2012 reading recap

Well, I had a goal to read 100 books in 2012--and that definitely didn't happen. It was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to after I didn't read like crazy all summer like I was expecting to. I got to 83 though--and I'm pretty sure that's just about where I was last year too. But I feel like it was kind of cheating because I counted the Hunger Games trilogy, the Harry Potters, and the books I read about childbirth over the summer! Still, I'm not sure I'll read quite as many this year--or maybe I will! Somehow, I always end up reading too much when I feel like I should be cleaning or taking care of other projects. It's always hard to find a balance.

For my own benefit, my favorite books of 2012 were (and of course, I couldn't choose just one for each category):

Fiction: A Town Like Alice, Gone with the Wind, and Bel Canto.

Memoir: Great With Child, The Happiness Project (more for the idea than the actual execution, perhaps)

Non-fiction: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, The Millionaire Next Door

I don't think I need to narrow it down more than that. Looking back over the year, I really did read a lot of books that I loved this year. And I also read a bunch that were good, but not amazing. It was a great year for reading.

I am so happy that I started this blog (and even happier that no one else reads it!) so that I can look back at what I read and remember how much I loved them. It also makes me feel more accomplished, like I actually did something by finishing another book, when I write it down and write my feelings about it. All in all, a great decision on my part in the beginning of 2012. I'm excited to keep it up for 2013. I don't think I'm going to set a numerical goal for books this year, because who knows what this year is going to bring with Dane changing so much every week (every day!). I will try to read at least one per week, I think--somewhere between 50 and 83, my accomplishment of this year. I think that's doable.

Book #83: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I'd wanted to read this book forever--I'd put in a request at the library almost a year ago to get the audiobook, but it took forever, and then I forgot about it, and I finally remembered about it a few weeks ago. I'd gotten a recommendation from someone about it, and I did really enjoy it. I think (not sure) that I read on the cover blurb that Eugenides was trying to put the Jane Austen-esque plots about love and marriage into today's modern society, asking questions about how novels about marriage would be affected by feminism and other complicating factors. So it's a story about love and marriage that doesn't actually end with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy getting married, being rich, and living happily ever after--there's a love triangle (boy loves girl, girl loves other boy, that boy loves girl but also has bipolar disorder, etc.) and today's real life that gets in the way. The book doesn't end in a marriage (actually, it ends with a divorce, kind of) but it doesn't give up on marriage--it just kind of seems like marriage is more complicated nowadays than it was back then, when marrying a rich, handsome man was the end of all of your problems (or at least that's how Mrs. Bennet saw it).

It's been a while since I actually finished the book, but I did really like Eugenides' style of writing and the plotline itself. I don't know if I will ever read it again, but I did get really into the story while I was reading it.

Book #82: Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from Storycorps edited by Dave Isay

This book is basically the sequel to Listening is an Act of Love, but all of the stories that people tell are related to their experiences with their mothers, or in being a mother themselves. I felt basically the same as with Listening--the stories were just fascinating to see a look into people's lives. But there's not much more to say about it that I haven't already said!

Book #81: The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks

I waited for this book to become available at the library for FOREVER, and I finally got it and got around to reading it. It would have been interesting to read this book at the same time as Nienie's memoir because they're pretty polar opposite--Nienie is so just flat-out Mormon and Joanna Brooks is very "unorthodox," a word she uses to describe herself about a gajillion times. But they started out in the same place--growing up in a very traditional Mormon household and very enmeshed in their Mormon faith. It was kind of unsettling to me to read the beginning chapters of Brooks' memoir, while she was describing her childhood and introducing her faith and life to her readers. I felt a bit like I did when I was reading Bound on Earth--like it was too personal and too close to my own life for comfort. Brooks describes herself as a "root beer among the Cokes" and talks about how she felt different from all her friends growing up--but how comfortable she felt in all that difference because she was a part of this bigger group of the Saints. She describes the ward activities and members and Girl's Camp, but it's all with a tone of being an outsider looking in and being amazed at how odd it all is. And I totally understand why she did that: first of all, she's very far from that feeling in her life now, and second, her audience is people who aren't members of the church and she's writing partially so that they can become more understanding and familiar with the LDS faith. But man, it still felt weird to me to read all of that.

I felt less uncomfortable when she started talking about how/when she started to fall away from the Church, oddly enough. And I can understand why she did--the mid-nineties were a pretty stressful time for feminists in the Church (to say the least). For someone who feels so strongly about the issues that were being fought over, it would have been traumatizing to be a part of it. I am just more amazed by her strength and courage in coming back to the Church and in dealing with her history and the Church's history, and how strong her love is for the Church despite her experiences with it's faults. I think that's the really beautiful thing about her story, and I really enjoyed hearing about that part of it. I'd really love to talk to her and find out more about what she really believes. For example, she's married to a Jewish man and is raising her daughters "Jewish-Mormon"--how on earth do you reconcile those two faiths? The central tenet of Mormonism is that Christ is our Savior, while Judaism believes the opposite. LDS doctrine states that to be with your family forever you need to be sealed in the temple--what does that mean to you being in an interfaith marriage? I am sincerely interested to know what she believes about these things in more detail, and I think her book and blog are very interesting.

Long story short, despite her unorthodoxy, I think Joanna Brooks has done some really valuable PR for the Church (maybe even because she IS so unorthodox) and I really admire her dedication and courage in sticking to her guns in being a part of the Church AND in disagreeing with the Church over some of the things she feels strongly about. It definitely has given me things to think about.

Book #80: Listening Is an Act of Love edited by Dave Isay

Listening Is an Act of Love is a collection of oral histories collected by the Storycorps project. I'd never heard of Storycorps before (or maybe I had, and forgotten about it), but it's apparently this amazing, fantastically cool organization that goes around collecting people's stories, and the vast collection is really a big part of "the American Story"--a total ground-up version of history. Anyone who wants to is invited to come to one of their booths (one in Grand Central Station, one at Ground Zero, several traveling booths) and be interviewed (by a family member or a facilitator) and just tell their story. If they want, their story can be collected in the Storycorps archives or they just get a copy of it to keep for themselves. The book version is a compilation of some of the most interesting stories people have told and given to Storycorps to share. And, oh, they really are so interesting! They're mostly short snippets, mostly about very individual memories that in theory aren't very meaningful to anyone else, but just knowing how important they are to the speaker makes them fascinating. I LOVE oral history (I worked a bit with it while I was an undergrad) and I love the vision that Storycorps has of history. I would love to do something like this with people--interview them and collect their stories. Wouldn't that be just a great career to have? It's such a meaningful thing to collect and do--like the title of the book says, it's an act of love.

I'm looking at the Storycorps website (www.storycorps.org) in the hopes that the mobile station will be coming around here sometime--or more interestingly, around Utah to get my grandparents to do it--but it doesn't seem like it is. But I definitely want to keep checking this out.

