floor?" It's divided into a handful of chapters, one for each room type, and each chapter has a vague description of how you could organize things that are commonly held in each space. Granted, "organize" is mostly code for "buy containers and put like away with like." But that IS organization!
Instead of the structure I was expecting, Conner includes a note at the beginning of most chapters pointing out that decluttering is the thing that takes the most time, and organization is a piece of cake ("Luckily, cleaning out the garage was the hard part: organizing it is much easier.") and should only take a couple of days. So the titular 31 days is basically a rough estimate to how long it will take you to organize what's left AFTER taking care of the clutter throughout the house, which I assume is covered in other e-books written by Conner.
I would give this one star but I got it for free and managed to eke out two tips that I can use, so it was worth it. Maybe if a reader is completely new to housekeeping and/or has never lived in a multi-room home before, Your Home Organized would be a helpful starting point, although even then, paying three bucks for this would make me Hulk out. You'd probably be better off browsing some organizational blogs. Maybe it's better if you've read Conner's clutter-busting books first? Probably. I'm probably being unfair.
Wait, why is there an iron on the cover when the laundry room ISN'T EVEN COVERED and the only iron mentioned in the whole thing is a curling iron?
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TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FAVORITE TYPO: "foray" for "foyer."
Bossypants is hard to review objectively because I just LIKE Tina Fey (well, her persona or whatever I can like from afar) so much. This memoir is written in the voice I recognize from "SNL" and "30 Rock," and I love it. Really, I guess it's more a collection of humorous essays than a tell-all memoir; it's clear Fey wants to keep most of her private life private, so this isn't a deep, therapeutic soul-baring or anything like that . . . it's just a book full of stories about Fey's life, and they're funny. Well, she MAKES them funny.
Fey runs through her childhood, talks about her father a little bit, discusses her summers in theatre camp (the slowest part of the book for me), and rolls on through her days of improv up to her current work on "30 Rock," throwing in a little bit about motherhood and her marriage along the way.
My favorite parts were the bits relating to Fey's career in television, especially the build-up to her first Sarah Palin impression on "SNL." She includes the script for that Clinton/Palin cold open, which I enjoyed reading -- seeing the revisions written into the script was interesting to me, but I guess it could seem like padding if you're not into that kind of thing. I also really enjoyed Fey's piece relating the rules of improv to everyday life.
IDK, I can definitely see a reader not liking Bossypants if they're not a fan of Fey's type of humor or expected something more chock full o' gossip, but I loved it from the minute I read the introduction 'til I read the little author bio on the back flap of my hard cover.
Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Never google the author of a memoir if you want to have a bias-free reading experience. I googled Gabrielle Hamilton and throughout Blood, Bones, and Butter, whenever she mentioned her sister Melissa, I couldn't help wondering how Hamilton could betray someone who was there for her as much as Melissa was by having an affair with Melissa's husband. It colored my opinion of Hamilton as a person and I wish I'd never conducted that search.Blood, Bones, and Butter is prettily written, although the author does some confusing jumping around within her personal timeline and changes tenses in weird places a couple of times. She tells some gross anecdotes that in another voice would sound way too "HI I'M SUPPOSED TO BE SHOCKING!" but they don't read that way at all in this book -- they're just Hamilton discussing another bit of her life that happened to be pretty nasty.
I really enjoyed reading about her dad's parties (Hamilton tells a good story, especially when it involves food) and her interesting and strange childhood, and how she climbed her way up to where she is today, but when the narrative got closer to the present, it became an angry little ode to bitterness.
I mean, I get it, this is supposed to be unflinchingly honest and REAL, but it wasn't the same kind of honesty as in the first half of the book; it was tinged with cold anger, and the anger is never really EXPLAINED, which makes it hard for me to understand why, for example, Hamilton stays away from her mother for twenty years and then acts like a sullen teenager when she does visit her. There are glimpses of the root of her bitterness every now and then, but they're fleeting. Maybe I was supposed to read between the lines or something, but I'm never very good at that.
On the plus side, it sounds like any affection that may have been displaced by anger has been transferred to food. Hamilton comes off as snobbish when it comes to food -- some of it's understandable, some of it's is the stuff eye rolls are made of -- but she also sounds like she knows her stuff, and she writes about food in a hungry-making way. I wouldn't want to live with her, but I'd love to eat her food.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
If In the Garden of Beasts was good for nothing else, it showed me that my grasp on basic history is AWFUL. I knew my education was lacking in that area, but I had no idea how little I knew, even about something like World War II, which was a pretty major event, I SUPPOSE.Larson uses this book to tell the stories of Ambassador William Dodd, a sort of odd-duck professor-turned-diplomat who managed to land a post in Germany in 1933, and his adult daughter, Martha, who accompanied him. Ambassador Dodd's wife and adult son were there, too, but they're on the sidelines for most of In the Garden of Beasts, presumably because they didn't leave detailed accounts of their time in Germany behind the way William and Martha did.
More than the story of a family, though, it's the story of Hitler's rise to power. I highlighted SO MANY passages, just because I was learning so much, and it was all fascinating (although a lot of it was horrifying). Many of the key players in Nazi Germany are fleshed out in this book, where they were just names on a page for me before. It's interesting, but horrible, watching everything fall into place, knowing how it ends.
