Book #17: The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The book club I just joined is reading this book, which is the main reason why I picked it up. The main character of the book is Victoria, who was a foster child and who has serious attachment issues. She spent her childhood bouncing around between 32 different foster homes, and the story starts as she ages out of the group home she was living in, and she becomes homeless. But she has this magical ability to do flower arrangements and she manages to get a job at a flower shop, and people fall in love with her flowers. She believes in the flowers and how each flower means something specific (according to the meanings of flowers in the Victorian age, very kitschy of the author to name her Victoria) and somehow her meaningful flower arrangements make people fall in love. She begins to have relationships with people and tries to overcome her natural desires to leave every relationship she has before she gets hurt. There are flashbacks every other chapter to Victoria's last foster parent, who she had a wonderful relationship with and loved, but you just knew something bad happened to ruin their relationship since she didn't end up there, and I felt like I was reading the whole time waiting for the hammer to fall.

I felt like Diffenbaugh was asking us to suspend a lot of disbelief by saying that Victoria was this magical flower arranger (knowing the meaning of flowers doesn't = amazing flower arrangements automatically) and that she immediately had this huge flower business after she started one. But overall, I really liked the part of the story dealing with flowers and how she handled them and made her flower dictionary; that was the fun part of the story.

[SPOILER ALERTS FOLLOW]: I just hated, hated, hated how depressing the main story of the book was. Victoria's history in the whole foster care system is super depressing to think about--I follow a blogger who writes about foster parenting and the sadness of it all really is hard to take. So I know this is real life for some people/kids, but oh man, it is really sad to think of them turning out like this. I also really, really hated how she got pregnant and gave away her baby. I cannot read those sorts of things while thinking about my own babies and all the real babies who are treated poorly. I was BLASTING through those chapters, just skimming and getting the main ideas, because I did not want to wallow in thinking about that. I knew that it would end up happy at the end, and it does, everyone reunited in almost too easy of a fashion, but I hated it still. I feel like a spoiled, privileged rich kid saying that I don't want to read about sad hard life stuff like that, but I don't. Particularly when it has to do with little kids or babies.

I do feel a lot of interest in looking into the foster system to be foster parents sometime, though. I feel like that is possibly the best place for service, the best one-on-one sort of service you can give to a child, although I don't think I would want to do it until we were done having our own babies. If the fictional Victoria had had one nice family try to take her in, she could have lived such a different, more secure life. And there are too many kids living in the same situation in our world. Maybe someday.

Book #16: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson

This book seems like the quintessential in self-help books, but not the current stylish kind of self-help books. I know I've seen it before because it is pretty ubiquitous, but I'd never considered reading it. But it is really chock full of great thoughts and great strategies for managing stress and making your life slower and more enjoyable. Some of them almost seemed gospel-related if you tweaked a couple of his ideas. I think this book would be better reading if you just took each vignette/idea individually instead of reading it in one sitting. They need to be considered separately in order for them to have the most impact, I think. I didn't read it in one sitting but I did push through it too quickly because I was pretty interested in it. I'm thinking I might make a list of my favorite 10 or so and try to apply them one at a time or something. Because I have so many moments a day where I need some reminders to calm myself and to remember not to take myself (or whatever frustrating predicament is going on right then) so seriously!

