i read another book!

This one is called "Divisadero" by Michael Ondaatje. It's hard to describe. Most of it feels quite a bit like poetry. There's a lot of pathos. Characters you come to care for, although I often felt like I was reading about something, rather than really being immersed in it. I recommend the book, but not nearly as highly as The English Patient, or even Anil's Ghost. 273 pages. yay!

-Tamie

I'm glad this wasn't my high school experience

The Battle of Jericho by Sharon M. Draper

Wow -- this was a pretty intense young adult book about The Warriors of Distinction, a high school "service" club that, in actuality, has brutal "initiation" and hazing rituals. Told from the point of view of Jericho, who has been invited to join the club. The author was National Teacher of the Year in 1997. 297 pages

Buffy in Denver

A wonderful book for book club, an okay (and short) book by local author

Mel, I think you will like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I haven't been able to bring myself to read The Road -- I'm afraid it's just going to be too dreary and pessimistic for me. (Though I'm truly not one who insists on happy endings, or happy beginnings. I do like to be able to find a glimmer of hope at some point in the text, though -- it doesn't have to be at the end. :))

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Book club book for this past Thursday. Good stuff. Several heartbreaking passages/events. From Amazon
Quote:
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer. 405 pages.

Now You See Him by Eli Gottleib
Fiction by a local author. Okay.262 pages.

Buffy in Denver

melissa here...

Wow! There's just no keeping up with Buffy and Jeremy! You put us all to shame.

I've a few to add to my list. Just short reviews this time. Will have to look at that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book next!!

Nick Hornby
'A Long Way'
331 pages
My favourite so far of Hornby's. He's hilarious and excellent. This one looks at four totally diverse characters wrestling with suicide. Happens to be very funny, in spite of subject matter.

Cormac McCarthy
'The Road'
285 pages
Akin to Atwoods' "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake." I feel like I have written this before, so maybe I've already counted this but don't want to go thru the archives to double check. If so, I've stolen 285 extra pages in my page count--sorry!

Mary Higgins Clark
'I Heard That Song Before'
384 pages
Horrendous soap opera. Am amazed I made it to the end, but I was slightly interested in how the plot turned out. Could have read the last chapter and discovered it all.

John Grisham
'The Appeal'
358 pages
Grisham is my literary cotton candy. He's returned to the topic of the legal system. Quite cynical. Good fluff read.

Jodi Picoult
'Plain Truth'
405 pages
I've read Picoult before. She writes about interesting, controversial subject matter, has well filled out, fully living and breathing characters, beautiful settings, and irritating plot manipulations. This woman's middle name should be Deux ex Machina. And her last name should be No Thread Left Hanging. She wraps up too many loose ends at the end of her story.
Nevertheless, I liked this book. I just ignored the last 3 to 4 pages in my imagination, after I'd read them. It's about an amish teenager who gets pregnant. I am fascinated by amish life, and I think Picoult presented a pretty fair representation.

Jodi Picoult
'The Pact'
389 pages
Funny that I find her plot twists so irritating but I read two of her books in the course of four days this week. Her subject matter is so interesting! And characters worth investing in. This book had SOME irritating plot twists but not a total Deux ex Machina ending, and left some (almost too deliberate) loose ends at the end of the book. This one was about two teenagers who made a suicide pact, but one of the two survived.

total page count this time:
2152

For overall total of:
4580

Wow -- I'm the mother of a four year old.

Today was our daughter's 4th birthday, and I'm wiped out -- just going to post titles -- feel free to ask if you want more details!

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen -- Fiction
269 pages

I Never Forget a Meal by Michael Tucker -- this one was a read-aloud for Jeremy and I.
242 pages

The Monster of Templeton by Lauren Groff -- James Fenimore Cooper, giant sea monster, imagined pregnancy, returning home -- a very bizarre book, in some ways. And yet not.
364 pages

Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams -- being hailed as the next Harry Potter -- it was okay...
472 pages

Buffy in Denver

Youth Redeemed

1. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels. In my opinion, superior to On the Road in both style and content. Kerouac begins with his solitary meditations on Buddhism and life while fire-watching in Washington State, travels through the illusions of fame and recklesness with Allen Ginsberg, depravity with William Burroughs in Tunisia, and comes back home to take his elderly French mother home to live with him. Profound, beautiful, and sincerely conflicted. I wish I had the courage to live like this. 409 pgs.

2. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption. A stunningly poetic and painstakingly crafted work by a Jewish mystical philosopher-theologian who sought to build bridges between Judaism and Christianity, philosophy and religion, while rejecting the excessive claims to truth of all of them. "Truth is not God; God is truth. God is not love; God loves." My new personal motto as an academic student of religion is, "Divine truth is hidden from the one who reaches for it with one hand only." 459 pgs.

3. John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. Interesting epic/lyrical story-within-a-story about Byron's lost Romantic novel, his dying daughter's encryption and footnoting of it, and its modern recovery by a web programmer whose relationship with her Byronic father is just as complicated. 465 pgs.

Wayward Youth

Jeremy here. (In non-literary news, Constantine was better than I thought it would be. Either this was a high point of Keanu's career or my expectations were so low I was bound to be pleased.)

1. Rebecca Godfrey, The Torn Skirt. Inputting Jesus Saves (see below) into Amazon netted me a bunch of Amazon recommendations which I got from the library, which unsurprisingly also netted me a bunch of novels about depressed druggie teens. I'm done with that now. Read Jesus Saves and then stop. 208 pgs.

2. Ann Patchett, Run. Much better. Over the course of 24 hours, a failed politician and his adopted sons deal with race, poverty, politics, and love in its infinite varieties. Patchett is a convincing and lyrical writer who is also very readable. 304 pgs.

