Book List 2010

Yeah, January was a nice month, right? Sheesh! I tried to get this done at the beginning of the month but I have the list written across two notebooks. One was always lost. I found both of them and finally, on the very last day of January, I will get this thing written.

Here is a list of the books I read in 2010, along with stars to indicate their quality. That could mean I liked (or disliked) the story, characters, prose, or whatever. In other words, it's purely subjective. I graded on a 5-point scale with 5 stars meaning "phenomenal" and 1 meaning something akin to "ick".

+ indicates a book club selection

January
Pardonable Lies (Jacqueline Winspear) ****
Messenger of Truth (Winspear) ****
An Incomplete Revenge (Winspear) ****
Callie's Tally (Betsy Howie) ***
Plain Language ***½
Scarlet Feather (Binchy) ****
Quentins (Binchy) ****
The Lilac Bus (Binchy) ***
Dublin 4 (Binchy)***
Tara Road (Binchy) ***½
Plain Language (Barbara Wright) ***½
Anne of Green Gables ****
Who's Haunting the White House? ***
Historic Houses of Ohio ***½
The Christmas Sweater ***
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress ***½

February
The Sugar Camp Quilt (Chiaverini) ***
The Lost Quilter (Chiaverini) ****
The Kitchen Quilt (Chiaverini) **
Manless in Montclair **½
Stones in the River (Has a note next to it that says "Weird book") **** +
Uneasy Spirits **
The Runaway Quilt (Chiaverini) ****
Deep in the Heart (Gilbert Morris) ***½
The Yellow Rose (Gilbert Morris) **½
Buckeye Schoolmaster (Couldn't finish)
Ghost Stories of Ohio **
The Know-It-All (Jacobs) ***½
The Eyes of Texas **
Violin: An Easy Guide (Coetzee) ****

March
Cindy's Honor **
Poison Study (Maria Snyder) ****+
Scrapbooking Solutions (Creating Keepsakes) ****
Quick and Easy Handmade Cards ***
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (A. McCall Smith) ****
Quick and Clever Instant Cards ***
Better Homes and Gardens Handmade Greetings for All Occasions ***
Creating Cards with Scrapbook Embellishments ***
The Artful Card (A. Eads) ***½
Stamping Tricks for Scrapbooks) **½
The Complete Guide to Card Making (Beaman) **
Tantalizing Textures (Sigurdson) ***½
Focal Point (Memory Maker Books) ***
Make Your Own Cool Cards (Blanchette & Thibault) **
Greeting Cards in an Afternoon (Gorder) **
Along the Ohio Trail ***
Celebrate with Cards **½
44 Scotland Street (McCall Smith) ****
Espresso Tales ***
Love Over Scotland ***½
The World According to Bertie (this and the other 2 above were also McCall Smith)
At Home on Ladybug Farm (Donna Ball...note says "made me cry") ****½
Dinner with Anna Karenina ***
A Quilter's Holiday (Chiaverini) ****
The White Queen (Gregory) ***½

April
Cream Puff Murder ***½
Peach Cobbler Murder ***½
Anne Frank In The World ****
Sunday Philosophy Club ***
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ****
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows *****
Where Do I Go? (Jackson) ***
Sweet Revenge (Davidson) ****
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (McCall Smith) **
Dark Tort (Davidson) ***
Carrot Cake Murder ***
Cook This, Not That ***½
Double Shot (Davidson) ***½
The Right Attitude to Rain (McCall Smith) ***
Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire ****

May
The Constant Princess (Gregory) ***½
The Last Queen of Henry VIII (Erickson) ***
The Boleyn Inheritance (Gregory) ***
The Other Queen (Gregory) ***½
Apple Turnover Murder ***
The Virgin's Lover (Gregory) **½
Anne's House of Dreams (Montgomery) Couldn't get through it
Careful Use of Compliment (McCall Smith) **
Jhereg (Brust) *** +
Yendi (Brust) ***
Taltos (Brust) ***
Teckla (Brust) ***
Day of Atonement (F. Kellerman) ****

June
Much Ado About Anne *** (J/YA)
Dear Pen Pal **** (J/YA)
A Plain Life: Walking My Faith (Scott Savage) ****½
The Plain Reader (Scott Savage) ****
Athyra ***
Good Bugs Bad Bugs ****
@ Home For the Holidays ***
SAHM I AM ***

July
Mother-Daughter Book Club *** (J/YA)
Return Journey **
The Help ****
Daddy Long-Legs ***
Julia's Last Hope (Oke) **
Picasso **
Little House in the Ozarks (Wilder) ****
Dead and Buried (Hambly) ****
To the Tower Born (R. Maxwell) ***½
Comfort Me With Apples (Reichl) **½
The Amish Cook's Family Favorites & Facts (Eicher & Williams) ***
The Amish Cook Cookbook (Coblentz) ***
Notes from An Italian Garden (Joan Marble) ****
Whitethorn Woods (Binchy) ***
September (Pilcher) **

August
Echoes (Binchy) **
The Prodigal Son (Koontz) ***½ +
Murder on Astor Place (V. Thompson) ***½
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All ***½ (Ok until the end)
Last Dinner on the Titanic (McCauley) ****
The Woman's Guide to Hysterectomy ***½
Southern Fried Divorce **
City of Night (Koontz) ****
Dead and Alive (Koontz) ****
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, & Got a Life (Viswanathan) *** (Should have been labeled YA)
1000 Gardens You Must See Before You Die **½
Murder on St. Mark's Place (Thompson) ***½
Murder In Little Italy (Thompson) ***½
Hangman (F. Kellerman) ****
Murder on Mulberry Bend (Thompson) ***½