My favorite ones (I folded over the corner on the pages that seemed especially applicable to me):
1. Be aware of the snowball effect of your thinking. Notice what's happening in your head before your thoughts have any chance to build momentum. Say, "Whew, there I go again," and consciously nip it in the bud. <--- I have already figured out how to do this when I'm laying in my bed late at night and trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep. It's so important to get your brain to stop whirling!
2. Create "Patience Practice Periods." Set up periods of time in your own mind to practice the art of patience. Start by saying to yourself, "Okay, for the next five minutes I won't allow myself to be bothered by anything. I'll be patient." Just having the intention to be patient will strengthen your capacity for patience. And you can build up to longer and longer periods.
3. Ask yourself the question: "Will this matter a year from now?" This helps you to see what is really important or if you're making it out to be more than it really is.
4. Become an anthropologist. Be interested, without judgment, in the way people choose to live and behave. Be genuinely curious about the way someone feels about something, and the less likely you are to be annoyed.
5. "Wherever you go, there you are." Don't constantly wish you were somewhere else and think that if you were, somehow you would be happier and more content. The truth is, if you have destructive mental habits, those habits will follow you wherever you go, and you will likely be as unhappy in other situations as well. You need to focus on becoming at peace with where you are right now.
6. Count to ten. When you feel yourself getting angry, take a long deep breath, and as you do, count the number one. Repeat with all the same numbers up to 10 (or even 25 if you are really angry). The combination of breathing and counting is so relaxing that it's almost impossible to remain angry once you are finished. <--- This would be an excellent one to use with kids. I have tried to implement this before but it's hard to break out of the cycle of anger once you're in it. You've got to catch it beforehand.
7. Be happy where you are. This reminds me of President Uchtdorf's quote, "Life is not meant to be appreciated only in retrospect."
8. Remember that you become what you practice most. This reminds me of another favorite quote by Richard G. Scott: "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day."
9. Become an early riser. Having a peaceful, meaningful life is made much easier when you have time for yourself. Consider that fatigue is caused by a lack of fulfillment and a sense of being overwhelmed, and getting up early to take care of things you want to do yourself is one way to combat this. You can have your "me" time before anyone else wakes up in order to have the quiet activities you never have the time to do. <--- This one is way easier said than done; particularly when in this phase with young babies. I have good intentions maybe once every few months but it never lasts very long. But it does sound lovely in theory.
10. Keep asking yourself, "What's really important?" Reminding yourself (consciously) of what's really important helps to keep your priorities straight. <--- I have thought about this but not on a super regular basis. It is easy to get caught up in feeling like my life at home with these kids is slow and not filled with anything important, but if I ask myself this question, I remember that the important thing is that they have a happy life--that we all have a happy life together.
11. Be open to "What Is." When we have preconceived ideas (expectations) about the way life should be, they interfere with our opportunity to enjoy or learn from the present moment. This prevents us from honoring what we are going through. Rather than reacting to a child's complaining, try opening your heart and accepting the moment for what it is. Make it okay that they aren't acting exactly the way you would like them to. <--- This reminds me of something my mom said to me: "Those expectations, they'll kill you every time."
12. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. We see in life what we want to see. < --- This one should be easy to do while staying home with adorable, sweet, precious kids.

I want to start implementing these strategies in my everyday life. I can totally see how if they became habits, you would be a calmer, happier, more peaceful person.

Book #15: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I've literally had this book on my to-read list on Goodreads for two plus years. And I'm glad I finally got around to it. This book tells the story of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and how it came about, how they put it together, and how it affected American culture afterwards. At the same time, the book also talks about Chicago serial killer H. H. Holmes, who lured innocent and vulnerable fairgoers and murdered them for his own pleasure. He may have killed up to 100 people, although that's probably an exaggeration, but he definitely built a whole hotel, with a creepy murderer's basement, for the express purpose of finding and killing victims. So you basically learn about the whole story of the fair and this murderer at the same time.

Honestly, I felt like these two storylines didn't overlap all that much. By the title, I expected that the murderer was going to the fair and killing people at the fair itself. But no, he was finding victims before and after the fair; his actions weren't all that related to the fair storyline. So I don't know, I think that Larson maybe could have done these stories completely separately and been pretty successful. There wasn't much of an overarching connection at the end to bring everything together. I also didn't really like how Larson dramatized some of the elements he was writing about. Unless it's a stylistic decision about the genre, I don't think that non-fiction writers should dramatize or imagine things about their books. Larson tended to make up motives for things that Holmes did and included them as facts, but they were completely made up (as he said in the notes at the end).

However, each story was very interesting. I loved seeing a look into Chicago in the 1890s, and I felt like I really got the emotions of the city and the expectations they had for the Fair. I loved learning about the World's Fair and the amount of community pride and work that it took to get it ready and going in time. And it was very interesting to learn about all of the things that are still familiar to us in culture today that came out of the fair itself, considering how most people today barely know that it happened. And I was very creeped out and disturbed by the story about Holmes and his evil plans, which is to be expected. This book was definitely worth a read and definitely a great glimpse into a time period that I wasn't familiar with, but probably should have been.

