Books

Forgive me, everyone, for hijacking Charlotte's blog for a minute. I've been thinking for a while about blogging about some of the books I read. Reading is one of my great hobbies (Adam's too) and I dedicate a couple of hours most days to it since I find that it feels really good after spending several hours on my dissertation and several more hours playing with blocks and plastic farm animals, changing diapers, and scraping baby food off the ground.

So, books I have read in the last couple months: (I have more to say as it gets closer to the date I have read the book, as you will see.)

**Interpreter of Maladies** by Jhumpa Lahiri--Reread it. This book is so, so good. It is a series of short stories, each achingly beautiful in different ways.

**Death Comes for the Archbishop** by Willa Cather--I love Willa Cather because I dig books about the settlement of the "wild west" she always takes me back to _Little House on the Prairie_.

**Plum Spooky** by Janet Evanovich--Not great. This is like number four billion in a series that was great for the first eight books but has since gotten stale. I'd quit now if I had the willpower, but I'm so far into the series that I can't bring myself to stop.

**John Adams** by David McCullough--I only feel semi-qualified to review this book since I stopped reading it about a quarter of the way through. I had a hard time sticking with this book since I already saw the HBO series--which frankly, I thought was more even-handed and compelling than McCullough's blatantly hero-worshipping portrait--and I read 1776 not that long ago and was a little uninterested in a rehash of this time period. But a lot of people rave about this book, and you may be one of them.

**The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie** by Alan Bradley--A very fun mystery novel. It is about a little girl who thinks and acts like an adult scientist (she is passionate about poisons) and solves mysteries on an English manor. Very clever and enjoyable read.

**Something Borrowed** by Emily Giffin--This was my second time through this book. This is chick lit at its best, a good love story but written in a way I could resonate with as an adult and as someone who was a teenager in the early 90s.

**Outlander** by Diana Gabaldon--This book has been around for a while and has been recommended to me by many people over the years. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations since I've heard a lot of people rave about it. But I think it is basically a trashy romance novel made more digestible by an interesting story line. A hundred and fifty pages of explicit sex and a climax (no pun intended) at the end that will make your stomach roll for a while afterward. I pretty easily decided not to read any of the four or five sequels to it.

**Finger Lickin' Fifteen** by Janet Evanovich--See my above note on this series. Like I said, if you're not already invested, don't bother reading past book ten in this series.

**Twenties Girl** by Sophie Kinsella--This was a really fun beach-read kind of book, the best Kinsella has written in a while outside of her Shopaholic series. Although the premise--girl meets ghost--wasn't very intriguing to me at first, I'm glad I gave it a chance because it turned out to be very entertaining.

**The Help** by Kathryn Stockett--Loved this book. I can't say enough nice stuff about this book. It is the story of two black maids and one white girl living in Mississippi in the 1960s and while being a real page-turner it still gave me a lot of perspective into some of the race and class conflict at the time without being too heavy. My mom liked it to when I recommended it to her so it must have some broad appeal and be appropriate for book clubs. And it also reminded me to be nice and grateful and respectful to my own domestic help and to pay attention to my daughter.

**The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo** by Stieg Larsson--This was a pretty decent read, most interesting to me because it was written by a Swedish author (translated into English--I haven't learned Swedish ... yet) and takes place in Sweden. It is a mystery within a mystery, one of them kind of disturbing if you don't have a high tolerence for crazy families. Larsson is not a great writer and his prose is kind of like Dan Brown's (who I hate) but his stories are more interesting and I'm willing to cut him some slack because I'm reading him in translation. One of the funniest things to me about this book was the casual way in which the lead guy goes in and out of sexual relationships with various women throughout the book--nothing graphic, just amazingly ... businesslike, just like how we go out to lunch with a friend or something. Ah, Sweden ...

**Testimony** by Anita Shreve--The book club here in my community is meeting to discuss this next week. It is about the scandal at a private school in Vermont and how it ripples through the lives of a number of those around it for the worse. Shreve is a good writer and some chapters are downright poetic, which I enjoyed. What I didn't enjoy was the gratuitous description of a sex tape in the first chapter, so if you read this book, skip it; knowing exactly what was on the tape doesn't matter much to the rest of the book anyway. I don't know that I would have read this book without a book club recommendation.

**On Chesil Beach** by Ian McEwan--(I just finished this last night, so this may be my longest comment.) This book was recommended to me two years ago by a friend right after I read Atonement by McEwan. He is a fantastic writer, so descriptive and so connected to the inner lives of people in different stages of life ... well, English people in the 1950s and 60s, anyway. He writes a full novel about the wedding night of a young, naive couple who, confined by upbringing and education (he regresses into their pasts), can't break through the barriers of communication to form a meaningful relationship that can comfortably express itself physically. (Maybe this should be required reading for all young Mormon couples before the Big Night.) While there is physical sexual description--central to the story--it isn't titillating or gratuitous. I think McEwan's greatest achievement is in dealing with a subject matter that can so easily fall into the erotic and avoiding that, turning the reader's focus upon the emotional and mental issues of intimacy between spouses. The moral is about communication rather than the importance of physical satisfaction.

(Wow, it has been fun to write something that wasn't about fourth-century bishops and nuns!)