Heartwood Hotel by Kallie George

I kept hearing about this book on Everyday Reading and finally decided to read it with the boys after they were too scared of the first chapters of The BFG to keep going (we will have to come back to that one in a year or so). This was a totally sweet, younger-kid-friendly version of Redwall, like Everyday Reading promised. Mona the mouse accidentally stumbles across this hidden hotel in a hollowed out tree, and finds a new home at the hotel as a maid there. The story was cute enough, but I kind of found it a little bit dull. I never got super interested in the characters or the kind-of lame drama between Tilly the squirrel and Mona. The boys loved it, though. They were really excited about listening to it every time.

There are three other books in this series, and I'm going to check them out for Dane. I want to read some other books with them, but I bet he'd like reading the others.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

I read Gilead at least ten years ago in college, and then again in the fall for my book club. I loved it so much both times, and both times I swore I would read the sequels, and have had them on my to-read list for years. But our library doesn't have a copy of this one (come on!) and wouldn't buy one when I requested it (I think the only thing they look at is what year it was published when deciding whether to buy it, and if it's old they always deny it), so I had to get around to getting it from the Plano library, and blah blah blah. I finally read it the last few weeks. It was slowwwww going, kind of like Gilead itself, but without all the beautiful writing from father to son, and the introspective musings of the Reverend Ames. This book is actually not a sequel to Gilead, but is concurrent with that one, but set in the Boughton household, mostly focusing on Glory and Jack, who are both home to take care of their aging and soon-to-be-dying father. This book is more a musing on how you can't go home again--or how you can, and things never change, no matter how much you want them to, and how you can still love your family even as you hurt them again and again, and how they can love you back even as they are hurting inside and hurting you. The book was really from Glory's perspective, and I loved how she was there to help her father, but how she really struggled inside sometimes with the decision to be there at home, and her fears of never escaping where she had been the baby of the family. I felt like each person in this book, and each member of the Boughton family, tries their hardest but lets their worst side show--very much like real life in a family. I felt like this book was one of the best depictions of all the messiness of the very real love and very real difficulty of a family, especially for someone who doesn't live up to his family's expectations or who has been gone for a long time. It was a beautiful and heart-wrenching read--not because anything very sad happened; there's not much of a plot here, just like in Gilead; but because it opened up the underbelly of the Boughton family and exposed their worst fears and their best sides as they tried to show how much they loved each other. I could see this book really resonating with people who struggle with going home to their families--and really anyone who has a sibling or parent they don't understand perfectly (so, anyone at all).

Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

I have no idea what the cover on this book is supposed to represent from the book itself... It doesn't at all give you an idea of what is going on in the story. Can you tell from that picture that this book is about an enormous and horribly bloody war going on between angels and chimera, and that Karou, our heroine from the first book in the series, is stuck working as a resurrectionist in the midst of a terrifying army of monsters that she's created? And that there is basically no romance in this book at all, since she and Akiva are separated from each other because of the major oversight he made of destroying the chimera city and basically killing all of her people? I don't know, this cover doesn't work at all for me, but the story was great. I felt like it was a major shift from the first book, which was basically a teen romance novel set in a fantasy world, and much more about huge, big-picture issues like saving your people and forgiving your enemies and all sorts of things like that. It was also a lot less fun and peppy than the first book was, with all of its funny aspects like enormous puppet shows and pubs with tables made of coffins. But I really liked it more for all of those things--it was much deeper and seemed to really get into the rest of the world of Eretz much more. And Taylor's writing is beautiful and does a great job of painting the world and giving you a good sense of the character's emotions and personalities. I loved the new characters we got to know in this book, particularly Ziri. I am definitely listening to the 3rd book once I get the chance.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I regret listening to this book. I wish I'd read it. That's really rare for me to feel this way--I feel like I usually really enjoy listening to books. But this book was really meant to be read. I loved it, even still, but I feel like I missed a lot of the more important meditations and asides and deeper thoughts that were a part of the narrator's descriptions, and I missed the chance to think about them more like I would have if I were reading this book. I think I might re-read it... someday (since I have a way-too-long list of books to read as it is). I might even buy it, because it was so good, and something that I feel like would be worthwhile to have. This book tells the story of Alexander Rostov, a Russian count who was condemned to house arrest in the Metropol hotel where he was living by the new Russian government in the 1920s. And it covers the next 30 years of him living in the Metropol, how he adjusts to finding a purpose in his life there and how he makes deep relationships with the other people that work and live there. It had some really deep thoughts and meaningful things in it, which I really enjoyed, and it was a beautiful, hopeful story, even though it was set in a kind of scary, dangerous time in Russian/Soviet history.

