Three This Week
215. Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff
This book is a heartbreaker. A great kid, the kind of son everyone would love to have, grows up to become a drug addict. I knew how it ended before I started, but I still kept reading to see what would happen. I can think of so many parents who would benefit from reading this book.
216. Were You Raised by Wolves? By Christie Mellor
I’ve asked myself this question many times about my two sons, though I know for a fact they were not. I am apparently fully responsible for their heathenish behavior. I would love for them to read this book. It relates the basic rules of adulthood to those who have not yet mastered or perhaps even heard of them. It is told with great humor and sympathy.
217. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee
Lee undertakes a difficult challenge: find out all there is to know about Chinese food. I am happy to say she lived up to the challenge. I learned more about General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies and soy sauce than I thought I ever wanted to know. All in all, it was an entertaining trip through Chinese American dining.
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209. Window Boy by Andrea White
I liked Window Boy. Sam Davis is an entirely believable character who both loves basketball and is confined to his wheelchair with cerebral palsy. The year is 1968. Sam, with the help of his babysitter, Miss Perkins, is allowed to enroll in public school. Here he fails and excels, meets friends and makes enemies. Sam’s mother longs for a normal life and she thinks she might find it in a new boyfriend. Sam’s most faithful companion is a voice in his head, Winston Churchill. Churchill cheers Sam on time and again, just when Sam is ready to give up, and helps Sam make his way in an uncertain world.
One of my favorite conversations between Sam and Winnie:
I just wish that the inside of me was outside so that everyone could know me, Sam says.
We all do, Sam.
210. Rules of the Red Rubber Ball by Kevin Carroll
Carroll shares his thoughts on finding success in this very thin inspirational book.
211. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Toad is both the hero and the villain in this wonderful children’s book. He is really just a big child himself and, despite the near constant admonitions of his friends, he cannot stop himself from engaging in danger. Boats and cars call to him and he answers, but his adventures lead him into terrible troubles. Toad’s weakness is also his strength and he is able to use his daring mind to find a way to escape. Delightful.
212. The Book Stops Here by Ian Sansom
The third book in the mobile library mystery series. Israel Armstrong unexpectedly finds he and a colleague have been given an opportunity to attend a mobile library convention in London and he is determined to go. The mobile library van Armstrong drives is ancient; somehow, Armstrong is told he may choose a new van. Armstrong and his friend make their way to London and, before he knows it, the mobile library van is gone. The two librarians track down the perpetrators. Along the way, they engage in misadventure after misadventure and that is the fun of the book.
213. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I read The Road and found it to be an unsettling and dark tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is as well, particularly so for women. The time is the future. The world’s religious sects are at war. Women have been relegated to serving men and attempting to have children. Not many children are being born and no one really knows why. Our main character is trapped into serving as a surrogate mother in this new society and it is not a world she likes. Instead, she longs for her days with her husband and child and seeks to find a way to rejoin them.
It does not seem likely this will happen. Yet our main character has no other choices in this life that she now lives; she must either try to find what pleasure she can as the handmaid of another woman’s husband or she must try to escape.
214. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
Claire Waverly has made a life for herself in Bascom. She creates magical dishes with wonderful herbs and spices she grows in her own garden that can change the people who eat them.
Then her sister, Sydney, returns home, and she returns with a child. It takes Sydney time, but she, too, is able to find her own Waverly magic to wend upon her world.
1 | Comment (0)Why We Hate Us
206. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux retraces the journey he took through Asia thirty years ago. I had only read the first chapter, an introduction to travel and its delights and difficulties, and I already knew the book would be brilliant. Theroux intermingles a little history of Asia with his own history and stops to visit here and there with other authors. The NYT found the book to be pompous but that was not my reaction at all; if anything, Theroux came across to me as a man who has been humbled by his journeys. My only disappointment was that he skipped China. I was happy to travel through Asia with this wonderful guide.
207. The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know is Wrong by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Lots of shockers in this book. Driest place on earth. The largest living thing. The most dangerous animal that ever lived.
Very fun browsable book.
208. Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium by Dick Meyer
I had to put this book down several times. It was horribly depressing. But it addresses a very important question: Why is it that we live in the most affluent society that has ever existed yet we are not pleased with ourselves? Like most books of this sort, the author spends twenty chapters addressing the problem and one tiny chapter offering solutions.
The biggest problem seems to be that people have no real connections. Almost half of America feels isolated. And our lives are shallow, not deep. Here’s a quote I like:
“With all our riches and freedoms, we have assembled what we thinly call ‘lifestyles’—assemblages of recreation, work, consumer goods, freely chosen beliefs, family arrangements, and a great deal of media. Our new arrangements are not providing the nourishment we need, the warm relationships and ready guides. The older, connective tissues of American life are fraying, and the new, artificial ones are weak.”
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