This is how it goes.....

 Hello readers,

This is how it goes for now.  I will write on this blog when and where I have time and desire to do so.  Having just finished reading two books I will let you know my impressions of them and .... we are off!

I just finished reading The Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff.  It is a true story of  an 11 year old panhandler and the woman he encounters on a NYC street.  This book was suggested by my lovely niece, Marla and I liked the book.  It fascinated me that she would so highly recommend this book having two children who are about the age of Maurice.  Had I read this book as a young mother I would never let my children out of my sight.  The stories that Maurice lived through were devastating to any human being.  (Have you read The Color of Water?  - it is a similar story of survival and rising above your circumstances).

I would highly recommend this book as well as highly recommend we all take steps to help someone who is in need.  Many people say charity begins at home but sometimes, just once in a while we can touch someone's life with a gentle act of kindness.

The other book completed recently was  And the Mountains Echoed by Hosseini ( the same author as The Kite Runner).    This was another interesting story about Afghanistan and the custom and culture of the country.  IMHO Kite Runner is his best book - hands down!  The Mountains Echoed had soooo many characters that got into so many situations that it was hard to follow the twists and turns of their lives and how it affected the story plot line.  I am glad I read it but wouldn't put it on the top of my reading list.

FYI - I am in Phoenix now and yesterday we visited the most fun museum.  The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM.ORG) is fun, fascinating and fabulous museum that we could have spent many hours in.  We loved it!  So... if you are ever in Phoenix, add that as a wonderful stop and place to see some spectacular instruments.

I have begun a new Kristen Hannah book and have received another hard copy book from my DDIL called A House in The Sky by Amanda Lindhout who was held captive in Somalia.  I look forward enjoying both of those books in the next week or so.

Signing out with lots of books still on my reading list,

Happy Reading!
Barbara

Still alive and well and enjoying the great summer

It has been a while since I have written so I want to catch up on some of the books I have been reading. 

Don’t know if any of you subscribe to Bookbub via Ipad but I get notices that some wonderful reading is available at very reasonable prices – sometimes it is free!  Most recently I finished reading Blood Orchids  (The Lei Crime Series   by Toby Neal.  It is a suspense thriller set on the Big Island of Hawaii and it had me spellbound from the first and then just when I though the book was over it went on and on and still held me on the edge of the bed – I did stay up reading until after 1 AM on just two nights finishing this book.  Characters were well defined and carefully created.  The main character, Lei, has a wonderful watchdog that is a Rottweiler and those of you who know me will know I love Rottie’s.    Toby Neal has many books and they will be on my ‘to read’ list when I am looking for a great beach, summer, airplane, just need to lose myself in a book – book! 

Then I also read The Ice Man by Philip Carlo.  This is a terrifying book because it is a true story of a mafia hit man who has admitted to killing hundreds if not thousands of people over his lifetime.  When finally caught he lived out his life in the Trenton State prison – just miles from our home in PA.  Philip Carlo also wrote Night Stalker so you can get the drift of the explicit descriptions in the book.  The main character killed people for a living and his family ‘didn’t know’ and didn’t care as long as he didn’t go off on them.  I felt the book was so graphic that it desensitized the violence and reality of the frequent murders or assassinations. 

Here are two links if you want to become familiar with the book before you might pick it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iceman_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski

I am going to post this now and will be back sometime soon to tell you what else I am reading.  Enjoy the summer skies!

Happy Reading,

Barbara

Their Eyes Were Watching God Part 2

Hello dear Readers,

As promised this is the follow-up to part 1.  These are some of the passages I marked and enjoyed while reading the book.  Hope you liked them also.

This is the beginning paragraph and what can give you a better view of life than this?

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.  For some they come in with the tide.  For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.  That is the life of men.

This paragraph in Zora’s infinite wisdom tells us we really have no control over the things that are not ours to control like the sun, moon, stars, and weather.  Yet, we as men want to believe we can be the sun-maker or weather maker. 

Folkses, de sun is goin’down.  De Sun-maker brings it up in de mornin’ and de Sun-maker sends it tuh bed at night.  Us poor weak humans can’t do nothin’ tuh hurry it up nor to slow it doen.  All we can do, if we want any light after de settin or befo’ de risin, is tuh make some light ourselves. 

Zora’s ability to paint pictures of the people’s lives is amazing and so poetic. I want this porch!  This from the first paragraph in Chapter 6:

When the people sat around on the porch and pssed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice.  The fact that the thought picures were always crayon enlargement of life made it even nicer to listen to. 

