Book Exchange Summary 2012

I love my Book Club, and the December meeting is one of the social highlights of the feastive season. It's the annual book exchange where each lady brings a new, wrapped book and we draw for selection order. Basically, it becomes a game of either choosing a wrapped book from the pile in the middle of the room, or "stealing" from someone who has already unwrapped and revealed the title of the book.

Most years there are a couple of "hot" titles that rip around the room, and cause great commotion on how to get the book back. It's always a good laugh and everyone leaves with a new book to read over Christmas!

Here's a list of the books that were offered in this year's exchange:

1.  The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler (I wanted this one so much that I went and bought myself a copy for my book pile.)

2. Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy (Old classic that I have on my Kobo--I read it a long time ago, and I'm not sure I want to read the Russian classics again for awhile.)

3.  Still Alice by Lisa Genova (Already read it, and loved it. Of course, I always think I'm losing my mind, but that's part of the process of reading it!)

4.  Astray by Emma Donahue (My contribution to the exchange as we read and enjoyed her earlier title "Room" this year)

5.  Canada, Richard Ford (yikes, Richard Ford is following me...I recently crawled through his "Independance Day", and I'm not signing up for more from him!)

6.  Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Not sure I'll ever take her seriously since Harry Potter)

7.  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (?)

8. The Shoemakers Wife by Adriana Trigiani (Nice cover...I think Lorece got this one and enjoyed it)

9.  Magnified World by Grace O'Connell (?)

10.   The Butterfly House by Marcia Preston (This is the book that I received, and I just finished blogging about it, See Feb 8 2013)

11.  The Secret Daughter by Shula Gowda (Loved this book, and think it's one not to be missed)

12.  The Twelve Tribes. (Duplication of books...must be a popular one in the book stores.)

13.  Inside by Alix Ohlin (?)

14.  The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom (shortish novel, and heard it was ok)

15.  The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman (I have this one on my list to read also.)

16. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel (On my side table, just waiting to read it. My mom keeps asking me if I have read it yet. I think it's a really good one.)

So as you can see, there are some really good titles that came up at the party. I look forward to reading them, and will enjoy selecting my contribution for next December's exchange.

OK, So I read one, But I have forgotten...

Ok, so sometimes I forget the titles of what I have just read. This time, I know I have read it, but I can't remember the title, and I can't remember what the book was about.

Usually, it's a sign that I wasn't much keen on the book to start. Knowing my short memory, I try to blog about the book as soon as I have finished it. In this case, I was so excited to get onto reading the October selection for my book club, that I put the finished novel down (somewhere) and now I can't find it, and I can't remember much about it. (In my defence, I am reorganizing my home office, so I have an excuse as I have just packed all my books up into boxes for a week.)

Hold on now...I remember it was about a man, who is a real estate agent in New Jersey, and he is divorced and struggling to maintain a relationship with his son. During the course of the story, his son is hit in the head with a baseball in a batting cage accident in Cooperstown.

What was it called again: One Ball Too Many?...No that isn't it.

Tell you what, when I find it, I'll fill in the blanks and we'll call it a blog entry. (Wonder if I can google a book just with short description?) Oh well.

OK. I FOUND IT. IT'S CALLED INDEPENDENCE DAY BY RICHARD FORD. Don't rush out and buy it. I'll lend you a copy!

Listen, I don't purport to know much about literature, but this is one of the reasons I wouldn't recommend it. David Louis Edelman sums up why I found it boring:

"No one could accuse Richard Ford of rushing things in Independence Day. (Bascombe spends fifty pages alone narrating his house tour with the Markhams.) But those who can float with the tide will find a brilliant and absorbing underbelly to Independence Day that makes it one of the most accomplished novels of the year."

No thanks to underbelly!!!
 

What Stinks Around Here?!? Day Late and a Dollar Short...OH YAHHHH!!!!!

What a drag...

Well, it pains me to say that this book was a real disappointment. Talk about perpetuating stereotypes, with little attempt to create a portrait of a real life family. "Well, you're reading fiction Claire!" you say. Ok, I realise that this is fiction, but Dollar Short just seems to be painfullly predictable.

This is a summary of the novel by Book Reporter: "Through the literary device of the talk story, we explore the ups and downs of "the Price family." At the opening, everyone is at odds with each other. Viola and her husband Cecil have separated after a tumultuous, 38-year marriage. Viola's second oldest daughter Charlotte and she are not speaking. Viola is troubled by a situation with her youngest daughter Janel. The only son, Lewis, is an alcoholic, in and out of jail and alienated from the family because he feels he is the "failure" among his middle-class sisters. Paris, who admittedly is living out her mother's dream, is the only one at peace with Viola. But even Paris is harboring secrets. Meanwhile, Charlotte is not speaking to Paris because she feels Viola and Paris triangulate against her. The whole family is in turmoil."

Here's my overview of the dysfunctional characters:

-Overbearing fat black mother who's on her deathbed and needs to fix everyone's problems
-Four siblings who are fighting in lumps;
-One daughter is constantly popping pills and abusing prescription drugs
-One daughter married to a man who is sexually abusing her daughter...and she is in denial about it
-One daughter who's husband has a secret child with another woman and is paying child support behind her back
-One alcoholic brother who has a son that he never parents

Needless to say, it's grim. So painfully grim and predictable in some ways.

This was my book club's September read, and it was chosen from the local library's Book Club collection set. We try to use this moving collection at least 50% of the time, so that we don't have to buy a new book every month.

This month's selection was really disappointing though, and I question how it could have been included in the library's collection.