That said, I think students of World War II might find In the Garden of Beasts boring, unless they manage to connect with the ambassador or his flighty daughter. I loved it. The story of Ambassador Dodd hooked me and made the actual history bits easier to understand as a timeline. I also really enjoy Larson's non-fic style, so this book had that going for it, too.
I do wish the end hadn't felt so rushed: the first year of Dodd's ambassadorship goes by at a snail's pace -- not in a bad way, just a detailed way -- and then everything kind of picks up speed until the end of the book. I guess there's only so much space in one book, though; I am glad the story didn't just drop off after Dodd returned home.
Not really related: I can find photos of almost everyone involved in the Dodds' story (and I think it's the mark of a good non-fic that I'm still googling semi-relevant stuff afterward) but I cannot find any photos of Boris Vinogradov, not even if I google "Winogradov" instead. Oh, Boris.
(four-and-a-half stars)
When I picked up Newcomb's Wildflower Guide from the library, I didn't have a clue how to identify flowers using a book, and I was afraid I would be in over my head. I shouldn't have been worried: Newcomb's wildflower categorization is easy to pick up on, using readily understood visual cues like the number of petals on a flower, flower color, and leaf type. I was able to identify almost every flower I was trying to name, and I'm as amateur as it gets.Using this guide is infinitely faster and less frustrating than trying to figure out flower names online, and the illustrations are very well-done and helpful. I do wish more illustrations had been in color, but the black-and-white drawings are still effective.
The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens
Chickens! Let me show you them.The Fairest Fowl is a collection of photos of championship chickens, taken by Tamara Staples; each chicken is accompanied by a page devoted to its breed's vital stats and info about the judging process, and there are some general photos from poultry shows mixed in there, too. At the very end is my favorite part, an essay (which was originally a bit for "This American Life") by Ira Glass about Staples's chicken-photography process.
I initially checked this book out to see if it would help me figure out what kind of chickens we have, but it wasn't really useful for that, since most of the chickens in The Fairest Fowl are more interesting breeds than ours: feathered feet! Chickens that look like boxers! Chickens that look like piles of silky wigs!
The chicken photos are definitely worth a look, and I really enjoyed the smart sense of humor evident throughout the book. Who knew a book solely about chickens could be pretty AND funny? I liked this one.
You know how there are crafty blogs that make you feel like you'll never get half the stuff done in a year that the blogger does in a week? And you know how some of those blogs are written by moms and their kids are always adorable and well-behaved and whimsical and only CUTELY mischievous and the blogger does all these lovely creative projects and has the PERFECT organizational system (held in a gorgeous "found" piece of furniture, of course) for craft supplies and whips up princess or pirate outfits for the kids at night while those little elfin children sleep, cuddling their acorn dolls and dreaming about the fairy houses they built that afternoon?
If those blogs make you feel inferior or miserable, you probably shouldn't read this book! If you can console yourself with the thought that the magazine-perfect blog you're reading is only one part of the whole story and right now one of those kids is probably cranky and tired and unphotographed, and you've learned to pick what you can use and leave the rest, The Creative Family might work for you. Maybe.
I enjoyed browsing through most of the projects -- a lot of them were things I've seen online before, but it's always nice to have them in a format that's easy to flip through -- and the pics of Soule's kids' projects were cute, but honestly, I ended up skimming most of the text; Soule's writing tic seems to be using scare quotes EVERYWHERE and they started to make me twitch after the first chapter.
There are some good ideas in The Creative Family regarding cultivating gratitude and an appreciation of nature, like the notion of having an outdoor spot that you think of as YOURS. There were a handful of ideas that would be impractical for my family to implement as-is, but with a little tweaking they'll work for us, and I think that was Soule's intention when she wrote the book, that it would be used as a jumping-off point. Then there were things like the little nature tables and baby clothes made out of adult shirts and over-complicated notions of nature appreciation -- those things just aren't going to happen for us.
In the end, I wasn't as enchanted by it as I expected to be. I guess I was looking for something more inclusive, while The Creative Family actually covers one family's experience in exploring creativity, and that family has a lot of time to do their exploring. Although my family lives smack-dab in the middle of nature, I work outside the home and I have an older child who attends school outside the home; when it comes down to it, I just don't feel like this book was MEANT for me. I'll take what I can use and move on.
(two-and-a-half stars)
I nabbed Preserve It! (edited by Lynda Brown) from the library because I liked the cover and have an ongoing interest in the subject matter. I've canned for a few years, and although I haven't been the most adventurous canner, I have a grasp on the basics. I didn't expect to find much that I didn't know already, but I was pleasantly surprised -- Preserve It! covers the basics of most preservation methods out there, from in-ground storage to curing. I enjoyed paging through it, and while I am not going to make gravlax anytime soon, it's interesting to read how it's done.
I like the layout of the book, too. Each method has its own section, and at the beginning of the section there's a recipe that walks you through the steps of, say, freezing. After that there are a few different recipes using that method. Also included in each section is a spread that pictures the foods best suited for that method.