September
The Last Town On Earth (Mullen) ***
State Fair (Fowler) ***½
This Time of Dying (James) ***
Murder in Chinatown (Thompson) ***½
Murder on Bank Street (Thompson) ***½
Murder on Waverly Place (Thompson) ***
Murder on Lenox Hill (Thompson) ***½
Polly (Borntrager) ** (J/YA)
Frankenstein: Lost Souls (Koontz) ***
Murder On Marble Row (Thompson) ***
Murder on Lexington Ave. (Thompson) ***½
Fired ***
Rosewater & Soda Bread (Mehran) ***½
Letters to Juliet (Friedman & Friedman) **
Hornswoggled (Donis Casey) ****
The Drop Edge of Yonder (Donis Casey) ****
The Sky Took Him (Donis Casey) ***½
Snow Flower & the Secret Fan *** +

October
Belles on Their Toes (Gilbreth) ***½
The Two Lives of Miss Charlotte Merryweather ***
Andy (Borntrager) **½ (J/YA)
Prayers for Sale (Sandra Dallas ****
These is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine 1881-1901 (Nancy Turner) ****
Garlic & Sapphires (Reichl) ***½
Sarah's Quilt (Turner) ***½
New Mercies (Sandra Dallas) ***
The Star Garden (Nancy Turner) ***½
The Lover's Knot (Clare O'Donohue) ***
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone (****
Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets ***½
Whiter Than Snow (Dallas) ***½
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban ***½
Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire ***½
Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix ****½
Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince ****½
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows *****
The Tale of Halcyon Crane *****
The Victory Club ***½
Tallgrass (Dallas) **** +
Girls of a Tender Age ****
The Red Queen (Gregory)***½
Unlocked (Kingsbury) ***

December
Much Ado About Anne ***
The Mother-Daughter Book Club ***
The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters) **** Note says "Well-written but wouldn't read again"
Love Finds You in Humble, Texas ***½
A Murder of Taste (Goldenbaum) ***
Olive Kitteridge (Strout) ***½
Hot Flash Club ***
The Spiritualist (Megan Chance) ****
Hot Flash Club Strikes Again ***
Hot Flash Club Chills Out ***
Mint Julep Murder (Carolyn Hart) ***½
Queen City Gothic *** Note says "Interesting but poorly edited."
Confessions of a Prairie B**** ***½
Glossed & Found *
Lydia's Charm ***
Holiday Grind (Coyle) ***
On What Grounds (Coyle) **½
Espresso Shot (Coyle) **
Piece de Resistance ***
Yankee Doodle Dead ***
Christmas Letters ***½ Loved the format of this book
A Set of Directions for Putting & Keeping Yourself Together ****
Love Finds You in Charm, Ohio ***

Library Loot

Friend Jen has been doing this Library Loot thing for a while and I've enjoyed reading her posts about her library finds. I finally determined this week that I would do the same, finally, because I want to laugh at myself. I go through feast or famine at the library. This summer I finally got so desperate for books that I started reading the ones holed up in my basement!

And then there are weeks like this one, when I walk out with as many books as I can manage and still regret having left some interesting-looking ones behind. Sometimes I'll make a list of books that I want to read and work through them that way and sometimes I chastise myself for getting so many and determine to get and read one at a time. But mostly I grab what looks good and what I've put on hold and that's that. And this week was a good library week! Actually, it was a phenomenal library week. And happily, we're going on a long driving weekend so I'll have plenty of time for guilt-free indulgence.

These are the books I got at the library this week.


I've never watched Supernanny but if she can help me keep Dave from destroying all of us, I'll read her book.

I liked Weird US except for all the occult stuff in it and this is more of the same. Even Friend Husband was reading it.

This was on the same table as Weird Indiana. Its title amuses me. Plus it sounds like a fun guide to field trips, don't you think? What good's a state if you can't make fun of it occasionally?


We read the first book in this series for book club last time. I didn't expect to like it at all but I ended up reading the whole series. I'm in line for some sort of sequel to the series.


I read the prior book about these people from this author and found it to be magical. I've been waiting impatiently for this one. Then I forgot about it. And then I rediscovered it! Yay!

New Kellerman Lazarus/Decker book. I love the interplay of the main characters in this series but I truly wish the murder mystery part of it wasn't so gruesome.

Looked interesting. Sort of is.


As someone who is adipose-enhanced, I find books with titles like this interesting.


I've really been getting into this author's Gaslight series. To the point where I've actually taken Friend Cherylyn's good lead and started ordering cheap books from Amazon so I could read the whole series. This is one our library had.



And also this one. And I've already read both of them. And the Kellerman & Koonz books. Yes, I was doing the rest of my work and yes, I read very quickly.


Since I read too quickly, I have a tendency to blow through series. I got some other series ideas from my Facebook friends last year and this series was among them. I like it fine but I think I was bogged down in actual work the last time I read one, so I didn't tear through the rest of them. So here it is, a murder mystery set in turn-of-the-last century Oklahoma.


And, per recommendation from another set of Facebook friends (the Cozy Mysteries group on GoodReads), I got this one, about southern sisters who solve mysteries.


We enjoy this series a lot...get some history into the family without much effort.


And also this one! Yes, I did get about 10 other books for the children while I was there, but these (and The Long Winter) are the ones I'm most likely to read.

Oh, and there are two more waiting for me at the library which I will probably pick up to read on the trip! They are both new installments of beloved series.





