Sep 10, 2007

Good Reads

The heat broke today and we are wearing sweatshirts. I am longing for a good book and a steep cup of coffee and so I think I may pack up my family tonight and hit the local book store. Oh yeah, we don’t have a local book store, we drive to the next town for that. Sigh. I want to read something good and heavy and contemplative but not terribly sad. So while “The Life of Pi” would be in I am again putting off “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. For those of you not following along it’s on my list to read next and I started it twice but when not to far in I am reading about selling a four year old, I can’t read further without being so entirely consumed by anger and sadness that I am wondering why I am continuing. I assure you all I will get past it someday and read this book, however not today. I joined good reads and am leafing through what people are reading. It’s like Myspace for book critiques, so if that’s something that sounds fun to you join me over there I could use some more friends.

3 comments:

Chrissy said...

you should read "the uses of enchantment" by heidi julavits. also, i need to get back into good reads. now that i am done with school (huzzah!) i have no excuse not to. thanks for the reminder!

Jenny said...

I'm puttin git on the list NEXT. Thank you. I walked around the book store for an hour without picking anything up for more than a few seconds to be dissapointed about it's chick read-ness or it's life lesson-ness bleah. I ended up buying "Winky" and read the first chapter last night. I am wholey in love with it already.

Amazon says: "This debut novel from memoirist Chase (The Hurry-up Song) begins with the capture and wounding by a SWAT team of the eponymous, sentient teddy bear in a backwoods cabin; the team thinks it has captured a mad bomber. In jail, Winkie, who no one denies is a teddy bear, must contend with cruel jailers; his stuttering, court-appointed lawyer named Unwin; the 9,678 counts of everything from treason to witchcraft he's charged with; and the intersection of his life with that of the previous possessor of the cabin, an old humanities professor whose bombs never worked."

Anonymous said...

Jenny I know you are looking for something heavy and contemplative but if you are in need of a page turner try "The Pursuit of Happiness" by Douglas Kennedy.

I received it as a gift and didn't think I would like it at all. But I haven't fallen asleep reading it in bed and that is always a good sign!

It is basically a love story but there is a lot in in about McCarthyism and that period in the US. The actual impact it had on lives beyond the stats of a history book. Take Care, Olivia

Book Description from Amazon

Manhattan, Thanksgiving Eve, 1945. The war was over, and Eric Smythe's party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara -- an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked a gatecrasher, Jack Malone -- a U. S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, and a man whose world-view did not tally with that of Eric and his friends. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of postwar New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch-hunts, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.