12 posts tagged “book review”

Just finished this book last night, and I highly recommend it.

I originally read about it in Poets and Writers, and I finished it in two days. I couldn't put it down, which is rare for me to say about a book any more.

This is Debra Gwartney's unflinching story of living (and not living) with two daughters who fall apart after her divorce from their father. Amanda and Stephanie, at 16 and 14, choose a life of drugs and running the streets over staying at home with their mother and two younger sisters. Gwartney's memoir is beautifully written and very honest...she admits her own mistakes and missteps at every turn.  

While this is certainly a sad and harrowing tale, it's ultimately uplifting because of its courage. A great read. 

This is an amazing cookbook...super healthy and tasty recipes. I just got it at the library today after seeing some of the recipes on the Today show a few weeks back, and the dishes they showcased looked mouth-watering. I will definitely be buying it. I got it not because I'm interested in dieting, but because I'm always looking for healthy alternatives and new variations on healthy meals, and it's hard to find a good cookbook. Super excited to try some of the recipes!

Okay, so I'm the last person on earth to discover Jhumpa Lahiri. I know. But I finally got around to reading this collection of stories and I'm hopelessly hooked. I have her other books on reserve at the library now.

This is great summer reading, people. The stories are richly layered with complex yet "average" characters dealing with everyday situations and conflicts. Most of the characters are Indian, and the stories are set in the U.S.; one of her major themes in every story is the culture clash of being both Indian and American. Identity is at the root of every character's conflict. 

Fabulous stuff. I highly recommend this book. Can't wait to read more of Lahiri's work.

Yes, I'm on a cookbook kick lately.

How I've missed this cookbook for the past several years is beyond me, but it's a definite keeper! I checked it out at the library last week and I am thrilled with this book. It reminds me a lot of The Joy of Cooking, except for veggies...it's full of hundreds (thousands?) of recipes, but it also exists as a great reference for everything from how to turn leftover roasted carrot dip into a soup all the way to tips for stocking the vegetarian pantry and how to save time each week and month.  

Today I'm going to make her recipe for Hillbilly Hummus (her restaurant, Dairy Hollow House, is located in Arkansas, hence the Ozark reference)...the main ingredients are black-eyed peas and peanut butter! She says no one can ever guess there's peanut butter in the dip. I can't wait to try it.  

I'm definitely buying this book! 

It's lovely. That's all I have to say.

 

Well, I finally finished this book yesterday, and meh. That about sums it up. I'm giving a spoiler alert right now, because although I'm not going to give away the ending, I will talk about things that happen in the middle of the book.

The book started out promisingly enough. The protagonist is a middle-aged teacher who's kind of an asshole, married three times and about to lose the third wife who just cheated on him. He beats the other guy up and loses his job, and after he and the wife patch it up, he can't get a job anywhere so they move from Connecticut to Colorado. Caelum Quirk, the protagonist, is a compelling guy and his voice is very readable, until about the last half of the book when things start going wonky.

Caelum and his wife, Maureen, work at Columbine; Maureen is a school nurse who hides in the library the day of the shooting and witnesses the rampage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, while Caelum is out of town because of a death in the family. I found this to be very uncomfortable to read, and not because of the violence...I'm just not a fan of mixing this type of non-fiction into fiction. It's just weird.  

Maureen ends up with PTSD from the Columbine shootings and they move back to the east coast to get away from Colorado. She ends up hooked on Xanax, gets clean, then gets a job as a nurse again in a nursing home after several years in therapy...and then on one crazy night in the nursing home, she shoots up Xanax and gets herself hooked again. After a few months of stealing and shooting up Xanax, she hits a pedestrian and kills him while she's driving home stoned from work. She ends up going to prison for five years. This prison just happens to be the one that Caelum's grandmother founded and is just down the street from his family's homestead. Sounds a little too convenient, right? That's because it was.

My other big issue with the book was the Quirk family history. At some point, when Hurricane Katrina hits, Caelum takes in two refugees from New Orleans who end up living in his farmhouse while his wife is imprisoned down the street. The woman refugee is a women's studies grad student who starts riffling through Quirk's grandmother's papers and then decides to write her dissertation on his women ancestors and the women's prison they founded. Getting through those portions of the book were absolute torture, and toward the end of this 700-page book, I almost quit reading it altogether; Lamb includes 19th-century letters from Quirk's ancestors, along with the dissertation the grad student writes. It was like watching paint dry. These were most definitely the worst parts of the book. If I hadn't been nearly finished with the book, I would have quit, no doubt about it. 

