Cyber Monday Sale at my Etsy Store

Hop on over to my Etsy store and take advantage of 10% off of all items, now through midnight tomorrow night.  Sales are happening!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LindasOtherLife

Black Friday Sale at my Etsy Store

Sleep in! Avoid crowds! - Shop Handmade and Local

Tomorrow only I am having a sale for my Facebook, Twitter and Book Blog friends.  If you buy something from my Etsy shop on Black Friday AND live in my local area, I will take 10% off the purchase total and refund your shipping costs when we arrange a delivery for your items.  If you are interested in a special order - certain color or type of fabric - just ask.  Visit my shop - 

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LindasOtherLife

Or email me at my business address - lindasotherlife@gmail.com

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

When your hairdresser recommends a book that made her laugh so hard on vacation that people wondered about her sanity - and then goes the extra mile and brings the book to the salon to loan - you have to read it.  I was unfamiliar with Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess: Like Mother Theresa Only Better).  The comparisons to Tina Fey and David Sedaris are correct - she is a hoot.  The book is purportedly a memoir of her twisted upbringing with parents who make Jeanette Walls' (The Glass Castle) parents look like the safe bet.  A tiny bit of the humor of her stories about her red neck father's hunting may have seemed a bit more believable because I read most of the book as I spend a luxurious night alone while my husband was overseeing the antics of his nephew's bachelor party taking place in an unfinished hunting cabin in Southern Ohio.  I have seen guys like her father, but never had them brought to life in such hilarious detail.  Every chapter - and they have titles like:“Stanley the Magical, Talking Squirrel”; “A Series of Angry Post-It Notes to My Husband”; and “My Vagina Is Fine. Thanks for Asking” - is a crazed rant about a single episode of her life and most of them are illustrated with vintage black and white photographs captioned to document the events.  If you want a better introduction, check out the book trailer 

How to Sell Your Crafts Online by Derrick Sutton

This post is a bit overdue and may border on shame-less self promotion, but if you are following this book blog, then you are probably familiar with my other life as well (www.lindasotherlife.com).  As a retirement gift, I was given this how-to book by a dear friend who knew of my intention to open an Etsy shop.  I have spent a good bit of time this fall sewing and sewing and designing in preparation for the grand opening which took place on October 26th.

If you can't wait until the end of this post - you can hurry on over to http://www.etsy.com/shop/LindasOtherLife.  

I have been doing a lot of sewing with oilcloth and chalk cloth.  I'm particularly proud of the reversible chalk cloth table runners I've been making.

Label dishes, dips, drinks - let guests be creative!

I also had a brain storm and came up with these Dear Santa placemats with a chalk cloth slate for Christmas Eve milk-and-cookies notes to Santa or those ever-changing wish lists.

So - shameless self-promotion aside - this book is the best resource for anyone interested in opening an Etsy shop.  There are so many details I would not have thought of - having a separate email address for your shop, creating an appealing shop banner, wrapping and packaging hints.  I keep referencing it and so far, the ideas have been very beneficial.  

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

The title of this literary memoir almost scared me away as it seems the ending is clear from the beginning.  Schwalbe has recorded with detailed poignancy the conversations he and his mother, Mary Anne, had about books as they sat in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 2007 when she was being treated for advanced pancreatic cancer.  His mother was a remarkable woman, having taken trips to war torn areas, and was dedicated, at the very end of her life, to building a library in Afghanistan.  The beauty of this book for me is in the book discussions.  I wish I were teaching The Kite Runner right now (as I would be right now had I not retired) so I could share the comments about characters and their choices in both The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.  So many of the texts in this book are texts I am deeply familiar with from teaching AP English, and very they are dear to me as well.  Later in the book, they discuss The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a post-9/11monologues of a young Princeton educated Wall Street employee who returns to Pakistan.  The ambiguity at the end of that novel is richly debated by Schwalbe and his mother.  Of course, this book reinforces my fundamental belief that we read, as human beings, to learn about the otherness that we may never experience first-hand - particularly the otherness of gender, race, birthright and suffering.  My favorite reflection in the book appears early: "Still, one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying."  Wow!

