September Quick Lit

Summer reading season always ends too quickly...

It's mid-September, and I think we can all agree summer reading time is over. Here's what I read in the last few carefree weeks of summer.

I'm not sure what to think about The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. The subject, WWII, was brutal, but the cadence of the book was soothing. This is the first book I added to my TBR when I started my LibraryThing account. Now that I finally read it I'm sure it will stay with me for a long, long time.

I read Are You There God, It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume in order to fill in a few blanks for some reading challenges. I'm glad I took the time, because this book is still a masterpiece. I was the same age as my son is now when I first read this book, and re-reading it this summer brought back a lot of my 3rd grade feelings. It was a timely reminder.

Walking With Plato by Gary Hayden tells the story of a walk. He reads and he thinks as he goes, and this book is a simple yet satisfying unpacking of his thoughts. He wasn't trying to write a book as he set off, and the reader gets a much better story for it. This was a five star read for me, and may end up as my favorite of the year.

The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin made me want to drop everything and read Truman Capote books all day and night. I had no idea that this was a fictional retelling of his relationships with the Fifth Avenue elite until I started, and it was such a lovely surprise. Sometimes when you pick a book by its cover it works out for you.

Brush Back by Sara Paretsky is the latest V.I. Warshawski novel. It's not the greatest in the series, but it was still worth reading. True story - when I was finally allowed to take books out of the adult section of my local public library growing up I randomly grabbed one of the first V.I. mysteries, and I haven't stopped reading them since.

Walking The Amazon by Ed Stafford was another book about walking -kind of a theme for me lately. This was a solid adventure story. It wasn't the best written of the bunch, but it was enough to make you want to run away from home and do something crazy.

Each month I link with Modern Mrs. Darcy's Quick Lit as a way to talk about the books I liked, but didn't review.

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September's Audiobooks

I listened to five audiobooks this month. Some awesome, some not so awesome.

The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey was full of quotable lines: "Parenting is more than a duty to make your kids happy." Wow. Something I always knew, but I appreciated the reminder via this audiobook. This was a great option for the weeks before my kids went back to school.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud was not such a great option. I don't recommend the mentally unstable 3rd grade teacher genre as an option for any parent's back to school reading. I probably would have stopped, but had a lot of laundry to do and nothing else to listen to.

I wasn't a huge fan of The Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan, but my son who "hates reading" couldn't get enough of this audiobook. As soon as we finished he started begging for the next one. I guess I'm in for a whole lot of Percy Jackson this year.

Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan was not a favorite for my kids, but I bawled through most of it. In a good way. Glenn Close was the narrator and I thought she did a great job.

I listened to the free version of O Pioneers by Willa Cather, and the story lost something from that. Still, this was a pleasant story that I would have never appreciated had I been forced to read it in high school.

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I am an instragram addict

I joined instagram a month or so ago, and I am an addict. It's all of the pictures I love from pinterest without all of the annoying instructions making me feel like I should be doing things.

I love the hashtags - my favorite is #readingoutside. I also love the pretty pictures of books next to tea cups. When I'm having a bad day at work (every day lately) I can look and be calmed instantly. Plus there are lots of clouds and sunsets.

I know I'm years behind on this, so if you're already on instagram please leave your name in the comments. I'd love to follow as many of my bookish friends as possible.

Pa is getting on my nerves

We took an epic road trip last week through Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. We got pretty close to Little House territory, and I even saw a sign for a slough at one point. I had plenty of time for car reading on this trip, and given the setting I decided to catch up on my favorite pioneer family.

I forgot just how much Pa annoys me in this book. I know it was a different time, but man. He really just does what he wants doesn't he? His only concession to his wife and girls is that he is only moving them to a shack in DeSmet instead of Oregon.

I think I need to keep reading to the next book (The Long Winter), because I like when Ma finally loses her patience and lets Pa have it. Rosin your fiddle with that Ingalls.

The Baby-Sitters Club Club

Like most everyone else my age I wanted to be Claudia Kishi when I grew up. She's the reason I have multiple holes in my ears, and I used to make earrings from miniature doll furniture I bought at the craft store. She was just the best.

I tried to start reading these book out loud to my 5 year old daughter, but she said they were boring. I was so sad.

Enter the Baby-Sitters Club Club podcast, and I now have an outlet for my baby-sitters love. They cover everything I ever wondered about our favorite baby-sitters and more. If you're not listening already, you need to give it a try, you silly billy boo goo.

August Quick Lit

New bikes for the kids have given me a good excuse to sit on the curb while reading a book.

