April Book Reviews

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
This book ended up being one of my favorite books that I have ever read. There were just so many things I loved about it - the characters, comprising a family of all girls, the true historical setting (although the book itself was fiction), the wordplay used by the characters and the changing narrator. "The Poisonwood Bible" is set mostly in the Congo (Belgian), Africa in the 1960s. It tells the story of a Baptist preacher and his family who travel to the Congo on an evangelical mission. The story is alternately narrated by the mother and the four daughters of the family. Each has a startlingly astute point of view, whether she realizes it or not. In the backdrop of the family's saga are the true events of the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the election of their first democratic leader, and his subsequent assassination as part of a coup backed by the CIA and the American government. I was shocked to read about this. Maybe I should have already known this important story, but I guess it's not the kind of thing they teach you in high school American history. It was a sad commentary on the effects of powerful, first-world nations, and the devastating repercussions faced by developing countries, especially resource-rich ones like the Congo. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. Five stars.


The Last Summer (of you and me), by Ann Brashares
This book was a nice easy read. It would have been perfect summer beach or camping reading. However, Chase and I had just made a trip to the DI for some old-looking books to help fill our built in shelves in the living room. I saw this one for a dollar, and having read the "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series by the same author, thought I'd give it a try. The back of the book says that this is Ann Brashares's first novel for adults. I'm not sure I'd say it's for adults, but I guess it's not for teenagers. It's about two sisters, Riley and Alice, who have spent their summers for their entire lives on Fire Island, a small island off the coast of New York. Riley and Alice are three years apart in age and very different, yet very close. They have shared many things, including the friendship of their next-door-neighbor on the island, Paul. The summer that the book takes place, Alice and Riley are both in their early twenties and they are spending what they both know may be their last summer on the island. Paul returns to the island that summer too, after being away from the girls for 3 years. Riley hasn't lost any of her childhood wonder, energy, or innocence, but Alice, the younger sister has grown up a bit and is confronted with the realization that she has always loved Paul. The two are faced with how to deal with their new found romance in the presence of Riley, who has always been best friends with Paul. The story follows the three through the summer, the fall, winter and spring of the next year, and into the next summer as they deal with growing up, loss, and love. (No, I didn't copy that off the back off the book, but it sounded kinda cheesy, didn't it?) The story was okay. I do think Ann Brashares has a talent for developing the deep feelings and inner musings of her characters, which I enjoy. This was a fun read that you can easily get through in a day or two. Not amazing though. Three stars.



'Tis, by Frank McCourt
This was another DI find. I haven't read his best-selling memoir, "Angela's Ashes" (not sure why - just haven't gotten around to it I guess), but I couldn't resist this "sequel" memoir by Frank McCourt for 2 dollars. Frank McCourt was born to an Irish family in Brooklyn in 1930. When Frank was four years old, his parents moved with him and their other children back to Limerick, Ireland, where his mother was from as his father was unable to find work in Depression-era America. His eventually found work in England when Frank was older, although he spent most of his earnings on alcohol, rarely sending any to support the family and forcing them into poverty and begging for food and other necessities. When Frank was 18, he returned to American by himself, joined the army, received an education at NYU, and became a high-school teacher and Pulitzer-prize winning author. He himself lived in poverty for many of the years he was in New York, subsisting on his meager teacher's salary and sending any extra money home to Ireland to support his mother and brothers. One by one, each of his family members made their way to America, with the exception of his father, with whom he never really reconciled. "'Tis" tells the story of Frank's adult life against the backdrop of mid-century America. I guess I was surprised to learn that even that recently in our country's history, so many immigrants were being treated differently. Not always badly, but sometimes. McCourt notes many times throughout the book that he wonders why anyone he meets who is Irish and can tell that he is Irish automatically tells him what part of Ireland their parents grew up in, and not to mingle with others who are not like him. Even those who are not Irish among the Americans he meets tell him he's better off sticking with other Irish people. "Stick with your own kind", they tell him. I of course realized that blacks and many other ethnic groups faced and still do face this kind of racism and discrimination, but it was sort of new to me to think of Irish (white people!) as being treated so differently in America, and so recently. Ultimately, though, I think McCourt's "Irishness" very profoundly shaped who he became. This was a sad and also funny and moving true story. Four stars.

Happy Earth Day!

Okay, I know it was yesterday. I didn't have time to post yesterday. But I still wanted to do a post on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day! I think it's great that since 1970, Earth Day has become more accepted and more mainstream. And hopefully, living in an Earth-friendly manner is something we're all considering more and more. I wanted to list a few easy things that we can all do, and that we try to do at our house, to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

1. Use less plastic. Reusable shopping bags are a great start. Plus, they are much cuter than plastic grocery bags. You can get some great-looking ones at Envirosax. They even come in a little case so you can throw them all in your glove box when you're driving to the store. And speaking of driving to the store...