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison

I am a brand new Jonathan Evison fan.  I don't know that I had ever heard of his other novels All About Lulu and West of Here but I'm going to seek them out now because I didn't want this novel to end.  My husband and I are suckers for road trip novels or movies and I almost missed the image of the van on the the cover of the book which previews the trip taken by Ben Benjamin, a down-and-out caregiver, and his charge, nineteen-year-old Trevor who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.  They are the road's most unlikely traveling pair, but they manage to bond with even less likely pilgrims - Dot who is running from her past, Elton who is running from the law, and Peaches who is ready to deliver her baby at any moment.  Each character has been genuinely screwed by the gods of fortune - Benjamin has his own demons to flee - but there is something about a shared quest to see Old Faithful that propels the spirit.  Although a course in The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving offered at the Abundant Life Foursquare Church behind the Howard Johnson qualified Benjamin to take on the responsibility for Trevor's care, his character cautions the reader that no manual prepares us for life - "Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan of possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant."

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

 

Although I received an advance readers copy if this book months ago, I jus got around to reading The Chaperone and I wish I wouldn't have waited. A work of historical fiction, this novel focuses on the Roaring Twenties, the early age of Hollywood, Prohibition, Women's Rights, unwed motherhood, birth control and even homosexuality. The title character is charged with chaperoning teen-aged Louise Brooks (1906-1985) as she travels to New York City to study dance. I knew nothing of Louise Brooks's career in film but have since done some reading and learned about her rise - and fall - as well as the scandals and her writing about it all in Lulu in Hollywood. Still, the central character is the chaperone, Cora Carlisle, whose own personality is transformed by her venture beyond her farm life in Kansas. The fact that she is reading Wharton's The Age of Innocence on the train to New York appropriately foreshadows her own enlightenment.

 

Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks

 

I had an imaginary friend as a child - I am an only child, so I needed a friend. Matthew Dicks novel about a fragile young boy named Max is narrated by his imaginary friend, Budo, whose engaging and naive voice reminds me of Emma Donoghue's narrator in Room. In fact, this novel bears comparison to both Room and The Lovely Bones. Budo knows when Max is in trouble, but as a imaginary friend he has limited powers in the real world. Much of the novel concerns how Max is treated by students and teachers when he is in school, and Dicks has created teacher heroes and teacher devils to drive this story. I loved that he had the good teacher reading The Tale of Despereaux in the last chapter. This book will definitely appeal to high school students and ring true with anyone who has ever imagined a friend.

P.S. My imaginary friend died with my tonsillectomy when I was five. Dicks and Budo agree many imaginary friends are present in hospitals and many don't make it past kindergarten.

 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

I am always excited about finding an honest-to-goodness, laugh-out-loud funny book now and then. Maria Semple has written for television – arrested development, Mad About You, and Ellen. She lives in Seattle where fictional Bernadette stages her “disappearance from the stresses of her life”. Bernadette is mother to precocious Bee, wife of Elgie the Microsoft guru of robotics and a MacArthur grant recipient in her own right for her architectural masterpiece – The Twenty Mile House – a pioneer in green building. But everything she would seek to build crumbles and when frustrations mount – she stages a vanishing act so funny it had me reading pages out loud. Don’t miss the transcript of Elgie’s fictional TED talk! I had seen this book advertised in several women’s magazines and couldn’t wait to get it from the library. I won’t say where I read it – but a picture is worth 1,000 words.

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Having just taken a job at a winery overlooking an orchard, I clicked on a recent advertisement for a new novel called The Orchardist and was surprised to find the high praise of my former student/author Salvatore Scibona
     “Nearly everybody in the book compels your admiration, either for their courage or for the heavy
     work they do, all the time and without complaint, even when wicked men are hunting them.
     Transfixing. I love this book straight through.” (Salvatore Scibona, author of THE END, National
     Book Award Finalist )
The cover art actually presages the panoramic scope of the book.  Based on family history from the author's ancestors in the fruit-rich Wenatchee Valley of Washington state, the novel reads like an old-fashioned story, heavy with description.  The comparisons reviewers have made to Steinbeck seem fitting.  William Talmadge quietly oversees his apple and apricot orchard, always scanning the landscape out of longing for the return of his sister.  One day two pregnant young women appear.  Their lives intertwine with his, setting off a plot of treachery, anguish and, ultimately, reconciliation. I loved the fluidity of this - rather long - novel so much, I didn't want it to end.  I welcome Amanda Coplin as a fresh young voice in fiction.