Oh well, onwards and upwards. October's read will be much better, I am quite sure!

Great Summer Read: The Red Tent

No summer is complete without a great story while laying in the sun or sitting by the pool. This year, my summer relaxation was perfected by Anita Diamant's The Red Tent.

Although my book club read this novel last year, I missed that month and put The Red Tent on my long list of "must reads". I am so glad I came back to it this month, as I will remember it as the summer vacation book of 2012. 

Arrowhead Provincial Park

Ironically, while it's call The Red Tent, I found myself reading inside a green and white tent in Arrowhead Provincial Park during a family camping trip. Our days were busy with hiking trails, kayaking on fresh water lakes and exploring the creatures of slow moving rivers. But at night, after the kids had roasted marshmallows on the camp fire and finally gone to sleep, I would pull out the bottle of Amarone and a flashlight so that I could enjoy Diamant's story under the northern Canadian stars. Reading by flashlight in the middle of the woods is absorbing...no disturbances (other than the occasional scratching from the nearby bushes.

Here's how Amazon.com summarizes the book:

"Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past. Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction."

Hands down, I loved this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading rich stories about strong women. Two bid thumbs up!!!

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

This is my book club's August selection, and we will be discussing it tomorrow morning at 9:30 am.  I just finished it, and wanted to jot down my thoughts before the meeting. (It should be noted that the Vaughan Public Library carries this novel as one of their Book Club selections, and as a result, we were all able to borrow this title from our local branch!)

I heard through the grapevine that many of the ladies haven't finished Gods. Some really didn't enjoy the mythological characters and references, and so they gave up early after about 40 pages.

Knowing that, I pressed on a little further, and to my surprise, I actually found this novel quite refreshing and very entertaining.

Here's summary: Twelve gods of Olympus find themselves living in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in an old London house--and none too happy about it. Times are tough for Gods, as no one really believes in them anymore, so they've had to get day jobs: Artemis as a dog-walker, Apollo as a TV psychic, Aphrodite as a phone sex operator, Dionysus as a DJ. 
 
Soon, what begins as a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills. Two perplexed humans, Alice and Neil, who are caught in the crossfire, must fear not only for their own lives, but for the survival of humankind. Nothing less than a true act of heroism is needed-but can these two decidedly ordinary people replicate the feats of the mythical heroes and save the world

This was a very creative novel. It was fiction, but I want to label more as creative "mythological" fiction. It reminded me alot of Tom Robbins' work...Extremely imaginative, and very unique. There is fiction, and then there is a leap of faith. Phillips takes the reader to the next level of creativity. Here's a link to her blog...She's a character! http://www.mariephillips.co.uk/

One reservation that I had with Phillips writing is that it sometimes relied too heavily on conversation, and I almost felt that I was reading a script at times. Not surprisingly, it has been picked up by Hollywood as a screenplay. 

King's 11/22/63: A Great Trip Back in Time

OMG, it's been too long. I have been reading but I lost my thought process. I didn't blog the last book that I read because I didn't finish it (that being Fifty Shades of Grey...ugh...Maybe I'll finish it, but I won't promise that!).

So here we go...Stephen King's 11/22/63 is a whopping 1900 pages.  It took me nearly a month of steady bedtime reading to polish this one off, but I found myself wanting to turn in early, just to catch up with the story. This is a very entertaining read, and I found myself thinking about the book during the day.

Here's a synopsis:  Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

This is my first King novel andI have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't expecting such cleaver writing, but I can't fault it at all. In fact, I look forward to reading more of his creative work. 

Life's Getting Too Complicated!

This video makes me chuckle. The more complicated our world becomes, the more silly we become! Enjoy!

Great Find: The Lost Daughters of China

Another Value Village Score!!!

While rummaging through the shelves at my local Value Village, I was lucky to find Karin Evans  account of her journey to China to adopt her daughter.  The Lost Daughters of China is the Evans' retelling of her adoption process between America and China in the late 1990's. 

Evans and her husband, unable to conceive children naturally, decide to adopt a baby girl from the Guangdong area of China. Although easy to decide that this is what she wants, her journey through the endless adoption red tape, and her far-away travels to the Peoples Republic of China shows how difficult a process this really is.

During her trip to the southern Chinese state, Evans' discovers that the One-Child policy is the tip of a very complicated social problem. The notion that male children are more valuable is ingrained in the Confusion culture for more than 1000 years. Further, this problematic policy creates such familial strife and suffering for many families who feel great pressure to produce a male child. Child abandonment is an ongoing problem that is a result of the policy that was introduced in the 1980's.

Evan's book is well written. She has done a great amount of research in preparing the context of her work. She sights academics, government studies, poems and literature. I found myself re-reading a few of such passages that were particularly touching.
 
For example, she quotes Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet: "Your children are not your children, they are not of  you, but they come through you. They are the gift of life's longing for itself."And also, a particularly beautiful excerpt from Meng Jia's poem Traveler's Song:

My loving mother, thread in hand,
Mended the coat I have on now,
Stitch by stitch, just before I left home,
Thinking that I might be gone a long time.

How can a blade of young grass
Ever repay the warmth of the spring sun?


One short coming of Evans' book is that there is an obvious absence of information about her daughter's progress in her new home country. How does her daughter feel about being adopted, and how does she cope with the feelings around being adopted? Also, she does become somewhat repetitive towards the end of the book, and I found that a little tighter editing would have been quite helpful there.

Overall this was a good read, but I would consider this only as a starting point for learning other aspects of adoption and the issues surrounding this complicated process.