Book #79: The New Kings of Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass

This book is a collection of nonfiction essays that editor Ira Glass read and enjoyed over the years and eventually brought together to be published in one book. Glass is the producer of the NPR show "This American Life" (which is also a podcast that Tommy listens to) and from what I gather, these essays are somewhat similar in style to that radio show. Glass's introduction laments that there isn't a  snappy name for this type of writing; some people apparently call it "literary non-fiction," but he says that that's too stuffy and boring for what it really is. What it really is is really great storytelling--using real facts and real live people and real things that happened in real life, as much as real things can happen and be described and told in a story. Each of the essays is really fascinating: one about a fourteen-year-old kid who got called up by the SEC for "manipulating the stock market" (because he was doing what actual stockbrokers do every day), one about Saddam Hussein and what he was really like (written back when he was alive), one where the author goes and befriends and becomes a part of a gang of marauding and vandalizing soccer fans in Britain, one about the man behind a violently right-wing talk radio show and how he and the show worked, and about ten more. This book went right up my nonfiction alley.

Book #78: The Moment edited by Larry Smith

The subtitle of this book probably says it best: "Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists, Famous and Obscure." Each artist wrote a short (from one paragraph to just a few pages) story about a life-changing moment in their past, one that dictated who they became. It was like a bunch of mini-memoirs, and since I'd only heard of a handful of them, it was just neat to read about a bunch of these people's lives and interesting things they had done. It was also so fast to go through and read all of these really short excerpts, which helped.

Books #76 and 77: Persuasion and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Like I said after reading Wives and Daughters, I started wanting to re-read all the Jane Austen novels, so these were the first two I picked up. I'm saving Pride and Prejudice for last, and I started with the two that I couldn't remember at all. And I realize WHY I didn't remember them, really--because the two main characters are SO BORING. I mean, the story is really good (in both novels), but Anne and Fanny are basically the same person--quiet and shy to the point of total silence around anyone else, 100% concerned with their duty and propriety, letting everyone walk all over them and say rude things to them without ever responding in any way. And I guess that's what the ideal was for women back then (or at least that's the way the books make it seem), but it kind of gets old. I wanted Fanny to tell Mrs. Norris to stop being rude, and wanted Anne to tell Mary to shut up. But of course they're too perfect to do that. But these books were great to read again! I do love Jane Austen's style--I think someone should write a book in her style but about modern people. I'm definitely not the person to do that, although I wish I were. Someone else get on that!

Book #75: Nemesis by Agatha Christie

We listened to this on our way to the Outer Banks. It was only two CDs long, but it was a perfect road trip mystery. It was a Miss Marple mystery, and since Miss Marple is my favorite Agatha Christie sleuth, it was very entertaining. She gets a posthumous letter from a deceased friend who asks for her help in an unnamed case, so she has to figure out what the case/problem is AND what the solution is, and she ends up clearing someone who had been wrongly accused of murder. Good times!

Book #74: Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

I don't know where I was for the majority of my life, because I'd never heard of Elizabeth Gaskell before last year. Tommy's sister Lindsay recommended Wives and Daughters and North and South (another Gaskell novel) to me and I read them last year and loved them. And just recently, Tommy and I found the miniseries on Netflix Instant Streaming and watched them both--and they were awesome! So awesome that it made me want to re-read at least this book, which I'd conveniently recently found at a used bookstore on my birthday (one of Tommy's bday presents to me). Even though this book is over 600 pages long, it's such a page-turner for me. I finished it in just a few days because I was so into it. The original novel had a subtitle of "An Every-day Story," which is just perfect as a description for the plot. There's nothing too fantastic or dramatic or climactic about this book--but there are such excellent characters and such realistic situations that you can't help wanting to see what's coming.

The most TERRIBLE thing about this book is that Gaskell actually died before she finished the book! At most, there are maybe one or two chapters left before all the loose ends would have been tied off, and Molly and Roger would have been happily married and everything would be made right in the world. As it is, the novel ends on a very abrupt note, which leaves you depressed and feeling gypped. It's SUCH a great book, though--and it's made me want to go back and re-read all of the Jane Austen books (I've already started Persuasion). So excited!

Book #73: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt

This book was really, really fascinating. As you might expect from the title, it's an investigation into all things related to driving--how we drive, what we think about when we drive, how we react to traffic signs, how traffic norms differ from culture to culture, etc. This is something Tommy and I are always talking about (aren't we all, since we all drive all the time?) and it was really cool to learn more about why traffic lights are so obnoxious and how traffic jams happen. Vanderbilt researched tons of scholarly articles and compiled them here, in addition to interviewing traffic engineers in cities across the world. Several very interesting things that I remember off the top of my head:

-There are actually people who work as traffic engineers! Yes, I actually knew that, but it's amazing to imagine people actually plan and design the roads and intersections to be the way they are, and there are reasons for every little decision that is made about their design (or at least there should be): how much to curve the road, how long the light should last until it changes to yellow, how many lanes to add to the road.
-The intersection of the 405 and the 10 in Santa Monica is the most congested part of freeway in the country--and we lived about two miles from it this summer! No wonder it always took us 25 minutes or more to drive the 4.6 miles to the temple.
-People assume they're better drivers than they are. They also assume that the safer/newer/nicer their car is, the worse they can drive and get away with it without any serious problems, which basically just cancels out the advantages that new safety additions bring to your new, nice, safe car.
-The best way to make things safer may just be to make the roads more dangerous. People drive more cautiously and therefore get into fewer accidents on thin, windy roads than they do on wide, smooth highways.
-People think that the better way to get rid of traffic is to add more roads, or more lanes to the roads that exist, but even when you do that, they get filled up. It's a real-life equivalent to "If you build it, they will come"--there have to be other, better ways to fight congestion.

These are all just general facts that I remember from the book, but it's filled with really fascinating statistics and case studies that make these ideas much more meaningful. I'm going to get Tommy to read it because it's so interesting, and I think something that he'd really enjoy--he's always joking that his goal after he graduates is to fix the horrible algorithms that are used to organize traffic lights. He'll just have to fight the traffic engineers to do it first.

Book #72: Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink

As is probably obvious, I am a not-so-secret fan of nonfiction, particularly nonfiction that describes scholarly social science research in a popular way so anyone can understand it. I think it stems back to Freakonomics, which was the first-ever book of nonfiction I read when I was much younger, and which totally rocked my world. I found it so interesting because it was so applicable and describing things in real life--and I've continued to love books like that ever since. Mindless Eating focuses on research having to do with food and how we eat (as should be obvious from the subtitle of the book). Wansink is the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, where they basically do tons of studies about how our environment influences what and how much we eat. For example, the bigger your plate, the more you serve yourself, and the more you eat. The shorter and stouter your cup, the more you pour yourself, and the more you drink. The healthier a food bills itself to be ("Low fat! No Carbs! Gluten Free!"), the more you eat. When you eat while watching TV or with any type of distraction like reading or conversation, you eat more. The Food and Brand Lab have done a number of really fascinating studies where they bring people in and put them through an experiment, usually where they offer them food in a certain situation to see what they do with it, and the results are pretty consistent. We eat mindlessly, and we do so all the time.