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer

This is it!  If I were really returning to the classroom next week, this would have been the panic point of the summer when I asked myself why I hadn't been able to find a great book to rave about to my new classes.  Well no new classes and book found!  Shine Shine Shine is a fresh, other-worldy, tear-jerking romance that illuminates the frailty of humanity.  Sunny Mann is bald from birth, mother of a special needs child named Bubber, pregnant with her second child and married to Maxim, a nerdly NASA astronaut launched into space on a robot colonization mission.  Through flashback, vignette, and symbolic near-poetic narration, Netzer tells how the couple met and fell in love as fragile children and now face the fears of the future as parents.  There were lovely passages I wanted to copy long-hand -
"All life is binary. On and Off. There is no middle setting.  Alive or dead. In love or not in love. Kissing or not kissing. Speaking or not speaking. One choice leads to another with no forks in the road."   For a first novel, it blew my mind, made me cry and wish for that classroom of kids that I could shake this book in front of.  Readers will be talking about this one for a while.
Check out this Snappy robot song and quirky trailer for this book

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Daisy - Innocence, Columbine - Desertion, Yellow Rose - Infidelity.  I knew from teaching Hamlet many times over the Ophelia had been schooled in the language of flowers, but didn't know how extensive the glossary of meaning could be until our book club chose this novel.  Victoria Jones spent her entire young life in the foster-care system and had difficulty loving or trusting anyone.  Once eighteen and out on her own, she sleeps in a public park where she cultivates a tiny flower garden and is befriended by a flower shop owner who discovers Victoria has a gift for choosing flowers based on the emotional needs of individual customers.  Reminiscent of the novel Chocolat, this is a story of an outcast longing for human connection.  Our book club enjoyed this one, even if it is a bit too predictable.

The Red House by Mark Haddon

I am a fan of Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, so I was excited to get his new novel from the library even though my husband had downloaded the opening chapter and found it very confusing.  For the first 100 pages I kept thinking he was writing the new Ulysses.  And not exactly in a good way.  The stream-of-consciousness, switching of narrators every paragraph made me crazy.  Then I backed off, considered the challenge and did what I tell my students to do - keep a little chart of character relationships on a bookmark.  Since the plot concerns an estranged brother and sister bringing their families together following the death of their mother to mend on holiday at a remote estate, the relationships are central.  And messy.  I finally let the syncopated rhythm of the book carry me and I learned - once again - that all families are both flawed and essential.

The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

How does a family cope after loss?  Beloved son and brother, Leo, was captured and killed while working in Iraq as a journalist and his parents are bringing his siblings, their families and his widow and son together for a memorial ceremony on the Fourth of July a year later at their idyllic summer home in the Berkshires.  But the reunion is all but idyllic.  Leo's death has crazed the veneer of normalcy and each character brings extra emotional baggage to the gathering.  The family dynamics Henkin illuminates ring true and are as explosive as the backdrop of the fireworks on the cover image.  Although I began to feel mired in the middle, I woke up early to finish this great summer novel.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

This book enticed me from the public library New Books shelf because of the library envelope on the cover against the backdrop of isolated trailer. The book that Rory Dawn Hendrix repeatedly checks out from the library is The Girl Scout Handbook, her instruction manual for life which takes the place of the missing wisdom from her bar maid mother and her barely educated grandmother. Hassman uses alternating chapters of experimental style ranging from story problems with multiple choice answers to assumed reports written by the social worker who visits the trailer to check up on Rory. This mix confused the story rather than supported it, but I suppose reinforced the patch work of the lives of these sorry characters. I must say this book sent me researching the historic Buck vs. Bell court ruling written by Oliver Wendell Holmes that mandated sterilization for women who were determined to be "feeble-minded" - a word Rory uses early in the novel to describe the women role models in her life. Hassman applauds the influence of The Girl Scouts of America in her acknowledgements. The book trailer for the novel is worth checking out -  Girlchild Trailer

