Books I read in August 2012

1. Broken Harbour by Tana French (fiction, Nook)
2. No Second Chance by Harlan Coben (Fiction
3. The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls (non-fiction, memoir)
4. One Breathe Away by Heather Gudenkauf (fiction, Nook)
5. Miracle Cure by Harlan Coben (fiction)
6. Just one Look by Harlen Coben (fiction)
7. One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper (fiction)
8. Triburbia by Karl Greenfield (fiction)

July 2012 reads

41. The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty (Jul 31 NOOK)

40. The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry (Jul 28 Nook)

39. Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore (Jul 27- NOOK)

38. The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan (Jul 24 NOOK)

37. The Motion of the Ocean by Janna Cawrse Esarey (Jul 21)

36. Come Home by Lisa Scottoline (July 16)

35. Unholy Night by Seth Grahame - Smith (Jul 13, NOOK)

34. The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner (July 10, NOOK)

33. Born To Rise by Deborah Kenny (July 9, NOOK)

32. Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe (July 8, NOOK)

31. Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult (July 6)

30. Shift by Jennifer Bradbury (July 4)

What I read in April 2012

The Pact by Jodi Picoult (April 27)

The Best of Times by Penny Vincenzi (April 19, NOOK)

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich (read April 8)

My Reading Life* by Pat Conroy (read April 8, NOOK)

The Night Circus* by Erin Morgenstern (April 6)

Home Front by Kristen Hannah (April 4)

Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson (April 1)

* I'll be reviewing these 2 books in upcoming posts!!!

Book 11( 2011): How Starbucks Saved My Life

How Starbucks Saved my Life is a memoir written by Michael Gates Gill, a former advertising exec who falls from his high pedestal in the wealthy world.

He was a Vice President at, according to him, the most well known and respected advertising agency in the world. He was fired in his early 60s. He lived off his savings but was essentially broke. He had an affair with a younger woman that he managed to impregnate so his wife leaves him and his 4 adult children are furious with him. So he's broke, alone and unemployed.

He's treating himself to a latte in a Starbucks and manages to get hired at counter help, just as a lowly barista. He works for a young African- American woman on a crew where he is the minority.

If all the information he presents about Starbucks as a company I am truly impressed and more than happy to pay $5 for my coffees there. This sounds a like an amazing company; I'll be researching them because I want to work there, too!

Other than Starbucks being amazing, I felt this story was.... okay. I hate judging someone's life so what I will complain about is the stilted dialogue writing. It was very false and fake. Dialogue did not make the people come to life; it made them sound flat and uninteresting. Gill's dialogue writing skills need improving. It was rough to read and I found I was skimming the dialogue.

I was also unimpressed with his repeated name dropping, over and over again. in his former life, according to him, he met US Presidents, had tea with Queen Elizabeth, worked with Lee Iaccoca and many more... it was just one famous person after another he "used" to know. In his fall from grace, this humbling he thought he was learning didn't sound so learned since he still felt the need to interject famous folks as part of his life lessons. That didn't fly well with me.

I read his story was going to be made into a movie with Tom Hanks. I will see it and hope Hanks can change my opinion. (265 pages)

C-

Book 74- Queen of the Road

First, I want to say that it is not the author's fault that I took 19 days to read this book. I'm doing about 367 other things while trying to read this book (along with reading about 12 Greek myths as well as Julius Caesar and To Kill a Mockingbird for school).

Doreen Orion's memoir Queen of the Road: A True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, A Husband, and a Bus With a Will of Its Own was a funny, funny, funny story of Doreen and her husband Project Nerd embarking on a cross country tour. In a bus. With their pets. In a bus. With lots and lots of martinis, which is the only way I'd leave my home and travel around the country for 1 year in a BUS!

Orion and hubby leave behind their lives and see the country, bonding with each other and seeing sights and friends. She proclaims herself a Jewish Princess of Long Island and she gave up her creature comforts, working from her bed all day in her jammies and her entire collection of shoes to travel with her husband, fulfilling his dreaming of traveling in a bus.

She's insightful and hysterical. And she gives such great recipes for many martinis.

She makes me want to be her, whether on or off the bus.

I enjoyed her book and plan on reading her others. I'm so glad she turned off the tv and got out of bed!

Book 72- Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen is hilarious and fun, yet offers a good think as well.

I truly enjoyed this memoir of a woman returning home to her parents after her ugly divorce, an illness and accident.

Rhoda's voice- a full of a blend of self depreciating humor, family memories, and nursing her new wounds- was refreshing and fun.

