This book is a collection of essays by the author sharing his true stories of life and love and trying to find someone to get through life with. I liked the story’s for the most part, some of them seemed a bit hard to believe, especially given that these were all things that were supposed to have happened to the same person. In thinking about it after reading it though, I do think if you sat down and wrote out all the crazy stories about things you had gotten into for love, I suppose you really could have a short story book. I liked that the author kept me laughing and narrated in such a way that as the reader you were really hoping for him to find someone to love already.
"Anyone who's every gotten into photography for a minute knows that when you start taking a lot of pictures, you start seeing the world in a different way. Your awareness of your surroundings shifts and deepens, and even when you don't have your camera in your hands, you become constantly struck by the lyricism of passing visuals." "...they were also honest about their divided hearts, that weird gnawing ache of living in an adopted home that even with its blessings can never truly feel like home."
The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan Really like this author and her style of writing. This book was about, as the title suggests, marriage. The author's style though is to have several story lines going at once, even at varying decades and then weaving them together by the end of the book. Readers don't just get a handful of simple, or not so simple, marriage stories, though. One of the story's followed the advertising campaigning of diamonds and how they become the pick for engagement rings. Another shares the story of a man who leaves his wife for happiness with another, but through the perspective of his mother who also narrates her own story of her marriage, past and present.
I picked this book because I love the author and it is her newest book, little did I know that less then a month later I'd end up engaged myself (nice surprise BB). The book wasn't all full of happily ever afters, just like real marriage, but it was a sweet story about the choices women make in their marriages and out of them in regards to love. It was thought provoking, and though I wasn't thinking of myself at the time, I think it was the perfect time for me to read it and so I am grateful for the unexpected timing.
"Ogden Nash Poem "A Word to Husbands"... To keep your marriage brimming,/ With love in the loving cup,/ Whenever you're wrong, admit it;/ Whenever you're right, shut up." " "They said horrible things to one another, unforgivable things, but they always forgave." "She tried to tell her mother that it wasn't about divorce. It was about the fact that marriage was outdated and exclusionary, and worked only 50 percent of the time anyway."
The Fault in our Stars by John Green
Have heard about this amazing teen novel for some time and I am very glad I finally picked it up. The story is of a terminally ill young teenage girl who is struggling to live with cancer with a very bad prognosis. She meets another young man in recovery from cancer at her cancer support group and we get to go on the ride of first love with lots of complications with our two main characters.
What an amazing journey the author takes us on with the two young lovers. To begin with our teenage characters are wise beyond their years for many reasons and also have so many struggles day in and day out. First love is also so pure and the fact that for at least one of the characters this is the first adventure of love gives us as readers a glance into that purity.
Though at times the book was a bit unbelievable in storyline, overall this book was an amazing read and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.
Some Quotes: " "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves."" "Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A write we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."
Banished A Memoir: Surviving my Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer What an intriguing memoir. If you haven’t heard of the Westboro Baptist Church, google them. These hate mongers are a fascinating group if you ask me and this is the first one of their members to break away and be able to give a first person account of how they operate and what their group is about. I feel for the author in the loss of her innocence and childhood because of her parents decision to join this organization. I feel for her that she still several years later is without her immediate family because the church sees her as an evil person and her parents and other siblings are still stuck in the church.
Everything about this organization from my previous impression of them, and now after reading this book, screams “cult.” Regardless of whether they will be considered as such or not though they are a very hateful and dangerous group. I am inspired by the authors bravery and courage to stand up against them and her continued strength to move forward in life in spite of all the bad things that have happened to her.
Love Anthony by Lisa Genova The plotline of this book is interesting. Two women on Nantucket, one who has 4 daughters and recently learns her husband is having an affair, and one who is hiding in her grief at the loss of her young autistic son. The story is really three stories in one and narrated as such with alternating chapters. You have the story of the two women and then the story the first woman, the one who’s husband cheats, is writing as an author. I liked the alternating chapters and the story lines of both of the women uniquely dealing with their very real losses. I liked too the suspense of waiting to find out how and when these woman’s lives would intersect.
I was disappointed when they did eventually intersect. It was a bit too much supernatural to me and even though I started guessing before it was 100% clear of what was happening, I think the plot could have gone in a very different direction and still had a successful book. To me it took away from the overall book that it got so spiritual at the end, just not my cup of tea.
With or Without You by Domenica Ruta This memoir of a young woman who grew up with an addicted mother in a loving but highly dysfunctional family was a very interesting read. We follow the author through her disorganized childhood, her own addiction troubles, and the healthy ways she tries to reestablish boundaries and limits in her family.
