Category Archives: Meme

30-Day Book Meme #4: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

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A Monstrous Regiment of Women

The book meme asks us to write about our favorite book from our favorite series. As I said, I don’t really have real favorites, but since I listed the Holmes & Russell series, I’m going to honor that choice and pick A Monstrous Regiment of Women as my favorite book within it.

It’s a book that represents a shift in Mary Russell’s relationship with Sherlock Holmes, which is interesting in and of itself, but it’s also a well-researched look at feminism and theology, how they mesh, and how they don’t, in 1920’s England. I enjoyed that aspect of the novel as much as I enjoyed the mystery at its core.

Booking Through Thursday: National Book Week

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Kiss My Tiara, by Susan Jane Gilman

On Thursday, August 11th, Booking through Thursday asked:

It’s National Book Week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you. Go to page 56. Copy the 5th sentence as your status

My sentence is from Kiss My Tiara by Susan Jane Gilman:

I’d been reading a lot of Rimbaud and I guess something about the situation struck me as daring and fantastically romantic and sophisticated.

Kiss My Tiara
Susan Jane Gilman
224 pages
Grand Central Publishing, February 2001
Buy this book from Amazon.com>>

30-Day Book Meme #2: Certain Women

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Certain Women

I’ve been a fan of Madeleine L’Engle since a friend of my mother’s gave me A Wrinkle in Time to read while I was at her house. It was, quite literally, a dark and stormy night, and I was sprawled on a guest-room bed covered in a patchwork quilt, immersed in a story and unafraid of the storm.

I’ve probably read A Wrinkle in Time at least a dozen times, but the novel I’m actually using for this prompt – a book I’ve read at least three times – is one of L’Engle’s adult novels, Certain Women. I like it because it’s a story within a story – on one level, it’s about an adult daughter spending time with her dying father, but on another level it’s the story of the play that her ex-husband created for father and daughter to perform, about King David and all his wives.

As someone whose religious education has been rather eclectic, I read it, the first time, with very little frame of reference, save for the fact that I read the Catholic version of the Bible cover-to-cover when I was seven. In the years since my first reading, however, my knowledge has expanded, and I’ve gotten more from the book.

I think I got even more from it as I’ve aged, as well…you can read the same book at forty that you did at twenty-five and even fifteen, and always enjoy it, but experience it three different ways, and with this novel, I’ve done that.

30-Day Book Meme #1: The Wave

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The Wave

The 30-day book meme asked me to talk about the best book I read last year. I don’t really rank my books in “best ever/worst ever” categories. I either didn’t like something, liked it, or loved it enough to read again. One of the books that fit the latter category, was The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey (review here).

This book alternates chapters, speaking with scientists and then surfers about finding the world’s biggest waves, predicting ocean waves and currents, surviving rogue waves, and even seeing waves from space – no really.

It’s a great book to go back to in weeks like this one, when it’s predicted to reach 109 today, and I’m really missing the ocean, but I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the science behind sailing and surfing, and why waves may be getting bigger and more dangerous.

Was it really the best book I read in 2010? Maybe, maybe not. It did, however, inspire me to download a surf report app for my iPhone.

Teaser Tuesdays: A Widow’s Awakening

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A Widow's Awakening

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
– BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
– Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

No frou frou stories about fashionistas or prom dresses, this week. No comforting Trek fic, not even another sea story. Instead, this:

On January 10th, Nick’s wife is scheduled for a 9:00 a.m. C-section. Why I, the nuttier-than-a-fruitcake recently widowed childless auntie, has been asked to attend the birth, I’m not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with my refusal to tell people how I’m really feeling. And still not having grasped the concept of saying no, off I go.

At 9:30, a baby girl with the middle name of Hope arrives. When she’s shown to me, I shiver.

“You’re being held by Sam,” the baby’s maternal grandmother says to me.

“Huh?”

“The way your body just reacted,” she explains, “it looked like someone was standing behind you, wrapping their arms around you.”

From A Widow’s Awakening, by Maryanne Pope – page 205-206.

Booking through Thursday: Firsts

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btt2

On Thursday, January 13th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Do you remember the first book you bought for yourself? Or the first book you checked out of the library? What was it and why did you choose it?

Back when I was a child, when going to the library didn’t involve a due date slip coming from a receipt printer, or being able to request books via the internet, I used to ride my bike there once a week, and fill my backpack to bursting, but I don’t really remember what my first book was. I know that when I was very young, I read a lot of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, that I borrowed all the Little House books before I owned my own, and that I probably read all of the Pern novels that way as well, but I don’t really remember what I checked out.

The same goes for what I bought…I mean, I was blowing my allowance on books when everyone else was buying clothes and makeup, and that was another special weekend ritual for me, but…I don’t really remember what I bought first.

