Slim for Life: My Insider Secrets to Simple, Fast, and Lasting Weight Loss

Finished Slim for Life: My Insider Secrets to Simple, Fast, and Lasting Weight Loss by Jillian Michaels. I chose to listen to an audiobook version read by Michaels. I listened to it while working out on the treadmill or eliptical, which seemed appropriate. I like Michaels. She has a kick ass can-do attitude and a good sense of humor. The book involves a point system for the tips she suggests. Because of this, I would recommend acquiring a hard copy of the book so that you can circle tips, make notes, add up your score easily, and return to the text as a reference. This is a bit tricky with an audiobook. She gives lots of good suggestions and she is realistic about what the average person can accomplish.

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy

Finished Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, another great book by Gary D. Schmidt. It won the Newbery Honor Medal in 2005. Set in 1912, it's the story of Turner Buckminster, the son of Phippsburgh, Maine's new minister, Reverend Buckminster. Turner's father is stiff and strict. He home schools his son, teaching him Latin and the classics. As the new minister he is eager to please the deacons and other important citizens and often comes across as cold and distant.

Turner's life in the new town is anything but easy. As a minister's son he is held to a much higher standard than the other boys his age. These other boys plague and tease him to no end. He is lonely and friendless until the day he meets a girl named Lizzie Bright Griffin, digging clams along the shore. Lizzie is the first black person Turner has ever known. She is outspoken and determined and filled with fun. She takes Turner in her boat over to Malaga Island to meet her grandfather, also a minister. He meets Lizzie's neighbors and their children and has a marvelous time playing with them and emulating the gulls.

Malaga Island has been home to a black community ever since the end of The Civil War. The local big cheese, Mr. Stonecrop, wants to drive all the blacks off of Malaga Island and develop it into a tourist destination. The families on the island live in cobbled together structures. They keep to themselves and have their own church, school and cemetery. While not grand, their community has deep roots here.

So begins a battle between Stonecrop and his investors and Turner over the rights of the residents of Malaga Island to stay in the place they have always known as home. Some truly shocking things happen, which I will not give away. Schmidt sticks with a harsh reality when all along I expected a miracle. The events concerning Malaga Island are based in fact. Schmidt's novel is engaging, profound and deeply felt. I highly recommend it. He also won the Newbery Honor Medal in 2008 for The Wednesday Wars.

Silas Marner

Finished Silas Marner by George Eliot. Silas is a weaver. As a young man he is accused of stealing money from the church after being set up by his supposed best friend. When he is found guilty, his fiancee leaves him for this best friend and Silas leaves the community in search of a new life. He settles in a kindly rural village and lives a sad and reclusive life, weaving linen and hoarding the gold coins he earns at it. He becomes obsessed with the coins, taking them out each night to count them and make little piles of them. When his coins are stolen from his house he is devastated. Soon after a small child comes into his life. She is charming and trusting and has beautiful hair of gold. When her mother is found dead in a snowbank and the identity of her father is unknown, Silas adopts her and raises her as his own, seeing her as the replacement for his missing gold. He names her Hephziba, after the little sister he lost, calling her Eppie for short. Years later, when Eppie is eighteen the truth about the missing gold and Eppie's parentage comes to light and threatens to break apart Silas and Eppie's happy, humble home. This was an easy, comfortable read.

Next summer it's back to Hardy and Jude the Obscure.

The Soldier's Wife

Finished The Soldier's Wife by Margaret Leroy. Set during the German Occupation of Guernsey, it's the story of Vivianne, a woman trying to maintain a reasonable life for her four and fourteen year old daughters, and her increasingly senile mother-in-law. Leroy's descriptions of the Guernsey landscape are luscious. This is continually thrown into contrast with the brutality and ugliness of the war.