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is one summer book I looked forward picking up from the library. Described as an apocalyptic novel, it begins when 11 year old Julia's southern California town begins to experience a phenomena called The Slowing. The earth simply slows. Suddenly every day is a few minutes longer than the one before, then a few hours, then so out of balance that society is divided into the Real Timers and the Clock Timers. Julia's nervous mother fears the changes, her father reveals changes of heart, and Julia changes as all adolescents do. She gauges it all against the reactions of the boy she has a crush on. Early in the novel, Walker drops her theme statement into the middle of a paragraph - middle school itself is the age of miracles. Walker's writing doesn't sparkle as much as the promise of the perforated book jacket might promise, but Julia reminds us of the not-so-apocalyptic miracles of adolescence.

 

Facing our Addiction

We spent the day cleaning the basement today. The main motivation - to find a new home for the 16 boxes of books we brought home when we cleared off our school bookshelves. Our classroom bookshelves held the books we loaned to students. Our office bookshelves were filled with references and the occasionalmbook we needed on to illustrate that one lesson every year.

Now they all sit in boxes in front of the already brimming bookshelves in the basement. If we we allow them to stay in the boxes, we will forget their covers. If we unpack them, other books will have to go to make room. We are book addicted and we don't know where to turn for counseling! We could open a book store now that we once again live in a town without one. We could donate a good portion of them, but what if we teach again? We could try bartering books for services and goods, but that doesn't seem likely in a suburb where the traffic slows around the mall and COSTCO entrance drive.

Truth be told - home is where our books are. There is comfort in being able to go downstairs late on a winter's night to pull that one book off the shelf and find that one marked passage on a dog-eared page that contains the quote that has been lodged in your mind all day - that you cannot sleep without rereading. And Google is a sorry substitute for the analog object with the college marginalia and the memories of time spent with text.

For the time being, we are making more frequent trips to the library where the books with the neon pink "new" stickers beckon, feeding an addiction that may not have an easy cure.

 

Gold by Chris Cleave

 

This is it! If you have been reading these reviews looking for the perfect summer beach read, you won't be disappointed by this timely tale of rival female speed cyclists preparing for the London Olympics 2012. Cleave's Little Bee has been very popular and I think people will be talking Gold all summer. Part sports story, part love story, part parenting story - the suspense of the final race day helped me read long past sunset to finish this book in one day.

 

Sunset at my favorite beach

 

When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams

 

I needed some non-fiction to ground me after John Irving, and Terry Tempest Williams writes with a lovely, transcendental voice. In fact, voice is the subject of her fifty-four short musings in this beautiful little book. Williams is an environmentalist, and a Mormon. As her mother was preparing to die from cancer she told Williams she was leaving her three shelves of her journals which were not to be opened until after her death. Her daughter obeyed only to find all of the journals were blank and her mother no longer alive to ask for an explanation. Instead, she authors her mothers musings - about nature, bearing children and the Mormon faith. The book is full of rhetorical questions and declarative statements defining the journals. Having waited 25 years to write about these journals has given Williams time to ponder. She concludes that the journals were left to her as a summons to listen carefully to what was not being said and what consider what can only be felt. The book touched be particularly because my mother has left me for the silence of Alzheimers. Although I spend time with her, the time is full of silences which I fill with her missing voice from the past. The book helped me to see these silences as a treasure of sorts.

In One Person by John Irving

 

I have long been a John Irving fan. The World According to Garp may have been my first adult pleasure read as a freshman in college. Irving's new novel is so adult that I could never consider making it summer reading for AP, even though it is a very literary book with many layered Shakespeare references. Early Shakespearean actors playing female roles introduces the central issue of the novel which is filled with transvestites, transsexuals, bisexuals, and teens grappling with sexual identities. I am not a prude or a timid reader, but I tired of the sexual tension. I wanted a "normal mom character" or character I could identify with. I didn't find the usual humor I look for in Irving. Since David read this book before me, I knew he was conflicted in his review, but I urged him to withhold his evaluation until I had a chance to read it too. Turns out withholding information is the theme here. In retrospect, I love the literary quality of the novel, but it's subject matter made me squeamish.

