Reading Life

Booking Through Thursday

This week Booking Through Thursday asks:
Buy A Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.What book would you choose to give to a friend and why?

And, if you’re feeling generous enough–head on over to Amazon and actually send one on its way!
I trade books with my friends all the time~sometimes it's hard to keep track of who has what, they get passed around to so many people. But I rather like the idea of buying a friend a book for no particular reason, especially since I know it will return to me eventually!
The Whole World Over, by Julia Glass, was one of my favorite reads last year. Glass has a real flair for description and character development. This is a sumptuous book about relationships, and, yes, friendships~ it makes wonderful "curl up with some chocolate and wine" reading, just the kind of thing I like to encourage my friends to do.
For my writer friends, The Right to Write, by Julia Cameron, provides the perfect combination of inspiration and exercise in short, concise chapters. This book distills all Cameron's highly touted theories about writing into one small volume. It's my favorite of all her books.
For more ideas on book shopping for your friends, check out Booking Through Thursday.

Comfort Reading

Booking Through Thursday asks: Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better. What do you read? (Any bets on how quickly somebody says the Bible or some other religious text? A good choice, to be sure, but to be honest, I was thinking more along the lines of fiction…. Unless I laid it on a little strong in the string of catastrophes? Maybe I should have just stuck to catching a cold on a rainy day...) Reading comforts me. Holding a book in my hands comforts me. Losing myself in the imaginary lives of others removes me from the daily aches and pains of my own life. When I was very small, I often awoke in the night with asthma attacks, and my grandmother would nestle on the couch and read to me, the vaporizer puffing clouds of steam around our heads. So for a very long time now, reading has served as comforter in times of stress.

But what would it take to get through the griefs piled upon that poor hapless person in the example above? I don't know if even books could help me in that scenario. But if they could, they would have to be giant books full of interesting characters...books like Julia Glass' The Whole World Over, or Penny Vincenzi's Into Tempation.

Or maybe tightly written, atmospheric mysteries~anything by Elizabeth George comes to mind. And certainly the dilemma's faced by any of Jodi Picoult's characters could distract me from my own.

These are the kinds of books I love whatever is going on in my life, books with richly drawn characters facing real life situations, characters toting lots of emotional baggage and working their way through the inticacies of personal relationships and life in general.

Comfort books.

Bookmarked-The Sunday List of Dreams

Dreams are the lively and lovely desires of the heart, soul, mind, and body that should propel us through every moment of our lives. ~ The Sunday List of Dreams, by Kris Radish~
Connie Nixon, 58 years young, divorced, and newly retired from a demanding career as an RN, is now ready to embark on a new life, one fueled by her Sunday List of Dreams, a list she's been keeping and tinkering with for "as long as she can remember." There are at least 48 items on this list, everything from "buy a convertible, something flashy, put the top down and drive someplace without thinking" and "start sleeping naked" to "stop doubting yourself" and "stop being afraid." Connie's journey toward fulfilling her dreams takes on some totally surprising twists and turns, as a reunion with her oldest daughter teaches her some amzing things about herself, and leads her to a completely new interpretation of her List of Dreams.
Sunday List of Dreams is the fourth novel from author Kris Radish (The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn, and Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral), whose series of books about women in mid-life and their experiences with friendship, life journeys, and learning to accept the past and embrace the future, are "chick lit" at it's best. Normally (and I hope I don't sound like a book snob when I say this) I don't read this particular genre~it seems to formulaic to me, the plots often contrived and hackneyed, the characters somewhat cairicaturistic.
I enjoyed this one though, (probably because it was such a departure from Paint it Black, the novel from Janet Finch that I finally had to set aside unfinished just before I picked this one up.)
It was a fun read, with strong and humorous women characters. Most interestingly, it brought up some very intersting issues for me.
First, The LIST. It's the backbone of the book, this list of dreams, and it informs everything Connie does. Following her progress in ticking off the items on her dream list, I was suddenly horrified to realize that I don't even have a list! Sure, I have dreams ~at least I guess you could call them that~ but they're so amorphous and vague they don't resemble anything like the 37 concise dreams Connie has documented in her brown leather notebook.
Then, there's the WAITING. For most of my life, I've been postponing even thinking about life dreams because I've been waiting for something~waiting to get through school, waiting to find a job, waiting to raise my family, waiting until I had enough money, waiting until my parents didn't need me, waiting, waiting, waiting~ and what it all comes down to is that I've been waiting for life to happen to me, and not making anything happen for myself.
SO~~~ in the spirit of creating dreams to "propel" me through the rest of my life~~~ here, in black and white, are the first three items on what I'll call my Monday Morning Dream Directive...
1. Stop waiting!
2. Take charge of your life!
3. Decide what your dreams are, and then do #1 and #2!
*Beginning today, The Sunday List of Dreams, is a featured selection of the Barnes and Noble online book club, including conversations with the author.