A group of four German officers moves into the empty house next door and Vivianne learns more than she expected about boundaries and the nuances of war than she ever imagined she would. This is an exciting and compelling novel. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Miss Fuller

Finished Miss Fuller by April Bernard. The novel imagines the last days of Margaret Fuller's life through a long journalistic letter written to Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophie. When Fuller's friends learn that she, her young son, and Italian husband have perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, they send Henry David Thoreau to the site of the wreck in search of Fuller's long awaited manuscript about the Italian revolution. Thoreau learns that a wooden lap desk has been scavenged from the wreck. Hoping the manuscript is inside he purchases the desk and returns to Concord. Inside he finds Fuller's letter to Sophie. He is troubled by the very existence of the letter and refuses to read it. He alerts Hawthorne to the fact of the letter, but he tells Thoreau to destroy it, that he and Sophie want nothing to do with it

Although they see her as strong, forceful, intelligent and determined, Fuller's friends among the Transcendentalists feel awkward about her death. Some were not that fond of her in life. While they admired her genius, they turned prudish and puritanical when they heard of her baby and Italian marriage. In doubting Fuller's goodness and virtue they are hypocrites. Emerson and others refused her monetary assistance, thus she and her small family had to return from Italy as the only passengers on a merchant ship. Had her friends sent her the aid she requested they would probably not have lost her.

Fuller's letter is rich, honest and true. She explains her choices to Sophie, already suspecting that her friends disapprove of the path she has chosen. When the letter is finally read, it is by Thoreau's younger sister Anne, nearly forty years later. This book examines the awkwardness and frailties of human relations. How fear, jealousy, rumor, gossip and sheer misunderstanding can undermine even the most altruistic of societies.

Johnny Tremain

Finished Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. It won the Newbery Medal in 1944. Set in Boston on the brink of the American Revolution, the book is about Johnny, an orphan who is a gifted apprentice to a silversmith. When Johnny's hand is badly burned and scarred after a prank gone wrong, played on him by one of his fellow apprentices, Johnny must give up his his work as silversmith. He becomes bitter and disillusioned until he meets Rab, a boy just a bit older than him who sets type at The Boston Observer, a newspaper run by the rebels. Rab takes an interest in Johnny, helps him get work and shares his accommodations with him. Johnny soon becomes embroiled in the Patriots' plans to defy King George. This leads to The Boston Tea Party and the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Figures such as Sam Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere are among those that Johnny rubs elbows with and even works with in the quest for America's freedom from England. I found this book of particular interest because Johnny makes acquaintance with, and even sympathizes with, several British soldiers who he does not see as enemies. So in some ways, both sides of the story are told to an extent.

Buttered Side Down

Finished Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber. This is her first collection of short stories, published in 1912. As with Dawn O'Hara, Ferber's voice is glib. The stories focus on characters living in Chicago who have left small town homes and feel at odds with city life. The mood varies from humorous to tragic. I was reminded just a bit of Katherine Mansfield's stories of single girls working in shops, living lonely lives in small rooms, but Ferber's stories have a distinctly American feel. I'm starting to enjoy short stories again. For a long time I did not because I preferred the long, narrative thread of a novel. But the tasty morsels of these stories are pretty satisfying.

Shirley

Finished Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. I'm a dope. I put off reading this book for YEARS because it looked and sounded boring. It was wonderful. Once again I was pleasantly surprised by Bronte's sense of humor. The story was suspenseful as well. It takes a local look at the Luddite movement and some early feminism.

The title character, Shirley, does not appear until the novel is well on it's way. She is rich, beautiful, intelligent, lively, arch, bossy, generous, mischievous and delightful, but I didn't consider her the heroine. Caroline Helstone, introduced early on, was the heroine to me. Caroline is gentle, mild, loving, compassionate, eager for knowledge and quite beautiful in her own right. The two young women become the best of friends and it appears that they are both in love with the same man.

The story featured a lovely tie-in with Bronte's sister Anne's novel Agnes Grey, but what that is you'll have to find out for yourself.

The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

Finished The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block. Although set in edgy, contemporary Los Angeles, these stories lose nothing of the mystery or magic of the original texts. They scintillate with tension. They are jewel encrusted re-visions. Stories include retellings of Snow White, Thumbelina, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and The Snow Queen. I loved this book.

The Horse and His Boy

Finished The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis. It was the fifth book published in the series, but the third one when reading in chronological order. I listened to an audiobook recording read by Alex Jennings. He has a wonderful voice and really brought out all the humor in the novel. This book takes place entirely beyond the back of the wardrobe. New characters include Shasta, a slave boy running away with a talking Narnian horse and Aravis, a girl running away from an nasty arranged marriage. As always, adventure, excitement, battles and Aslan all play a large part in the fun of the book. Have I mentioned how much I love Aslan? I simply adore him.

