re-Lit Candles - A Recycling Initiative for Literacy

Every single day, someone asks us - "What are you doing now that you are retired?"  Well, today we finally have something to show for our fall efforts.  We have posted the first images of re-Lit Candles on Etsy, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest - and now - here.  My husband and I began meeting with our close friends during the summer to discuss what we would do in retirement besides drink wine by candlelight out on the deck late into the night.  We had retired from 30 years as high school English teachers, and our friend, Laurie, retired at the same time with the same length of tenure as a Media Specialist.  We commiserated about all of the books we brought home from school, all the changes being made in public schools - and all the wine bottles in our recycling.  Would the neighbors start to talk?

Sometime in August, we decided in earnest to set aside some of our newly acquired free time for the Greater Good.  And re-Lit Candles was born.  We played around with many names, but we wanted to keep a focus on Literature - and more importantly, Literacy.



We made up a word!  Why not!  Reliteration - noun - the purposeful enjoyment of natural light.



We wrote our "story" and David designed a Kraft paper label which we had printed by the good people at Ink It Press in Vermilion, Ohio.  The prototype labels were printed on the back of Trader Joe's bags, but we figured we would go broke shopping to keep labels in stock.  We found a source of bottles that were not being recycled.  Jim practiced cutting and sanding bottles, with much trial and error.  Laurie researched wax supply and wick resources.  We practiced filling containers, watching wicks burn - all the while drinking a bit of wine to keep encouraged.



David took advantage of some rare winter Ohio sunshine to take 150 photographs today.  This one features a school desk from the school his father and grandfather attended in Delaware, Ohio.  Old books make good props.  They burned plenty of candles in The Grapes of Wrath - didn't they?



Even Shakespeare looks like a good choice next to the right candle.



We are hoping to do a Craft Fair in Cleveland in February.  We are talking to area retailers.   I applied for a transient vendors license.  Above all, we want to keep the focus on literacy and intend to send a portion of our profits to a local literacy initiative.



What have we been doing?  What we enjoy, what makes sense, what is good.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

I was excited to read Sweet Tooth after hearing that McEwan's narrator, Serena Frome, is the first female narrator he has written since Atonement.  I was also interested because it is described as both a spy story and a love story.  Frome is employed by British Intelligence in the 1970's and Operation Sweet Tooth engages her to infiltrate the literary circle of a new writer on the scene, Tom Haley.  Serena falls in love with the prose and the man.  The opening passage of the novel warns the reader that the relationship will be flawed when Frome admits - "I didn't return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing."  I enjoyed the novel's meta-fictional experimentation.  Within the chapters which advance the plot are long passages of Serena's summaries of the books by Haley that she is reading.  Those plots were, perhaps, even more interesting to me than the rest of Serena's  adventures.  I still prefer Atonement.

A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

Everyone has a favorite Christmas story, and mine begins “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago.”   The story is A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956.  Autobiographical and bitter-sweet, the tale is narrated by a seven-year-old and tell of his oddly childlike older cousin with whom he bakes and delivers fruitcakes every Christmas.  The beginning of the story recounts the complicated procedure of collecting pecans and purchasing ingredients – even a visit to a Native American bootlegger named Ha Ha Jones who sells them the requisite whiskey.  As they work together, they discuss the possible recipients of this year’s fruitcakes – neighbors as well as people, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who they have never met.  The general sense is that the bond between Buddy, the boy, and Sookie, the much elder cousin, is special.  When they separate after the cakes are made, to fashion gifts for each other, the simple joy and frustration of Christmas gift giving is beautifully articulated – It’s bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.

In my early days as an English teacher, my “gift” to my students was a reading of A Christmas Memory.  I believe I began reading the story to tenth graders because it was included in their Anthology of American Literature textbook.  I would choose a day close to the holiday break, turn on some appropriate instrumental background music, and invite them to read along in the text, or simply sit quietly and listen.  I hung a little “Reading in Progress – Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle and for about 40 minutes, I would read and they would listen – enthralled by the beauty of the story.  I’m not just stroking my ego – I know they were enthralled.

The two relatives make kites for each other, and take them out to a field to fly them on Christmas day.  Against the background of the winter sky, Buddy listens to one of the most poignant reflections on life and death I have ever read – My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are, just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.I would finish reading, and look up at the class and see smiles of understanding and, more often, eyes filled with tears. There were a few years that graduates returned to my classroom on their first Christmas break, just to hear the story again. The story is that moving.

But what moves me to write this reflection is my understanding of how much students, and their capacity for story, changed over the course of my thirty years in the classroom.  I don’t remember when I stopped this personal Christmas tradition.  At some point I realized that sustained silent listening is as rare as a good Christmas fruitcake these days.   Contemporary students, with cell phones in their pockets and instant gratification monitors finely calibrated, would rather have a candy cane or day off to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as a holiday classroom treat.  I know one year – somewhat recently – I read A Christmas Memory instead having my AP students write their previously scheduled in-class Hamlet essays, and they seemed moved to tears of joy and relief.  The story is still included in our tenth grade anthology, but I don’t know of any of my former colleague who still read it with their students.

The story may be more dear to me since our visit to Monroeville,  Alabama a few summers ago. Truman Capote and Harper Lee shared their childhoods in Monroe, and it is fictionalized as Maycomb in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

 

Writing Self Portrait in 1972, Capote said, As a child, I lived until I was ten or so with an elderly spinster relative in a rural, remote part of Alabama. Miss Sook Faulk. She herself was not more than twelve years old mentally, which is what accounted for her purity, timidity, her strange, unexpected wisdom. He wrote two stories about Sook: A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor.