And I want to say this, loudly and clearly: she has a good relationship with her mother. Yes, her mother most certainly drove her absolutely insane, but she has a good relationship with her despite of crazy. She loves her mom and doesn't blame the ills and wrongs in her life on her mother. Thank you for writing a memoir that's funny and honest yet still endearing of family. It was refreshing.

What was I thinking?

Okay in theory it seemed like a good idea to read a whole bunch of books with the same theme: memoirs written by women who turned to cooking careers. I checked out several of these from the library and started reading and... it's not the fun I thought it would be,

I read Julie and Julia last year and it was awesome, and I loved it. I also read I Loved I Lost I Made Spaghetti and loved it as well. Ditto the recently read The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry. I also read a few others so that's what nudged this project along for me. I thought since I tend to gravitate to these books and enjoy them, reading several for a theme month would be fun. I was wrong.

First, I screwed up because I ended up with books that weren't exactly what I was looking for. While Spaghetti, Knife and Julie were about just regular women doing cooking, the books I found were a bit different. I read Garlic and Sapphires which was about a woman who was a food critic for the NYTimes. While it was interesting, it wasn't what I wanted, exactly. I read The Recipe Club which was a fictional story of the friendship between two women told through letters and recipes. While it wasn't what I wanted, I did, however, REALLY enjoy it, and was glad I found it (thanks for the recommendation from a fellow blogger who pens Food for Thought!)

Then I found a book called Spoonfed about a woman who turned critic and something about her messed up life and blah blah blah. I have to admit I didn't even finish it! Spiced was about the alleged drama in the life of a new pastry chef. And it wasn't that dramatic as it claimed to be; I read it cover to cover waiting for the spiciness.

I wanted more of a feel like Julie, Knife and Spaghetti, I guess. Or maybe I read too many of the same genre all together. Whatever my problem, I just know it wasn't my best plan. So now, I'm back to mixing it up a bit. I'm got lots of good books in my stack:

• a new Greg Rucka book with the Atticus Kodiak character
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• Little Bee by Chris Cleave
• The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
• State Fair (a Bennie Harper mystery) by Earlene Fowler
• Beachcombers

So with that failed projected off my plate, I can turn to my waiting list of books, which is about 100 right now. Until I come up with another harebrained scheme!

Happy reading!
Mags

Book 50- Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise is about former New York Times restaurant critic's adventures in reviewing. It's also about her evolution as a reviewer and the great lengths she went to get get fair treatment rather than the royal treatment reserved for critics and kings. Though in one instance, she received better treatment than a king.

She donned disguises and took friends, family members, and colleagues to eat in the best of the best that NYC has to offer. During this time in her life as being the most important food person in... well, the world, she also went through a personal evolution and realized this wasn't the sort of writer she wanted to be. It also wasn't the sort of "eater" she wanted to be.

Author and former NYTimes critic Ruth Reichl is not the editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.

This is obviously a memoir and try as I might reviewing someone's life doesn't seem right. So basically I can say it was entertaining but still sort of sad. It's sad that such "fancy" and "exclusive" restaurants give crappy treatment and cheat the food to the poor and unknowns who visit their establishments. It was nice for someone like Reichl to go through what she did to give honest reviews. The anecdotes she shared about her son Nicky were some of my favorite parts of this non-fiction story.

I like that she enclosed recipes within her her book, of her favorite foods to fix, since she really loves to cook.

I still liked Julie and Julia and I Loved I Lost I Made Spaghetti better!

Book 49- Spiced

Spiced: A pastry chef's true stories of trials by fire, after hours exploits, and what goes on in the kitchen by Dalia Jurgensen is a memoir of her early years as a pastry chef. And it basically is what she said it is: what goes on in the kitchen during and after hours. It's not scathing nor is it raunchy, but just a factual account of her pastry making experiences.

I did enjoy this book when I read it but as I sit here writing the review and summation, I can't think of any reason it stands out that made me REALLY like it, or even, any special details to share about it. Again, it's certainly part of a genre I enjoy reading: women, food, cooking. She tells her story in a pleasant voice, and she also doesn't take herself too seriously. Almost, but not quite.

Actually, she really deviates from what I like best about the "memoir by a woman about her life turned to cooking" stories- the humor, the love, the humor. She was sort of funny, but it didn't seem as real as some of the other books in the genre. Again, it was a pleasant enough of a read but nothing that makes me jump and down for having read it. One other thing was missing as well: recipes. She talked about all these wonderful desserts she created and it was a memoir so recipes, or at least PHOTOS of her creations would've been just lovely.

I guess I didn't like it so much after all. I hope her pastry is better than her book.

