MAD HONEY - Jodi Picoult

I haven't been reading much. Our book club broke up because none of us wanted to read the others' book selections. We were in our eighties mostly and eye problems, etc. slowed us down. However, a group of younger women I spend time with almost pushed me into reading Mad Honey. I have never read Jodi Picoult before and thought, having seen her books around for years, that she was probably one of those writers that writes for young women and their book clubs. I soldiered in until I reached just about half way when I was hit hard and the book became a grabber of interest and a learning experience. I can only say Read It. Don't study up on it beforehand....just dive in. Some of the writing was a little disjointed and that might have been because it was a two person collaboration. There were chances to nitpick characters and plot development, but it was a beautiful thing and I heartily recommend reading it right away. Our local library has 19 copies and they are all out.....similarly with the other forms of reading they offer.

INVISIBLE STORM

I started to read this book and began to actively dislike Jason Kander and his story. Then I set it aside and picked it up the other night and picked up at the point where he turned himself over to therapists at the Veteran's Administration for PTSD therapy. From an abject, suicidal mess he (and his wife) worked diligently to deal with his mental trauma. This part of the book was almost beyond fascinating and I felt that I learned a lot about how much pain we can control without understanding why it needs to be faced and dealt with.

 

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, Eric Selland (Translator)

 A delicately beautiful and deceptively simple story. The cat is a unifying theme involving two young Japanese writers renting a home in a beautiful location in Tokyo. It gives you a sense of what daily life in Tokyo might be like. The writing is unfussy and straightforward and in places incredibly beautiful and vivid.

Ladyparts is a good read!

I enjoyed this book and read it in measured chunks. Her humor and complete honesty kept me engaged through some difficult reading about her sad divorce, her serious medical problems, and probably worst of all for me, the financial and job problems that compounded misery for her and for her children. The parts of the book detailing the problems with health insurance were especially well written and instructive as she tried to deal with COBRA, jobs that included insurance only if she worked a certain period of time and made a certain threshold of salary. And then when she listed her mountains of debt..... At these points I felt my blood pressure going up big time and had to stop reading a while.

 Through it all I loved the amusing stories, insights on loving and close friends. I loved her ability to create a vivid image of all her thoughts and actions. I enjoyed hearing about her jobs and the people she worked with. Her adventures in locating a companion with empathy was a bit rocky too at times. The last part of the book detailing some of the abuse she suffered from male work associates brought home to me more of what the Me Too Movement is all about....more than sexual abuse it is treating a woman as a "game piece", dangling and removing job offers and opportunities....spreading misinformation about her and blocking any forward advancement. It was a great pleasure to see evidence of her strength, staying power and sense of self emerge victorious.

 

 

 

HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON: JOHN LEWIS by John Meachum

In this book recently loaned to me by a friend, a lot of new and deeper information about John Lewis and the Southern United States was revealed. John Meachum writes beautifully about religious teachings and the call that Lewis felt to improve the lives of the people he knew. He simply could not as his family would, stand back and let the cruelty of segregation stand. He was called to be a minister from a very early age and his steadfastness over the years began to enthrall me. He felt called to put his life on the line in the service of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”. Arrested 45 times in his life, Lewis was a strong proponent of the nonviolent approach to political change. Even as times and opinions changed, he stood by his creed of nonviolence and a faith in a “beloved community”.
I have read so much over the years about this time, but this was an almost new eye-opening experience. Time and again the leadership above him pleaded with him and his followers to desist and he (and they) said, no, we’ve made out our wills, we are going on.
He became head of SNCC and after a few years was deposed by Stokely Carmichael as the fight for Civil Rights moved from the Deep South to the entire US and non-violence was cast aside for Black Power. He met JFK, LBJ and many leaders, he spoke at the March on Washington, his proudest moment was pushing to get the Voting Rights Act passed….but he never lost his humility and sense of self. I would have liked to know what his many years in the House of Representatives was like.
Sad that we have lost both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis in these recent days.

There are so many good reviews here on Goodreads that I don't want to duplicate them. I agree with all the high praise. I suspect when I think back on this wonderful book I will remember Junia the mule and feel the ache of sadness for the hard lives of so many people living in the Kentucky mountains....many so hungry, whole families dying....children with pellegra.....I'll think of the recipes in the scrapbooks, trying to live on nettle soup....reading National Geographic Magazine, months old newspapers, the lucky find of a copy of The Good Earth.....the fact that Brave New World was banned and Cussy Mary's mother had a cherished copy.....the horrible working conditions of the miners...the racism and hatred, the lack of medical care....I think that will stay with me. Cussy Mary and her good friends warmed the story enough to make it sing for me. (less)

Sylvia Tedesco's Reviews > American Dirt

American Dirt
by 

Jeanine Cummins (Goodreads Author)

