Inspired by Hannah's impressive end of year book list last year, I decided to keep track of what I read in 2008. Life interfered some months, or I'd start a few at once, and end up finishing them the following month.  All told I finished 40 books in 2008.  I meant to review as I went along, but it just didn't happen (with a few exceptions).

January

1. Atonement – Ian McEwan: enjoyable, though slow at moments.  The most engrossing part?  A really well-written sex scene in the library.

2. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – Marina Leywka: Short and fun.  Would recommend.  Reviewed it here.

3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling:  I delayed reading the last book just because I wasn't quite ready to be done with Harry and Hogwarts.  I enjoyed it the most of all the books in the series and thought the ending was perfect.

 

February

4. Austenland – Shannon Hale: Good, fluffy read about an Austen fan who predictably finds her own Mr.Darcy.

5. Shadow of the Wind – Carols Ruiz Zafon: Came highly recommended by a friend of mine.  Took a while to get into it, but once I was I could not put it down.

6. Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro:  Creepy at times, but definitely thought-provoking and beautifully-written.

7. The Wonder Spot – Melissa Banks: Fun and light.

8.  Little Children – Tom Perrotta: It was so close to the film (which I saw first) that it was a bit boring.  Still Perrotta nails suburbian angst to perfection.

 

March

9. Naptime is the new happy hour – Stefanie Wilder-Taylor:  Reviewed this one here.

 

April

10. Traveling Mercies – Anne Lamott:  I <3 Anne Lamott.  What else is there to say?  This a collection of her thoughts on faith.  She's an unorthodox Christian, and I really dig that.

 

May

11. A Widow for one year – John Irving:  Read it over a weekend.  Though I can't remember too much of it in hindsight.  Is that strange?

12.  The Yummy Mummy Manifesto – Anna Johnson:  Reviewed it here.

13.  The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver (re-read for book club):  As I recently commented elsewhere in blogland, this is not a feel-good novel.  But, it is incredible.  Characters are so distinct you'll think it's a biography and writing so rich I longed to write at her level.

 

June

14. Middlesex – Jeffery Euginides:  Insightful, funny, and quite frankly one of the best books I read all year.  P.S it's about a hermaphrodite, but not in the least bit creepy.

 

July

15.  A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (read for a book club):  Enjoyed it, but also found it diffcult to read at times.  Didn't like it as much as other John Irving books I've read.

16.  The Memory Keeper’s Daughter – Kim Edwards:  Kept my interest initially, but didn't love it.

17.  This Charming Man – Marian Keyes:  I will read anything Marian Keyes writes and usually love it.  This was no exception.  She falls in chick lit territory, but her stories aren't as vapid and cliched as other novels in that genre.

 

August

18.  On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan: About the unravelling of a marriage.  Don't remember much else about it.  Written in typical McEwan meandering style.

19.  Four Seasons in Rome – Anthony Doerr:  Memoir about a writer who wins a fellowship to Rome and goes for a year with his wife and twin boys. It brought back fond memories of Rome, and as a writer I couldn't help fantasizing that I would win the same fellowship someday and be paid to write in the Eternal City.

20.  Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith – Anne Lamott:  Didn't adore it as much as Traveling Mercies, but it had some good moments.

21.  Lullabies for little criminals – Heather O’Neill: Dark, but excellent.  Made me cherish my sometimes boring childhood.

 

September

22. Odyssey of Homer – Richard Lattimore translation (read for class):  Read first in high school, and found it much more palatable as an adult.

23.  Free Food for Millionaires – Min Jin Lee: Rather long, but engrossing novel about a young woman in New York.  Enjoyable, but possibly could have been edited a bit.

24.  Carry on Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse:  Light and easy to digest short stories about the always impressive butler Jeeves.

 

October

25.  The Ramayana – R.K. Narayan (read for class):  Quintessential Indian epic. Thankfully easy to read.

26.  Recognition of Sakuntala – Kalidasa (play read for class):  Japanese drama that was painful to read.  Seriously, I hated it.

27.  StoriTelling – Tori Spelling:  Yes, I'm actually admitting I read this.  It was - in my defense - given to me by a friend who said it wasn't bad.  And was it bad?  Not really.  But, only if you see it as long-form US Weekly. 

28.  The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett:  Short and delightful read.  Fiction about how the Queen of England re-discovers reading and basically can't stop.  Thanks Cori.