(Pictured here: wolf by wolf by Ryan Graudin)

I have been reading a wide variety of stuff lately - just whatever suits me at the time, really. It's too hot to stick to a list!

The Royal Nanny by Karen Harper was an interesting book, made all the more interesting because it's based on a the true story of the Nanny who took care of King Edward VIII and King George VI. It's a little longer than needed, and is sure to force interaction between the Nanny and all the major political figured of the day (the Tsar, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.) Recommend for fans of royal baby pictures and The Royal We. (I got this book from Library Thing in exchange for a review.)

I wanted to read Jaws by Peter Benchley this summer, but forced myself to wait until after our annual trip to Cape Cod. I needn't have waited, as the movie is way more scary than the book. I kind of thought the book was just meh, actually. Plus a lot of the 1970's language is offensive. I know they didn't live in such an enlightened time as us, but it's not really worth it for a sub-par book.

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin was about a motorcycle race in a world that would have existed if Hitler had won the war. If you try not to think about the details too much this is a really good book. I'm looking forward to the sequel due out in November.

I've had Off Balance by Dominique Moceanu on my to be read list forever, but it took the Rio Olympics to finally get me to read it. This book has its ups and downs, but was really interesting to a once every four years gymnastics freak like me. I did some background research on Wikipedia, and it seems like a lot of people in the gymnastics industry deny a lot of Moceanu's claims. However given recent news stories about USA Gymnastics and Marta Karoli's handling of the team I see Dominique in a much better light than I may have a month ago.

Each month I link with Modern Mrs. Darcy's Quick Lit as a way to talk about the books I liked, but didn't review.

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Best books about World War II

Like a lot of people I read a lot of books about World War II. It's an interesting subject, and there's a lot of material. Here are some of my favorites.

Novels

Margot by Jillian Cantor

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Diaries

Mr. Brown's War Ed. by Helen D. Millgate

The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

Non-Fiction

No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin

D-Day by Stephen Ambrose

Kids and YA

The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wain

World War II Spies (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Cookbooks

Cooking on the Home Front by Hugh and Judy Gowan

Lost Recipes by Marion Cunningham

What am I missing? What are your favorite books about this fascinating time period?

This month's audiobooks

I have been listening to audiobooks like no one's business lately. My rabid consumption has been driven by a combination of a huge pile of laundry from my kids' swim camp, and all of the time in the car spent driving them to said camp. Being a parent is giving me perspective into how much work my mom had to do so that I could be bored all summer. Oh well, turning lemons into reading time and all that. Anyone want me to throw in a load of towels for them?

The Residence by Kate Andersen Brower was fascinating. I really liked getting a behind the scenes look at life in the White House. (But note: both of my kids complained endlessly about the narrator on this one. They said the voice gave them a headache.)

I had seen the movie version of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, but I've never read an Agatha Christie book. The movie was pretty good, but the book was just so much more messed up. (In a good way.) Look for more Agatha Christie in my future reads.

The Royal Wedding by Meg Cabot was my solution when I was craving something light and funny. It was super predictable and stupid, and that made me love it all the more. Sometimes that's all you need.

Eruption by Steve Olson was a fascinating look into the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. I didn't know much about the eruption going into this book. I remember a teacher bringing a jar of ash to school, and all of us being like Mount St. Who? I was also vaguely aware that the state highpoints of Oregon and Washington were volcanoes. I was too young at the time, and too distracted since with my east coast problems to realize that there are volcanoes that have, can, and will explode in the Pacific Northwest. I can't decide if I should should rush out west to see them before they do, or stay far far away forever in case they pick my vacation week to come alive. There were some boring bits that I tuned out about the history of the lumber industry, but most of this audiobook took my breath away, much like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air.

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Books about the Olympics

Last night I started reading Off Balance by Dominique Moceanu. It's not the greatest book ever written, but since it involves the 1996 Olympics I'm all about it. I caught serious Olympic fever the summer Kim Zmeskal went to Barcelona. It intensified the summer the Magnificent Seven won gold (YOU CAN DO IT!!!), and has never gone away since then. Because of this it's really surprising that the only other two books I've read about the Olympics have been Unbroken and The Boys In The Boat.

Can anyone recommend some awesome Olympics books to me?

Two books I'm thinking of checking out:

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The 20 oldest books on my TBR

I started using Library Thing in 2014 to track the books I've read, and to track the books I want to read. This makes me sound like Angela from The Office, but I find Goodreads to be a bit too flashy for my tastes.