Book 42- A Thousand Days in Venice

A Thousand Days in Venice [An Unexpected Romance] is a love story memoir by Marlena de Blasi. She chronicles her first trip to Venice, Italy and the relationship she has with the city, and the relationship she doesn't want to have, because it's the city of love and magic. After she succumbs to the city, she returns often and then one day, the magic of the city takes her over with an encounter with a strange man.

And in an instant, they have fallen in love. And after a few days and a visit, they plan to marry. Marlena plans to give up her career, her cafe, her home, most of her belongings, her life as she knows it, to move to Venice for this love affair, this romance, this first time with love, and she's well into her 50s when this happens.

This isn't something she does as a young woman, but as a grown adult.

And she does it in a rush. They don't take time to get to know each other, they rush, head long into this romance, and from their meeting in December, she moves in June to Venice and they marry in October. Ah sweet Venice, so she can marry her Venetian, a man she calls the Stranger. To a man who speaks very little English and she, a woman who speaks very little Italian, except for food.

I do like the whirl wind of it all. I like that she argues that she didn't want to wait, didn't need to wait, didn't need to go slowly, because why wait when you found the person you're in love with, why wait to be with him any longer? And the magic of it all, is that he felt the same way about her. It was an instant.

Now, what I didn't like, or maybe I should say, who I don't like is her Venetian, her Fernando. He's sort of an ass. And after she gets to Venice, it became rather mired in the "I'm living here so I have to learn everything" drudgery. She just seemed to go on and on about the slowness of the Italian culture, from cooking to planning the wedding to re-doing their apartment; it was such a long process of telling of the long process- blech.

I was hoping it would be rather like the other books I've read but there was very little love of food, though there are recipes at the back of the book. There is quite a bit of just... well, love. Love of the Stranger, love of Venice, learning to love herself, love her apartment, love of wanderlust, but very love WITH food, Fernando mostly didn't even love food. And I felt like this book had an author who lost her self, lost her own identity, who she was, with this huge transformation. I wholeheartedly agree that moving around the world for love is wonderful, but as I read I just felt like de Blasi gave up who she was for this adventure.

Or maybe it burst my bubble a bit. I've always wanted to visit Italy, especially Venice, but after much of her description, other than of the city itself, I think my frustration would come full tilt in dealing with the mindset of the people, rather than letting me fall slowly in love with the city of love.

Food, memoirs, women

So, I'm thinking about a "reading theme" for myself for the summer. I'll read other stuff, but I was thinking of trying to read several books of a particular type.

I really enjoyed the book Julie and Julia: 356 Days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment (and I also loved the movie!) last year. Another one of my favorite books I read last year was I Loved I Lost I Made Spaghetti. And earlier this week I finished The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry and enjoyed it immensely. What do all these have in common? They're memoirs of women who have made some life changes that usually revolve around food, cooking, eating, or all three. For some reason, this particular genre has hugely interested me. I don't know if it's the journeys these women take, if it's all the food, if it's their writing styles, their voices.... I don't know, but I do know that I really like this particular style. I usually enjoy a memoir by a woman (Eat Pray Love seems to be the exception to that rule since I hated that book- yeah, I'm the only woman in the world who hates that book, it seems. So, shoot me!) and I've read several. But the one's about food/ cooking and the woman searching for something in life really speak to me.

I have no desire to go to a cooking school but I do love food. I love to cook and I LOVE to eat. I like to be creative in the kitchen when time and resources allow for such. The food part is always interesting. And life and food always generate some wonderful metaphors and analogies from "Life is like a box of chocolates" to "people are like onions. Keep peeling back the layers.." sort of thinking.

The women who've written the three books I've read so far are pretty smart women, too. I like how they've written their stories, and they don't seem to take themselves too seriously. I also like that all these start at the adult point in their lives. Food may been important to them since they were children or someone in their childhood might have influenced their food love, but these are memoirs not biographies so I like forgoing the long drawn out family stories about food- blah blah blah. I like the here and now, "I am woman, hear me cook" sort of stories.

The one thought that gives me pause is that if I read several more of these books, will I burn myself out? Will I feel as if I've over indulged in this decadent dessert type of reading to the point where I'll be sick? (I said I like food metaphors and analogies.)

I've made a list of titles:

• Garlic and Sapphires: The secret life of a food critic in disguise
• Cakewalk: A Memoir
• Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life
• Spiced: A Pastry Chef's true stories of Trials by Fire, After Hours Exploits, and What really Goes on on the Kitchen
• Under the Table: Saucy tales from Culinary School
• Lunch in Paris: A love story, with recipes

I've always enjoyed books about food. I read several fiction writers who incorporate food in their story lines and characters. It just seems to be something I'm drawn to.