I would write more, but Lucy is crying and I need to go help her. But definitely a great, great book.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

After only about an hour of listening to this book, I could not stop comparing this to Educated, which I listened to last year. They basically both follow the same format: a memoir of a dysfunctional family from the perspective of a child being raised in this really unusual way. Walls' parents raised her roaming around the deserts of Nevada, California, and Arizona, before moving to West Virginia. They didn't worry about things like finding food for their kids or having any sort of money or support for their kids at all. The book opens with Jeanette burning herself all over when she caught fire while trying to cook hot dogs on the stove by herself when she was three years old. They were free range parents to the extreme--they basically just let the kids run around and do anything so that the parents could do what they wanted to (for her dad, it was drinking, and for her mom, it was her "art"). After they moved to West Virginia, their lives really went downhill, and they lived in a broken-down shack with holes in the ceiling and no plumbing or trash collection. It was a really eye-opening story to hear about how some people live, when they had plenty of resources and options to do otherwise (her mom had plenty of land that she'd inherited that they could have sold, and a home that they owned back in Phoenix which they'd left to move to West Virginia). I listened to this for my book club here, and we are talking about it tonight. I'm really interested to talk about it.

The Glass Castle is set a few decades before Educated, and without the religious/Mormon background, and there were a few other differences, the most obvious one being that I felt like The Glass Castle was less obviously depressing. It seemed like their family was obviously crazy, but the kids were less torn apart by the way they were raised. Or maybe I'm just hoping that. The book description on Goodreads says it's the "moving, profound tale of unconditional love in a family," which I think is a little excessive. I don't know that that's what I would call this family. But I was interested by how the kids managed to work together to survive in the crazy world their parents created.

The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America by Virginia Sole-Smith

I read this book for our family book club (which has not been super-regular over the last while, but Camille chose this one to discuss). I like food books, and I really liked the premise of this one: that basically our way of looking at and eating food is broken. We've kind of lost our eating instinct, or our ability to eat without having to second-guess and pre-judge everything that goes into our mouths. We know we should eat healthily, and not too much, and lately we've learned that we should eat organic, locally sourced food. And all of these things come together to make a population of people that have forgotten how to eat for pleasure and how to be normal about our eating.

I want so badly to try and avoid the pitfalls of giving our kids a complex about food. I try really hard to make sure they aren't picky eaters (although her chapter in this book about picky eating was different than anything I'd ever read, and it really opened my eyes--more about that in a second), but I also try really hard to make sure I don't make a big deal about "we have to eat healthy." Of course I want us to eat healthy, but I also want us to eat treats. I want them to know it's okay to eat desserts sometimes--we all do, and we all enjoy it. And it's okay! But I know that I can't stop them from learning these other negative lessons from the rest of the world--everyone does. I remember someone telling me that brownies are sooo bad for you, worse than other desserts, and so much fat. I remember driving to seminary with girls who constantly talked about how they wanted to have a "thigh gap" (I didn't even know what they meant). But I came through it okay, I think. I don't have any sort of complex about my body and I feel totally fine eating dessert. But like everyone, I do pre-judge my food and sometimes feel bad about not eating enough veggies or healthy enough lunches or whatever. I wonder if there's any way to truly remove that sort of thinking, or if you can just try to be happy with wherever you are.