One interesting thing about the book is that it doesn't bill itself as a diet book, but it does offer suggestions for takeaways for readers to improve their own eating habits now that they have the knowledge offered in the book. Lots of them are just small changes in habits that you can make, like serving out portion sizes in small bowls instead of eating chips straight from the bag. At the end of the book, he suggests making three small changes in your eating habits and keeping track of them for a month, instead of going on a big diet. I really like that idea--I feel like we've been doing a really great job at eating relatively healthy (particularly lately), but there are ALWAYS things we can do to improve. I want to be sure we eat at least some fruit and vegetable at both lunch and dinner as much as possible (even if it's just lettuce on the sandwich), so I think that's one goal we'll make. Of course, we are coming up on the holiday season, and we'll be visiting family for three weeks and won't have as much control over what we're eating, but it's never a bad time to start trying to be healthier.

Book #71: American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

I picked this book up at the library after reading The Kitchen Counter Cooking School because it was one of the books in the "Recommended Reading" section. In KCCS, one of the chapters (and one of the lessons for the students) was about how to use up your leftovers and not waste/throw out tons of food you paid good money for. I liked their ideas so much that I've been thinking a lot about using up ALL of the food we get, not just finishing half of the red onion we bought for a salad and then letting it rot until we throw it away. If you think about it, if you used the other half of the red onion that you weren't planning on using, it's like you got it for free. And I can definitely get behind that idea.

American Wasteland is like that whole concept, but on steroids. Bloom is a waste-obsessed blogger-turned-journalist/writer who goes around looking to see how much food is wasted in the U.S. (and according to some statistics, it's around 50% of the food produced) and what we can do to make that number smaller. Food is wasted at all points in the food distribution process--from food not harvested and left to rot in the fields, to food thrown out because it got to warm during transportation, to food thrown out from supermarkets because it's reached its sell-by date (even though it's still totally edible), to food wasted at restaurants, to food that we buy and ends up going bad. It's pretty impressive when you think about it, and Bloom shares some interesting anecdotes and experiences of massive amounts of food waste. He also provides a lot of great tips on how we can reduce our food waste at the end of the book as well. My only complaints about this book was that it got a bit repetitive (every chapter could have been titled: Food Is Being Wasted Unnecessarily--Do Something About It!) and his tone was a bit over the top. I mean, yes, I do think that food waste is not a great thing and that we should definitely do what we can to reduce it. He even provides some convincing arguments for why it is so bad. But he made it sound equivalent to real, serious human issues like human trafficking in the way he talked about it, which bugged me. But that's his THING, so I can see why he writes so seriously about it.

Bonus: He lives in Durham, North Carolina, so most of his research and most of the places he writes about are in the Triangle area! That was pretty neat to read about some local food waste efforts (and some of the not-so-great locations of really bad food waste).

Book #70: The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan

Back in the 50s, companies ran contests for people to enter their own lyrics or jingles as part of advertisements for their products. A lot of the time, the company would provide a prompt ("I use Dial soap because:") and then ask people to provide an answer in "25 words or less," with prizes for the best responses. The prizes varied from wristwatches to cars, wall clocks to trips to Europe. And Evelyn Ryan, mother of the author, made a part-time career out of her skills at writing answers for these contests, winning prizes for nearly one out of every four entries she sent in (and many times beating out tens of thousands of other responses). Their family was extremely poor, and the father was an alcoholic, leaving Evelyn Ryan to use her wits to help the family to survive. But the amazing part of the story is how the prizes always came in at the crucial moment: thousands of dollars used to buy a house right when they were about to be evicted, and several years later thousands of dollars more used to pay for the second mortgage on their new house three days before it was due, and a year's worth of prizes used as Christmas presents for all the kids in a year when they didn't have enough money to buy any outright. It was really amazing reading about how determined and intelligent she was, and how able she was at providing for her family when it was needed--in such an unconventional way. Bonus: A few days ago, we saw on cnn.com that Romney was campaigning in Defiance, Ohio!

Book #69: One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus

The title of this book sounds totally racist, right? Haha that's what Tommy said when he saw what I was reading. It actually refers to a fictionalized version of a historical event--or at least a "what if?" scenario for a historical event. Apparently, in the 1800s, a Cheyenne tribe sent messengers to the U.S. government during a peace conference, and made the proposition that they would make peace if they were given 1000 white women for their men to marry (and in exchange they'd give the U.S. 1000 horses). You can imagine the government's response: Protect white womanhood! Send the savages away! An insult to our fair maidens! And all that jazz.

But in this novel, Fergus explores the idea of what it would have been like if they had sent those white women to marry the Indians, through the journals of one of those women: May Dodd. And that's where my real problem came with this book--I just could not believe that May was a real nineteenth-century woman. She sounded far too modern--she wasn't racist, she wasn't interested in "conventional" marriage, she was independent, etc. Not to say that there weren't women back then who were like that, but May just wasn't very convincing as a character. She was ALWAYS the one who happened to be the first one to do anything ("I started singing, and everyone else joined in"), and said a BILLION times that she was a woman with "strong passions" and used that to justify her actions. It just didn't feel very realistic to me. I ended up skimming the last fifty pages or so just to finish it--I just wasn't that into the story.

Book #68: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

My mom's going to be so proud of me for reading this. She read it over the summer and kept telling me about it, and I kept meaning to read it but never got around to it, until I FINALLY remembered to request it from the library. I picked it up yesterday and was so into it that I plowed through it and just finished it--and then ordered a copy of it for myself on Amazon. I NEED to own it so that I can remember everything in here!

Flinn is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, and she works as a food writer (or something like that) since she graduated. But one day in the grocery store she saw a woman with a cart full of what she called "antinourishment" or non-food--only processed food like boxes of Hamburger Helper and canned soup. So she followed her around and started telling her how to make real food and replace all those boxes in her cart--and that encounter opened up a whole new project for Flinn. She recruited nine women who were terrified of cooking and taught them a (free) weekly cooking class to give them the fundamentals and build their confidence in themselves as cooks. She visited each of their kitchens before beginning to see where they each were in their skills, and many of them were in horrible food situations (only eating fast food and frozen meals, for example). But by the end of the class series, many of them were roasting chickens and making their own stock and making soups from scratch! I'm pretty jealous because I want to take a class like that--but Flinn's book is basically set up to BE a class like that for you to read. She narrates each chapter as though she's just telling you what happened in each class, but she's really passing on the information to you as much as to the nine students in her class. The classes covered things like knife skills, roasting a whole chicken, making vinaigrettes, different ways to prepare vegetables, meat, and fish, easy bread recipes, and how to use the leftovers you have in your fridge. So, you can see why I would want a copy of my own--I want to remember all the different skills she taught.