2. Drive less! Combine trips if you can, and ride the bus or the train! Lots of times when I ride the bus, I am the only one on it. If we could fill up the buses, we'd take a lot of cars off the road!

3. Use less power. Unplug your phone charger when it's not actually charging your phone. Plug your TV, DVD player, etc. into power strips that you can turn off when you're not using them. Get dimmer switches for your room lights, and use CFLs. But dispose of them properly!

4. RECYCLE! This one is easy! We put so much less garbage in our landfills when we recyle.

5. Use less water by implementing strategies like using a shower timer to take shorter showers, or turning off the water while you're brushing your teeth. (I'm still working on these ones.)

6. Grow your own food. Plant a garden and get as much food out of your own yard as you can! The only energy used in producing and harvesting will be the calories you burn working in the garden and picking your home grown fruits and vegetables!

These are just a few things that are easy to add into your daily life...I may add more if I think of them. What things do you do?

March Book Reviews

I didn't get as much reading done as I was hoping in March. I did manage to get through two short books though. So I'm a little late in posting them, but here they are.


"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston was the first book I read in March. It is a novel that is considered the author's greatest work. Zora Neale Hurston was an African American author in the early 20th century. I would actually like to read more of her books, as she was a compelling and stimulating author, who also seems like a very interesting woman. And, Zora is a really cool name. This books is about a young African American girl who has grown up in the South, experiencing the many prejudices faced by blacks and women at that time. Refusing to fit into the mold that society has cast for her, the story follows Janie into adulthood through three marriages (one arranged) and shows how she finds love on her own terms. The story takes place primarily in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town. As someone who was born and grew up after civil rights were in place it seemed like a great glimpse for me into the life of African Americans in the early 20th century. Five stars.


I've had "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" on my shelf for probably at least ten years. I think I had to buy it for a college class once, but then I don't think we ever ended up using it for the class. At any rate, this was the first time I read it. It was a nice inspirational story, I suppose, and it had a good message about working hard to become your best self and help others. I found it a little hokey, though. Maybe it was the grainy black-and-white photos of seagulls throughout the book, or the corny 1970s feel to the story and the personification of seagulls with dignified sounding human names (and middle names!), but it just didn't quite do it for me. It only took me about an hour to read though, so I wouldn't say it was a waste of time. I can only wonder what the film version is like...two stars.

Some more remodeling

We've been slowly working on our house for the last 10 months or so. Some of the projects, like finishing the kitchen, have had to wait because of expenses. We're still trying to catch up since Chase lost his job last fall. But last week, when our garbage disposal broke, we decided we had to do something. We could pay $55 to get our garbage disposal looked at, and possibly pieced back together to work marginally well for another couple of months under our home warranty, or we could pay $70 to get a brand new one. Which we did. However, we knew we needed to eventually get a new sink and counter tops, and it would be silly to install a new garbage disposal in our old sink if we were just going to replace it...you can see where I am going with this. So, we went to Ikea and found a "damaged" (slightly scratched) sink for 40% off and wood countertops that we liked that were pretty affordable. We only got countertops for the counter that has the sink right now, so for a while we will be mismatched. But that's okay, it's starting to look (and function) so much better in there!






This is what the sink area of our kitchen looked like before. Stained, ugly sink, disgusting old faucet, chipped countertops...





This is what it looks like now. Much better, right? We just need to add our colored glass tile backsplash, which Chase scored for $7 for the whole kitchen at a tile store sale!

February Book Reviews

Febraury was a short month...that's my reasoning for only having read two books. Also, they both took a while to get through.

This was a very interesting book that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. (Yup, I'm catching up on my Christmas presents for the last several years.) It is thought to be an original manuscript written by a black slave woman in the 1850s. It was found at an auction by Henry Louis Gates, and researched and edited by him. There is a lengthy introduction about the acquisition of and the research done on the manuscript, which is what made it take a while to read. The book itself is fairly short, probably less than 200 pages. Gates makes the case that this is the first novel ever written by a female slave, and possibly by a black woman at all. The novel is though to be fiction, but heavily influenced by actual events in the author's life as well as the literary style of the day, namely the gothic and sentimental novels of the 19th century. An interesting read, mostly for its novelty. Three stars.