29. Twilight – Stephenie Meyer:  I resisted for months.  I did.  I heard over and over that it was worth reading.  But, a young adult book about vampires and first love?  Finally, a close friend (you know who you are because we salivated over Robert Pattison in the theater together) convinced me to try it.  I mean, this friend is getting her Masters in Literature - I trust her!  Stephenie Meyer's not in line to win any critical acclaim and certainly her books are flawed, but all of the Twilighters out there are proof that she can weave a good tale.

 

November

30. Tale of the Genji – Lady Murasaki (read for class):  Not a bad Japanese novel, but it interfered with my ability to get through the Twilight series, so I was bitter.

31. New Moon - Stephenie Meyer:  Devoured.  See Twilight.

32. Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer:  See above.

33. Breaking Dawn - Stephenie Meyer:  Darker tone and heavier on the vampire "culture", which I actually liked (other readers did not).  Read it in a few hours, then re-read it a second time because I wasn't ready to let the series go.

34.  Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood: My return to adult fiction, and a great read.  If you've read the Odyssey and wondered what Penelope was really thinking, this novella is the answer.

35. When you are engulfed in flames – David Sedaris:  Usually I love anything he writes, but this one was just sort of meh.  David are you getting too comfortable with success?

36. Arabian Nights – Husain Haddawy translation (read for class): Enjoyable, but not something I would pick up on my own.

 

December

37. The Inferno – Dante (read for class):  My favorite assigned reading for the semester.  According to Dante I'd probably be headed toward some circle in Upper Hell, but I didn't let that marr my enjoyment of it.

38. An exact replica of a figment of my imagination – Elizabeth McCracken:  Heartbreaking memoir, but therapuetic to read.  A woman gives birth to a stillborn, then goes on to give birth to a healthy son later that year.  That kind of loss made me weep repeatedly, but like I said, in a good way.

39.  The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri:  Intelligent, enjoyable, and well worth the read.

40.  White Oleander – Janet Fitch:  Another great novel where I thanked God for my staid, but stable childhood.

Picture the following: A toy-strewn living room, a kitchen where the dishes haven’t magically loaded themselves into the dishwasher, a wild toddler sans underpants, but covered in stickers, and me - clad in a pair of black yoga pants and t-shirt.  My life as I knew it and the white carpet in the house really haven’t been the same since my daughter’s blessed arrival.
 

So, when The Yummy Mummy Manifesto flew into radar, I was intrigued. 

The subtitle is Baby, Beauty, Balance, and Bliss….all very important B words.  It’s meant to be a book of advice and reflections on the wide mental and physical world of motherhood.  And as you probably know, I love my mommy books.

 

The author, Anna Johnson, defines Yummy as “joyous, naughty, delicious, creative, intrepid, and sensually alive”, and concedes that mothering in this fashion is not taking the easy or popular road.  She covers everything from style to nutrition to running a house and how to stay sane.

 

The heart of the book is valuable and holds an inspired message.  Despite sometimes feeling like just a “cradle and service station”, or guilty about any combination of things, she reminds mothers to follow our instincts. 

 

That said, parts of the book resemble a narcissistic monologue on bohemian mothering, which may be world’s apart from your own experience.  I found myself taking little gems and skipping over other chapters completely (particularly some of the pregnancy-related ones). 

For example, she completely lost me when she devoted pages on pages about “utterly scrumptious names” (Nothing could make me name my son Adonis or daughter Gogo), but then reeled me back in with this sentence:

“Until I finally joined the ranks, I hated every homily I heard about the lifestyle, commitment, and knotty conundrums of motherhood.”

Followed with:

“Erma Bombeck carried on about domestic angst and housewife hell with a dry, endless cackle, but now I realize she was a Buddha of suburbia.  Only a Zen master could sail through all this smiling, and monks don’t mother.  They meditate.” 

Another favorite: “It’s a passion and it’s a job, and just because it needs to be done, it shouldn’t obliterate the identity and importance of the woman doing it.”

Reading The Yummy Mummy Manifesto is a bit like listening to an older sister you both admire and question.  Some of what she says will be dead on helpful and affirming, and other parts are just going to cause you to roll your eyes.  I believe that’s because Johnson writes in a candid tone, and her book isn't meant to be an instruction manual.  It's written more like a blog - something to be savored bit by bit, but not used as a rigorous reference.

A humorous book on motherhood?  Yes, please.  After all, even though “it’s the hardest job you’ll ever love”, if we all took motherhood too seriously we would literally tear our hair out, or take the first flight out of town.  I’ve seen far too many new mothers hunt for the elusive ideal of motherhood, wherein you ALWAYS feed your child something healthy, NEVER let them watch TV, and OTHERWISE beat your sleep-deprived psyche to a bloody pulp. 