The ending is just plain bizarre. I won't discuss it here, in case anyone still decides to read the book, but suffice it to say I'm really disappointed in Lamb's latest effort. It just seemed like a mish-mash of crazy stuff, especially the last half of the book, between Columbine and Katrina and how the whole plot line with Maureen finally unravels. He had to stretch to connect it. Lamb is such an amazing writer, and so capable of creating a believable and fascinating protagonist, that this just fell far short of what I'm used to from him. If I had to rate this, I'd give it 2 stars out of 4.  

 

I'm totally grooving on this book:

 

Years ago when I became a vegetarian (I went veg in 2000), I checked this book out at the library, but nothing seemed to speak to me. Now, I'm loving this book. I've made two recipes--Almost Irish Stew and Slow-Cooked Ziti Casserole--and they were both delicious, easy and inexpensive. Last week I met a group of friends for lunch and brought the Irish Stew--it was a huge hit! They scraped the bottom of the crock pot for seconds.

The book contains recipes for appetizers, soups and chilis, pastas and casseroles, and "stuffed" dishes (like stuffed squash), as well as breakfast and dessert recipes. If you're a vegetarian or you just like a healthy alternative for the crock pot, this is a great book. I've put it on my wish list at Amazon and plan to get it sometime after the holidays...in the meantime, I'll just keep renewing my copy from the library! 

 

Chilling, fascinating, disturbing. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. A stellar read.

 

 

This book was hilarious...I listened to it in the car on my way to Philadelphia last month, and the author was the reader. This is the author's story of his foray into totally green living after he breaks up with his girlfriend and buys a ranch in New Mexico. I think that this book was much easier to listen to than it would have been to read because of its casual, conversational style. Just a guess, though. 

 

 

My most recent dog book purchase. Interesting to no one except for those involved in competitive obedience...but if you are, this book is WELL worth the $20 it cost. I'm going to a seminar by the author in December and am really looking forward to it.

 

 

Reading this now. It's a rare day that I read fiction any more, because my taste leans so much more to non-fiction, but this one's excellent. Very well-written and the main character is engaging right from the first page. It's a typical Indian tale, long and winding and very broad in scope while also focusing in details of individual lives. I love the way the author takes you back into the protagonist's past and brings you back up to the present effortlessly (also a hallmark of Indian novels/stories).  

 

 

Another chilling and disturbing read. Details the transformation of the American government after 9/11; most of the book deals with the administration's decision to use torture and abandon the Geneva Conventions, in addition to the Bush administration's skewering of the Constitution thanks to Cheney and his little henchman David Addington. I heard the author interviewed on NPR and she said that the White House hasn't denied a single detail in the book (i.e., every last bit of it is correct, because the administration would have pounced on even the tiniest error). Mayer is a meticulous researcher with hundreds of sources, most of which she discloses in the book. I promise that this book will shock you.

 

 

This is Jon Katz's latest in his series about the dogs of Bedlam Farm. I listened to this one, too, in the car on my way to Philadelphia, and it was a beautifully-written tale about Orson, a rescue Border Collie that Katz adopts. The book not only focuses on Orson's trials and tribulations as a working farm dog, but also delves into the impact this dog has on Katz's life. Very moving.

 

 

Meh. That sums up my feelings on this one. Doty is an eloquent poet, but I really don't like his memoirs. There are always bursts of brilliance, but otherwise he tends to fixate on the inane for far too long (pages), then jerks back into narrative. It's jarring. There were far too many times I just wanted him to get on with the story. This memoir focuses on Doty's rescued Golden Retriever, Beau, and Beau's story is intertwined with the death of Doty's lover. I read Still Life With Oysters and Lemon a couple years ago and hated every bit of it, even though it had received rave reviews...and I have to say, this one was rather unimpressive too. I was glad I only paid a buck for it at a book sale.

I've been gorging myself on books lately, making up for lost time after 3 years with almost no pleasure reading. Here goes.

 

Halfway through this one, and, as is always the case with anything by Elizabeth George, it's exquisite. She's a top-notch writer, and I'm hopelessly addicted to her characters, Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers. If you've never read Elizabeth George, I highly recommend her; she's one of my top five writers (I used to say she was my favorite, but that's really, really difficult to pin down onto one author). She's an American who writes English mystery novels.