This book is just one more motivation for me to continue our recent push towards eating more whole foods. We have been SO good lately at eating lots of fruits and vegetables (a lot of it for me is because I'm breastfeeding--and trying to lose the baby weight in a healthy way) but there are plenty more ways to do things in the kitchen and make things (like vegetables) more interesting. I'm excited to try!

Book #67: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

This book kind of reminded me of John Green's Looking for Alaska which I read last week. The narrator, an introverted, quiet kid, goes to a new school where he becomes friends with some really outgoing kids who introduce him to all the new life experiences that come with being a teenager (especially the smoking, drinking, and sex). It's a coming-of-age novel in the best sense of the term. Looking for Alaska deals with some really serious philosophical issues, like death and figuring out the meaning of life, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower dealt with other serious issues that many teenagers face in growing up, like sexual abuse and being made fun of for being gay. After reading these two books, I'm convinced that either my high school experience was abnormally sheltered (I'm sure this is true) or these writers overgeneralize the teenager stereotypes of smoking and drinking, etc. I never personally experienced most of the things he has Charlie go through--not even close. And I don't know if Charlie really convinced me that he was a real teenager--he didn't seem self-conscious enough to go along with his shyness and introverted nature.

Book #66: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

Remember when your childhood understanding of the solar system was shattered when all of a sudden Pluto was not a planet any more? When suddenly there are only EIGHT planets and My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas doesn't work as a mnemonic device for the names of the planets any more? That's all thanks to the work of astronomer Mike Brown, a Caltech professor who discovered several other orbiting objects out near Pluto that were similar to it in size and other characteristics and therefore proved that Pluto was just one of many floating objects out past Neptune, making it not something as special as a planet. I know that I was disappointed when I heard that news--but I'd never really thought about how or why they'd made that decision (or who the "they" who made that decision were). Brown's book serves kind of as a memoir/astronomy textbook describing the whole process and how he discovered the other non-planets. He writes very well and understands his audience very clearly, giving really great non-scientific explanations for everything and a lot of background that's really fascinating for a non-scientist and non-astronomer. He also writes about his personal life along with the discoveries he made, such as his getting married and having a daughter and all that jazz. It was almost poetic in how well-written it was, which is surprising based on the stereotype of scientific writing, haha. I really liked this book!

Book #65: The Vaccine Book by Robert W. Sears

The picture on this cover should probably be a giant scary syringe or something instead of the cute, curious-looking child that's on there. I picked this book up at the library on the recommendation of a nurse that we talked to, and after hearing about vaccinations from several different people. Although I am totally pro-vaccines, we'd heard enough about the controversies surrounding immunizations that I thought it would be a good idea to at least find out what people were so concerned about. I did some Internet research for a while, but that wasn't really that helpful because most websites just kept saying that people are concerned about the links between vaccines and autism, but there hasn't been anything proven through research, etc. However, this book had a totally different format: Sears went through each individual disease and vaccine and explained what the disease was, how severe it is, how the vaccine is made, when it's given, and why people choose (not) to get it for their child. That individual look at each vaccine (while repetitive--I definitely skimmed huge parts of each chapter) was really helpful and gave me a good idea of what to be worried about and what NOT to be worried about.

Sears also provides a sample alternative vaccine schedule if you don't want to keep your kid on the normal AAP-recommended schedule because of concerns about giving too many vaccines at one time, etc. I was pretty interested in reading that and seeing the differences between the two schedules, although I don't really know if we'll be using a different schedule for Dane (although we'll eventually have to figure this out). Who knew that I would care about this kind of thing? It's not the most interesting thing in the world, but it's good (for me) to feel informed before we go into giving Dane four or five shots at a time at his next doctor's appointment. I do like the idea of postponing certain vaccines that have scary potential side effects, like the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, but that's one that he won't be getting for a while, so we don't need to decide that yet.

Book #64: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

This book isn't necessarily a baby advice/parenting book, although it does end up being just about that. It's more of an anthropological comparison of two different cultures and how they view children, parents, and families--which makes it WAY more interesting. Druckerman is an American expat living in Paris, and after she starts having kids, she realizes the extreme difference between how well-behaved French and American kids are. So she sets out to investigate why that would be, and what French parents are doing that's better (or at least different) from Americans. The differences between the two groups are pretty amazing:

-French babies sleep through the night way earlier (the norm = 3 months)
-French kids eat all the same normal foods that adults eat--no kids menus with only grilled cheese and hamburgers for them
-French kids are more obedient to their parents, don't throw temper tantrums, and are generally more accepting of the rules their parents set for them

I don't know about you, but these are all qualities I want my children to have (especially the sleeping through the night thing at this point in my life). But the great thing is that since Druckerman is American and not French, she is just observing these amazing children and trying to figure out how they became that way, instead of giving you a ton of hard-and-fast rules about how to be a good parent. She's not some "expert" telling you that if you don't follow her rules, you'll REGRET IT FOREVER and your baby will suffer! (Think Babywise and every other parenting book out there.) She's just curious and impressed and hoping desperately that her children will adopt those same characteristics that we're all trying to develop. This tone is what really sets it apart from the many, many obnoxious parenting books that I have skimmed lately. It's also more like a memoir, since she describes her own experiences with her own children and their French friends and acquaintances, and that always makes a book more likeable when it's personal.

Book #63: Looking for Alaska by John Green

I loved John Green's other book, The Fault in Our Stars, so much that I decided to look up his other books and read some of them. Looking for Alaska was also highly rated online, so I picked it up at the library and plowed through it during a few feeding sessions. It's another young adult novel, and like The Fault in Our Stars, it deals with some pretty heavy philosophical and life issues in a really normal, real-life way. Miles, aka Pudge, is a sixteen-year-old kid who heads off in search of "The Great Perhaps" at a totally new (boarding) school in Alabama. He gets introduced to a lot of new experiences and meets some new friends, including Alaska Young, an extremely intense and intriguing (and hot) girl who makes everything more exciting, in good and bad ways. SPOILER ALERT: However, halfway through the school year, Alaska gets killed in a drunk driving accident (herself being the drunk driver) and Miles and the rest of his friends spend the rest of the year trying to figure out what happened to her, dealing with the guilt of letting her go, and trying to figure out how to live without her. I really like John Green's characters that he develops--they're smart but normal kids who make mistakes and are learning how to deal with them in the real world. This book was definitely a great read.