So I probably won't have to go to the library until, oh, the end of next week, right?

Önskar er alla ett riktigt Gott Nytt År 2010!*

* Stolen directly from Cousin Monica's Facebook status, as my Swedish does not extend past saying, "Excuse me!"

So, here we are, the last day of 2009. It has been a difficult year, for many reasons. But it has also been a wonderful year in many ways. My Friend Cherylyn is still around, for which I am very grateful. The twins have grown up a little more, making them a little easier to train. We had enough money for the medical traumas we got to experience this year...there are many ways that I could go with this but I will stop here and celebrate one of the great loves of my life: books.

I have always been a reader. To my mother's great dismay, I read all the time. I read most of the books in my elementary school library. I mean, I was into it. I did my share of watching television too, but I usually had a book in my hand at the same time.

At the beginning of this year, I had the idea to write down all the books that I had read over the course of the year. I wanted to know how many books I read in the course of a year. As I was writing them down, I thought it would be a good idea to rate them along some continuum so I would have some idea of how much I liked them (or didn't). I came up with a very simple star system (I'm all into simple these days) and rated the books. Now remember that I couldn't possibly rate them the exact same way every time, so these are just "take it with a grain of salt" type ratings. And I did catch myself saying things like, "Well, this is ok for (insert genre here) but within the entire pantheon of fiction, it's a lower ranking." Yes, I do talk to myself like that. I'm sure that there is not a crowd of people waiting with baited breath to know what I thought of this that or the other book. But I felt that a warning was necessary.

Friend Cherylyn asked me how I kept track of the books. Here it is: I wrote them down in my journal. Now I am about the most disorganized thing in life and I know that I forgot to write down one book in the middle of the year, but by and large, I think I recorded the rest of them. I'm glad that I didn't write them down in a Word document on the computer, as our computer has been reformatted twice this year. It was an easier discipline (if I may use that term here) to achieve than I thought it would be and it is fun to see all the books I've read this year. So, here we go:

** average
*** above average
**** super-read again
***** unbelievably good

January

All Things Bright and Beautiful (Herriot)
All Creatures Great and Small (Herriot)
All Things Wise and Wonderful (Herriot)
Every Living Thing (Herriot)
I didn't rate any of these, probably because they are ones that I read over and over again. That should probably make them 4 stars, right?

James Herriot (Graham Lord) ***
Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Writing Thank You Notes (Gifford and Fisher) **
Sarah's Seasons (Martha Moore Davis) ****
The Children's Blizzard (David Laskin) ****
The Emancipator's Wife (Barbara Hambly) ****
See You In 100 Years (Logan Ward) ***
Dinner With Dad (Cameron Stracher) **
24-Karat Kids (Goldstein & Stuart) ****
Love the One You're With (Emily Giffin) ****
Marrying Anita (Anita Jain) **
Cincinnati, For Pete's Sake (Peter Bronson) ***

February

Queen City Lady: The 1861 Journal of Amanda Wilson (William Thomas Venner) ***
A Pioneer Woman's Memoir (Fulton, Greenberg & McKeever) ***
Love Comes Softly
Love's Enduring Promise
Love's Long Journey
Love's Abiding Joy (all by Janette Oke and all rated ***)
All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House (Giffels) ***
Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines ***
Patriot Hearts (Barbara Hambly) ***
Rhett Butler's People (McCaig) ***
20 and Counting (Duggar& Duggar) ***½

March

Fever Season (Hambly) ****½
William Henry is a Fine Name (Gohlke)****
I Have Seen Him in the Watchfires (Gohlke) ****
A Free Man of Color (Hambly) ****
Graveyard Dust (Hambly) ****
Sold Down the River (Hambly) ****
Cream Puff Murder (Fluke) ***
When Men Became Gods (Singular) *½
Die Upon A Kiss (Hambly) **

April

Multiple Blessings (Goesslin & Goesslin) *
Wet Grave (Hambly) *****
Days of the Dead (Hambly) ****
Dead Water (Hambly) *****
Heart and Soul (Binchy) ****
Joey Green's Gardening Magic ***
Plain Perfect (Wiseman) ***
Love Mercy (Earlene Fowler) ****
Something From the Kitchen (Laura Shapiro) ***
Blueberry Muffin Murder (Fluke) ***
After the Rice (Wendy French) *
Baker Towers (Jennifer Haigh) ***
Naptime is the New Happy Hour (Stefanie Wilder-Taylor) *

May

Irish Country Village (Patrick Taylor) **
Gone With The Wind ****
Scarlett ****

June

Whitethorn Woods (Binchy) ***
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World (Myron &Witter) **
The Way She Chose **½

July

Summer on Blossom Street (Debbie Macomber) **½
Ellie
Daniel
Reuben (All by Mary Christner Bontrager & all rated **½)
Lucy Winchester (C.C. Kaufmann) **

August
A Bride Most Begrudging (Gist) **½
The Old Buzzard Had it Coming (Donis Casey) ****
Blindman's Bluff (Kellerman) ****
Years of Rice and Salt (Very strange book) ***
American Cookery (Kalpakian) ****

September
Those Who Love (Irving Stone) **
The Memoir Club (Kalpakian) ****
Patchwork Clan (Lund) ***
The Girls from Ames (Zaslow)***
Twilight (Meyer) ***
New Moon (Meyer) **
Eclipse (Meyer) **
Pretty In Plaid (Jen Lancaster) ***½
The Missing (Beverly Lewis) **
Murder on Marble Row (Victoria Thompson) ****