Now I just have to see what the local library has, what Half Price Books has and what I can get ILL and from Amazon. And if anyone here has any of these and wants to share, please let me know!

Maggie

Book 40- The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry

This is a memoir of Kathleen Flinn, an American rat race exec who, at age 40-ish, loses her cushy London job and decides to spend her entire life savings, move to Paris with her boyfriend, and attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school, even though her French language skills were extremely limited. In The Sharper Your Knife, the Less you Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School she chronicles her experiences in Paris during her time as a student, on a personal level, and as a "professional" student of the renowned school.

I loved her voice and her storytelling style. This is the type of memoir that I love to read, one that tells her story so it reads like fiction, her wit and food! She seems to have told "it like it is" and while she didn't pull any punches, she was still positive about her experience at the famous cut throat academy that graduated the likes of, none other than, Julia Child.

Wonderfully told story and the food sounds to die for. I couldn't cook a dang thing she gave a recipe for, but I like knowing the food it there and that I could try if I want. Excellent memoir of s smart woman going after what she wants, with a good outlook, not afraid to laugh at her self, or cry a little, and without all the whining! LOVE IT! Just what a memoir should be!

Book 7- Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession

Cleaving is the second memoir written by Julie Powell who rose to fame in 2009 when her first book was made into a major motion picture called, sharing the title with her first memoir, Julie & Julia. Yes, this is the second offering from the woman who spent a year cooking her way through the Julia Child cookbook and extolling her wonderful, fantastic, supportive husband. Cleaving is... well, not that. At all.

I'm going to deviate a bit here from standard form so please hang with me, here.

First, I was excited about this book and looking forward to it for ages. I asked my public library to order it for me and they did. I didn't even have to buy it, and I was the first one to get it. I figured I would end up buying it eventually because I thought Julie& Julia was so brilliant and funny and poignant and just.... excellent that I would eventually buy a copy of Cleaving but I didn't want to wait until I had the funds to do that.

Cleaving is everything that Julia & Julia was not, which to me was sad. Cleaving is about Julie wanting to learn to be a butcher. Okay, cool concept, right? She wrote that she was always interested in butchery and she even thought butchers were sort of sexy. She went on a quest to find a place that would let her apprentice in a butcher shoppe. She wasn't looking to get paid, she just wanted to learn the art, to the learn the technique.

But Cleaving is more than Julie learning butchery of meat; she is certainly butchering her relationships. In this book, she also tells how she single handedly tore her marriage apart, because she wanted more from life. She was unsettled and wanted to 'find herself', which she actually wrote and I actually threw up in my mouth a little at the trite line written by a person I thought was a smarter writer than that. Not only did she write about her experience as a butcher's apprentice, but about how she had an affair with a man she called D and her obsession with him when it ended- serious stalker like obsession that bordered on the psychotic (and made me increase my hatred of Blackberrys even more...). She wrote in graphic lurid detail about her cheap and tawdry S & M sex with strangers, about her travels to Russia, Africa and Buenos Aires to learn more about butchery, and about hurting Eric.

She went into page after page detail about butchering, about how to break down a side of beef or tie a round or.... whatever she was doing. That reading was long and tedious, like reading directions. Written in Chinese. I finally just skimmed those sections, which is probably why I killed off this book in about a half a day. She also interspersed recipes but most of them had bizarre ingredients for things no one in the US can even buy or get unless they "know" a butcher.

Other than the reading was bogged and mired with too much detail about the butchering, the personal stuff was just has hard to read and to stomach as the butchering part in an entirely different way. She was so sad and depressed and maudlin. She was also creepy in her stalking, obsessive behaviors about this D person. I realize she was laying her soul bare but I was at a "enough is enough" point and wanted to scream and shout "get over him already"!! I think I muttered that often enough in my reading, and I even caught myself rolling my eyes over here drama queen ways. Yes, I rolled my eyes at a book. I've been in relationships where I've been dumped and have hurt but there is a line and she crossed it, in my opinion, with her behavior. Furthermore, she didn't appreciate the wonderful relationship she had with Eric. No, I wasn't there to know what it was like behind closed door, but in Julie & Julia she extols his many virtues, AND this continues in this book. She knows how great Eric is and how lucky she is to have such a husband, yet she continues to hack away at her marriage-- you know, butchering it. She had in Eric what all women seemingly want in a marriage yet she wanted... more? Something else? Maybe she's just a freaking crazy woman...