Book #62: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started this book back in JULY and just now finished it... in October. Sure, I moved across the county and had a baby in between the beginning and ending of the book, so I have been busy, but I've obviously had plenty of reading time based on all the other books I read--I just wasn't super motivated to get back to reading this book. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it--I really liked this book every time I was reading it. The story is pretty engrossing and Thackeray's commentary is really hilarious if you pay attention. But it was just so LONG that I got discouraged every time I looked at how much I had left to read. The version I have is over 650 pages (too lazy to go look at how many exactly) and it just didn't feel like the quick summer reads I was preferring while vacationing all summer long. It's also hard because I've been reading in short half-hour bursts instead of getting long reading periods in, which I think would have made this book easier. But I kept looking at it sitting on my nightstand and feeling guilty for not finishing it, so I finally sat down with it this week and polished it off.

This book reminded me a lot of Dickens, which makes sense because Thackeray and Dickens were contemporaries (and competitors). They use a lot of the same conventions (like addressing the reader ("Oh, dear reader...")) and are writing about the same time period. But this book is making fun of the society that Dickens writes within, and pointing out the inconsistencies and insecurities that people have and that motivate them to act in his world of Vanity Fair. The full title of the book (as it was originally published), was Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, which, after you read it, makes total sense: all the characters in it are deeply flawed and problematic. Becky Sharp, the main character, is just the most open about it--she knows she's bad and she thrives on it. Other characters start out as being apparently good and respectable people but turn into sniveling wimps or obnoxious creeps over the course of the book. It seems like everyone gets worse from the beginning to the end (except for Becky's husband, who gets better and stops being such a gambler and tries to become an honest man), which makes it seem like Thackeray has a pretty negative view of the world. There's a good number of chapters in the middle that seem to drag to me (or probably any modern reader) where he's specifically making fun of his contemporary society and their parties and expectations and such. It's also interesting because the story covers a number of decades of time, but you forget that it does because Thackeray never says "Four years later..." or any indication of how much time has passed--you only figure it out because the children in the story get older and older, haha. You start out when Becky and Amelia are leaving school, and they're middle-aged women (or even older) by the end of the book. Overall, I enjoyed reading this portrayal of the time period--I think we all think it was all Pride and Prejudice back then (although that's set much earlier) and it's funny to read something completely different.

Book #61: Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the LAST book in the Maisie Dobbs series! And by last, I mean the last one she's published--it was published this year, so there very well could be many more to come, which I wouldn't mind at all! I've really enjoyed getting into this series and reading all nine of these mysteries. Winspear definitely does a good job of creating a good mystery AND interweaving it with real-life concerns and experiences that Maisie has. That's something that seems lacking in a lot of other mystery novels, like Sherlock Holmes--you'd never know he thinks about anything other than the case he's working on. But Maisie is a real human being with her own problems that she has to deal with at the same time that she works on these mysteries.

I kind of felt like the actual case Maisie was working on in this novel fell flat--the resolution didn't seem like an actual resolution to me and didn't seem to really solve the questions she'd start off with. But I was so thrilled that Maisie finally began to confront her most annoying characteristic, that has shown up in ALL of the previous novels--she always tries to do everything for everyone else, to the point of being overbearing and meddlesome. She bought a house for her assistant, Billy, because she really and truly wanted to help them, but, I mean, nobody asked her to do that. They never asked her for help--she just went and did it and basically forced them to move in there, in a very kind and helpful way. All of that stuff comes back to bite her in this book, and she begins to realize what she's doing and trying to stop that habit. Thank goodness! And her relationship with James hits a few snags, but luckily they figure things out in a better way than I'd expected. I wish she'd just get over her "I'm too independent; I can't get married" thing, but I understood why she felt that way much more in this book than ever before.

Book #60: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

I came about this book in a random way. Back in June, I read a memoir by Beth Ann Fennelly and really liked it. She talks about her husband Tommy in there (cute, she calls him Tommy!) and how he's also a writer, blah blah blah. So out of curiosity I looked him up and turns out this book had just come out. And then I forgot about it. And then I saw it at Costco randomly one day, and really wanted to buy it, but abstained, and then remembered about it and requested it through the library and yadda yadda yadda I finally read it. And really liked it!

This book felt more like Real Literature than some of the light stuff I've been reading lately (pop science and Maisie Dobbs books, etc.). It was a really great thriller story--with murders and supposed serial killers and stuff--but it was very well-written and thought-provoking as well. Short summary: Larry was accused of killing a girl back in high school and it was never cleared up, so everyone still thinks he did it, and so when another girl from the same town is kidnapped twenty years later everyone automatically blames him. Silas was Larry's friend when they were in middle school, but they haven't talked since they fought in eighth grade, but he's now a police officer in the town--and he helps to investigate and solve the crime.

The book was also pretty Southern Lit (set in Mississippi, which is where the name of the book comes from), which I've become more interested in since living here and going to NCSU (where the MFA program is pretty entrenched in Southern Lit like Flannery O'Connor and others). Not that I've read that much more of it, but I'm actually aware of it existing as a genre, and I'd like to read some!

I've had a lot of reading opportunities lately, now that I'm spending eight hours a day (or so) rocking in a chair and nursing the baby. So I still doubt I'll make my original goal of 100 books for the year, but I'm making some good progress anyways.

Book #59: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

The full title of this book is actually The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, but I didn't want to make that the title of this blog post. I loved the idea behind this book: Rubin spends a year actively living resolutions intending to make herself happier, keeping track of her progress through a chart and changing the resolutions she was focusing on each month. She also did a lot of reading and research on happiness--through philosophers, psychologists, pop scientists, pop culture, etc.--and interweaves her discoveries throughout the book. She starts off in January by trying to improve her energy, and has resolutions like exercising better and decluttering her apartment, then in February focuses on improving her marriage by changing how she communicates, etc. It was so fun to read about the little changes she decided to make in her life, and how those changes really did impact the way she was living and interacting and feeling.

The cool thing about this project is that it's something that anyone and everyone can do--and everyone does attempt to do it with New Year's Resolutions (which we all inevitably forget about after a week or two, right?). But Rubin keeps it up by keeping a chart that she checks every single day--how did I do on not losing my temper today? She concludes at the end of the book that it was that chart that really made all the difference and helped her to keep her resolutions in focus every day. Anyway, it really impressed me how she worked at this and kept those resolutions, and makes me really want to do the same type of project at some point. Or at least just keep a few resolutions more responsibly.