October
A Year on Ladybug Farm ***
4 novels by Wanda Brunstetter (Brides of Webster County) **
Photo Finished (Laura Childs) **
Dragonwell Dead (Childs) **
Keepsake Crimes (Childs) **
Blood Orange Brewing (Childs) **
The Quilter's Legacy (Chiaverini) ****
Circle of Quilters (Chiaverini) **
Winding Way Quilt (Chiaverini) ***
Quilter's Homecoming (Chiaverini) ****
The Christmas Quilt (Chiaverini) **
The New Years Quilt (Chiaverini) ***
Eyewitness Classics: Little Women ***
Building a Home with My Husband (Rachel Simon) **½
The Jazz Bird (Craig Holden) ****

November
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Porter) ***
Homegrown Stories & Homefried Lies (Mitch Jayne) ***
Among the Mad (Jacquelyn Winspear) ****
Plum Pudding Murder (Fluke) ***
The Angel of Darkness (Caleb Carr) ****
This Time of Dying (Reina) ****
Giving Thanks (Plimouth Plantation) **
Growing up in a New Century **
After the Ball (Beard) ***

December
Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (Matthew Algeo) ***
Roots (Alex Haley) ****
Birds of a Feather (Winspear) ****
Haunted Ohio I, II, III, IV, & V (Chris Woodyard) ***
Maisie Dobbs (Winspear) ***½
When the Morning Comes (Woodsmall) ***
When the Soul Mends (Woodsmall) ***½
Upstairs in the White House (West) ***½
Men In Knits (Manning) ***
The Trophy Wife's Club (Billerbeck) **½
Back to Life (Billerbeck) **½
The Sound of Sleigh Bells (Woodsmall) ***½
The Hope of Refuge (Woodsmall) **½
Tragic Magic (Childs) **
Pardonable Lies (Winspear) ****

This year, it seems that I discovered three authors whose books intrigued me enough to read a number of them. These would be Barbara Hambly, Laura Kalpakian, & Jacquelyn Winspear. I can highly recommend the Hambly books in the Benjamin January series as well as The Emancipator's Wife but I have not read the rest of her extensive list of works. I can also highly recommend Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series. It is quite an interesting and meaty bit of detective fiction. Now, I have never read Agatha Christy, so I don't know how she compares, but I am intrigued by the setting (England, between the World Wars) and the protagonist. I still have two more in the series. I shall be very sad to have finished them.

There you have it, for what it's worth. Happy reading and happy new year!

Chapter Eight, in which Our Heroine Ponders Why it is that Blogging is so Difficult in these modern Days

I did start a post on Tuesday, which was Abby's 9th birthday, but since I was running around like mad trying to get the components to her birthday dinner, then trying to cook said dinner, I didn't have time to complete it. Then it was sort of stale. So here I am on Thursday, attempting to summarize all the things, interesting and otherwise, that have been happening around here of late.

Let's see...I made a cake! Wanna see it?


It was awfully yummy and it lasted almost a full 24 hours. I got one piece of it. Of course, I much prefer my cake unbaked (which means that I like the batter better than the cake) but this one is pretty good baked. She wanted me to make another one for her slumber party tomorrow night but I talked her down to cupcakes. Something about making two 4-layer cakes in a week makes me a little hysterical. I mean, I could do it but I don't really want to.

What I really want to do is to play Pack Rat on Facebook and to plant my garden.

The garden has been a bit problematic this year. I made 3 new ones last week (hee hee hee) and the soil is dreadful. It's almost solid clay. I don't know how anything survives in our yard. So I told Friend Husband that I was going to have to suck up and buy some topsoil in bulk so I could mix it in the gardens, make a layer around the house for drainage, and maybe put some in the yard for the poor grass. Our local soil outlet wanted about $150 for 3 cubic yards of dirt (their minimum order) and I reluctantly agreed. When Friend Husband heard about it, he didn't exactly hit the roof but he was decidedly unthrilled about the whole thing. Uncharacteristically, I had a mini-tizzy and told him that, quite frankly, I was sick and tired of loading, unloading, and moving eleventy-million bags of topsoil and that it would be a lot easier on me if I didn't have to do two of those steps. He pondered that for a moment then offered, "Ok, I'll go get the bagged dirt and we'll cancel the delivery." And we did. So now I'm waiting for him and eleventy-million bags of topsoil to arrive. We do get our exercise in the spring.

While I'm waiting and not playing Pack Rat, I'm knitting on the Hedera socks from Knitty and reading a couple of books. What can I say? My socks are not nearly as beautious as those pictured on the website. I seem to have issues with lace knitting and randomly end up with more or fewer stitches than I need. I decided not to worry about it since these socks are supposed to be for me (yay!) and it's a practice thing. It does make me much happier to knit socks than the dishcloths and sweaters I've been doing. I like my cute little dpns and the danglingness of the sock being formed beneath them. I like the idea that I can knit socks, for Pete's sake...who'd have thunk it possible? Not me.

I did really really like Knitting in America or whatever that knitting book was that I mentioned on my Xanga blog last week. A knitting book with a historical bent is just what the doctor ordered for Geek Woman here. I'm having other issues with a book I'm reading now.

I am concurrently (and accidentally) reading Eat, Pray, Love, and Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair. I waited a long time to get the former title and have discovered that I really don't like it at all. The adventures she has are interesting but I just don't like it. Perhaps I don't like the tone in which she writes. I don't know. I am enjoying DD & CCH, though. It's written by a woman whose blog I enjoy reading and it's not as bad as the title would make it out. It's been interesting, though, that the books have paralleled each other in many ways as I've been reading them. Each woman is adjusting to life without her husband. Each (at the point in the books I am right now) is traveling in another country. Each is attempting to find the definition of who she is after a big loss. I still like Laurie Perry's better. If EPL doesn't improve, it's going back to the library, unfinished. Life is too short to read irritating books.