Today I was shuffling through my TBR and realized I had books on there that dated from the inception of my account in 2014. That inspired a new reading challenge. If I don't read these 20 books by the end of 2016 I'm taking them off my list.

I'm going to post the covers here. If you want the amazon.com description click on the cover.

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A walk in the woods with Stephen King

My trip to Maine earlier this month featured good decisions and bad decisions.

Good decisions:

• Turning around .2 miles from the summit of Mt. Katahdin because the weather was deteriorating and my group was on its way back down.
• Packing way more food and water for my hike than I should have needed.
• Keeping gloves in my pack even though it was July.

Bad decisions:

• Taking a walk in sandals that I know give me blisters the day before our summit.
• Being okay with a combined 16 hours of driving in the day before and day after our hike.
• Deciding to read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King while camping in Maine.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a psychological thriller featuring 9 year old (but tall for her age) Tricia, the Boston Red Sox when they were still cursed, and a pretty good reason to stay on the trail when you're hiking in the woods. Especially the Maine woods. Because the Maine woods are pretty isolated. Anything can happen out there. This is a fact that I didn't really appreciate until I had driven 8 hours to get there from Providence, RI. Not a great time to be reading a Stephen King book about the very place you happen to be camping.

Let's just say that Tricia discovered the world has teeth while hiking in Maine, and so did I. Her discovery involved bears, the sub audible, and being lost in the woods. My discovery involved freezing rain in July, hypothermia, nightmares in a tent, and way too much time to think while driving a rental car.

Other scary books that take place in the north east:

(Note: I had the good sense to put off reading Jaws until after my beach vacation to Cape Cod last week. I read Doctor Sleep in Vermont last August.)

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REVIEW: End of Watch by Stephen King

I finished End of Watch by Stephen King while I was on the train, and it was all I could do to keep myself from sobbing.

And I should stop you right here and let you know that this review might be considered spoilery by some people. I'm not going to tell you what happens at the end, but I'm going to talk a lot about my feelings at the end. You've been warned.

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The first book of this trilogy, Mr. Mercedes was billed as a detective story, and it worked. I liked it a lot, and even compared it to Robert Galbraith's Strike series. The second book wasn't as great, but it was still good. It was a good story, but Bill Hodges didn't show up until about 2/3 of the way through, and I like Bill Hodges. Plus the ending was weird. Brady is still alive, and maybe can move things with his mind? What does that have to do with criminals that are obsessed enough with books to murder for them?

On to the third book. I had to wait a few weeks for my turn on the library wait list, and when I got it I was almost afraid to read it. Stephen King has sucked me into a series before only to crush my bookworm heart.

But start it I did. This book is in high demand, and the library only gave me two weeks to get through it. In fact I started it on the 11 hour ride back from Cape Cod last week. Were my kids screaming the whole way? I don't know. I was reading.

End of Watch was not the greatest story ever told. But the characters were some of King's best, and when taken together this trilogy is greater than the sum of its parts because of it. By the end you really care about them.

And the end. The end is about facing what life throws at you instead of escaping from it. It was about living every day to the fullest on your own terms. And it crushed me. In a good way. There were no loose threads or unrealistic conclusions. It was kind of perfect. And, I hope I'm wrong about this, but it almost seemed as if Stephen King himself was telling us a few things he learned over his life. It felt like he was saying he's getting to end of his watch. And that's what crushed me the most.

I read about it in a book, and now I must go...

I finished The Wright Brothers last week, and now I am itching to travel to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I've been there before, but David McCullough's book is so rich with detail that I need to figure out a way to see it again. I barely remember it, and I'm sure I didn't appreciate it enough. Luckily it's only about a four hour drive from here (when traffic is good.)

Have you ever done that? Read about a place, and gone there? As much as I read it usually works the opposite for me. I read about a place because I've just been there, or because I have plans to go there.

A new adventure! How exciting!

July Quick Lit

Each month I link with Modern Mrs. Darcy's Quick Lit as a way to talk about the books I liked, but didn't review.

DC Metro has decided to make up for years of delayed repairs by doing them all at once this summer. That means they are just shutting down certain areas of track for weeks at a time leaving a whole city to scramble when it comes time to get to work. I'm learning the city's bus system, and getting in some extra reading time while I wait for unfamiliar modes of public transportation to arrive. July 2016 might be a record breaking reading month for me!

If I had just picked up Eligible as a Curtis Sittenfeld fan I would have hated the horribly bigoted characters. However, since I knew it was a play on Pride and Prejudice I kind of found the whole thing amusing and impressive. This book doesn't stand alone like Bridget Jones does, but as a Jane Austen re-write it's kind of cute. I loved that Mary got a chapter at the end of the book. 