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s follow-up to Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, is Naptime is the New Happy Hour – a funny, honest collection of scenes with a toddler.  She covers the joys of potty training, choosing a preschool, tantrums, and dealing with those Smug Moms you just want to punch. 

 

Wilder-Taylor is unapologetic about her toddler’s TV habit and cookie consumption, and honestly dishes about her mixed feelings on suburbia.  Her book was easy to read, possibly because she’s written down thoughts that I’ve had in my head, but not uttered out loud (or only to close friends), reaffirming that while I love my child completely, I’m not a “bad mother” for occasionally setting my child in front of the TV so I can take a shower or catch up on reading blogs (oops, did I just admit that?).

 

Her account of flying with her toddler and hating her a little afterwards hit a little close to home, and her chapter on stay-at-home versus work-outside-of-the-home was honest and quite comforting.

 

She is a little heavy on the joke of medicating herself, with heavy doses of sarcasm, which made me feel occasionally like I was reading the literary equivalent of stand-up comedy, but looking aside that one aspect, I found myself reading it whenever I had little pockets of time. 

 

In the end, life with a toddler is frustrating, rewarding, and quite frequently funny, if you choose to see it that way.  Naptime is the new Happy Hour definitely captures those funny moments, and in easily digestible bites.

Just finished an enjoyable and charming novel.  Thanks to Hannahbanana, who mentioned it in one of her posts.  The premise sounded so intriguing that I had to pick it up.

Summary from the New Yorker - Two estranged sisters living in England discover that their addled elderly father, a Ukrainian war refugee and expert on tractors, is planning to marry a young, enormous-breasted woman who sees his modest pension as her ticket to capitalist comfort. The sisters put aside their differences, and embark on a spirited campaign to save him from boil-in-the-bag dinners, slovenly housekeeping, and such extravagant purchases as a broken-down Rolls-Royce. In the midst of these machinations—which include long-winded letters to solicitors, venomous gossip, and all-out spying—Lewycka stealthily reveals how the depredations of the past century dictate what a family can bear.

What starts as a humorous story about the narrator's father marrying a big-breasted young tart, blossoms into an authentic look at family dynamics, the sacrifices we make for one another, and the tie immigrants have to their "birth country".  I rode the emotional rollercoaster with the narrator, and felt very satisfied with the end.  Lewycka's characters are full-bodied, lovable (even the "villainess"), and remarkably real.

I'll leave you with the first three lines of the novel, which for me was the equivalent of "you had me at hello":
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee.  He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six.  She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.

Like all great fiction does, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony gripped me from the first sentence:

“Out!  Out!  Out!”  The first words Julian Wainwright ever spoke, according to his father, Richard Wainwright III, graduate of Yale and grand lubricator of the economic machinery, and Julian’s mother, Constance Wainwright, Wellesley graduate and descendant of a long family of Pennsylvania Republicans.

 

Though Julian is the epitome of upper-east-side, white, male privilege, the book isn’t about that.  As the title indicates the story is really about the relationship that Julian, a writer, has with Mia, a college classmate he fortuitously meets in the laundry room.  The book chronicles their lives from their infatuation to commitment, and examines all the complex layers that become the foundation of a long-term relationship.

 

This novel was very enjoyable to read.  I cared deeply about each of the characters because Henkin created them so beautifully.  As I read, and developed a better sense of who they were, I befriended them.  I started to care where they were going, and how they were going to come out of certain situations.  Undoubtedly, a sign that Henkin has written strong, multi-dimensional characters. 

 

As a writer, I also derived delight from reading about a fellow writer, and being able to relate to a lot of the struggles he faces professionally.  While some of the plot points were predictable, that actually didn’t work against the novel.  Henkin’s portrayal of relationships is honest, and didn’t fail to encompass the struggles, joys, comforts, and anxieties of relationships.

 

If you’re looking for a thrill or action, this isn’t your book, but if you’re looking for a smart piece of fiction that delves into the subtleties of long-term romantic relationships, this book is for definitely you.

I often contemplate the complex, bittersweet nature of modern motherhood.  So, when I discovered Naomi Stadlen’s book What Mothers Do: Especially when it looks like Nothing, I was certainly intrigued.  The summary states that amid today’s “Mommy Wars” (contradictory theories on how to raise children, and mothers who disagree on them), we often “lose sight of what mothers do on a day-to-day basis and how important these seemingly insignificant tasks are in shaping the lives of their young children”.   Stadlen asserts that a mothering lexicon needs to be created, as many mother’s don’t feel they are “doing anything”, when in fact they are “generously mothering”.  She declares that without positive terminology for everyday mothering tasks, mothers don’t take credit where they should.  For example, the two words negligent and overprotective indicate either too much or too little attention on the part of mothers.  There isn’t a word that exists for “protecting her child the right amount” – which would in turn help mothers everywhere feel like they were doing a good job.   