I was so disappointed because in Julie & Julia Julie was likable, sweet, smart, funny, and completely quirky. In Cleaving she's none of these things. I appreciate she had the guts to write a book where she laid it all on the line, like she did here in Cleaving, but it's such a drastic change from what she offered before, such a drastic change it read like it was about a different woman, written by a different person.

I was truly disappointed.

Book 5- Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love is a memoir written by journalist and author Elizabeth Gilbert in which she chronicles a year of her life where she lived in Italy, Indonesia, and India.

This is a memoir so it's a true story, a part of a person's life and for awhile I struggled about what I wanted to say. Is if fair to criticize the way person chooses to live his or her life? Can I just critique the writing and presentation itself without judging the person? I think the answer I came to is a resounding "no" because I think Gilbert is a whiner. I am not a fan.

She was PAID to travel the world to eat, to pray and to fall in love. Okay, she wasn't paid to fall in love, but it still happened and all she did through this entire diatribe was whine about her past life. Okay, you want to go on a spiritual journey to get closer to God or find peace in life, then by all mean go. And Gilbert went.

I also understand that she ended a marriage in a painful fashion and had an unhealthy romance with a guy and those things do hurt. Yes, I understand that all too well. BUT, here is the big BUT in all of this.

Gilbert left her entire life for a chance to get away and start over, to get a fresh perspective, a new outlook, and this is GREAT, except she whines her way across the world. The title should've been Eat Pray Love A Woman Whines her Way through Three Counties. She seems miserable and when the misery starts to shut down, she seems ungrateful at the good fortune that befell her. The rest of us do not get to flee our lives when things go wrong and she was so lucky to have this chance.

While in the first part of the book, Italy, she was eating her way through the country. And whining. This is where the back story was laid for us about her marriage ending and about her terrible relationship with David. But she was rather pathetic. And she chose to be celibate in Italy. okay, personal choice but I wanted her to stop complaining about it since it was her choice! Italy sounded wonderful in certain parts, where she was talking about food and the country, but I wanted more of the "travelogue" than to listen to any more of her pity party. I will certainly give props to her description of her trip to Venice. It sounds beautiful and haunting, simply perfect.

The second part of her book was about her visit to India to pray and meditate with her guru and live an Ashram with others. More whining. I'm sure it was supposed to be funny, the ongoing argument she had with god over meditation that she couldn't seem to accomplish but... get real. It was just another way to add something new to complain about. She was about over her bad relationships and finding some peace and digging the whole India things so now she whined about her inability to mediate. Until the life lesson came along (oh we readers never saw that coming, oh no!) and smacked her around and she could suddenly mediate. And her buddy Richard from Texas... once he arrived on the scene she seemed to quote him all the time, and do what he suggested. What happened to her guru?

In the final section of the book, which couldn't arrive fast enough, she stayed in Bali to just... relax i guess. To re-charge before she was going to return to the States. I knew nothing about Bali so the historical information is interesting and I was impressed with her analysis, I guess, of the Balinese people and customs. However, I about said "screw this stupid book" when she went out on the town with new friends, wore a dress and make up for the first time since leaving the States, flirted with men who flirted back and got drunk. Doesn't sound like a bad way to have an evening, does it? But nooooooooooooooo Gilbert suddenly finds herself seized with thoughts of her ex -husband and about her ex- boyfriend David and questioning everything. To me, if one night of drinking, dancing and flirting, was enough to undo all she had worked on for months, then she is weak. Seriously, she thought she had put her past where it belonged (behind her!) but one night flipped her out? And instead of using all that she had allegedly learned in her meditations and from her travels, she channels Richard, the guy from Texas friend she met in India who dispensed life advise and spiritual wisdom like a first graders dispensing Pez on the playground. I had had enough at that point. One evening out with guys and her life falls apart? Sad, pathetic and weak.

Her self depreciating humor left much to be desired. I felt a little of that went a long way. It just got to the point where it was annoying.

And after her rants and raves about the ills of marriage, her newly released sequel is all about how she got married. I think not. The word that screams in my head is "HYPOCRITE". I will NOT be reading about more Gilbert. The subtitle of her book is One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but I feel like after reading this tome, I knew exactly what she was searching for: a new husband, and she found him.

I wanted to like this book so much and I know my displeasure puts me in the minority. This was a NYT best seller, she was on every talk show in the land and it's been translated into a million languages, or something like that. I should like it: a woman my age gets to travel the world and write about it. Right up my alley, right? Should be my sort of thing! The last 30 days were a a trial for me, slogging through these pages. But Gilbert's constant whining and begging for sympathy made this a distasteful read for me. I'm glad it's done.