Careless in Red features Lynley investigating a murder he stumbles upon while cliff-walking (warning: don't read this review or this book if you haven't read the earlier novels). He's trying to overcome the murder of his wife and has begun walking to work through his grief--I admit I'm still angry that George killed Helen off--and he discovers a body of a cliff climber near the sea's edge. Lynley begins investigating the cliff climber's murder at the behest of the local constabulary, even though he's supposedly quit Scotland Yard after his wife's murder.  

 

I finished The Doctor's Wife very quickly, right around two days. What an excellent story, and so well-written! I thought it might be junk--it has a stupid title--but it turned out to be a great read. I just read about her second book (Someone Else's Daughter, if I remember right) in Poets & Writers, which is how I found out about this one. It's a story about a small-town doctor who decides to do abortions at a local clinic, and the fallout from it...the story is so well-layered and chock-full of tension that it was impossible to put down.

 

I bought this book last month and have been reading it very slowly, because it's full of great stuff. Its subject is obvious, but what makes it so fantastic is the author's voice. He's funny and irreverent, but the book is filled with excellent writing advice and exercises; he's often self-effacing, as he's more than willing to admit to his own stupidity and mistakes, and this makes him seem very real, for lack of a better word. He follows a particular group of his students throughout the book, showing the progress of their writing and how it evolves, which I like a lot.

 

 

This book is an absolute must-read. Published in the mid-1990s (I don't know how I've missed this book all these years!), this is Karr's story of growing up with her mentally-ill mother in Texas in the sixties. It is heartbreaking, poignant, hilarious in spots, and so sumptuously written that the words almost fall off the page into your lap. An exquisite book. I have Cherry, her sequel to The Liars' Club, waiting in my TBR pile.

 

Another memoir of mental illness. The author was hospitalized during her late teens by a complacent psychiatrist, and this book is her story. The prose is very spartan, and the author pulls no punches; she's very honest about her time spent in the hospital. I remember when this book came out as a movie, but I never saw it. I thought the ending was abrupt, but it fits with the author's style.  

 

Excellent read! This is a plot-driven novel based on a true story, written by a thirty-something circuit court judge in Virginia. It's the story of two brothers and what happens when the "good brother" covers for his criminal brother after he murders someone on a roadside. The author's Southern voice is very strong and compelling, and often downright funny in a way that only Southern voices can be; this was an enjoyable read even though I'm usually not a fan of plot-driven books. I have two more of Martin's novels, Plain Heathen Mischief and The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, sitting in my TBR pile, both of which I ordered on Bookmooch after reading this book. Like the cover of this book says, Martin is "the thinking man's John Grisham."

 

Another excellent novel, and this one is heavily character-driven. There are quite a few surprises in this book, and I had a hard time putting it down once I started it. I almost didn't read it because the cover is so ugly and the title is about as boring as it gets, but I'm glad I didn't overlook it. It's a thin book so it was a fast read, but the writer develops the characters very well. I don't want to say much about the actual story because I would give away too many surprises.  

Okay, that's all for now; I've read lots more but they're scattered to the four corners of the house and many have already been returned to the library. Hope you find something worth reading in here!   

I finished this book yesterday, about 24 hours after I started it. It is a compelling and eloquent read; I highly recommend this memoir.

Hall's story details her accidental pregnancy at sixteen years old in the late 1960s, and how she was shunned by her family as a result. The writing is beyond beautiful; it's poignant and very honest, and she leaves no stone unturned. It's definitely a dark read, but I think that makes it even more beautiful. I felt emotionally exhausted when I finished the book, as if I'd lived those years with the author and been a part of her family.

I had planned on saving this read for my retreat in a couple weeks, but it didn't make it...once I started it, I couldn't put it down. She never lets up throughout the entire book, and I found myself marking up the pages with a pencil because of her gorgeous prose. Hall closely examines the prisons we live in, both those imposed on us and those we impose on ourselves.

The only downside is that the timeline of the book is unconventional and sometimes hard to follow, but once you understand during reading that she is not attempting a complete chronology, it doesn't detract from the book at all.

Hall wrote her memoir with a $50,000 grant from the A Room of Her Own Foundation, which gives grants to women writers and artists in the form of financial freedom for one year.

Buy this book.