 

Stadlen conducted extensive interviews with mothers as research, and writes on subjects including “getting nothing done all day”, “being so tired I could die”, and “snapping at my partner” – sounds like a typical day to me!  Stadlen addresses a group of women who may have left their careers and co-workers in the “mainstream” for a “solitary journey” of staying at home with their babies.  She acknowledges that seeking out fellow mothers is sometimes more daunting than having a built in social network of co-workers. 

 

She describes how many modern mothers may be overwhelmed by the brave new world of mothering, as they may never have been exposed to child-tending before giving birth.  In today’s society, work and motherhood are segregated, while in the past, women would literally bring their babies to work, which created a community focused child-rearing system.  This also enabled non-mothers to learn about mothering before they actually had their own children.

 

One of the perfect examples Stadlen gives for illustrating what mothers do, but don’t realize, is grocery shopping.  Mothers (who have their babies and/or young children with them) have two jobs when at the store.  Not only is she shopping for food, she is “mothering” – which encompasses demonstrating “supermarket behavior” (choosing items, paying for them, etc.), showing personal values (calculating price), and how she relates to the checkout staff.  “Everything takes twice as long, and she has to keep switching her attention from the adult shopping world to the child world.  If we don’t recognize the mothering portion of the job, we can’t be pleased we have combined two jobs reasonably well, instead focusing on being annoyed with doing one job badly.” 

 

Stadlen’s call for a mothering lexicon is quite radical, since she’s effectively asking us to change the way we look at everything a mother does.  She is asking mothers everywhere to stop feeling responsible for “failures” (like babies not sleeping thru the night) and start realizing all of the positive actions mothers take naturally.  I love that she’s reaffirming what is a sometimes daunting, and exhausting life, and reminding mothers that the experience of motherhood is amazing work.  It seems so many books tell mothers what we "should" be doing, whereas this book acknowledges what we already do, that we may take for granted.

 

I wish I had this book in the early days of motherhood, when I was overwhelmed by a new world with a baby who mysteriously showed up without an instruction manual.  While I eventually found my confidence in my mothering skills, it wasn’t without the help of other mothers affirming my thoughts, and acknowledging the seemingly little tasks that filled my days were in fact significant.  I'd highly recommended this book for all new mothers, as well as for those of us moms who need a reminder of all the good we actually do.   

I’m predictable in the sense that I will almost always read fiction written by Asian or Asian-American women.  No doubt I’m looking for characters that I can relate to in some way.  An additional bonus is the possibility of gleaning a bit of history and/or exploring a perspective I wouldn’t normally glimpse.  So, it was with these expectations that I picked up February Flowers, written by Fan Wu. 

 

The novel is set in China in the early 90’s, and centers around two young women attending college.  It opens with the tidbit that the women – who were very close during college – are no longer in contact.  It would be a stretch to say it’s suspenseful, but the mystery of why they eventually part ways is somewhat intriguing.

 

After a slow, meandering start of contrasting the qualities of women in an unlikely friendship, the book begins to provide some possible answers to why these women are attracted to each other at all. 

 

The younger student, Chen Ming, is the narrator.  She’s studious, comes from an intellectual family, and is somewhat cautious when it comes to dating and life in general.  We learn quickly that she’s somewhat withdrawn compared to her peers.  She is portrayed preferring books to people, until she meets Miao Yan.  The author teases us with details about the mysterious Yan (who is four years older than Ming).  We learn about her bit by bit, as Ming does.  Though we know right away she’s a wilder, sensual, less traditional figure from the start.  Their glue seems to be a curiosity about each other, as their approaches and choices are diametrical.  Since their friendship isn’t borne out of a sense of similarity, as a reader, you know that at some point they’ll be at odds with one another. 

 

It seems these women could be metaphors for old China and modern China, and how the traditional population and those with modern ways of thinking are attempting to co-exist and learn from each other.  The passages in this novel describing the Chinese city of Guangzhou were insightful and intriguing.  The city itself is transitioning from old to new, just as the girls are becoming women.

 

In summary, this is a coming of age story, as well as a perspective of the complicated nature of young female friendship.  They fall in infatuation with each other, the way only young people can.  For whatever reason I never fully invested in either of the characters.  So, personally the novel lacked the emotional draw that characterizes fiction I'll re-read and savor.  Though I would still recommend this book to anyone who is interested in reading about China, and/or coming of age stories.