And, now that Abby's birthday is past, it's time to think about camp. It'll be here before we know it. It will be nice to see Friend Janet and family, Friend Jennifer and family, Friend Cherylyn and family, and so many others. I do dread the drive though, and the cost of the gas. We're going to have to get up way too early in the morning after the camp closes to make it back here Saturday night...I'm getting to be too old for that. Oh well. Next year, Sarah can help drive.

And what else? Seems like I can blog up a storm in my brain while away from the computer, but not much in front of the computer. Oh well, it's probably time for me to go knit on that sock some more anyway. Sorry about the bizarre update, but I guess a bizarre update is better than none.

Thursday Thirteen # 74

Thirteen Books in my queue These are books that I actually have in my possession which are awaiting their turn to be perused. When it gets cold and snowy, I have a tendency to hunker down with a book or a quilt to work on or something of that ilk. I usually read books about sunny, hot places in the winter but I don't have any of them in queue right now. Here are 13 of the many that are awaiting me: 1. Straight Man by Richard Russo. This was recommended to me by another faculty wife at the department holiday party. I liked his Empire Falls that we read for book club and this one has my head spinning. It also makes me wonder if this is what Friend Husband and I will be like in 5 or 10 years (it's about the department head of English at some little university and the whole academia waltz thing is mindboggling and hilarious). So far, Empire Falls is the better book, though. 2. Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair by Laurie Perry. Ok, before the eyebrows raise, this was written by the woman who writes Crazy Aunt Purl, a blog that is on my SIR list. It's an interesting book so far but I can't read it when I eat (which is when I usually read) because it's new and doesn't belong to me or to the library, so I don't want to risk its getting messed up. 3. Snobs by Julian Fellowes. This was being read and enjoyed by Susan Wise Bauer, so I thought I'd give it a shot. 4. The Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanna Fluke. I've finished this but I haven't made all the recipes out of it that I want to. Yesterday I made the Cappucino Royales. They were enjoyed by most of the family but I thought they needed more coffee. Of course, then they probably wouldn't have tasted so like cappucino and wouldn't have been so much enjoyed by everyone else. 5. The Ultimate Doll's House Book by Faith Eaton and A Beginner's Guide to the Doll's House Hobby by Jean Nisbett. This whole thing with Rachel's doll house has the makings of a new obsession. 6. The Diary of Anne Frank. Mean mom that I am, I'm making Sarah and Rachel read this for school and I decided to read the "critical edition" myself. I haven't read this book in decades. 7. The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough. Making that list last week got me to thinking about other David McCullough books that I haven't read. Of course, you can't make a statement about how much you like his books if you haven't read all of them, right? Ha ha. Anyway, I read an interesting excerpt from a book about the Johnstown Flood many years ago (decades even) and I am wondering if this is the one. 8. Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued From the Holocaust by Maxine Rosenberg. 9. The Iliad by Homer 10. Mornings on Horseback again, by David McCullough. I really enjoyed Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris, although it was ponderous in parts. Theodore Roosevelt was such a person. They surely don't come like that anymore. 11. Tumbling Blocks by Earlene Fowler. Hooray! She's one of the authors whose books I read as soon as I can after they come out. Some of her books (I mentioned them in last week's TT) just have me bawling before the end. I don't anticipate that this would be one of them but I do have to say that I enjoy her depiction of relationships. I like her characters too, especially Benni Harper Ortiz and her family, but the relationships just really get me every time. 12. Candy Cane Murder by Joanne Fluke, Laura Levine & Leslie Meier. I've read food-related mysteries by all of these authors and when I saw this book on Amazon last week, I decided to see if our local library had it. It did and now it is in queue. I have to say this about Joanne Fluke's books. The recipes are marvelous. The family really likes it when I am reading her books because they know that cookies are coming shortly. 13. Thunderstruck by Eric Larson. I've enjoyed the last couple of books he's written for their lush depictions of life in another time. They are rather grim, as they describe death and destruction generally but the descriptions are so interesting that I can get past them. So there you have it! What's on your winter reading list? Happy Thursday!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others' comments. It’s easy, and fun! Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Thursday Thirteen # 73