The unfortunate stories of her childhood were relatable, at least to me, and as a reader you really are hoping for her success at overcoming all the things life has thrown at her. I like memoirs like this because good or bad, the outcome is decided by the time it’s written and you can really hope for the main character but ultimately get the answer of what really happened, how it all really turned out. It’s easy in stories like this sometimes to forget that this is not really a story but more of a journey of one individuals life and where they land, influenced by all the things in the past that have happened to them.
Some Quotes: "You were sick, but now you're well, and there's work to do" Kurt Vonnegut; [in regards to reading] "Hunger like this is pitiful. It never affords you the luxury of distinguishing between useless and important knowledge, between good and bad words." "I ignored her perverted impulse to protect me now, bit my tongue before screaming, "Too late for that!" " about her addiction "Life disappears faster than it actually happens." "Except, no. No! I want this to be true, but it's just not working. There is no platitude that can get me over this." "
Man Crazy by Joyce Carol Oates You have to be in the right mood for a JCO book sometimes. I love her books for the most part but I also personally think her books are hit or miss for me. I think this one was better then the last I read but it was still pretty hard to follow for me at first.
It’s a coming of age story about a young girl who’s family falls apart pretty quickly and how that affects her promiscuous adolescence. She then winds up in a young adult cult and suffers some more horrific events. The book ends with her in therapy and processing the trauma of her life.
The title fits given Oates’ feminist writing style, but I had to take a pause to really look under the surface of the book to understand why she would title this book with a main female character the way she did. I think she’s commenting on the idea that this girl came into the world more or less into a decent enough family but to begin with her family is destroyed by her father’s actions. Then in adolescence during her awkward teenage years she goes through the trauma of her physical awkwardness with her male classmates who use her for sex but thinking very little of her otherwise. At the hands of the cult it is male cult members who rape and mutilate her.
Overall a very different coming of age story and a good read from an author I like very much.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time by Mark Haddon So what’s weird about the timing of this novel is that a few books above, Love Anthony, mentioned this book a lot. Shortly after I finished that book a coworker loaned me this book which I have wanted to read for some time. This novel’s narrator is a young autistic boy who is trying to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor’s dog. The entire book is written from his perspective, even down to the way the chapters are numbered (won’t give it away) which I really liked since the author kept with narration this way throughout in all details.
I found certain parts of the novel to be predictable and guessed some of the plotlines in advance. I did learn quite a bit about this young fictional character’s illness though which I did like. I think though, especially professionally speaking, autism is such a wide spectrum illness that it’s hard to say this book speaks for all autistic individuals. It speaks for autistic kids that would fall near the same place on the spectrum that this character did.
I am glad to have finally read this and it was a quick easy read that held my attention to the end.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez This is a novel that I have been suggested to read for some time. I found it difficult to follow most of the story especially with the confusing characters with often the same or very similar names. That being said I think the visual imagery the author was able to create in my head was pretty amazing.
I’m not sure I could summarize the plotline because it was so varied, but in general the story is following a family in a fictional land and has a magical component to it. There are many wars that take place and extreme movement of characters, some die and then return, which is why it was hard to follow, but it worked for this story. I’m not a big fan of books that get too magical/ sci fi/ etc but if you can make me believe in the make believe world then I often times really like these novels. This author was definitely able to do that for me.
The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver The plot line of this book is very intriguing. A woman at a cross roads of her life, deciding whether to cheat or not to cheat on her husband, and the decision she makes. Only the book becomes a “choose your own adventure” in a way and gives you both sides of the path she chose. The odd chapters follow one way and the even another. I loved the concept of being able to see how life turned out if either decision was made and find it a very universal question in terms of “what if I had decided that instead of this, how would my life have turned out?” I also really like this author so had no trouble reading her book.
I think the problem for me was that I sort of predicted from the beginning how it would end. Not so much specifically but just how the last chapter would look. The book also took place over several years which worked in the sense that we got to see a bigger portion of how the one decision she made affected her long term, but also then sort of felt hurried through life events.
I also am not sure how to explain the biggest thing I didn’t like in the book but I’ll give it an attempt. The main character is an illustrator/author and at a certain point in the book in each of the storylines she authors a children’s book. The books are different for each story but in both of them the overall message is the same as this actual novel, in terms of the decisions we make affect the outcomes of the rest of our lives. It was almost the same story within the story, which I really didn’t like.
I also didn’t necessary like how either story line ended, this may have been my own expectation in being able to determine at the end which was the right choice from the beginning, but I guess this was the intention of the author. Showing that either choice then affected the rest of the decisions but that ultimately there is no right or wrong choice, there are just different paths that may or may not lead to similar places.
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