Book #35: The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

This is a modern rewrite of Jane Eyre, and although I've never REALLY liked Jane Eyre in the first place, I thought this sounded interesting. Turns out it wasn't, really, basically for the same reasons I don't like the original. But I still pushed through it because I felt dumb putting it down after reading halfway through it, and I'm glad I did, because the best part was last 1/5 of the book.

Like Jane, Gemma Hardy was raised by her aunt and uncle, but when her uncle died, her aunt sends her away to a boarding school as a working student and basically relinquishes any interest in her. When the school shuts down, Gemma gets a job as a nanny at Blackbird Hall in the Orkneys of Scotland, where the whole falling-in-love-and-then-running-away thing happens. The best part of the book happens after she gets back on her feet, with a job as a nanny for a cute boy and having made some friends, and she goes to ICELAND to try to find some family (because that is where she was born and where her parents died).

I never understood why Mr. Rochester falls in love with Jane in the original (and vice versa--how is he lovable? There's no compelling reason there!) and the same applies here. There's seriously no believable reason for why Mr. Sinclair should fall in love with Gemma. He's over twice her age! She's only 18! Also, I don't see why she feels like she has to run away altogether from him--it's not like he had a secret wife hidden in his attic like in the original; he just did some things like twenty years ago that she didn't agree with. But I really liked the people who ended up befriending her and her life that she had afterwards, and especially her trip to Iceland where she finally meets her aunt and learns about herself and her parents. I loved reading about Iceland--especially because I actually WENT to the exact little villages she writes about and did the same trip. It was nice that Gemma ends up with a happy ending after being completely alone for all of her life, although I don't know why it had to be with Mr. Too-Old-For-You Sinclair.

Book #34: Run by Ann Patchett

I have loved all of Ann Patchett's books I've read, but this is probably my least favorite so far. On Goodreads, some of the commenters say that Patchett clearly wrote this book for the Oprah's Book Club readers of the world, and after finishing it, I can kind of see why. Run is about the Doyle family, a wealthy white Boston family who adopted two black baby boys after not being able to have any other children of their own. Most of the action of the book happens within a twenty-four hour period, when the boys' biological mother, who had been watching them, pushes Tip out of the way to keep him from being hit by a car and ends up being hit herself. The Doyles take care of her young daughter while she's in the hospital, and her reappearance into their lives creates a lot of questions for all of them.

Although I did really like how the Doyle family seemed like a normal, happy family (even though they lost their mother to cancer, and they had problems with their older brother, but they love each other), I feel like some issues in the book seem a little unexamined. How is it possible that Tip and Teddy have never, ever wondered about their biological mother or father, and the thought of this mother coming into their life is such a shock? How come there isn't more tension for them being black boys adopted into a white family? There's one little line about Tip feeling less tension at the Jesse Jackson lecture they go to, because there are more black people there, but that's it. Why on earth is Tip so obsessed with fish? (He wants to become an icthyology researcher.) I felt like this book really was kind of a let-down and not nearly as thoughtful as Patchett's other books that I've read.

Book #33: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

I can't tell you how many times I have meant to read this book before. I absolutely LOVED Eleanor and Park when I read it last year and thought I would immediately jump to reading this one by the same author but for some reason it kept falling through the cracks. I'm really happy I finally read it. This book is about Cath Avery in her first year at college, in the dorms. She has major anxiety and stress about new situations and new people, so this is a very stressful situation for her--and to make things worse, her twin sister Wren isn't rooming with her. So she does what she's always done--buried herself in her fan fiction, writing a fanfic sequel to her favorite series about Simon Snow (a Harry Potter twin), which gets tens of thousands of hits online. The book has small tidbits of her fanfiction and snippets from the original books that she's writing about, in addition to the main storyline about her freshman year and her relationship with her sister, her dad, and the new life she makes and the way she changes and grows up and tries to take herself out of just living to disappear into her writing. This was such a great story (warning: some language and a few questionable situations) with really awesome characters. I really enjoy Rowell's books.

Book #32: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

I think this book was pretty short; I don't even know if it totally counts as a full-on book. I don't really know how long it was though, since I downloaded it on my Kindle from the library. (I really don't do that all that often; I much prefer reading actual books. But this was VERY convenient... I think I will start doing it more often!) The book is basically exactly what the title sounds like--a memoir about making The Princess Bride movie. And like everyone, I love that movie, so I couldn't help but check this book out. And it was moderately interesting--who doesn't like to get an insider look at something as familiar and beloved as this movie? However, I feel like enough time has passed that Elwes doesn't really seem to have all that much distinctive information to contribute. He tells a couple of funny anecdotes and talks about training for the big swordfight, but he even says at one point something about how over time you forget a lot of bigger things but some small things stick out from what he remembers. I wish he would have thought to write this memoir twenty-five years ago, because as it is, it feels a lot like he's just trying to cash in on how much people love this movie, knowing that people like me are going to be tempted just knowing it's by him. Also, maybe 60% of the book is Elwes talking about how brilliant and hilarious and amazing and ridiculously awesome every single person involved with the project was, and how they are all the absolute best at everything they did. That's very gracious and nice of him, but it seriously got overdone after a while.