Thirteen of my very favoritest books Yes, I'm stretching but I couldn't think of anything else to write about today. (And yes, Julie, I know that I'm under no obligation to write but I do feel sort of a compulsion on Thursdays.) When I was a youngster, for some reason, I decided that it would be really really cool to own and read the classics of literature. I did very well with this until I got married, started graduate school, had children, etc. Then I was just looking for release and not validation of my basic worth as a person. Well, I was looking for the validation but it was more important to me to just chill. So this list is quite a bit different than it would have been say 20 years ago. 1. ...And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer I first discovered this book when I was breastfeeding my now 8-year-old daughter. If I didn't read while we were nursing, I would fall asleep, which could have negative effects for both me and the baby. I think I must have picked this book up at a library sale. It was a very thick paperback and had pictures of people who looked interesting to me so I got it. I was soon engrossed in the doings of Waynesboro, OH, Anne Alexander Gordon and Sally Cochran Rausch. I still read it about every year (just finished this year's reading of it) and I get something new out of it every time. If you don't like tales that involve the entire life span of the characters, you won't like this one. Recently I was reading a book about ghosts in Ohio and came across a reference to the book. I knew that the author lived in Xenia, which is about an hour north of here, but it never occurred to me that she was taking scenery and actual characters from her hometown. They mentioned not only a certain house in this book but a couple of characters as well. My cup runneth over. 2. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Naturally, I read these more as a child, but I still read them over again periodically. I don't read my own copies of them anymore because they are about to fall apart at the seams as it is. We have listened to these books on tape when we're on long road trips. I can highly recommend the Harper Collins series with Cherry Jones as narrator. I can't recall if I did this audibly while we were driving, but many of the scenes I could quote almost verbatim from reading them so very often over the years. Also interesting are the collected articles she did for the Missouri Ruralist in the earlier part of the 1900's. 3. Little Women/Little Men/Jo's Boys, etc. by Louisa May Alcott. Again, books that I've read repeatedly through the years, but they touch me in different ways each time I read them. Yes, I know that she wrote other books for adults but remember, this is escapist reading for me. 4. Chaim Potok's books, especially Davita's Harp and The Promise. I've always been fascinated with Orthodox Judaism and Judaism as a whole and its parallels to fundamentalist Christianity and, while these are only works of fiction, at least some of his later novels were largely based on real people and situations. The question of finding your bridge from your parents' beliefs and struggles to your own is compelling to many, I think. I could always relate to that theme and the theme of figuring out how to integrate real, modern life into your ancient and deeply-held religious beliefs. 5. Faye Kellerman's books, especially Street Dreams and Double Homicide, which she wrote with her husband, novelist Jonathan Kellerman. Actually, I just really like the characters of Rina Lazarus Decker and her husband Peter. The only book of hers that I didn't really like was The Quality of Mercy, which dealt with the Spanish Jews during the Inquisition. I was reading it during lunch and it has a quite graphic depiction of someone burning at the stake, I think. It was rather too much and even thinking about it now makes me queasy. 6. Earlene Fowler's books, especially Mariner's Compass and Sunshine and Shadow, for different reasons. I really like the main characters in this series and enjoy the glimpse into a world about which I would know nothing if it weren't for her books. Sunshine and Shadow, especially, ended with a bang and left me crying and wanting more, right this very minute. Mariner's Compass fed into my need to know who my parents really were as people, before they were my parents, and also spoke to the part of me that felt abandoned as a child. It might not hit you the same way and I'm pretty sure that S&S wouldn't if you don't know the characters, but I'd still recommend the series. 7. Diane Mott Davidson's books, especially The Last Suppers and Sticks and Scones. I guess this is turning into "my favorite authors" rather than my favorite books. Oh well. I like Davidson's books and her recipes but word to the wise, the books after and including Double Shot are significantly darker than the ones previous. Double Shot was a good book, but written in a totally different way than the ones before it. After DS, Davidson seemed to return to more of the Goldy Bear Schultz formula but it was still more informed and colored by knowledge of the seamier side of life. 8. And yet another author: Joanne Fluke, who writes the Hannah Swensen series. My favorite of hers is the Sugar Cookie Murder, as much for the recipes as for the story. Fluke, like Davidson, includes delicious recipes in the book. Sugar Cookie Murder not only has the signature cookie recipes but all sorts of other yummy things (and Fluke's recipes are quite a bit more accessible to the average person than Davidson's). Looking over the Amazon listings, I realize that I've missed out on two new Hannah Swensen books and a collaboration with two other authors. I can't wait until they come in to the library! 9. The Last Season by Eric Blehm. I don't buy books as much as I used to. Well, let me amend that by saying that I don't buy many new books anymore. No money for it, for one thing, and I've also learned to use the resources at my public library to circumvent my having to buy books. This is one book that I read from the library that I then went out and acquired a copy of. I've written about it before (probably about 18 months ago) and more effusively. It's the story of Randy Morgenson, an experienced park ranger who disappeared in the Sierras in 1996. While some of the background information is, to be blunt, tedious, the depictions of the wilderness that Morgenson loved were soaring and spectacular. It gave me a whole new appreciation for our wild areas and the people who work there. Of course, I love a good mystery and the one surrounding Morgenson's disappearance is well paced and well-written. 10. Those Who Love by Irving Stone and John Adams by David McCullough. Those Who Love ignited my years-long obsession with Abigail Adams and John Adams helped me to appreciate her beloved friend and husband. Actually, now that I think about it, my own Friend Husband bought me both copies that I own...go, Friend Husband! I can't explain to you who deeply obsessed I was with Abigail Adams. I could quote long passages about her life and what it meant both to those around her and to me. I've got a shelf and a half of books just about Adams and her descendants. Though TWL is a novel, and I imagine that, if I were to read it again, it would seem rather ponderous, it was so interesting a book to me that it made me want to go out there and learn more about the wife of our second president (and mother of our 6th). I also love the way that David McCullough gets into his subjects and makes them living breathing people (I also really liked Truman). That has inspired me to go out and learn about the subjects on my own (and to independently verify some of the claims made by historians). 11. Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson (I also liked The Devil in the White City). I'm sensing a theme here: history combined with the personal stories of actual people. This was a recollection of the hurricane that leveled Galveston, TX, in 1900 and the meterologist who was supposed to be responsible for warning the population about it. It was also a book about the world of 1900 and how it was on the cusp of change. 12. Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. Ok, I'm stretching here but I'm having trouble getting to 13 and Rachel needs to use the computer. I did like this book. Sadly, it made me laugh. And it made me super vigilant about our children when I take them anywhere out in anything approaching "the wild". 13. Books by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and The Hindi-Bindi Club by Monica Pradhan. I love books about different cultures (see # 4 above) and I am especially fascinated by India and Indian (and Indian-American) culture. The Hindi-Bindi Club has the added advantage of recipes (and I can highly recommend the Goan Shrimp Curry, having made that last night). The books are mainly about Indian women and their relationships, which is also fascinating to me. Women's relationships, I mean. Having been such a tomboy when I was growing up, it wasn't until graduate school that I had a really deep relationship with women at all. Now I find myself surrounded by them at all times and I still feel a little, shall we say, out of my element. Something about Divakaruni's writing is very mysterious and compelling and I have read her books more than once. Ok, sorry, this has dragged on ad infinitem. Hope it was enjoyable. Happy Thursday, everyone!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others' comments. It’s easy, and fun! Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Book reviews