Book #58: Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

This was a pretty interesting pop science read. It reminded me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell's stuff (and indeed, Malcolm Gladwell even provided one of the blurbs on the back cover), which means it was well-written and had a good balance of factual information and narrative. I've read books that were trying to be like this but ended up being too dry and were extremely boring, but this one didn't follow that pattern. Lehrer writes about all the different sources of creativity and where it comes from in our brains and in our interactions with others, reviewing the most current scientific research and incorporating some great narratives to illustrate his points. I especially liked the chapter about how Pixar Studios works and where they get their ideas and processes. I did tend to skim the sections where he was actually reviewing the brain patterns and neurological functions related to creativity--it still got a little bit too in-depth for me--but overall this was a great read!

Book #57: A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

I believe this is book number 8 in the Maisie Dobbs series? And I really don't have much to add about this one that I haven't already said about the other seven. I really liked this one--I think the books have gotten better as the series has gone along. One thing I liked about this one was how Maisie and James are so happy and in a good relationship, although I feel like Maisie's going to be dumb and ruin a good thing after a while. Why doesn't she just get a grip and marry the guy? (Not to totally spoil the book or anything...) I'm anxiously waiting the next in the series from the library... and then I think I've reached the end of all the ones that have been published so far!

Book #56: Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin

Grandma Murphy actually recommended this book to me when I was talking to her on the phone a little while ago, so I requested it from the library. Somehow, I ended up with the Young Readers Edition (whoops), but that may have been a good thing because I got through it pretty quickly and enjoyed the storyline a lot. Li Cunxin was a poor peasant boy from a rural province in China who was selected to be a part of Madame Mao's ballet company, and this memoir tells the entire story of his life, from growing up in one of Mao's communes to learning to study ballet at the cultural university they'd established. He eventually got a chance to study ballet as a cultural exchange student at the Houston Ballet Company and defected from China to stay in America, and became a huge star in the ballet world (apparently).

One of the most interesting things about this book, which was probably downplayed or dumbed down since this was the Young Readers Edition, was reading about the propaganda that the Chinese government fed to their citizens and Li's eventual realization that it wasn't all true. They were apparently told that America was a land of evil people with horrible poverty, while China was the best and richest country in the world, but once Li got to America all of those statements clashed horribly with his upbringing as a poor peasant boy living off of dried yams. All in all, this was a really interesting book because of Li's "insider perspective" as a Chinese citizen during the 60s and 70s--a time period I didn't really know much about.

Book #55: The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

If there's anything that is a grown-up topic of discussion, it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And since I still do not consider myself a real true grown-up, I've never known anything about it (sad as that is to admit). There's always stuff happening with it, but I've never had the chance to be introduced to the conflict from the beginning and therefore always been overwhelmed to try and learn anything about it. But this book was an AWESOME introduction to the entire situation. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to find out what's going on over in that part of the world.

Tolan tells the story of the conflict through the narrative of two people, two families: an Arab family from al-Ramla, and a Jewish family who moved into their home after the Arabs had been expelled from that part of Palestine. He uses these two people as the example of what happened to hundreds and thousands of people on both sides of the conflict: the Arabs kicked out of their homes, the Jews brought in in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Arabs longing for the right to return from exile, the Jews terrified of the Arabs' increasing desperation. You can't read this story without feeling terribly sorry for both sides of the conflict, and without feeling angry at the overriding "powers that be" that made the decisions that affected both groups of people so seriously. For someone like me, on the outside of the conflict, it's easy to see the truth to both sides of the conflict and the rights that both groups have. There is no easy solution--the only obvious fix is to go back to the past, before all of these problems started (which would really be thousands of years), and obviously that's no solution at all.

I really liked how Tolan seemed (to my inexperienced view) to be really impartial to the conflict and to be trying to represent both parties fairly and equally. I think that's part of the problem with the conflict--it's nearly impossible to hear from both sides.

Book #54: Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

This book kind of goes along with all the Maisie Dobbs books I was reading over the summer (and I'm actually reading another one right now)--an attractive young woman in London in the 1930s starts solving crimes. But Maisie Dobbs is set much more in the aftermath of WWI and the difficulties of the depression, while Her Royal Spyness seems much more happy-go-lucky Roarin' 20s-ish. Lady Georgiana, a duke's daughter, is a "minor royal," as she says, and gets caught up in a mystery when she finds a man drowned in her family's London home's bathtub. Eventually it comes to light that someone is also trying to kill her, and she manages to figure out who it is and find love in the bargain. Hooray!

I didn't love the author's style--it seemed pretty clunky at times--but I did get attached to Georgie and kept going back to thinking about the storyline after finishing it. I don't really feel interested in reading more of the sequels, but it was a fun, quick read.

Book #53: Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Sometimes, when I read news stories or even just think too hard about the future, I get depressed. Oh, most of the world lives in poverty and doesn't have access to clean water or education. Oh, the environment is going to pieces and we're all going to die when global warming happens. Oh, the world's population is too big and we're not going to be able to produce enough food and clean water for ourselves in a few years. Oh, the health care system in America is messed up and what are we all going to do when there are more retired people than working people in America?

Now, I really don't know very much (or ANYTHING) about these issues, except what you hear over the news. But this book, which I am really very happy I read, is actually promoting the opposite, non-depressing vision of the world: things aren't getting WORSE, they're actually about to get better. There are tons of problems facing the world right now, but the good news is, there are hundreds and thousands of people working on coming up with solutions to those problems, and a lot of those solutions sound really, really neat. And are becoming actual realities really, really fast.

For example, a huge percentage of the world doesn't have adequate energy sources and still relies on wood-burning stoves to provide their food and heating. This lack of energy contributes hugely to their poverty level--they can't improve their situation when they have to spend 50% of their time searching for more wood to burn so they can feed their families, etc. But there are some really incredible developments that are coming in the energy world, in solar, biofuel, and nuclear energy, that might change all of those problems. Solar energy is becoming more and more affordable by the year, and thousands of people are highly invested in developing better and better technologies for it. According to this book, within the next five years, solar energy should be just as affordable as normal energy sources in the United States. Isn't that amazing to think about? And similar developments are coming about in nuclear energy as well--imagine personal-sized nuclear generators that are completely safe and maintenance-free, which can be buried in the backyard and work for 50 years without problems. (That's a little farther away--maybe 15, 20 years, but people are talking about it!)

Diamandis and Kotler present tons of examples of these developments in a number of other areas as well: water, food, education, health care. I feel so much more optimistic about the world's chances of survival after reading this book. Even if none of these specific developments end up fixing everything (or anything), the point is that there are people out there who are working on fixing these problems. There are technologies being developed to specifically address every single issue we're worried about. I just hope they come about pretty quickly, you know?

Book #52: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Okay, this book was really, really, really awesome.

I went to check it out from the library this afternoon, and since I was waiting for the carpet cleaners to finish up at our apartment, I sat down to read for a few minutes. One and half hours later, I dragged myself home, where I sat for another hour and a half to finish the rest of my book. I felt so disoriented while waiting to get back to the rest of the book--I NEEDED to see what was happening next.