The recipe I tried first was Cilantro Walnut Pesto, which I LOVED, although my husband said "it tastes like leaves and oil." TO BE FAIR, it basically IS leaves and oil. I probably should have put it on something first instead of having him taste it straight, oops. The recipes, according to the acknowledgments, were compiled from a few different sources, so most of them can probably be found online, but it's nice to be able to page through them.
Ultimately, Preserve It! is more of a beginner's overview of preserving than anything else. If you know what you're doing already, it might not be worth a purchase, but it's a good introduction to different preservation methods, and it's fun to browse through for inspiration.
Psychopath (Crimescape)
In Psychopath, Dr. Ramsland discusses the criminal history of H. H. Holmes, a cold and skillfully manipulative serial killer who took advantage of the chaos of the 1893 World Fair to go on an undetected (at the time) killing spree. That's probably what he's best known for these days, thanks to Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. Holmes pulled a lot of cons and committed many murders aside from the ones that took place in his "Murder Castle," though, and it was one of those unrelated cons that finally got him caught. Dr. Ramsland starts with that case of insurance fraud, follows Holmes's arrest, the subsequent investigation into his other crimes, and his incarceration and trial, and uses her background in criminal psychology to paint a picture of Holmes's probable mindset during that time. She also explains his attempts to manipulate the public before and during his trial, and digs a little into the possible root causes of psychopathy in general.
The book includes some discussion of phrenology -- a pseudoscience that was fashionable in the early 1800s -- and touches on neuroscientific research into psychopathy and the ethics of punishing true psychopaths, but mostly it functions as a "true crime"-type story.
It's a quick read, short and compelling. I don't know whether I LIKED it, I mean, it's a horrible story, but that has nothing to do with Dr. Ramsland's writing or storytelling style, which I did like.
Graceling (Graceling Realm, #1)
Graceling is a book I want to call ADORABLE but not in a cutesy way, it's more like . . . sweet, maybe. Katsa is a strong -- flawed, irritating at times, but ultimately sympathetic -- heroine, Po is engaging and a good balance for Katsa's toughness, and I love the world that Kristin Cashore built around her characters; the whole Grace thing is great, and I thought it was interesting that Gracelings have to figure out the particulars of how they're gifted, instead of the Graces being passed down or made obvious by eye color or something. The romance is predictable but that didn't stop me from cheering it on like I was being paid for it. I thought it was sweet and refreshing.
Katsa's obsession with not being like ~other women~ and never getting married gets a little old after a while, but I can see what Cashore was trying to do. It's just that it gets heavy-handed at times, as if she didn't trust that the reader would get it without a frying pan attached.
I dug the plot twists and, for the most part, liked the pacing. Some important things happen very quickly, but I liked that, it worked for me. There are a couple of slow spots, like all the time Katsa spends in the mountains with Bitterblue -- Cashore really wants us to like Bitterblue, but she didn't click with me for whatever reason. (Imagine my sadness when I realized the next book is told from her perspective. The sample chapters in the back of Graceling seemed okay, though.)
I loved the secondary characters as much as I loved Katsa and Po, and I miss them all already. I'll definitely be picking up the sequel.
(four-and-a-half stars)
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Irrelevant to the book itself: the Kindle version of this book has a handful of formatting errors and typos. They got annoying after a while.
Memento Nora (Memento Nora, #1)
There is a great book hidden inside Memento Nora, but somehow it missed the mark for me. I was hooked from the first chapter, with an initial rush of action pulling me into the interesting world that Angie Smibert created, and I read the whole thing pretty fast, but I can't help but feel it could have been more substantial. Nora's story is set roughly thirty years in the future, a future where terrorist attacks occur in the US on a regular basis and "forgetting clinics" provide a way to forget your worries. When a few kids decide they don't want to forget, they start an underground comic that sparks a little rebellion. It doesn't go over well.
Memento Nora is told from three different perspectives -- three kids, the ones involved in the comic -- but the speaker is noted at the beginning of each chapter, so it's not confusing. The plot is a bit predictable, in a spy-movie way.
I loved the heart of the story itself, but the book felt rushed and everything seemed to get tied up way too fast. Memento Nora started life as a short story, and was expanded into a book, and I'm glad it was, but I agree with the reviewers who've said it should have either been longer (more substance) or remained a short story (more punch).
Somehow I got A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies mixed up with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in my head, and I stayed confused until I was starting to read it, then I read the cover copy and was like whaaaat genteel porn what? I don't even remember buying/swapping for this one.It turns out Ellen Cooney has NOT actually written genteel porn -- at least not in this novel -- although there are a couple of mildly explicit (does that make sense?) sexual references in A Private Hotel.
Eh, it was okay. I enjoyed Cooney's writing but the story just seems . . . stuck? I don't feel like it goes anywhere. I liked the female characters but disliked almost every male character, and I especially disliked the ending.
Reading this book felt like a two-hour ride to nowhere, one where you're okay with the scenery but end up taking a nap for most of the trip.
Currently reading
How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate
Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity
Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
The Machinery of Life
The Haunting of Hill House (Stephen King Horror Library)