Book #31: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

It's hard to believe that this year marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I feel like I was pretty oblivious to everything that was going on, as a 16-year-old watching the news and hearing about the destruction--and particularly after reading this book, I know I was oblivious and had really no idea how extensive and severe it all was. In Five Days at Memorial, Fink investigates and reports on what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, one of the hospitals that was flooded out and lost power during the emergency. The hospital, like most hospitals in the area, didn't evacuate its patients beforehand, because of the difficulty of moving so many of them--and usually, in the case of these emergencies, the hospital usually served as a safe home base for people to wait out the storm. In the case of Katrina, though, the destruction was so much more overwhelming than was expected, and there were between 1500 and 2000 people (hospital workers and their families, and patients and their families) to evacuate from the hospital--in addition to the hundreds and thousands of other people stranded at their homes in the area that also needed to be rescued. In the panic and craziness of the situation, doctors and nurses began to be sure that not all the patients would be able to be rescued--and in the end, they injected some 20+ elderly and very sick patients with morphine to hasten their deaths. There was a huge investigation after the fact and several doctors and nurses were put on trial for what happened. Fink interviewed hundreds of people to try to find out what really happened, during and after the emergency, and compiled it all into this book. Although the doctor and nurses accused of murdering these patients ended up not being indicted, Fink seems to think that they were guilty, although she turns it into a kind of "decide for what you think about this issue" at the end. I think they were guilty--they gave up on these patients and didn't even try to evacuate them and gave them drugs to hasten their deaths without even asking them or their families for permission. That is inexcusable. The first half of this book, detailing what happened during the disaster, was very interesting, but it really started to drag in the second half about the investigation and how the doctor and nurses were trying to clear their names and all their lawyers' tactics to clear them. Blah blah blah. I ended up skimming the last 50 pages because it wasn't worth all the effort to keep reading it all the way through.

Books #24-30: Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

After reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiography, I couldn't wait to get into her books again to revisit all the scenes she writes about--which is funny, since the books and the autobiography have a lot of the same stories. I'd read the first two books a few months ago, but hadn't re-read the last six or seven for years, so it was really fun to get back into them. It was especially enjoyable after re-reading the autobiography to compare what I knew had really happened in her life (like, 90% of what's in the books) with the fictionalizing that she did.

As I read, I was so blown away by how resourceful and independent they were 150 years ago. Sure, I know that those were the themes that Wilder wanted to emphasize in her stories, and therefore she told them in a way that made those themes most obvious, but no matter how you look at it, it's really amazing how strong they were and how they survived. The hardships they went through just to make a living are just amazing--the grasshoppers eating their whole crop, illnesses that go through the whole family, babies dying, an entire winter without any supplies and being shut up in the snow for months. When reading these books as a kid, I never really noticed or thought about how ridiculously hard and stressful that would have been to live through, particularly as a parent. And it's unbelievable how they were able to make a meal from nothing but potatoes and wheat and a happy life from nothing. I read these feeling like I am such a whiner with no real trials in my life, compared to them--it was a good, uplifting series to help me stop being such a baby with my easy, easy life that we have here.

Books #22 and #23: Baby Sleep Book Knockdown!

These are totally only interesting to parents of newborns who are really lacking in sleep--but obviously, that's the intended audience for them anyways. As we've been getting used to having a newborn and remembering what all of that entails, I've been trying to remember what we did with Dane and what works with getting your baby to sleep enough--and enough sleep for us along with that. I read both of these books and wanted to remember what I thought about them so I know what to look at next time around. And these two books recommend kind of different things, so it was interesting reading them so close together. First off, I HATE Babywise. I wish I'd remembered how obnoxious it is before I read it, because even though I disagree with it, it still adds to my stress by making me think that I'm doing something wrong. Babywise suggests that you should start sleep training your baby when they are ONE WEEK OLD--that you should put them down and make them learn how to go to sleep on their own from the very beginning. And it tells you that if you don't do this, you will NEVER EVER get your kid to learn how to sleep and you will hate your life forever. It doesn't tell you that NO one-week-old baby is going to go to sleep on their own and you will just hate your life and be extra stressed from the very beginning, causing unnecessary stress from the very beginning of your parenting. I really regret reading it because even just when Graham was two weeks old it made me start feeling panicky that I wasn't already working with him to learn how to sleep on his own--which I know is ridiculous. I don't need that extra stress.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child has a different approach. The book is very poorly organized, which makes it annoying to read (I want to go in there and be Weissbluth's editor), but amidst all the chaos in the book there is some really good information that is really helpful to new parents. The thing I like about this book is that he emphasizes that it's very important that your baby get enough sleep, and that it's your responsibility as a parent to help that happen, but that there are any number of different ways to accomplish that, not just ONE right way. He presents tons of research to back up his claims and explains the natural sleep cycles of infants and children to help you get them to nap and sleep easier at night and during the day, and he talks a lot about helpful tactics to soothing and calming crying babies (which is really important at this stage!). And he doesn't make you feel guilty about not getting your baby on a schedule right away--the main thing about this age that he emphasizes is that babies can only stay awake for 1-2 hours (and sometimes not even that) in between naps during the day, so try to let them get back to sleep quickly after that. This book has been very helpful to me and I think about it 25 times a day when I am wondering if Graham is tired or what I could do to help him--it's got some great tips and things that I am always remembering and thinking about.