Chapter 16 discusses the fact that black people admire or want to be lighter skinned or ‘high yellow’ or something they are not and that somehow would change who they are or their opportunities.  I am always fascinated by this discussion since most of us would love to have something we don’t and isn’t it all about envy – not necessarily opportunity?  However, most black people don’t seem to assess it this way. 

 Now we come to the end of the book and I think there are two great philosophies shared on the last pages.  Love, life and living, what more can we ask for?

Love is lak de sea.  It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore. 

Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves.  They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin fuh theyselves.

Happy Reading ya’ll,

Barbara

PS:  What are you reading now?

Their Eyes Were Watching God #1

 

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By: Zora Neale Hurston

From Wikipedia:

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best known work by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny" (So to speak!) Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received for its rejection of racial uplift literary prescriptions. Today, it has come to be regarded as a seminal work in both African-American literature and women's literature. Time included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923

More on WIKIPEDIA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God#Politics

Hello Readers.

Hope you are all well and know that I didn’t fall off the face of the earth.  It’s been hard to focus myself on writing when spring has sprung and the weather turns me to the golf course.  This year I have begun ‘walking’ and let me tell you – its exercise!  Exhaustion follows me each day I walk and it makes my scores go up and up! 

Here is the new addition to our family.  Grandsons are so precious and wonderful.  Alexander and I had almost twelve days to play together before Silas decided to come into this world 31 hours before my trip back east.  Luckily he and his parents came home from the hospital so I could spend hours cuddling this loved bundle.

Well, I know ya'll didn’t turn in to hear me bragging about my grandkids so off we go to the book!

I enjoyed reading this book mostly because it gave me a different perspective about the settlement of central and southern Florida (where I have lived).  Many of the places mentioned in the book have become developments and suburbs filled with houses, cars, stores, and the like.  Trying to imagine it as a untamed place is interesting for me however many of the children I taught had no knowledge of anywhere but where they were as well as very little language skills. 

Do you find it difficult to read a book where the language is in dialect or uses lots of slang?  In Shakespeare he uses so many colloquialisms that many times it is difficult for me to understand and I found the same with this book so it took me quite a while to read.

The next blog post will contain some of my favorite passages from the book and my thoughts on them. 

Happy reading,

Barbara

PS:  I have decided not to name a book of the month, at least for the summer.  I will continue to tell you what I am reading and what I think of it.  Also I will list suggestions received from fellow readers and their reading lists. 

PPS:  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is what I am reading now. It is futuristic science fiction. 

The Corrections is over!

I am back again readers with the last installment of The Corrections. I am glad it’s done and hope you have found some redemption from reading and thinking about this book.  As I think back there is so much in the book that many if ….nah, I really didn’t like the book but maybe the characters do appear in real life all around me and I am like Enid, I ignore them!

11. Why does it take so long for the Lamberts to acknowledge the seriousness of Alfred's illness?  Because unless we are hypochondriacs, we all ignore those little things that are keeping us back from good health. Is Alfred's deteriorating mental health solely a result of Parkinson's disease? Yes, we are all experts on PD! 

This entire line of questions is so offensive to me in regards to PD.  Since my own father suffered greatly from this and my mother supported and cared for him so valiantly, I cannot entertain this line of questions.  No one knows until they walk in the shoes.

17. Why is Denise drawn to both Robin and Brian? How attractive are they as characters? How does Denise's attraction to Robin initially manifest itself? Why is she unable to make a life with Robin?  Because she is a selfish bitch! Mostly she can only be happy if she is controlling the people around her and their activities.  She manipulates both Robin and Brian to their own personal failures.  So passive-aggressive and distructive.

20. Why does Denise tell Chip not to pay back the money she has lent him? What does the use of the word "forgive" suggest in Denise's plea to her brother? Like I said, selfish bitch and therefore she will still have something to hold over him in the future.

22. Is Alfred's death the key to Enid's happiness? How does the quality of her life change once Al is hospitalized? What reaction do his children have to his death? Are we meant to believe that their father's death is the catalyst for their "corrections"? For how much of the unhappiness in the Lambert household was Al responsible?

I can’t even begin to understand this question – do you?

Summer will be upon us shortly so we will have to have some light and fluffy beach reading very soon! 

Happy Reading Everyone!