3. Paul Auster, Moon Palace. I am now officially a Paul Auster fan after reading this and the New York Trilogy. Auster writes about storytelling and narrative within his fiction in a very different way than the in-your-face footnoted self-aware histrionics of more recent writers (which I also enjoy, don't get me wrong). The jacket cover described this as "modern sensibility in a nineteenth-century cover," which is a very nice way to say Auster deals with deep philosophical issues at the same time as writing a great story. After the painting trip into the desert, I actually gasped out loud. That's all I'll give away - read it for yourself. 320 pgs.

Nostalgic Reading

Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
Man, I loved this book when I was younger -- read it and read it. Newbery Honor in 1957. Just finished reading it aloud to my nearly four year old daughter. Main characters are cousins (Portia and Julian) who are spending the summer together and "discover" a swamp with a row of old, falling-down houses ... Don't want to spoil the plot twists. ;) 256 pages

~Buffy in Denver

The Visual Reading Explosion

So my next two books are actually books that are like a combination of reading and something else:

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, ed. by Steven Jay Schneider. The entire "1001...You Must...Die" series is really quite good, despite their somewhat ominous titles. I've always thought short, to-the-point journalistic writing was some of the best writing out there. This series of descriptions of the must-see films of all times fits that particular bill. You don't even have to watch any of the movies afterward - the plot descriptions and intelligent comments make the book a beautiful (though hefty) joy to read. 960 pages.

The Gunslinger Born, the Marvel adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. To put it briefly, don't bother - read the books instead. 240 pages.

Can you tell it's spring break? I'm gonna watch Constantine soon. Darn you, Keanu Reeves, for making movies I want to watch and having the gall to act in them as well.

Yippee for The Sun

Just read the March issue of The Sun. Sure enjoy it. Good, good stuff. 48 pages.
~Buffy in Denver

Michelle here...

I also just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Obviously, everyone else in this challenge needs to read it too! Buffy's review pretty much sums it up; it is an excellent book! I told my dad about it and he has been making fun of me for wanting to start a garden in Febuary in the north east ever since :) 354 pgs

Concerning Faith

Letter to a Godchild (Concerning Faith) by Reynolds Price
Fiona has just woken, so I'll be quick -- Price is a Professor of English at Duke University. This is the expanded version of a letter he wrote to his godson on the occasion of his baptism, intended for him to read later in life. He considers himself a Christian, but approaches faith from a broader perspective than one single religion might provide. I liked it. 95 pages.
~Buffy

Life - It's Messy

Jeremy posting so that Buffy's title doesn't become a post in itself.

Books For School

It's getting toward the end of the quarter and I'm doing projects rather than reading, so only one book: McKeachie's Teaching Tips, a helpful guide for college teachers about designing syllabi, lecturing and technology in the classroom, etc. Not really something to curl up with on a winter's night, but very helpful. 407 pgs.

Books For Fun (?)

Darcey Steinke, Jesus Saves. A dark exploration of a 13-year-old pastor's daughter dealing with her spiritual and sexual longings (and how those get confused), paralleled by the account of a kidnapped schoolmate. Disturbing and harrowingly written. 224 pgs.

Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher. An interesting parallel to the Steinke novel, this one shifts back and forth between a high school health teacher who upsets the local community when she refuses to teach the school's newly adopted abstinence curriculum, and a former addict who has newly joined the evangelical church and is now coaching the soccer team on which the health teacher's daughter plays. Their relationship unfolds in complicated and unpredictable ways. Perrotta does an excellent job of being sympathetic to the motivations of both the teacher and the soccer coach - no straw men here, refreshingly. 368 pgs.

Finally, I read through The Unprocessed Child and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - see Buffy's reviews below. 595 pgs.

Growing Food, Growing Children, Growing Evil. Reading Magazines. Chocolate and Grammar.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
The authors' family tries to eat locally for an entire year and also try to grow/raise their own food. Lots of great info here -- I think it's a good book for anyone to read, simply to think more about where the food that you are eating comes from (and how much petroleum is used to get it to you.) I made the spinach lasagna recipe tonight and it was absolutely lovely. Yum. I've never made lasagna before, either! 354 pages

The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School by Valerie Fitzenreiter
Excellent -- obviously an unschooling book, but also (in my opinion) just an amazing parenting book. In fact, I think anyone who will interact with any child for more than 5 hours should read it. It's one of those books where just reading a paragraph gives me a fresh perspective and enables me to keep trying to be the parent I want to be (much like Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline.) The author unschooled her daughter, who is now an adult. 241 pages

Added on March 2nd:

A Special Mission: Hitler's Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius XII by Dan Kurzman
More non-fiction. Wasn't as compelling as it could have been, but interesting. 247 pages.

Added on March 5:

The February issue of The Sun. Man, I love this magazine. Tamie introduced us to it several years ago and Jeremy got me a subscription for Christmas -- Good gift, husband! 48 pages.

The March-April issue of Mothering. Another good magazine. If you need a introductory lesson on cloth diapers or starter foods for babies, this would be a great issue for you. At the risk of offending someone here, let me just say -- this magazine is nothing like your average magazine aimed towards parents. It's good stuff. I would say that every issue has at least one article that would be appealing even if you don't have children. 104 pages, I'll take off 50 for ads, just to be safe ~ 54 pages.

Added March 7th:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl -- Just finished reading this one aloud with my daughter. 162 pages

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse by Ben Yagoda
This book was really really fun to read. (It was our bathroom book for a while.) One of the highlights for me was learning that ampersand (&) was once considered the 27th letter of the alphabet and was pronounced "and". When children were saying the alphabet, they would end with "and, per se, 'and'" and from that we've gotten "ampersand". Someone out there has to be as fascinated by this as I was...Right? 241 pages.