Home Field by Hannah Gersen is billed as a book fans of Friday Night lights will enjoy. I've never watched Friday Night Lights, but I know enough people who have to know this book would appeal to me. It's one of those books that tells the story of nice people who are trying to do their best in a really tough situation. The ending was just about perfect. (Note: review based on an ARC I received from Library Thing.)

The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell was entertaining - we all would like a world where Bronte descendants were reported on about as much as the Kardashians in this world wouldn't we? Another book with a perfect ending, this was well worth the read, though if I had to do it again I would wait and curl up with it on a cold winter's day.

The audiobook version of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods was road trip entertainment for my brother and I when we were driving to Maine last week. I've listened to this probably about eight times, but it never gets old for me. This is by far my favorite Bill Bryson book.

Rise of the Rocket Girls was interesting from a science standpoint, but even more interesting from a working mom point of view. This was an awesome look at some of the unknown heroes of NASA.

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Books to read when you can't do anything else

There were mountains out there...

I spent a good part of last week fighting hypothermia in a tent in Maine. It was much better than it sounds, actually! When you can't leave your sleeping bag, you get some good reading done. I read two books that were perfect for the occasion.

There are a lot of books that feature down on their luck women who stop doing their actual jobs and find peace by opening bakeries. These story lines annoy me (It actually takes a lot of work and skill to bake bread and run a business. It's not something you do because you can't handle your more stressful career back in the city.) However, once I get past that I usually really enjoy these books when I'm looking for some fluff. The Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan was no exception - this one featured an island that can only be reached at certain times, and a sexy beekeeper from Georgia.

I somehow lucked out and was first in line when my library got the new book First Comes Love by Emily Giffin. This, again, was not Earth shattering literature, but it took my mind off the rain coming through my tent walls. It was what summer reading is all about - a light but thought provoking story line with characters that you can root for, flaws and all.

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REVIEW: A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches by Tyler Kord

I have never laughed so hard when reading about sandwiches. Amazing. Even if you are on a carb free gluten free paleo diet get this cookbook right away and read it cover to cover. All of the recipes, descriptions, even the index have little notes, and bits of sarcasm that just make you smile.

The recipes sound good too. There are normal meaty sandwiches, but there are also interesting vegetarian ones that involve broccoli. Apparently these are all served at the author's restaurant in New York, and I have never wanted to eat at a restaurant so much as I have after reading this cookbook. The food sounds good, but if the place is half the fun of this book I will never want to leave.

This isn't just a cookbook. It's a conversation starter, or something you would leave on your coffee table.  It would make a great gift for a Secret Santa or your quirky cousin.

Note: I received a copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a honest review.

Books for little gardners

As any good parent would, I'm trying to brainwash my kids into liking all of the things I do -- mostly the Red Sox, hiking, reading, and gardening.  These books about the garden and vegetables help with the last two.

Cheers for a Dozen Ears: A Summer Crop of Counting is a rhyming book with vibrant pictures.  It makes for a great read aloud.

A Cottage Garden Alphabet doesn't have much of a story, but is wonderful to flip though on a rainy day with your favorite little person.

Eating the Alphabet has long been a favorite of ours -- and my go to baby shower or 1st birthday gift.  The pictures are so lovely, I sometimes find myself looking through it when my kids aren't around.

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The Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook

I've been hunting around for kid's cook books at my local library, and I really like what I see in this Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook.  The recipes are fun without being too out there -- although I was surprised that their recipe for Roast Beast used chicken instead of beef.

This book would also be great for birthday party food.

Have you tried anything from this book?  Do your kids have a favorite cook book?

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The best cookbooks for freezer cooking

Cooking in summer isn't always fun, but still the people who live here want to eat every day. I tend to rely on freezer cooking or batch cooking to get us through until the humidity falls back below 50%. There are tons of freezer cooking options online, but of course my most trusted resources are books.

Click on any of the book covers below to go to the description on amazon.com.

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Review: Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

I got a lot more laundry done than usual this weekend because I was listening to the audiobook version of Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson. This book about the least famous Kennedy child was heartbreaking, but also inspiring. Her birth was rough, and Rosemary suffered from intellectual disabilities. After a failed lobotomy in her early 20's Rosemary spent her life hidden away from her public, and even her family for a time. It's hard not to judge Joseph Kennedy for what happened to Rosemary, just as much as it's hard not to admire what her brothers and sisters, especially Eunice and Ted, did later in life to better the positions of disabled people.

If you like biographies of underappreciated people try: