Hello readers - here we are again at the end of another year.
Lots going on in our household - the night before Webster's graduation from his Babson MBA program, we found out we are expecting our first child! (EDD 1/25/13 - yes, soon!) Over the summer, Webster joined an early-stage startup based in Palo Alto and is loving it. I am leading a small team of technical marketing professionals at Dell and continue to learn a lot and thrive in the role. Lucy is doing great.
My parents continue to snowbird between NJ and Florida, and fortunately were safely in Florida during Hurricane Sandy. Jo lives in Manhattan and is an attending at NYU Hospital, which is finally re-opened since the hurricane. We lost my grandmother a few weeks ago and while it was sad, I reflected a lot on the 98 years she did live.
On to the books! I read 37 books this year, 10 of them non-fiction. Right now I have books on my library queue that won't come up until after the baby arrives - we'll see how that goes, but I have faith that I'll always be a reader. The baby has his/her first few books already - a set of my old Golden Books that my mom had saved, and The Giving Tree and Goodnight Moon from Webster's parents.
Omitted from the following list are three books that are part of series that I am reading: Voyager, WWW:Watch, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
Top Fiction:
Say You're One of Them - touching set of unrelated short stories about children in Africa.
Reamde - for geeks only - huge adventure story about when real life and online life collide.
Fiction Runners-up:
QBVII - classic courtroom drama set in the shadows of the Holocaust
World Without End - long-awaited sequel to Pillars of the Earth
Unaccustomed Earth - short stories about people reconciling modern lives with Indian childhoods
Distant Hours and The Forgotten Garden - two books by Kate Morten that are well-written gothic-style mysteries
Lady Matador's Hotel - linked short stories all taking place in a hotel in an unnamed Latin American country
The Disappeared - story about a woman who falls in love with a man still haunted by his family's past in Cambodia
Buddha in the Attic - linked short stories about a set of women who are Japanese mail-order brides
My Life on a Plate - funny story about the mishaps of a slightly-overweight mom, reminiscent of Bridget Jones
My New American Life - the first few years of an Armenian woman's life in the United States, and her relationship with the Armenian community
The Love Wife - a family struggles to accept a new member of the family from China, as requested by the matriarch's dying wishes.
Top Nonfiction:
Pack of Two - Caroline Knapp's examination of her relationship with her dog.
Revolution - a woman's memoir of leaving college to join "the revolution" in the 1980's in Central America with her boyfriend.
Longitude - the story of how someone came up with an ingenious way to measure longitude at sea.
Happy 2013 to all!
Sheryl
Monday, December 31, 2012
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir by Elna Baker
Another NPR find - this one someone I heard on The Moth and I think I also heard on This American Life.
Elna is a Mormon from the West Coast who moves to New York City to go to college and ends up living there for several years in her early 20's. This is a collection of essays about her life in the city as she struggles to figure out how much of her Mormon background she wants to carry forward in her adult life. Many chapters read like "No Sex and the City." Others are more about her jobs (among others, at FAO Schwartz and Nobu) or her family relationships.
This was definitely a quick read that kept my attention. Baker is a funny writer, able to see humor in her own misadventures. Her ongoing conflict between the secular and the traditional is well-described and it is easy to empathize with her.
Elna is a Mormon from the West Coast who moves to New York City to go to college and ends up living there for several years in her early 20's. This is a collection of essays about her life in the city as she struggles to figure out how much of her Mormon background she wants to carry forward in her adult life. Many chapters read like "No Sex and the City." Others are more about her jobs (among others, at FAO Schwartz and Nobu) or her family relationships.
This was definitely a quick read that kept my attention. Baker is a funny writer, able to see humor in her own misadventures. Her ongoing conflict between the secular and the traditional is well-described and it is easy to empathize with her.
Learning to Die in Miami by Carlos Eire
Oops - this memoir is a sequel to a book I read last year but forgot to review at the time! I had heard Carlos Eire interviewed on NPR and thought his story was interesting.
The first book was called Waiting for Snow in Havana. In that book, Carlos is growing up in Cuba in the late 1950's and early 1960's. His privileged and sheltered childhood comes to an abrupt end when he is among 14,000 chilren airlifted out of Cuba and sent to the U.S. upon Castro's ascendance.
This book picks up with Carlos adjusting to life in the U.S. He is shuffled among family friends, foster homes, and other living arrangements, sometimes with his older brother and sometimes alone. The title of the books is an allusion to his belief that "Carlos" from Cuba has to die for his American "Charles" or "Chuck" or other identity to emerge. While the first book told a lot of his childhood, this one talks about him mostly as a pre-teen and teen, and flashes forward many times to his life as an adult.
Unlike other memoirs I've read that have been written in more than one part, these two books were very similar in style, tone, and composition. I enjoyed Eire's style in fact - it was unusual - the books being written more as a reverie, a collection of memories, than as a straightforward linear narrative. Eire was very poetic in places, very sad in others. This was not a laugh-out-loud set of books, but I did learn about an immigrant experience I was unfamiliar with, and was compelled to read the second one.
The first book was called Waiting for Snow in Havana. In that book, Carlos is growing up in Cuba in the late 1950's and early 1960's. His privileged and sheltered childhood comes to an abrupt end when he is among 14,000 chilren airlifted out of Cuba and sent to the U.S. upon Castro's ascendance.
This book picks up with Carlos adjusting to life in the U.S. He is shuffled among family friends, foster homes, and other living arrangements, sometimes with his older brother and sometimes alone. The title of the books is an allusion to his belief that "Carlos" from Cuba has to die for his American "Charles" or "Chuck" or other identity to emerge. While the first book told a lot of his childhood, this one talks about him mostly as a pre-teen and teen, and flashes forward many times to his life as an adult.
Unlike other memoirs I've read that have been written in more than one part, these two books were very similar in style, tone, and composition. I enjoyed Eire's style in fact - it was unusual - the books being written more as a reverie, a collection of memories, than as a straightforward linear narrative. Eire was very poetic in places, very sad in others. This was not a laugh-out-loud set of books, but I did learn about an immigrant experience I was unfamiliar with, and was compelled to read the second one.
The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli
Soli's previous book The Lotus Eaters was one of my favorites, so I was excited to read this 2012-published novel by her. I liked it - it was really good.
The story starts with the main character, Claire, experiencing a tragic accident in her family on the farm they own and run. Years later, her marriage has fallen apart but she remains on the farm, even though her family moves away. When she is diagnosed with cancer, she hires a young woman named Minna to help her around the house. While Minna is a good caretaker, she begins to exhibit unusual behavior and her past slowly comes out throughout the story. Claire and Minna's relationship develops into something Claire does not expect, and becomes the focus of the majority of the book.
This book was haunting - when Minna's back story comes out, it is touching and surprising and violent. Similarly strange is Claire's acquiescence to a lot of Minna's idiosyncrasies. Whether either of their backgrounds justify their behavior throughout the story is perhaps the biggest question left with the reader at the end of the book.
The story starts with the main character, Claire, experiencing a tragic accident in her family on the farm they own and run. Years later, her marriage has fallen apart but she remains on the farm, even though her family moves away. When she is diagnosed with cancer, she hires a young woman named Minna to help her around the house. While Minna is a good caretaker, she begins to exhibit unusual behavior and her past slowly comes out throughout the story. Claire and Minna's relationship develops into something Claire does not expect, and becomes the focus of the majority of the book.
This book was haunting - when Minna's back story comes out, it is touching and surprising and violent. Similarly strange is Claire's acquiescence to a lot of Minna's idiosyncrasies. Whether either of their backgrounds justify their behavior throughout the story is perhaps the biggest question left with the reader at the end of the book.
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