Book #14: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson

OH MY GOSH. OH MY GOSH. I am totally converted to Brandon Sanderson. He has a SERIOUS talent for creating the best, clearest, most detailed worlds and plots that I have ever read. It's flat-out amazing to me the amount of planning and pre-writing and mapping out that this series (and his other books) must have taken before he even started writing. Because this book just confirms it--everything, EVERYTHING is was planned from the beginning. Even the smallest, most insignificant details from the first book come back to be important later on in this third book. There's not really a way to nutshell the plot because it's so overwhelming. Vin and Elend and the rest of the crew are basically trying to stop the world from collapsing on itself, both physically and politically.

I absolutely loved seeing how well everything fit together and how everything got resolved at the end of the series. The first book was so interesting and kind of Ocean's Eleven-esque, with a crew getting together to do a totally impossible job against a big bad evil guy. It was fun to read but kind of localized in its impact, as far as you read. The second book was a lot slower and less interesting with a lot of politics and the crew trying to run the country after they'd taken it over, so it seemed like they were working on a much larger scale. But this third book--it was asking questions about God and forces of nature and saving the world from being destroyed by ash and volcanoes and rampaging herds of wild animals, and it was so huge in scale and in the impact that it's hard to even believe that someone could even imagine something that big. I loved how everything wrapped up at the end, loved loved LOVED how it ended and who ended up being the "Hero of Ages" after all, and how he ended up saving (or re-creating) the world after all was lost.

I really liked the religious undertones of it all. Sazed, the Keeper who has always studied and believed in all religions, goes through a serious crisis of faith after the woman he loves dies at the end of the second book. This whole book he loses all interest and he decides to go through every different faith he has collected to decide which is true, and he eliminates all of them. But in the end, he learns and realizes the fact that faith has to be chosen, and religion in its essence is not based on logic. And his ability to believe, and his knowledge of the religions he has studied his whole life, ends up saving the world and enabling him to create a new, better world than the one they were fighting to save. It was such a beautiful ending. I also loved the epigraphs to each chapter, how they kind of gave hints of what was going on and what the writer had learned.

I have a lot of other things I could say about this book, but I don't have time. Totally loved it--I would recommend this series to anyone, not just fantasy lovers.

Book #13: The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This is one of the first John Grisham books I read maybe 8-10 years ago. I guess it has been a while since revisiting it, but I loved it as much as I did before. Honestly, you can't read too many John Grishams at once or else they all start to blend together. When I first discovered them, back in high school, I read five or six in a row--and I got TOTALLY sick of them. I knew exactly what was going to happen and I was done. But it's been so long since I've read any Grisham at all, so this felt fresh and it was fun to revisit Darby Shaw and the Pelican Brief.

The whole premise of the book is pretty amazing, and brilliant, in the most evil way possible. A guy pays to get two Supreme Court justices killed off so that a court case coming up the rounds will be decided in his favor. Nobody can figure it out, but Darby Shaw, a second-year law student at Tulane, does. She writes a brief about it and it makes its way up to the FBI--and when it does, people start getting killed left and right. Darby goes on the run, and most of the book tracks how she keeps herself alive by running from hotel room to hotel room and escaping from murder attempts. Eventually she makes contact with a reporter in DC who helps her to prove her theory and expose the bad guys. It's a pretty enthralling story, and isn't exactly mysterious as much as it is thrilling, like a James Bond movie or something.

I don't like how Grisham writes about women. I remember in some of his other books that he kind of objectifies them a bit, and just writes about how attractive any female characters are. That totally plays out in this book too--Darby is apparently the most attractive woman any of these people have ever seen, and everyone falls in love with her at first sight. Also, the romantic storyline of this book is pretty unbelievable and annoying too--why on earth would Darby even be thinking about getting interested in anyone else ten days after her lover is murdered in front of her eyes? She goes through a two-day mourning period and is then like, "I'm good." I don't know, it doesn't seem realistic. That's bothered me about this book every time. But otherwise, it's a good read and definitely a quick, fun one to distract you from real life for a while.

Book #12: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

I don't know why this book has been on my "to-read" list forever. But I think it's because a friend from my master's program talked about it on Facebook one time, because the author teaches in the MFA program at NC State. But I ignored it until I happened to see this book on a shelf at the library while I was there last time and I picked it up, spur of the moment (I know! I'm wild and crazy!), and proceeded to leave it unread on my shelf until it was demanded to be returned. But I just sped through it the last few days--and I actually really enjoyed it. (Except for the end, but not because it was poorly written--just because it was sad.)