Back in September, I sort of entered a contest wherein we were to list the books we wanted to read this fall. I've read almost half of them and here is the book review of them. If you want to find out about the contest, go here.

First, I will totally cop to the fact that I've only read about 1/3 of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It needs to go back to the library since it's overdue and other people have it on hold. Maybe I'll get it on hold again too, to see if the latter 2/3 are as grueling as the first 1/3. Perhaps it was a problem with expectations. I expected to see a book that would be inspiring to me to seek out food that is locally grown, perhaps even by my ownself. The only thing this book inspired in me is reactance, due to its preachiness and slight holier-than-thou attitude toward those of us who do not own land enough to sustain our own families on our gardens. Like I said, perhaps it gets better, but so far I'd give it a C- and it only gets that because I haven't finished it.

At last, a new Faye Kellerman book! Hooray! As I have said, I'm a big fan anyway. I love her Decker-Lazarus series and I have even enjoyed her forays out of that series, with the exception of The Quality of Mercy. Her new book, The Burnt House, was much more Decker than Lazarus (in other words, more about the police work and less about the family life that I so like to read about) but I was fascinated by the techniques described in the book to attempt to reconstruct a victim's identity when the bones that are available are too fragile to use themselves. Very interesting. The mystery was also more labyrinthine than her usual mysteries and that kept me on the edge of my seat. Definitely recommend. 5/5

Right after I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns, I wanted to log on and describe how wonderful I thought it was. Don't get me wrong, it was extremely difficult to read in certain parts, just from what was described (can you imagine living as a woman in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan?) but it was well worth the effort, if you want a glimpse into living a different life in a different culture. (For more of that, in a juvenile book, try The Breadwinner, by Deborah Ellis.) My thought on finishing it and closing the covers was, "Wow." 4.5/5 (Cautions: violence, graphic war imagery, some sexual situations, including marital relations)

And finally, the book I finished this morning, just in time for this review, Look Me In The Eye: My Life With Asperger's by John Elder Robison. Yow. This book did not disappoint, although it was somewhat different than I thought it would be. I thought I'd be reading something more along the lines of Finding Ben. Instead, I read the very real memoirs of a man who struggled with Asperger's until his mid 30's, when he was finally diagnosed. By that time, he had managed to find a way to use his Aspergian skills to his benefit but it was a long, difficult road to get there. Definite language cautions here. It was sometimes hard to get through the cursing to the primary message of the book. Still, an interesting read, although as a parent of children with Asperger's, I wouldn't say it was exactly comforting. I sure wouldn't want any of my children to live the life that John Robison did. I did convulse with laughter about the names that he gave the people in his life. For example, his wife, who is the second daughter in a family of three daughters, is named Unit Two. Her sisters are Units One and Three and the sister's husband is known as Three-B. Sorry, just had to throw that in because it was so funny. 4/5, both for the Asperger's information and the "inside view" of what it is to be Aspergian.

Yarn Love---Book Love

I got me some yarn love in the mailbox today:  2 skeins of woolish things to try out for a sweater jacket for Friend Husband and 2 skeins of sock yarn.  Part of the sock yarn will be put to use (hopefully) finishing David's socks and the rest will become other socks, in time.  I so love getting yarn (fabric, pictures, books, letters, whatever) in the mail.  It was happy dance time, right out there in the street and all.  I've got them down here by the computer so that I could enter them into my Ravelry account prior to tearing into them ravenously.

As any casual observer here will note, I also enjoy (nay, love) reading.  On a number of blogs recently, I've seen Katrina's contest mentioned and I'd intended to enter but just hadn't gotten around to it.  To my shock, tomorrow is the last day to enter the challenge if you want to go for prizes.  Since there are a bazillion people entered, I doubt I'll win anything, but hey, I'll take it.  So here's my official entry.

The contest entails writing down the books that you plan to get read this fall.  No pressure, no rules about how worthy or wonderful they're to be.  Make the contest whatever you want it to be.  So here are a few books I want to read this fall:

Mr. Darcy's Diary by Amanda Grange.  Friend Sharon gave this to me for my birthday and it's just sat on my table gathering dust.  I want to read it but for some reason I haven't.  So I finally will, ok?  (By the way, did you know that there is an entire page of Amazon listings devoted to Pride and Prejudice characters with Darcy in their surnames?  I mean, people who written sequels and prequels and other stuff...weird.)

Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World by Joanna Weaver.  Hey, if I'm reading all the cool books that Friend Sharon has given me, I'll put this one in queue.  She gave it to me at least five years ago...yoiks!  Good thing she can't read this, huh?

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  Second novel by the author of Kite Runner, which we read in book club a while back.  The first novel was brutal but magnificent.