Lavender and Old Lace

Finished Lavender and Old Lace by Myrtle Reed. Published in 1902, it is part romance, part mystery. The book is quaint, humorous, lush, and edgy, all at the same time. The prose reminded me very much of the later books in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series: small town, modern young people befriending old fashioned spinsters, lots of flowers, with the scent of the blooms floating through the pages. A charming read.

Reed published seventeen novels and a number of cookbooks between 1899 and 1911 when she died of an overdose of sleeping draft. As an insomniac, she must have been writing all night long. What a shame we lost her so soon.

Housekeeping

Finished Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Published in 1980, it won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. This book is very cerebral. The narrator Ruth describes her surroundings and her thoughts and reactions to them with sparkling prose. Ruth and her younger sister Lucille live with their grandmother after their mother commits suicide. After their grandmother dies two spinster great aunts arrive to fuss and worry over them and themselves. They are woefully unfit for the task of raising children and enlist the help of their niece Sylvie, aunt to the two girls. Sylvie is a most unconventional aunt. She is a transient who rides the rails, from town to town, job to job, free from ties and restrictions. As soon as Sylvie arrives from Montana, the two great aunts decamp, leaving her in charge of housekeeping.

Sylvie does her best to look after Ruth and Lucille and the house that they live in, but it's just not what she's used to. Their schedule becomes quirky and their lives offbeat. As Lucille begins to mature she rejects Sylvie's eccentricities and leaves to go live with the Home Economics teacher from school, whose home in undoubtedly the exact opposite of Sylvie's household. Ruth loves Sylvie and sees a lot of her mother in her. The more time she spends with Sylvie the more like her she becomes. The various ladies of the the town begin to take notice of all this and voice their concern. They bring casseroles and the sheriff. When it becomes clear that Sylvie will lose guardianship of Ruth the two take desperate measures.

Oh how I love a good coming of age novel. Why is that I wonder? This one was excellent.

The Yellow House

Finished The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey. Set in the early 20th century in Northern Ireland, it's the story of a young girl, Eileen O'Neill, who grows to warrior womanhood amidst local politics and family tragedy. The book begins with her father coming home from the marketplace with tubs of yellow paint, to paint their ancestral family home, once lost and hard won, a warm yellow so that it may be seen from the top of Slieve Gullion, their nearby mountain. Eileen's brother and baby sister join in the painting of the house. This is perhaps the happiest moment in the book, for things soon go very wrong for all involved. There were times when I thought "how much more can Eileen take?", but from a holistic view, there was no tragedy that did not further the story or the development of the characters. This was a raw and exciting novel. I've developed the habit of using the word "feck" from it. Highly recommended for those who enjoy Irish literature. I look forward to reading Falvey's next novel The Linen Queen.

A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower, 1620

Finished A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower, 1620 by Kathryn Lasky. It's the first book in the "Dear America" series. Each book in the series is set during a poignant time in American history. The narrator is a young girl who records her observations of life during this time in her diary. Remember (Mem) Patience Whipple journeys from Holland to American on the Mayflower to start a new life with her family and a number of other Saints and non-Saints. Their intention is to land off the coast of Virginia. Instead they land on Cape Cod at Plymouth.

Mem records the rough seas, boredom and illness on ship, and her longing to disembark once they land. Once the plantation is built she and her family have their own house. The community meets two English speaking Native Americans who introduce them to the local native community and various forms of medicine and food. Mem records the first Thanksgiving feast, but also the loss of her mother and many others to illness. It's a frank account and I actually learned some things I didn't know (or didn't remember) about the time. I hope to read all the books in the series over time.

The Great Gatsby

Finished The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald for perhaps the 20th time. I had to revisit it just once more before seeing Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation. Every time I absorb Fitzgerald's prose I remember that he was my favorite author when I was in my 20s and a writer myself. This passage where Nick Caraway is describing Daisy is a perfect example why:

"For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk."

I think perhaps it is the best book ever written.