Life After Life is about the residents of a nursing home in Fulton, North Carolina, and how each one is adjusting to the new expectations and situation of this new life that they are living. Some of them have known each other their whole lives, while others are transplants. But they each have their own private story which nobody else really knows about--no matter how long they've known each other--and we learn about each person's secrets through individual narratives from the perspective of each character. There are also a few people who work at the nursing home, and people who visit, who we get to know. Almost everyone has a kind of tragic history, even the little twelve-year-old with a sad home life who comes to visit an old resident every day to escape from her home. I didn't love that about this book--everyone had hidden, dark, sad secrets--although I know that's more realistic than I'd like to think about this world. I just really hated the ending--it kind of came out of nowhere and I didn't feel prepared for it. Maybe that was an authorial choice, to surprise you with this dark twist at the end, but it seemed like there should have been more build-up or hinting at what was going on before we got there. Additionally, there were a few characters that didn't seem fully real--like the super catty, self-obsessed mom who's having an affair and thinks of nothing but wearing designer clothes and hates her husband for not being ambitious. Are there really people that are that one-dimensional? I think the answer is probably YES, but I always expect to find more interesting people, with more than one characteristic to define them, in books (at least, in well-written books). My favorite character was Sadie Randolph, one of the older residents of the nursing home, who was a third-grade teacher her whole life and knows all the kids in the town. She is cheerful, sweet, and had a happy life with her husband and kids--but it doesn't seem cloying or fake. I want to be like her when I'm 90.

Overall, this book got to me. I think I felt that by how depressed I was by the ending. I felt like I really got a glimpse into each character's head and that I really knew them by the end. It was a good read.

Book #11: The President's Lady by Irving Stone

This book is a novelization of the love story and lives of President Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel Donelson Jackson. It was pretty fascinating to read about their lives and how they met--and it left me wanting to know for sure what actually happened. At the beginning of the book, Rachel Donelson is married to Lewis Robards, who is a jealous, angry, unstable and abusive man, and despite all of her efforts and attempts at reconciling with him (several times), he casts her out. In the middle of all of these goings-on, she meets Andrew Jackson and becomes friends with him (as he is a visitor staying with her family). After she leaves her husband, they fall in love, and eventually they hear Robards has filed for divorce (which is unheard of). In the end, they get married--but it turns out he didn't really get the divorce, so she'd been a bigamist for the first three years of their marriage. But they managed to survive it and loved each other solidly for their entire marriage--and weathered all of the negative things people could think and say about them in the early nineteenth century way.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this book was most interesting for the first 100 pages. The last half of the book was way, way too long and boring. It's impossible to cover 40 years of marriage in a novel and keep the plot going, keep the readers interested. I really loved reading about how Rachel and Andrew met each other and fell in love, and how they overcame the odds with her ex-husband and her divorce. But the rest of the book was basically all Andrew going away for various things and Rachel missing him, and Andrew fighting over people saying that Rachel was an adulteress for getting a divorce. Over and over and over. If this was a real novel, and not a re-telling of history in fictional form, I would have said to chop it in half. As it was, Stone should have just focused on the first part of their relationship. It really dragged. I seriously skimmed the last 50 pages because I knew exactly what was going to happen... except the ending, when Rachel died before Andrew was inaugurated (which I vaguely remember now). I think that's probably why he included the whole long story--because it's so poignant that she died, probably from all the stresses of being dragged through the mud in Washington society and in the newspapers.

One other thing that really bugged me: I didn't feel like the conversation rang true enough to me. I hate it when I'm reading a conversation characters are having and it feels false and made-up. That sort of thing usually happens in romantic conversations, because so many authors do that badly. I also kind of felt that way about when we were getting a look into Rachel's thoughts as well--is that really a likely thing for her to think?

I don't think I would have read this book at all (I'd never heard of it), except that it's one of the books for the book club which I am wanting to be more involved in (I went once, in November, but haven't made it back since!). Mostly, I think this genre is an interesting one--it's a fictionalization of what really happened in history. This is something I wrote whole papers on in my English major days: what does this really say about what "really" happened? How do we know what is fiction and what is reality? That's what is frustrating to me about this book and this sort of historical fiction (or biographical fiction, as Irving Stone calls it in his preface): I want to know what is "fictionalized" and what isn't. Of course, the language and conversation can't be real, and we have no idea what exactly Rachel was thinking (outside of reading her letters) but the newspaper excerpts included are. Are all the events really as they happened?