The Burnt House by Faye Kellerman.  I've read everything she's written except for The Quality of Mercy, which just sickened me to the point of no return.  This is the latest in the Rina Lazarus-Peter Decker series, which I love.

Look Me In The Eye:  My Life With Asperger's by John Elder Robison.  When I went scanning the list of new Asperger's books recently, I found this one that sounded like one I'd enjoy.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.  I am always fascinated by people who are able to be self-sufficient.  I toy with the idea late at night when my house is quiet, but it fades and then pops with a small sound in the light of day.  The Kingsolvers did it and wrote about it, so I'll just live vicariously through them.

Susannah's Garden by Debbie Macomber.  Because I like her writing, ok?

Rediscovering Yourself by Gordon MacDonald.  I think the subtitle is something like "listening to midlife" or something like that.  It's been on my shelf forever and recently made the climb upstairs.

Ok, that's enough.  No doubt, if I still have my faculties about me, I'll read more books than these, but thus ends my list.  If you want to enter the contest (before midnight tomorrow), follow the link on the pretty picture above.

A Walk in the Woods

Today I took a long walk in the woods. It was actually more of a hike and believe me, I know I will be paying for it tomorrow, but it was wonderful nonetheless. I've been wanting to do some long hikes rather than shorter walks and decided that Saturday morning would be a good time to disappear in the woods for a while, hike, think, decompress, pray, and sweat. I didn't get out as early this morning as I would have liked, but I finally did get out there for a three-hour hike.

A three hour hike.

Ha, had to get that Gilligan's Island reference in there. Anyway, I went to our local hiking trails with Lucy the Wonder Dog, who was in transports because she got to go somewhere. Anywhere. The vet's office? Sure thing! Walk around the block? I'm there! She had a great time today but I think it took a lot out of her.

It's amazing how wonderful it was to just walk in the woods. It was quiet, not silent, but quiet. We heard some really weird sounds, like a squeaky car trunk opening. I decided that they were the tops of the trees as they swayed in the breeze. We saw some folks, but not many, given that this is a gorgeous Saturday afternoon.

It may have been because of the trail.

For over a year, I've been wanting to walk Red Wing Trail. It's the longest of the trails and labeled "difficult", so I hadn't done it. When we've hiked the Fox Rock Trail (now called the Geology Trail), it's taken the wind out of my sails. It's got a gazillion picturesque steps to go up and down. Who needs a stair-step machine? So I've never done Red Wing and today I dove in and did it.

There's a chicken-out spot on Red Wing, where you can take a shortcut which will put you back near the beginning of Red Wing so you don't have to do the 2.6 miles, plus the mileage after that to get back to the Visitor Center. It is a little bit after a monster incline which had me gasping for breath and I stood there and contemplated it while Lucy paced impatiently. Some other folks came off the longer part of the trail and stood at the crossroads with me, trying to figure out whether to take the shortcut or to go the longer way (with the incline). They went on the shortcut and I, perversely, decided to go all the way around the long way. Because I couldn't look like a wuss. Yeah, that's a good reason to hike over 4 miles.

We walked through grand old trees, thrusting branches up into a cerulean sky. We walked through meadows where the goldenrod was eye-height to me and Lucy got scared off by something in the midst of it (they have trails cut through the meadow and laid through the woods). We walked along and, occasionally, through streams and streambeds. We looked at an area which is supposedly reclaimed wetland but, in this weather, is just another dry creek with lots of grass around it. I saw deeply fissured ground and thought how wonderful it would be for us to get a good soaking rain. I saw butterflies, birds, and bugs. It was very relaxing. My soul sang for gladness and thankfulness. And I wondered why it couldn't always be the way it was in the woods. Why can't I be serene and happy in my everyday life? Why do I have to walk to the top of a hill to achieve peace?

Maybe it was the oxygen deprivation (it's been a while since I did any hiking).

I thought a lot about that, about the depression that dogs my life, about my family and our life choices. I thought about duty, committment, and sacrifice. I thought about sucking it up and I thought about expressing feelings, needs, and desires. I wondered if I'd ever make it out of the woods and to the restroom at the Visitor's Center.

Well, it was a long hike!

It was a super time. I'm so grateful I got the chance to go and I really want to go again. I even went so far as to challenge myself to hike all 20 or so miles of trails there in Rowe Woods (surely nothing could be as arduous as today was?) My problem is that I'm either too hard on myself or too lenient. I was afraid to actually do the challenge because then I'd have an instantaneous negative reaction and never walk out there again. But I think it's good for me and I want to continue. I'd love to be one of the vigorous old ladies I see hiking out there. I've given up on the idea of being a thin old lady (or middle-aged lady) but I'll opt for vigor over the other option any day of the week. So, that's the plan. Hike Rowe Woods. I've already done Red Wing, part of Geology, and part of Whitetail, how hard could it be?

Oh, and the Crocs were a mistake. Even if it's the height of summer and your feet are hot, hot, hot, do not give into the temptation to hike in Crocs. I'm just sayin'.

Oh, oh, oh! Guess what? I hit the mother lode of books at the library yesterday. All of a sudden, a lot of the books I'd attempted to place on hold came in. Here are a few of the goodies:

Sweet Revenge, the new Diane Mott Davidson book

The Roosevelt Women, Betty Boyd Caroli

Unleash the Power of NatureFoods

Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger Syndrome, Luke Jackson

Dream House and Blues in the Night, Rochelle Krich

The new Yarn Harlot book

I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life Dramatic Events that Changed America

And two Haunted Ohio books.

You know what I'll be doing this weekend! I hope yours is a happy one!