I just finished this one. This book was very sad, and actually kind of depressing. It's a holocaust story, but not your typical holocaust story. Told from the point of view of a Polish Gentile survivor of Auschwitz and a young American writer, it addresses issues not only of the war and the holocaust, but also of the decade of the 1940s and the feeling and mood of the time. It talks about how Americans, even though we were part of the war, for the most part did not know what went on in Europe during those years. It suggests that the suffering of the Holocaust was endured and experienced by many peoples throughout Europe and the world, not just Jews, and draws parallels between anti-Semitism and the heated racial tensions in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. The book had a little more profanity and other explicit scenes than I would have liked, but it was a wonderful, sad, heart breaking story that still applies today. Four stars.

The Trip

Last month, we finally went on the cruise we'd been planning for over a year. This was in place of the one we didn't get to go on for our first anniversary, because the boat left without us (how mean!). I won't tell the whole story here - it's too painful! - suffice it to say, we were really looking forward to this one. We both love the warm weather and even though our trip didn't have as much of that as we hoped, we enjoyed experiencing the Caribbean.

This time we flew in on a Saturday, 2 days before our cruise left. This gave us plenty of time to relax. We hung out in our hotel room, watched TV (which is something we only do when we're traveling since we don't have TV at home), went for walks, and went swimming. We took a one-hour bus ride to the port on Monday morning, and there we were, on our ship! It was actually the same ship we cruised on for our honeymoon! We couldn't believe we actually made it on this time and were going to the Bahamas!

The cruise had two stops, Coco Cay (the cruise line's private island) and Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas, on New Providence Island. We stopped in Coco Cay the day after the ship departed Florida. It was a really fun stop. Everyone on the island was from our cruise, so it didn't seem too crowded and they were able to include lunch with our excursion. We went snorkeling in the crystal clear Caribbean water. It was my first time snorkeling, and it was amazing. I love how you can sort of float along with almost no effort; slightly kicking your feet to move yourself through the water is all you have to do. The bottom of the ocean was beautiful to see. There were so many colored fish, starfish, coral, conch shells, sand dollars, and...WE SAW A MANATEE! I believe wild manatee sightings in the Bahamas are pretty rare, since manatees are endangered animals. Chase and I were the only people that saw it, I'm not sure if the other people that were snorkeling around us believed us, but we kept wanting to tell everyone, we were so excited! It was less than 3 feet from us. It was so friendly and docile. It stopped in the water near us and let us look at it while it looked at us for what felt like several minutes. Then, just as quickly, it swam away and was gone. It was definitely one of the most amazing things I have ever seen! The people preparing us for our snorkeling expedition did not even mention the possiblity of seeing a manatee, or maybe we would have invested in the disposable underwater cameras they had for sale...I wish we had a picture of our manatee! But here is what it looked like:

It was smaller than I expected. After seeing it, we talked with one of the cruise employees working on the island, and she said there was a family of manatees living nearby, a father, mother, and a baby. I am pretty sure the one we saw was the baby, or at least young, manatee.

Here are some more pictures of Coco Cay. It was a beautiful day. I ended up with a sunburn (as usual) even though I used lots of SPF 50. I'm pretty sure I was the whitest person on that beach.





The next day our ship stopped in Nassau. It was actually kind of disappointing. It was raining all day, so even though we were docked and didn't have to be back on the ship until 11 PM, we went back around 1 PM because it was freezing cold, pouring rain, and there really wasn't that much to do there. Nassau seemed like a rather dirty, seedy city that really catered to tourists. Everywhere you walked there were people shouting at you to buy something that they were selling. We took a water taxi over to Paradise Island, hoping that would be a little better. Most of that island is owned by the Atlantis Resort, which has a huge hotel, condo residences, a casino, shops, restaurants, and aquarium, and a water park on the island. Of course, this didn't make things any cheaper there! They owned everything and could jack up the prices. So lunch for the two of us at Johnny Rocket's was $30. And we didn't even get drinks. Also, you had to pay to go on the beaches.

The Atlantis Hotel on Paradise Island


Us on Paradise Island



The aquarium on Paradise Island


Nassau


This one kind of shows how bad the weather was. The islands were beautiful though.

The next day we were at sea all day on our cruise ship. The cruise lines do a pretty good job of coming up with activities to entertain people on days like that. Chase and I won second place on the cruise's ship scavenger hunt, so we are now the proud owners of 6 Royal Caribbean pens. Chase also entered the men's sexy legs contest, and he won a medal for "Best Flamingo Legs"!

Showing off the medal (and the legs)
We had a great time on the cruise. We ate dinner with some fun people that sat at our table every night. There was a honeymooning young couple from Boston, another couple from Michigan, a British couple that lived in France (and entertained us every night with their stories) and a couple from Hong Kong. We all got along really well and even hung out outside of dinner! The last night we all went to the ship's piano bar and listened to the pianist play and sing request after request from people on the ship. It was a great time.