A Christmas Memory is worth reading once a holiday season.  It remains my favorite Christmas story.

Holiday Reading Memories

On Pinterest, every idea is a new idea worth sharing. I can skip over the home remedies that aren’t as new as tried and true, but when I saw this idea being repinned with comments like “Great idea for when I have little ones”, I decided to go public. When my daughter was in second grade, I got the idea to wrap up all of the Christmas children’s books in the house and put them in a big wicker laundry basket on the hearth to open and read one with her each night at bedtime from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

She LOVED it. It became a tradition that continued through middle school. When she was little, I saw it as a good way to hurry bedtime. Many nights she begged to unwrap a book before she was bathed and dressed in her pjs, and the answer was always that she had to be ready for bed before we could read. Of course, my ulterior motive was to encourage reading. Always to encourage reading! Even though both of my kids still seldom read for pleasure, it isn’t because they didn’t grow up surrounded by books. The book-a-night Christmas tradition could begin at a very young age. I remember one of the first Christmas books that my kids begged for night after night was Carl’s Christmas. They adored all of the Carl books by Alexandra Day, and I liked the creative story telling they encouraged.

Each year, I would buy a few new books to swell the pile and wrap them along with the old. I swear my daughter could snoop out the new books by feel. And certain traditional books were obviously shaped. Chris Van Allsburg’s Polar Express was a long rectangle and easily selected. Certain books, including The Polar Express, were favorites and, therefore, saved for later in the season.

 
Another favorite was Yes, Virginia There is a Santa Claus – this one is clearly marked “The Classic Version” by Francis P. Church. Rereading these favorites strengthened our Christmas spirit. Once the Christmas tree – always real in this house – was up and lit, the bedtime reading would move from the bedroom to the family room in front of the tree.

As she got older, I suggested each year that perhaps it was time to just put the books in a basket unwrapped, but she pleaded with me – “not this year – not yet“. So I tried to find less juvenile reading selections. I always relished a trip to the book store (Yes, Virginia! We had book stores) and I found humor in Santa Cows and How Murray’s Saved Christmas. Santa Cows was one that I would also take in to school to read to my classes, working it in as a fine example of a parody – both of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and Field of Dreams!

Part of the magic of this yearly tradition is giving a child a chance to open a present of literature. The unwrapping is physical, but the savoring of each story is intrinsically valuable. One of the books I included is the only childhood Christmas book that I remember reading over and over again – with the exception of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. It is a little book of poems, stories and songs published by Ideals.

Even tonight, when I open the shiny cover, I discover poems I can still repeat by heart. It looks like the book has a 1958 copyright, and the inked inscription suggests it was a gift from the preacher to my parents, but that book is as dear to me as any Christmas memory.

 

 recently drove to my daughter’s college to take her out to dinner with a few of her new friends, and the subject of Christmas traditions came up. She described – with glee – the book-a-night Christmas tradition, and tried her best to make her friends jealous. She will return from her first semester away at college this weekend, and the deeply nostalgic, Chrismas-loving part of me wants to hurry up and wrap the books. They are all in a box on a closet shelf these days, stored but not buried away like some vestiges of my children’s childhoods.

This Christmas, I sit in a family room lit by the lights on another real tree, in a house strangely devoid of the sounds and energy of kids. I don’t know if Pinterest is the right platform for spreading the word – but if it is, then spread it. Read with your kids! Start a tradition that will keep them talking for the rest of their lives. This idea is inexpensive, but I guarantee you and your children will be rich in memories for years to come.

15,000 Page Views!

A little blog that began as a simple way to remember what I had been reading has reached 15,000 page views.  I'm pretty tickled.  Thank you to all my readers and I certainly hope I continue to provide some guidance about books.

I was thrilled to see that I had read seven of the novels included in the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2012.  Included in the list is Shine, Shine, Shine which I wrote about back in the summer beginning with my claim "This is it".    It would make a great Christmas gift book for the reader on your shopping list.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I have long been a Barbara Kingsolver fan and waited patiently to get my copy of her new book from the library.  I am still trying to be really, really good about not bringing more books into the house since the stack of boxes we brought home from school are a standing reminder of our addiction.  I avoided reading much of any review of the book and was very glad I didn't know the specific subject through the first two chapters - so I won't spoil the surprise for my readers in case you want to experience the anticipation that I felt while reading.  Simply put, Kingsolver takes on global warming in this expertly crafted - and very readable - novel set in her own Appalachian territory.  I say readable, because this is a book I would recommend to students and friends alike.  Kingsolver uses colloquial vernacular, contemporary cultural references - Facebook, text messages and viral videos - to cement her connection with a wide range of readers. Dellarobia is a bright but dissatisfied mother and housewife when she witnesses a spectacle in the hills around her home.  Her husband, Cub, and domineering in-laws, Hester and Bear, are forced to reckon with attention when the unnatural phenomenon brings scientists, protestors and casual gawkers to their property.  The novel seamlessly weaves religious, agro-environmental, educational, and philosophical issues. The essential debate of the novel occurs in one of the final chapters when a stereotypic media talking head shoves a camera in the face of Ovid Byron, an expert research scientist, and tries to spin what he deems a crisis into a story of uncommon beauty.

P.S. For all my former students reading this - There are several sentences in this book I would be reading aloud to you today, especially the one where she assumes her preacher took honors English in high school because he seems to "know the difference between Homer's Ulysses and the one by James Joyce, and how to get down to business with a metaphor".  I loved her minor character, Mrs. Lake the Honors English teacher, even though Kingsolver made her "about a hundred years old" and most likely "dead by now."  Ha!

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.