The premise of this book sounds so depressing--and it IS depressing. Two teenagers with terminal cancer fall in love with each other. The end. How much more sad can you get? But these two teenagers are so dry and realistic and sarcastic that it makes everything so much more bearable. They're tired of the pity and platitudes they get from everyone around them, and just want to live life like everyone else. But Gus has a fake leg and Hazel has an oxygen cart that she has to carry around with her everywhere, so they really can't. They make fun of their situation, even as they're struggling with it and dealing with the pain of it all, so there are so many funny and real moments in the book. I did, of course, tear up towards the end (no spoilers here), but that's pretty par for the course nowadays.

And of course, it's a YA novel, which makes it a quick read, which can only be a good thing. A+ on this one.

Book #51: Heaven is Here by Stephanie Nielson

I wasn't going to read this book. I've read NieNie's blog for years now and don't love it. I just keep going back to it out of habit and some curiosity, but her writing style annoys me (so many incomplete sentences and so much bad grammar--it's pathetic that it bugs me so much, but it does) and so does the fact that half of her posts are advertisements for people and products she loves (her cupcake shop, her photographer friends, etc.), which is nice for those people, but not really the reason why anyone checks her blog in the first place, right? For those of you who are totally out of the Mormon mommy blog loop, NieNie got in a plane accident four years ago and was severely burned over 80% of her body. A lot of her blog details her recovery and her journey back to normal life with her four (now five) kids, and her book does the same. I decided to check out the book after reading a few recommendations about it and I'm glad I did.

I checked this book out from the library (I was impressed that the Durham County Library had a copy) and powered through it just last night. I was totally absorbed in it, and it made me so sad at parts I got teary-eyed (but, then again, that's not a huge accomplishment nowadays--I cry at everything). I felt like the book filled in a lot of the gaps in NieNie's story that I've always wondered about and never really appreciated--how emotionally difficult it was for her after the crash, how it took her nearly three months to look at herself in the mirror, how hard it was for her to see her kids again and how terrified she was that they would reject her now that she looked so different. After the crash, she felt guilty for leaving her children like she did, terrified of dying during surgery, mortified/disgusted about how she looked. It was really eye-opening to read much more in-depth about her recovery, both physical and emotional, because you can't really get the full story from her blog (which she has a perfect right to keep to herself if she wants to). She doesn't shy away from talking about how hard it was and how long it took her to start getting back to normal, which I thought sounded so much more realistic than her description of her life pre-crash.

Several things: she must have had a really great co-author (slash editor) because it was soooo much better than her blog: totally coherent and flowing and grammatically correct (haha). Also, her entire extended family lives in Provo (as far as I can tell from the book), which makes half of my mind writhe with jealousy and half of it scream with incredulity. HOW can all nine of the kids in your family live in Provo? How is it that no one has moved away for jobs or school or anything? It just seems so foreign to me, having grown up with a similarly large extended family that reaches to every corner of the country. Sure, who WOULDN'T love to have everyone living in the same city and all of your kids and their cousins going to high school together? But how realistic is that? It almost bugs me that they have that amazing, perfect family situation, but on the other hand, I think she deserves and needs the family nearby with everything she's gone through.

Book #50: Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

Tommy sent me a list of books that the RAND faculty (apparently they also have a RAND grad school, which is strange to me since it's not associated with an actual university) compiled, called "Books that will change the way you think." Some of them looked more interesting than others, and this one looked the most interesting of all. I checked it out from the library here in SM and have been reading through it. It seems to me like the author is responding to some of Malcolm Gladwell's books and theories (he references Gladwell a lot, and is always disagreeing with him) and is pretty much making the point that the way we think about things, our common sense ideas about how things work, is generally wrong. He says again and again that we cannot rely on common sense to make big, public policy decisions, because common sense works well in everyday decisions that rule our personal lives, but it's not applicable on a global or governmental scale. And I'm pretty sure he's right, if that makes him feel any better. The funny and ironic thing is that Malcolm Gladwell markets his ideas as being totally against our normal ideas of common sense, and this guy is writing about them as if they ARE common sense and he's the one giving us the new, outlandish ideas.

The only thing about this book is that it's really not as engaging as other nonfiction books that I've read similar to this. The Tipping Point and Freakonomics are story-centered--they draw principles from specific people and experiments and are generally pretty narrative-based, which makes them incredibly interesting. This book is much more dry and not as focused on examples, which just means it's harder to get through and is probably why it's not as popular as Freakonomics was. All in all, a good read, but not one I'll be recommending to everyone I meet.

Also, this is my fiftieth book this year--halfway to my goal of 100! And it's only mid-August... haha I haven't read as much as I'd planned this summer. I've done much, much more than I'd planned, except for the reading. But I think I can still make it, depending on how crazy things are post-baby.

Book #49: The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear

Well, this is the last Maisie Dobbs novel I checked out from the library, so there will be a break from the Maisie Dobbs recounts for a while. But this was another book I thoroughly enjoyed. There were several things at the end of the mystery that it wasn't clear how Maisie discovered them, but I feel like that's how ALL mysteries have to be--the detective is always somewhat all-knowing and figures out things without really having the evidence to prove it (to the rest of us).

I really like how Maisie's personal life is intertwined with the mysteries, by the way. Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are completely professional beings, with no personal life whatsoever that we know of. In this book, Maisie finally gets into a relationship (!) that she seems excited about (and one that I definitely could get into) and her mentor dies after a long illness, and it's great to read about her dealing with those things along with the mysteries themselves.

Book #48: Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie goes a little more in-depth in this book and gets more into the action. She gets knocked out by a bomb in the first scene of the book (spoiler alert!) and then ends up facing off with the bad guy at the end and beating him up (somewhat). That seemed very Sherlock Holmes of her (I love how Sherlock and Watson are always so fit and able to keep up/chase down their suspects, no matter how difficult it seems it should be) and I liked the change, since she never really has problems with actually being in DANGER while she's on the case. This seemed to make sense though.

And, completely unrelated to the book itself, I like the design of these covers, with the huge sans serif font with the title and author's name. It works very well, in my limited knowledge and opinion of design principles.

Book #47: An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear

Hooray for yet another Maisie Dobbs book! I don't have too much to add about this one, but I liked the plot of this one. It's different from the typical "whodunit" detective story, and it's difficult to figure out what's going on until later on in the story, so it was really enjoyable to read. Go Maisie.