On the day the cruise ended, we decided to go to Disney World. We had free passes from participating in Disney's "Give a Day, Get a Disney Day" program. We spent our day at Epcot Center. I had never been to Disney World at all. Chase had been once to all the parks, and recommended Epcot as the place to go for me. Since he said the Magic Kingdom at Disney World is pretty much just like Disneyland, and I've been to Disneyland tons of times, we opted for something different. Epcot was great! I loved seeing all their depictions of the different countries, with the shops and restaurants located in each one. We ate lunch in "Morocco", and also visited Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, Norway, Mexico, and probably some others!

Italy


Norway

There weren't as many rides at Epcot, but there were a few really fun ones we did go on. They had a lot of other fun things like films about the environment or the different countries, shops selling things from those countries, and (this surprised me) tons of the Disney characters roaming around! We saw Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins in England, Aladdin and Jasmine in Morocco, Beauty and the Beast in France, Snow White in Germany, etc.

There is so much to see in Disney World; if we were ever going to hope to see it all I think we'd have to make that a week long trip in itself. The trip was amazing. It wore us out though (or mostly the traveling wore us out I guess) and we were glad to get home. I think Lucy was glad to see us too, although she had a fun time spending the week in Woodland Hills with Chases's parents. Now she's used to having us home and back to her regular antics.

January Book Reviews

This year I think I would like to post reviews each month on the books I read. It will help me keep track of what I have read so I can look back and recommend books to other people. January was a long month (it seemed). I was able to get through four pretty good books.

I got the book "To See You Again" for Christmas from my dad. He had told me about it before, so I was excited to open it on Christmas. I've always been a sucker for books about WWII, and this one was the true story of Betty Schimmel, a young Jewish girl growing up in Eastern Europe. She and her childhood sweetheart, Richie, were separated during an air raid in Budapest, where their families were living in the ghetto. They vowed they would find each other and get married someday, but after Betty and her family were liberated from a concentration camp, she was unable to find Richie. At the urging of her family, she married another nice young man, Otto, whom she never really loved. They have 3 children and build a life together in America. On a trip back to Hungary later in her adult years, after her children are grown, she has a chance meeting with Richie in a restaurant, and must decide whether to act upon the feelings of love she still has for him after all those years. This story was beautifully told, especially for someone who is not a writer, or even a native English speaker, and simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking. I give it 4 1/2 stars.

Next I read "The Looking Glass" by Richard Paul Evans. I have had this book for nearly 10 years, and I think I have read it in the past, but it has been long enough that I couldn't remember...I pulled it out again because I knew I could read it in a day or so. This is a fictional story of course, set in 1870s Utah during the gold rush. It involves a man who was once a preacher, who has abandoned his parish and come out west to search for gold and new meaning in his life after his wife dies. It is an interesting historical fiction that covers some of the issues of the time, such as women's rights and racism, that are still pertinent today. It may have been a little trite and predictable, but was still a nice love story. Three stars.

Next on my list was "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. I received this one last year for Christmas from my Dad, but hadn't had time to read it since I was in school. This was also a quick read, as it is a series of short essays, almost letters, from the author, between a half page and several pages long. Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his 40s. He had a young family and had only been married for ten years or so. Soon after his diagnosis, the university asked him to give a "last lecture", something that professors usually do upon retirement to leave their last bits of wisdom to their students. Randy decided to do this as a tribute to his children, to leave them life advice he knew they would need later on, and as a way to remember him. He writes about many different subjects, including childhood dreams, career, love, and family. He seems to have an exceptional personality and positive attitude, therefore, his life has also been exceptional and full of many great opportunities. Although most people may not be able to apply everything he says, not having had the many great opportunities and advantages he seems to have had, it is still great advice on how to life a good, full life. Four stars.

Finally, in January I read "Dewey: The small town library cat who touched the world" by Vicki Myron. Chase got this one last year for Christmas (thanks again Dad!) and loved it, so I thought I'd read it. This was also a non-fiction about a library in Spencer, Iowa. Dewey was a kitten that had been shoved into the library's book return slot on a cold winter evening, and found the next morning by the librarian. She kept him and he became the cat in residence at the Spencer Public Library. Woven in with the story of Dewey and how he touched the library patrons are scenes from the author's life and views of a small Midwestern farming town and its struggle to survive during the 80s and 90s. The library was a big part of the town, and Dewey became a big part of people's lives. I love reading non fiction, and I love it even more when the true so story is so exceptional that it seems like it should be fiction! The things that happen in people's lives really are better than fiction a lot of times. Three and a half stars here. Also looking forward to the movie version, in which Meryl Streep is rumored to play the librarian.