I've heard about the Division of Responsibility when it comes to food with kids, and we mostly use it. It's that parents decide what, when and where we eat, and the kids decide how much (although I do insist our kids try everything and take at least a few bites). I don't make our kids finish their plates if they say they don't want to, but I do make them take a few bites because I don't give them food later if they say they're hungry. We don't have many food battles in our house this way (although I feel like we used to more when Dane was younger and I was more strict), but our kids are great eaters most of the time.

I'm going to just write down a few bullet points of things I'll want to talk about with our family book club:
-I have long been annoyed by the gluten-free, sugar-free, whole 30 trends that have been going around. And in her chapter, she talks about how there is an actual (not-scientific diagnosis) term for people who are obsessed with healthy eating: orthorexia. I feel like this is such a common thing these days, although many people probably aren't actually totally obsessed. It really annoys me how much people follow random "gurus" on Instagram and on the Internet and take their diet and health recommendations as gospel.
-One thing she talked about was that we don't need to cleanse our bodies through elimination diets--our bodies already do this using our liver and kidneys!
-It can be dangerous when people make the case that changing your diet can help with serious health issues. And it doesn't work. (The story about Anna with her MS)
-I love her point that food is linked to comfort from birth. We are born naturally linking needing food with needing comfort, and receiving the two of them at the same time.
-I felt like my high-and-mighty opinions about picky eating really had to get hammered with the chapter on the fear of food. I'd never considered that there are real psychological complexes about having a fear of food or eating, or that they could be so common. I am sure that most picky eaters don't actually have a "fear" of food, but maybe many of them do. I really thought about the question she poses, as to why should people who are picky eaters be considered "less than" adventurous ones? And I'm not sure there's a good answer to that (although I have DEFINITELY been guilty of doing that, pretty vocally to). Particularly in the case of someone who has a legitimate fear or physiological reaction to new foods, then I don't think they should suffer a stigma for eating less than adventurously. But I also don't think that means that parents should cater to their child's every random whim when it comes to food (not that I think she's advocating for that). It's a really interesting question and I would love to talk about it with them.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

I absolutely loved this book as a kid, and read it many times. So this was a Newbery I wanted to revisit anyway. I had a hard time getting into it at first, because I was reading a bunch of other books at the same time and it never drew me in with the limited time I was giving it. But once I finally sat down to read, I couldn't stop.

This book is the story of Salamanca Tree Hiddle, who is on a road trip with her grandparents to go find her mother, who left a few years ago and went to Lewiston, Idaho. While on the way, Salamanca tells her grandparents the story of her friend Phoebe Winterbottom, and on the way learns a lot about her own story and her own relationship with her mother. It was really interesting reading this book as an adult, as a mother this time. I had never really thought too much about Salamanca's mom before--I don't think I thought she was selfish, but I didn't understand her leaving. It seemed so strange for a mother to leave like that. But now, as a mother myself--I can only think about the pain she must have been in. She must have been waiting for years of infertility to have another baby, then to lose the baby and any chance of any more--she must have been seriously grieving and questioning her whole point in life. She wasn't leaving to run away and never come back--she just needed a reset, and she would have come back if she could. I was tearing up at the end, when Salamanca finds what she needed and when their trip comes to an end. I loved seeing how Salamanca grew and learned and healed through this trip with her grandparents, and what she learned about her mother by trying to walk in her shoes and see things as her mother did.

This part really stuck out to me, and I think I will be thinking about it for a while. It's something that I worry about often--like if something small I do could cause something terrible to happen, and how do you live through that?
"I wondered if Gram's snake bite had anything to do with her stroke, and if Gramps felt guilty for whizzing off the highway and stopping at that river. If we hadn't gone to that river, Gram would never have been bitten by that snake. And then I started thinking about my mother's stillborn baby and maybe if I hadn't climbed that tree and if my mother hadn't carried me, maybe the baby would have lived and my mother never would have gone away, and everything would be as it used to be.
But as I sat there thinking these things, it occurred to me that a person couldn't stay all locked up in the house like Phoebe and her mother had used to do at first. A person had to go out and do things and see things, and I wondered, for the first time, if this had something to do with Gram and Gramps taking me on this trip."