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!