Review and Summer Challenge

Three things today. I read not one, but TWO books last week. No. I didn't neglect my children or my husband. I would never do that. Never. I also included information about Summer Book Challenge. I have linked up to the Blog Hop at Proud Book Nerd and I hope you too in order to let us know what great things you have read lately.




1. I read The Fixer Upper by Mary Kay Andrews (copyright 2009). I was glad to read it because after reading a historical fiction heavy on scripture, and Caramello by Sandra Cisneros I was ready for something less challenging.

The book is about a young lawyer who is involved in a D.C. scandal. As a result she ends up in Guthrie, Georgia fixing up an old house while trying to extricate herself from the scandal.

It is a good book. The characters are cute. There was a well written MILD love scene in the book (nothing that would have made my mother sigh and flip pages.) and I found myself looking forward to another one. Naughty me! It was amusing, which I think was the point so I can forgive the unrealistic way the character remodeled the old house and worked with the FBI. (I assume that part was unrealistic. I have never worked with the FBI.)

I haven't read other books by this author so I am looking forward to checking some out this summer as nice pool reading.




2. I really wanted to read a book by Rivers titled, Her Mother's Hope. Our wonderful school library doesn't have it yet though. So until the lovely ladies there order it for me I thought I would read another book by Rivers.

The Sin Eater (copyright 1998 - Why don't I read something a tad bit more recent?) is set in the highlands of the Smokey Mountains. The main character in the story is a ten year old girl, Cadi. She is some how involved in the death of her sister. Her adventure starts as an attempt to be forgiven for her "sins". It ends in exposing a huge tragedy committed by one of the orginal settlers of the area.


In the process of having her sins forgiven Cadi is preached to by a prophet and comes to accept the Lord. So does her young friend Fagan. It is then their misson to bring the rest of their community to see the error of their ways before it is too late.

I liked the book. I was tickled by the regional dialect the characters use. The book was very heavy on scripture. It was thought provoking as far as making me wonder how DID people learn the truth about the Bible in places and times where reading wasn't a common skill.

It was a good book. It was not a great book. I would read the author again, but I probably wouldn't pay actual money to do so.

3. Booking Mama is hosting a Summer Book Challenge. It looks interesting. I have included button on my sidebar. If you click this she can explain the fun better than I can. There are 17 books on the list, but you can choose how many you plan to read and review. I am in the process of looking them up and seeing which ones I will most likely read. She is going to offer a place to link up reviews and possibly some prizes for those reviews. So why are you still here. Get going!

To All the Books I've Loved Before

I saw this on a website the other day. I am sorry I forgot which one. As today is Follow Me Friday I figured this would be a good way for my readers and I to get to know each other.
The books I have read completely have are purple. If I tried to read them and failed they are orange. I have added some notes beccause...well because I talk too much. It's not a secret, you were bound to find out soon enough.
On the original blog I read it said having read over seven or more was above average. I do not know above average what? Smartypants? Nerd? Bookworm?

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - One of my all time favorites. Scout was on the short list of possible names for my youngest daughter.
6. The Bible - Epic Fail. My MIL got me a "read in a year" Bible and for two years I have aborted the read. Terrible. My failure here should be an entirely separate post.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - As punishment from God (for not reading the Bible?) I had to teach this book to six classes of freshman each year for four years. I do not like the book. I would go so far as to say I do not care for Dickens at all.
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I have read many of them. Not ALL of them. Shees.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - I just checked this out from the library.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - I may have as a child. Not certain.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - Can't remember now why I gave up.
39.Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - Not a fave. Charlotte's Web is the only talking pig book I care to read. Thank you.
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - I love this book, and most of his other novels.
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (TBR)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac - I had to read this for a college history class. I was NOT a fan of this either. Seemed like too much whining to me at the time.
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (TBR)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden -Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno-Dante - Isn't this is Italian or something? I can't read Italian. No fair.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - A.S. Byatt
81.A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down -Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I don't know who compiled this list. It seems broad enough. I am noticing an absence of Vonnegut and Stephen King (who I have barely read, my mother didn't allow me to in high school.) Where is Laura Ingalls Wilder? Ernest Hemingway? Jack London? Mark Twain? Ok. I have to stop. STOP.

I see several on here I should read. I will put them on my own personal summer reading list. Like Little Women and Emma. I'll pick a couple more later before summer comes. Plus I am joining a Summer Reading Challenge from another blog. I am trying to get the links and the button to work, so more on that soon.