Book #46: Austenland by Shannon Hale

This was 100% a total chick-flick in novel form. It took me about 2 hours to read and I knew exactly what was going to happen the whole way through. But it was fun and enjoyable all the same. The main character loves Pride and Prejudice and eventually gets to go to a resort-type place where you live as Jane Austen characters did, in a giant fancy house with servants and the whole shebang. You have to act like it's 1816 and everyone else does as well, so Jane, the main character, feels really self-conscious a lot of the time knowing that everyone's really pretending or acting and everyone actually belongs in the modern world. This type of vacation sounds like it would be really fun to do with a group of girlfriends instead of by yourself, though.

Spoiler alert! In the end, Jane ends up falling in (real) love with the Mr. Darcy character and he falls in (real) love with her and goes back to New York with her. Not totally unexpected, but it was a fun read for how much time I spent with it.

Side note: the author is Mormon, and lives in South Jordan. I could tell she was, simply because all the kissing scenes end up just being kissing scenes with no mention of going any farther, which is a nice change from most books of this type.

Book #45: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the fourth book in the Maisie Dobbs series. For some reason, I'd thought that I missed the third one and that I was reading them out of order, but turns out this was the right one for me to read anyways. I checked out four of the Maisie Dobbs books from the library to read while we were at Aspen Grove (since I knew I was going to be unable to do most of the active activities), but I didn't even pull one of them out the whole time I was there! I was busy bonding with family and doing other fun things. So I read this right when I got back and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Maisie Dobbs is a great character--she's a very motivated, strong career woman. I expect her to be closer to my age--mid- to late-twenties--but she is really in her mid-thirties because of all of her experiences during WWI. I am a little bit bugged by how Maisie always seems to be perfectly in control and never unsure of herself, even when being pressured by the forceful male detectives of the day, for example. Even in the first book, during her first mystery, when she had little experience and little work, she was always able to squash the guys who came after her trying to pressure her into doing things they wanted her to. And how realistic is that? Maybe that's just me, because I don't think I'd be able to be perfectly on my game, 100% of the time, like Maisie is.

Also, I think it's interesting how Winspear has Maisie break up with her current boyfriend because she doesn't want to give up her work. She understands that if she gets married, her husband would eventually expect her to play the role of the doctor's wife and she doesn't think she can do that. I think it's great for Maisie to be so self-aware of what she thinks she can and cannot do, personally. But it's also a little sad to me that she doesn't even allow herself to become invested in relationships with people because she's so career-driven. Like I said, she's getting older and all the people she's close to are in their seventies (her father and her mentors)--soon, she's going to be all alone. It's sad that she feels like her work and a marriage are incompatible, because nowadays that's not the case. I hope she can figure that out and make things work with SOMEBODY eventually.

Book #44: The Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

Another quick Agatha Christie read from the library. This one featured Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a detective couple I hadn't heard of in any of the other A.C. books I'd read before. I wish I had now, because they seem pretty hilarious: an awesome old couple doing detective work. This is apparently the last book Agatha Christie ever wrote, and it's pretty different in style even from Roger Ackroyd that I read yesterday. She seems very focused on the characters and the conversations that they have instead of the mystery itself; usually the only conversations or incidents that are written into a story are ones that later prove useful or significant towards the plot, but that doesn't exactly seem to be the case here. Tommy and Tuppence (a nickname for Prudence) talk a lot, to each other and to other people, and it seems like 90% of their conversations don't really have much to do with anything.

Like John Grisham or the Nancy Drew books, you can't read too many Agatha Christie novels in a row. (Not that I think two in a row is too many, but many more and you'd start to figure things out too easily, I think.)

Book #43: On Becoming Babywise by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam

I've had plenty of people tell me, "You HAVE to read Babywise!" So I found it at the library and read/skimmed through it. (I'll be honest, I have a hard time reading these baby books all the way through, because they don't REALLY apply to me yet and I'm not really all that interested in parenting techniques--yet.) The basic premise of the book is that parents can and should set sleeping schedules for their babies, even from when they're just a few weeks old, and that makes things much, much easier for both the parents and the babies. It all seems very logical and I do think I want to do SOMETHING like this once baby boy is born. I'll probably check it out from the library again once I'm in Durham and read it more carefully once we're close to the due date.

The tone of this book was super obnoxious, though. The authors took that all-too-familiar-and-tempting road for parenting books to be overly condemning of any other parenting techniques and overly confident in the benefits of their own. The end of every section seems to go back to something like, "Remember, it's your responsibility to make sure your baby gets enough sleep. You can do it! Blah blah blah blah." Really not that appealing to me. But I do think the information is good.

Book #42: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I just can't help loving Agatha Christie. Her mysteries are so 100% absorbing and usually very surprising at the end. The only complaint I've had with several of her books (and very slightly with this one) is that the detective (or whoever solves the mystery) sometimes makes these giant assumptions that help him solve the case--but there isn't enough evidence to explain WHY he made that giant assumption. Usually this happens with Hercule Poirot; Miss Marple does the same thing but usually explains it somewhat satisfactorily with how she was reminded of something that happened in the past. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a Hercule Poirot mystery (that is, he's the detective who solves the crime) and I loved the ending. I won't spoil it for anyone, but let's just say that of course you're always looking for it to be the least likely person,  and in this case, it definitely was. I kept thinking throughout that it had to be a number of different people, but I was totally wrong. And you don't find out who it was until the last five pages or so! This was definitely a very satisfying mystery, and a quick read--I finished it in about three hours or so.

Book #41: Easy Labor: Every Woman's Guide to Choosing Less Pain and More Joy During Childbirth by William Camann and Kathryn J. Alexander

Last baby book post for the day. This one was my favorite of the books I've read so far, because it actually DID seem unbiased (instead of the last one, which just masqueraded as unbiased). It was one I just saw at the library and grabbed (because OF COURSE I want an easy labor, like the title) and I'm really glad I did. The book's tone was also pretty reassuring and generally more professional (not quite as personal or first-person as the other baby books I've read), which just made it FEEL more unbiased as well. But anyway, the main point of this book is  to explain what options there are for dealing with the pain of childbirth and to give clear explanations of what the pros and cons there are of each one. There's a chapter about epidurals alongside a chapter on the Lamaze and Bradley techniques and even hypnosis, and they have birth stories from women who are anesthesiologists and midwives. So it really felt very even-sided on the whole natural-birth vs. not issue.

This book also felt very supportive of any choices that you might make in deciding how you want to give birth. It says several times in different places that whatever you decide is totally fine--your choices depend on your philosophy about birth and it doesn't say that you're more or less courageous or that you love your baby more or less than the next woman. That's exactly what I think, and that's exactly why I hate the preachy natural birth books that make it sound so evil for people who don't follow their personal ideas. My philosophy on birth is that it's just something I have to go through to get this baby at the end of it, and I want it to be as smooth and not painful as possible. So I'm planning to get whatever pain medication I want when I'm actually giving birth. I know lots of people feel differently, and that's awesome--more power to you! Maybe I'll feel differently after I have this baby, who knows.