Finished Reading… Three Weeks’ Worth

After we went into crisis mode with Chris’s accident, I stopped posting about my reading.  I feel, too, like I read less and spent more time just staring at the page without seeing what was there.  My life keeps moving forward, though, and I want to jot down a few notes about what I did read, and move on.

- The Wednesday Sisters, by Meg Waite Clayton.  This was an interesting look at life in California in the late 1960′s, when five women start out a friendship by meeting in the park with their kids.   They grow together, their families intertwine, they start a writing group together.  Each one, of course, has a distinct personality (from the flap: “Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts.”)  I found it a good read and a thoughtful presentation of what it meant to be a woman at that chaotic point in history.

- The Book Borrower, by Alice Mattison.  This book was much harder for me to get into.  The style was hard to read, for me – everything in the present used em dashes to introduce quotes, rather than quotation marks, and trying to read this in a hospital waiting room proved too much.  Eventually, I found some quiet time to read it and I did find the story interesting.  It follows two friends – who aren’t always friends – through various stages of their life, while weaving this into the story of Trolley Girl, a book about a young female Jewish anarchist accused of murder.  In the end, this book had a lot to say about friendship between women, and how it’s not always easy.

- Handle with Care, by Jodi Picoult.  Phew.  You wouldn’t think I’d want a book about medical tragedy.  But the smoothness and ease of her writing style was like a balm.  I could sink into this book and let the real world wash away.  This one follows her established style – a family going through an ethical crisis, and in this case, also a lawsuit.  The family is trying to decide whether to sue their obstetrician for failing to detect brittle bone disease in their baby, who is now five.  Even harder because the daughter is old enough to understand what a “Wrongful Birth” claim means (she would have been aborted if they’d known) and the OB is the mother’s best friend.  It was a different world that I was all too glad to escape into.

- The Noticer, by Andy Andrews.  I have to apologize to the folks at Thomas Nelson.  I accepted this book with the understanding that my review (and hundreds of others) would be written on Monday the 27th, in a big promotional push.  It was just after midnight that day that Chris died, and this review – and lots of other things – slipped away.  I did read this book during the previous week, while Chris was being treated at the hospital.  The tagline of this book is Sometimes, all a person needs is a little perspective.  It’s a fictional allegory about a character – Jones (or Garcia, or a dozen other common names) who comes mysteriously in and out of people’s lives, and talks to them directly and honestly about their troubles, and gives them the perspective they need to turn their lives around.  I needed a little dose of perspective that week, to say the least.  It’s a little spiritual without being too overtly Christian, and it touches quickly on lots of different issues, things like the four love languages or making choices instead of mistakes.  It gave me something to think about, a different way of looking at things that took me out of my sad moment just a little.

- The School of Essential Ingredients, by Erica Bauermeister, was a perfectly-timed follow-up for me – I love it when books chosen separately still seem to run parallel.  This book runs in a similar way to The Noticer at its core: the story of a woman, Lillian, who runs a cooking class in her restaurant and deftly touches each student’s life.  Both books are a series of backstories about the individuals, and each has an awakening to perspective and hope for the future, a deeper understanding about life, love, and – in this case – food.  Although The Noticer was okay, The School of Essential Ingredients was so much better, and accomplished the same task but with a scrumptious literary shell.  Mmm.  The descriptions of the food alone were enough to make me love this book – but the path to gentle enlightenment was delicious too.