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!