 

Skios by Michael Frayn

Every summer I long for a funny book. Something absurdly entertaining that will take me out of this world into a madcap world of laughter and I expected Michael Frayn, whose famous play Noises Off is very funny, to deliver. At best, it reminded me of an episode of Three's Company. Set on the private island on Skios at Greek villa conference center where wealthy philanthropists have gathered to hear world-renowned lecturer Dr. Norman Wilfred speak, a case of switched personalities occurs. Enter the surprisingly younger, more handsome Oliver Fox, who assumes Wilfred's identity at the airport and is whisked off to Skios where everyone but this reader falls for his charm and fails to see he is not who he is supposed to be. I love dramatic irony, but not simplistic dramas where people taking off their clothes in front of the wrong people and purported geniuses can't keep a cell phone charged.

 

You Came Back by Christopher Coake

I'm not one for ghost stories, but I love an Ohio connection and Christopher Coake got his MFA in fiction at The Ohio State University, so You Came Back is set in Columbus.  He mentions German Village, and Short North and even Hocking Hills, so I felt very comfortable with the setting.  I did not feel comfortable with the subject matter because the loss of a child, even in a fictional setting, is unfathomable for me.  Mark Fife's young son Brendan died after fall in their home and, although the loss results in Mark's divorce from Brendan's mother, he has moved on and found love again.  This happiness is interrupted when the woman who lives in the home where Brendan died seeks Mark out to  tell him his son "came back".  I am uncomfortable with the notion of spirits and mediums, but I stayed up late one summer's night reading until I knew how this compelling story would unfold.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

I keep giving Tom Perotta one more chance - this time because one of my AP reader friends suggested I would enjoy The Leftovers.  I had avoided reading the book thus far because the premise - the recovery measures taken by a group of suburbanites left after various of their loved ones were mysteriously seized by a Rapture-type event - didn't seem appealing.  As I started the book, I thought it would be biting satire, but the people of Mapleton could be the people of any town, and Kevin Garvey, the town mayor, ends up struggling with typical and mundane stresses - a spouses' rejection, a teenager's rebellion, mid-life angst.  Parts of the plot are mildly humorous, especially the cult-like Guilty Remnants who take a vow of silence and wander the town eaves-dropping on their neighbors while smoking mandatory cigarettes.  But the book seemed so contrived by the end I was left with the vapors of a great story - a fictional smoke-trick.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

A former AP student recommended this as an appropriate summer reading title for AP students, so I quickly read it on our trip to see our daughter's college graduation in Massachusetts. The main character, aptly named Changez, had been a Pakistani student studying at an American university and then a New York City businessman prior to 9/11. The episodic novel takes the form of a dialogue between Changez and an unnamed American tourist who is sitting in a cafe in Lahore. As the day fades, so do the lines between truth and memory as Changez grapples with his cultural identity and what it means to live The American Dream. Thanks for the recommendation, Bristee. I will miss hearing the discussions next fall about this enigmatic and mysterious novel.

Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light (and Dark Chocolate) by Amy Thomas

To kick off summer leisure reading, I began with the book I had given to my friend, Kathy, for Valentine's Day.  After reading it herself, she thought I would enjoy borrowing it - especially since daughter Meredith was talking about spending the summer in Paris.  Thomas was given the opportunity to leave her job in New York to spend a year in Paris as an advertising writer for Louis Vuitton.  The book compares bakeries and their specialties in New York and Paris and has quite an extensive list of bakeries and addresses for both locations in the back of the book.  I enjoyed reading the luscious and decadent descriptions of macaroons, cupcakes, madeleines and chocolates.  For a single woman living out her dream, Thomas seemed to be a bit of a whiner, but the vicarious culinary romp was enough diversion from Ohio on a summer's day to please my sweet tooth.