What about you? How many have you read on this list? Do you have a favorite? Unfavorite? Which ones might you be inspired to read? Which important books/authors do you think have been left off?

Book Review - Caramello by Sandra Cisneros

A few weeks ago I stopped by our wonderful school library and checked out Caramello by Sandra Cisneros (Copyright 2002). She is the author also of The House on Mango Street which is required reading in many high schools.

This is the story of three generations of a Mexican American family. It centers around the daughter/grand daughter. Lala. She is the favorite among her six brothers. The book is separated into three sections. The first tells about a summer visit to her grandmother's house in Mexico. The second chronicles her grandmother's childhood and early marriage. Then finally the focus is on the changes occuring in the family after her grandfather dies and The Grandmother comes to the U.S. to live with them.

The first part of the book I loved. I flew through it, enjoying every minute. I was totally immersed as I usually am while reading. Poor Shaye Baby was quite confused as to why I called her, "Pobrecita" all weekend.
The rest of the book was difficult to read and it wasn't because it wasn't a good book. Part of the reason it was difficult was because I kept getting interupted. Imagine that, I have five kids. The other reason it was difficult was because it was just a challenging book to read. There was a lot of history explained in end notes. I love history, obviously I teach it. These historial notations though were from a different viewpoint than I am accustomed to and they took some pondering. There was symbolism galore. Most of which I am sure I wouldn't do justice if I tried to explain. One item, The Grandmother's rebozo, is mentioned often as an item that is not only passed down, but would at one point be an impossible item to duplicate in the modern world.
As Lala tries to bridge the gap between being Mexican, and being American, the role of the different lies told in the family's history is stressed. The untruths go back as far as Lala's great grandmother and her background. The other theme woven throughout the story is the idea of a favorite child and how that affects relationships. I enjoy reading about different cultures and different time periods. So I did enjoy that even though the author probably intended the book to have a deeper meaning.
The only thing I did not like about the book was the narration in the second section. The daughter interupts the flow of the story with her and her grandmother's comments. It un-immersed me. It almost felt like an intertuption.
Overall it was a good, thought provoking book. I wish I would have been able to read it in a less disjointed , more concentrated way.

Have you ever read this book? What did you think? Have you read a book lately you would like to discuss? Is there a book you would like to suggest?

How about you? Do you alternate between challenging literature and just fun reads. What is a challening, but good book you have read lately.

Book Review - House Rules by Jodi Picoult

When I first started to want a blog years ago. I envisioned it as a place where I could write, but more importantly write book reviews. Two things were stopping me, 1. I didn’t own a home computer, and 2. I had a complete lack of any technological knowledge. Six years later I still am suffering from 2, but I have decided to forge on. I read ALOT. Not as much as I used to, but I read alot. This by the way is my main qualification for writing reviews in case you are wondering. Second qualification- I know what I like. (I also do have a BLA in English/history, and I taught Am. Lit. for a few years before switching to history. Your call on whether or not that qualifies me.)

I recently read House Rules by Jodi Picoult. It is about a kid with Aspergers who is on trial for murder. I have had three students over the years with Aspergers, so it was interesting to compare. He has a brother in the story and much of the plot revolves around insights into how much of the mom's time and energy is taken up caring for the son with Aspergers and the resulting hard feelings. You can read a more detailed synopsis here.

I got so into the book, as I tend to do, that for a day and half after finishing it I continually talked to my own kids as if they were autistic. They didn’t notice.

The book was a tad better than decent. Entertaining. Somewhat predictable. Picoult is a talented writer and I admire her style, and word choice. I do get annoyed though with overtly obvious, thinly veiled foreshadowing and that is present in the story. I enjoy the way she shows the events from multiple points of view. However, it is hard to show those points of view without being repetitive and I did find myself wanting to skip to the end of some of the more redundant recounts. I felt like the ending was a vast improvement over the endings of the last two books I read of hers. (One more unsatisfactory ending and I was giving up on this author.) I would like to see Picoult break out of a bit of a rut. It seems the last three books I have read by here involve similar topics and situations.

My book rating system is based on suggested buying.

Best – Buy it new, hardback even.
Wait for the paperback version.
**Hold off until you come across it at the used book store.
Read it only if you can swipe it from a relative or friend.
Worst – Read the back of a cereal box instead.

It turns out I borrowed this one from Mom for free. Thanks Mom! It is a decent read from an author who always manages to explore family relationships in a way I had not thought about.