Barbara

PS:  Maybe these Oprah questions would have been more palatable if I was drinking a good bottle of wine - the whole bottle!

Correct me if I am wrong!

Hello Readers,

This begins the first of two groups of questions on The Corrections.  These have been written well beforehand while I am on a visit to Colorado.  I hope you enjoy my responses to these Oprah questions.  I have left them  numbered  so you can relate them to the original listing if you care to. 

Discussion Questions:

4. Why does Denise choose to lose her virginity to Don Armour? Which qualities of her co-worker simultaneously attract and repel her? Why does Al sacrifice his job for Denise's privacy?

What a wacky woman this Denise is and yet sometimes during the book she seems the most sane.  Why she decided to have sex with Armour is beyond me and yet she seemed to think it would get her something.  Why her father decided to sacrifice for her is balanced by the fact that he could have turned the tables on Armour for harassment.  Again, this is a weird fact exposed in the book that had all the world of consequences in its secrecy.

6. How does the issue of class play out during the course of the novel? In what different ways does class drive Enid's behavior on the cruise and propel Denise's decision to sleep with Don Armour? How does concern over class status affect Gary and Caroline or Brian and Robin?

They had none but wanted it and the more they chased it the more they lost.

  

8. Discuss the different moral codes members of the Lambert family adhere to. Consider Enid's fear of her children's "immorality," Gary's obsession with Caroline's dishonesty, Alfred's refusal to engage in insider trading, Denise's rage at Gary for having betrayed the sibling code of honor and Chip's animus against the W_ _ Corporation and big business in general. Which of these judgments seem most valid? Does the book favor one moral view over another? 

This entire family was chasing their entire lives – except maybe Alfred who refused to play the game.  Maybe that is why I found the book so frantic.  Run, run, run to catch what?  I don’t think the book actually favored any moral code – the redemption of Chip at the end isn’t necessarily long lasting when you have seen his character throughout the book.  Alfred is dead and Enid gets to continue chasing something more that she feels she should be entitled to.   

9. Consider the atmosphere of suburban St. Jude (named for the patron saint of hopeless causes) in comparison to the more sophisticated surroundings of Philadelphia and New York. Why has the Lamberts' neighborhood evolved into a gerontocratic refuge? "What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it" [p. 178]. What negative and positive qualities are attributed to the Midwest? How are the characters shaped by the cities or towns they live in?

Honestly, aren’t people just people no matter where they live and what ‘surroundings’ they live in?  These Oprah questions seem to me to constantly direct you to dislike someone else who has something different that you do.  Hat the corporation, hate the Midwest, hate the city, hate that restaurant, hate, hate, hate, --- it gets really disheartening!

  

10. What is the significance of "one last Christmas?" Is Enid's obsession with the holidays predictable for a mother of her generation or is it, as Gary fears, "a symptom of a larger malaise" [p. 148]?

Don’t we all desire to have family close to us for the sake of our spouse?  Enid knew that Alfred was failing, this would be the last gathering of his offspring – all together.  Why wouldn’t a wife want to give him a memory to hold onto?

  

I hope you all are enjoying Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Book of the Month for May.

Happy Reading,

Barbara

The Corrections by Franzen

Hello Dear Readers,

I will be (or am) in Colorado from April 27-May 11 so I am writing this review/questions a few weeks early and they will post via scheduling on the blog. 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen…. What did you think?  This is the first book I have read by Franzen and although I enjoyed the book I am not sure if I’ll read another.  The Corrections was full of the typical situations that keep a reader reading.  Love, hate, anxiety, drama, mental and physical illness, separation, intrigue, assumptions, passive aggressive behavior and dominance were all present in this book along with every other psychiatric condition you could name. All of them were in my opinion, extreme.   T he pace of the book was frantic.  It was filled with chaos.  Of course all of this is my opinion.  

I don’t know if I have ever read a book where the pace of the words just pulled you along at a reading pace so quickly.  The characters were bounced around from the present to the past to a different character rapidly.  I almost gave up halfway through the book and know that if it wasn’t for our readers out there I wouldn’t have completed this book.  I am glad I did finish because the end was worth completing. 

In September 2001 this book was an Oprah Book Club Book.  The following are a sampling of questions that were presented from that discussion.  I am not going to complete them all but have selected a few that will appear over the next weeks.  Please enjoy the entirety at your leisure:

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/The-Corrections-by-Jonathan-Franzen/3

Happy Reading,

Barbara