Sylvia Tedesco's review

Feb 26, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

I just binge-read this book and think it is a great addition to the literature of what migrants are suffering. It was difficult to read. There is nothing more frightening than a mother trying to protect a young child. In the end, I learned so much. The people who populate this book are so real. The incredibly kind people and the unbelievably cruel people just make your heart race and all the outside world fall away. The protagonist is a well-educated woman from Acapulco and I identified with her and her reasoning, fears, decisions and was glad I followed her all the way to the end. I only left one star off the rating because of one strand of the story seemed a bit unrealistic....but overall this book is a fabulous read.
UPDATE

Sam Ogren asked:

To those who haven't read the book, and yet posted a scathing review below...isn't commentary on something you haven't yourself experienced at the core of your objection? If you read it and thought it sucked, cool. But exactly when did thinking for oneself go out of fashion? Just seems like the uninformed hate is not elevating the conversation, and frankly not the enlightened stance I think you're going for...

My response:  I agree with Sam Ogren. Now I've read the book I am more aware than I thought I had been and I'm ready to read more sophisticated accounts. Sometimes a book like this is an entry point into really seeing the complexities of a situation.

THE COLOR OF LIGHTNING by Paulette Jiles

Review by Diane Barnes from the Goodreads Website:

The cover blurb from the Washington Post on my edition says, "Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted...This is glorious work.". That just about covers it.

Yes, a glorious work. Well written historical fiction can teach me more than years in a classroom, because it gives me people with personalities, names, faces, motives; it leads me step by step into dangerous but lovely landscapes, it shows me why certain things happened as they did, and in this book it explains so much about the western expansion and the tragedy of the American Indian. I get overwhelmed just thinking of how to describe this book and all it contains.

Very basically, it is the story of Britt Johnson, who comes to Texas as a free black man just after the Civil War. He has plans to become a freighter, hauling goods by wagon to outposts and forts. The Commanche raid his community, kill his oldest son, and take his wife and two younger children captive. He sets out to find them. It's also the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker sent to work with Indian Affairs, who discovers that all the love and Christian charity in the world is sometimes useless. The author also miraculously gets us to understand the native American mind-set, and in so doing shows us the heartbreak and tragedy of a brave people who couldn't fight white man's progress.

A warning to those who don't like violence; this book has a lot of it. Really though, how can you write about the West without it, if you want the whole story of what it took to survive in that time, and the courage needed to try? Paulette Jiles includes the violence, but then gives us the most beautiful prose to make up for it. I seem to be reading her books in backward order, as I started with News of the World, her latest book. I will surely add her two earlier books to my list now, and eagerly wait for whatever she does next.

Goodreads remark: 

There's nothing that "explains" the color of lightning, but there is a sentence from which i gather the title is derived…it's (in my book) chapter 12…britt is on his way to get his wife & kids and he's met tissoyo…tissoyo is describing a "fight" that he had heard about when he was a child--he's recalling the incident as he's telling britt: "i only heard about it. i was too young to go. how i wish i had been there. when they all came home they were streaming a kind of fire around them. they sang as they came into camp. fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy.… there was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning."

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Sylvia Tedesco's review
Nov 25, 2019  · 


I recently spent some wonderful hours reading this book. I loved every minute and every page and learned and felt so much. Our library system has a great feature that they give you suggestions about books to read after you have finished in case you are having a problem breaking off and being left hanging.... This book and its talented and caring author restores your faith in the power of love and thought and personal contact to make your world better.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by 

Olga Tokarczuk,

 

Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translation)

 3.97 

I just now finished the book and wanted to write how much I enjoyed it. What an original voice, written so clearly about deep subjects with a kind of poetry of its own. She managed to conjure a world of people and animals so particularly of their country (Poland and Czech Republic) and yet timeless and current. I'll be thinking about it for some time.
This book might not appeal to everyone. The protagonist is a "crazy old lady" who goes in for serious Astrology, hates hunters, is a vegetarian.....quirky, very bright and funny too.
"In Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation, the prose is by turns witty and melancholy, and never slips out of that distinctive narrative voice." from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
The action of the novel, the title could be translated as a quote from Blake’s Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, takes place in a remote mountain settlement in the beautiful Kotlina Kłodzka. That quiet, tranquil location suddenly is a place of murders of local hunters, with only animals’ tracks left on the crime scene. Revenge of the game?

Favorite quotes: “The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”other.”

― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

SIGN TALKER - THE ADVENTURE OF GEORGE DROUILLARD ON THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

by 

James Alexander Thom

Sep 07, 2019  ·  edit

really liked it

 Last read August 2019 to September 2019.

The story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is told in a long novel from the point of view of an Indian member travelling with the party. George Drouillard is a half-breed Shawnee/French Sign-Talker whose abilities included great hunting ability to feed this large group with game for the long trek as well as a sensitivity to the tribes and peoples they met and whose help they often needed along the way. Took me much longer to read than usual because I kept stopping to enjoy the scenery and comments on the feelings and sentiments of this amazing man whose appreciation of the beauty of nature, long descriptions of his personal beliefs and traditions enriched the story substantially. The personalities of Lewis and Clark stand out and the narrative is interspersed with parts of their daily journals.