I do know that even though I LOVE my kindle, there’s nothing like walking into a bookstore with available cash and weekend to fill.

Teaser Tuesdays: Little House on the Prairie

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Little House on the Prairie

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
– BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
– Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I’m cheating this week, because I’m so tired of ads hawking everything from the best cigar deals to new cars that come with free iPads right out of the box. While I’m not particularly religious, I do think the commercialism of Christmas is way overdone. It’s exhausting, and somewhat repulsive.

It was with intention, then, that I pulled from my shelves earlier today, a couple of the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This excerpt, then, is from the chapter entitled “Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus,” from the book Little House on the Prairie, because I’m feeling wistful for a time when something as simple as a cup of your very own meant you had an incredible Christmas. It’s a bit longer than teasers are meant to be, but it’s important to me to share it.

Something was shining bright in the top of Laura’s stocking. She squealed and jumped out of bed. So Did Mary, but Laura beat her to the fireplace. And the shining thing was a glittering new tin cup.

Mary had one exactly like it.

These new tin cups were their very own. Now they each had a cup to drink out of. Laura jumped up and down and shouted and laughed, but Mary stood still and looked with shining eyes at her own tin cup.

Then they plunged their hands into the stockings again. And they pulled out two long, long, sticks of candy. It was peppermint candy, striped red and white. They looked and looked at that beautiful candy, and Laura licked her stick, just one lick. But Mary was not so greedy. She didn’t even take one lick of her stick.

Those stockings weren’t empty yet. Mary and Laura pulled out two small packages. They unwrapped them, and each found a little heart-shaped cake. Over their delicate brown tops was sprinkled white sugar. The sparkling grains lay like tiny drifts of snow.

The cakes were too pretty to eat. Mary and Laura just looked at them. But at last Laura turned hers over, and she nibbled a tiny nibble from underneath, where it wouldn’t show. And the inside of that little cake was white!

It had been made of pure white flour, and sweetened with white sugar.

Laura and Mary never would have looked in their stockings again. The cups and the cakes and the candy were almost too much. They were too happy to speak. But Ma asked if they were sure the stockings were empty.

Then they put their arms down inside them, to make sure.

And in the very toe of each stocking was a shining bright, new penny!

They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny.

There never had been such a Christmas.

The Sunday Salon: Struggling to Read

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In the last week, I’ve written a novel’s worth of articles, supervised (and tried to help) while my husband and friends moved some furniture around inside, and also into, our house, helped a friend pack to move half way across the country, picked up a cake for another friend’s birthday, managed to shatter the glass of my iPhone when my dog knocked it from my hands, and I’m also rehearsing a song for church. If there was a way to get a roadside assistance plan for my brain, I totally would.

While this has been going on, I’ve noticed that reading has become a struggle. Either I’m too tired, or too hyper, or I just don’t have time. I posted a few days ago that I was not in a reading mood at all, but that’s not true. I want to get lost in a book, and am in the middle of three now (up from two), but I’m not connecting to anything. It’s like, I only have the mental capacity to hum Christmas tunes and watch cheesy movies on Fa-la-la-la-Lifetime.

I know this mood won’t hold, but I was really hoping to manage to complete 104 books this year, and I’m short of that goal.

So, I wonder – what does everyone else do when reading becomes a struggle when it never was before?

Booking Through Thursday: Character

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btt2

On Thursday, December 16th, Booking through Thursday asked:

If you could be a character from any book, who would you be? And why?

I must not be taking my multivitamins because I swear there was no Booking Through Thursday prompt when I wrote my piece on the 17th. I guess I must have missed it.

In any case, the truth is that there are many characters I’d love to hang out with, but there isn’t one single one I’d like to be. One type maybe – feisty literary heroines like Jo March and Anne Shirley really appeal to me, but I really don’t want to live in either of their time periods, and while I really enjoyed reading Tania Aebi’s account of sailing around the world in a wooden ship as an eighteen-year-old, I know myself well enough to know that I am not happy without access to hot bubblebaths, espresso, bookstores, my dogs, and high-speed internet access.

Lame answer, I know, but the truth nevertheless.

Booking Through Thursday: First

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btt2

On Thursday, December 2nd, Booking through Thursday asked:

How about First Editions? Are they something special? Or “just another book” to you?

Since the nice folks at BTT didn’t share a prompt this week, I’m answering one that I skipped.

So, First Editions. To be honest, I’m not a used book fan. I think used books are much akin to used gym equipment in that they serve a very important market, but it’s not a market I’m in. For me, there is nothing better than cracking the cover on a brand new book, with no one else’s cigarette smoke or mothball scents trapped in the pages. On the other hand, I do recognize that first editions are potentially valuable, and I do have a small collection, including one Arthur Conan Doyle volume that a friend gave me. It was an incredibly generous gift.