The Salt Path

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read a review of this book a week ago and immediately knew I had to read it. A perfect antidote to all the bad news floating around the atmosphere. I read it voraciously and loved every page, every description and anecdote. I loved the descriptions of the sea, the birds, rocks and bracken, the daily parsing out of their limited funds for food, the people they met on the 630 mile walk. A totally honest book and a real upper.


View all my reviews

"So Anyway" autobiography 2014 by John Cleese

So, Anyway... by John Cleese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and laughed a lot. I was pleasantly surprised to find it deals very much with his youth, school experiences and personal life. Towards the end there were a lot of scripts of shows and Monty Python skits. I liked his analysis of what is funny. Very enjoyable book.


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A Death in Live Oak....Jack Swytek legal thriller

A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I stayed up till 1am last night to finish this book. First Grippando book I've read and I liked it a lot. I felt I learned about life and history in Florida. "The farther north you go, the more Southern it gets." Also enjoyed reading about campus life at the University of Florida. I had never heard of "atonement cases and trials...need to check them out. Swyteck, the lawyer, is believable, I will be looking for another one soon. Any advice?


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Catching up with Harry Bosch

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't read a Harry Bosch novel in quite a while and it was delightful to get immersed in his adventures again on rainy days in January. All his characters, situations and activities are so real. It is fun to follow him around the Los Angeles area and learn new things about the law, the drug world and his world.
My first readings of his books were back in the Vietnam era and now he has gotten a little older. I liked this book better than the time he was in Hong Kong with his daughter. Which book was that?


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Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido"

After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing.

But having a Colette in the family is like having a deathless raconteur who shall keep your family alive for as long as there are human beings who read or listen. These novelettish biographies were published around the 1950's so even without me googling it, I am sure Colette and her then still living brother had long both passed away too. Yet here they, and the rest of the family, are as alive as the person next to you. How common is it, for example, for us to have had mothers who were full-time housewives, had grown old doing mostly nothing but housework, and still thought of their family and household concerns up to their dying days? Yet only a Colette can write about a mother like that (her own) with a memorably bittersweet nostalgia like this (her mother already 71 years old at the time, a widow, with various illnesses):

"At five o'clock in the morning I would be awakened by the clank of a full bucket being set down in the kitchen sink immediately opposite my room.

"'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?'

"And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits.

"The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.

"It was not until one morning when I found the kitchen unwarmed and the blue enamel saucepan hanging on the wall, that I felt my mother's end to be near. Her illness knew many respites, during which the fire flared up again on the hearth, and the smell of fresh bread and melting chocolate stole under the door together with the cat's impatient paw. These respites were periods of unexpected alarms. My mother and the big walnut cupboard were discovered together in a heap at the foot of the stairs, she having determined to transport it in secret from the upper landing to the ground floor. Whereupon my elder brother insisted that my mother should keep still and that an old servant should sleep in the little house. But how could an old servant prevail against a vital energy so youthful and mischievous that it contrived to tempt and lead astray a body already half fettered by death? My brother, returning before sunrise from attending a distant patient, one day caught my mother red-handed in the most wanton of crimes. Dressed in her nightgown, but wearing heavy gardening sabots, her little grey septuagenarian's plait of hair turning up like a scorpion's tail on the nape of her neck, one foot firmly planted on the crosspiece of the beech trestle, her back bent in the attitude of the expert jobber, my mother, rejuvenated by an indescribable expression of guilty enjoyment, in defiance of all her promises and of the freezing morning dew, was sawing logs in her own yard."

Think: apart from literature, where one writes from the heart, which magical thing here on earth can make a brief, solitary dawn in a forgotten place on a forgotten day, eternal like this?

Lincoln in the Bardo

Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo

Review

I finished this book yesterday and am still wondering what I think of it. Our book club leader jokingly tried to "sell" it to us by saying, "....there's a lot of white space..." I don't know how anyone could read it as an audio book. First, you have to acknowledge that it represents a great feat of imagination. It took some time to figure out what was going on and there are still points I missed. Why were some of the denizens of the graveyard "staying" on and others were suffering horrors in the pit or on the fence? I see that the author was trying to show that Lincoln's visits to his son and the conceit that the denizens could enter his body and touch his mind were responsible for his great and growing empathy at a serious low point of the Civil War. All the characters were quite representative of their time in history (also their names) and you did get a sense of the era. It also had many bawdy moments. I will continue to think! George Saunders is certainly one of a kind! A virtual reality view of Bardo from the New York Times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phuCt... interview with Jeffrey Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9MKN... (less)

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Family Photo from John and Julie's Wedding Reception