Life: It Goes On - March 30

Or does it? After battling a nasty cold that settled in my lungs for the past five days, it feels like life may be going on but it's going on without me!

Today it's supposed to get up to 73 degrees - this girl is planning on letting the sun help her heal with a book in my hands. It's a good excuse to sit around and read a lot but I'm getting so far behind on household stuff. The Big Guy's been a huge help - but then he gave me this stuff so he, ya know, owes me and I had to wait on him last week. We are, quite possibly, the dullest couple in America lately!


Here's What I'm:

Listening To: Still Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Librivox has redeemed itself and the book is easy enough to listen to (although I swear there was a set template that all girls' books of this period used).

Watching: Still basketball, plus The Voice and some old movies on TCM (including The Great Race yesterday - best cake fight scene ever!).

Reading: Finishing up Paul Adam's Paganini's Ghost then it's back to The Goldfinch so I'm ready for book club this month. I only have one scheduled review book for April so this weekend I put together a kind of plan for April reading to help me get caught up on those but what will come first is any body's guess!

Making: Chocolate peanut butter cookies.

Planning: On getting caught back up with 40 Bags In 40 Days this week.

Grateful for: Albuterol and Kleenex.

Baker's Candies - the green ones are my favorites!

Loving: Baker's chocolates. The Big Guy stopped at the factory the other day and brought me home a bag for a treat.

Feeling: Frustrated. I'm really starting to sound whiny in this post, aren't I?

Thinking: It's time for a trip to the garden store. We're got to change up some things with our gardens this year and I need to get some ideas for how to make that happen.

Looking forward to: Being productive again!

Hope you've had a better week! What are you looking forward to this week?

Late, As Usual, To The Bloggiesta Party

Four days, y'all, four days I had to do Bloggiesta this spring and here it is Saturday already and I'm just getting started! I caught a cold Tuesday that has knocked me on my butt and I've done almost nothing for the past five days. At least I don't have to make up an excuse to just sit on the computer for the next day or so! With a limited amount of time to work on the blog, my goals are modest:

1. Clean up email (of course!)

2. Clean up blog reader (I'm actually in good shape already with this one so it shouldn't take long)

3. Clean up downloads file

4. Clean up picture files

5. Set up spring reading plan

6. Check out the mini-challenges to see if there's anything that will help me
7. Update Challenges Page
8. Work on tags

Thanks to April at The Steadfast Reader for the mini-challenge urging us to work on the look of our blogs, you'll notice big changes have been made. I haven't been happy with the background for a while (that's not true, I loved the background but in my heart I knew it made things look too busy), the width of the columns and total blog and I've been toying with changing the sidebars for some time. What do you think of the changes?

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Published June 1992 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: downloaded to my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another...

In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon—when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an "outlander"—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord...1743.

Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire's destiny in soon inextricably intertwined with Clan MacKenzie and the forbidden Castle Leoch. She is catapulted without warning into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life ...and shatter her heart. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.

Her husband is two centuries away, she is related to her lover's mortal enemy, and her neighbors think she's a witch.


My Thoughts:
Sometimes I stumble across a book and pick it up because I'm drawn into it by the publisher's blurb alone. Sometimes I'll read a book because I get caught up in all of the buzz about it. And then there's Outlander which I was forced (yes, forced!) to read. I'm looking at you, Cheryl.

Clan MacKenzie Crest

I had never heard of this series until I started blogging and two things about it immediately put me off: time travel and the fact that it was part of a series that, at that time, was six novels and over 7000 pages long. I had no intention of starting something that might suck me into that much of a commitment.

But some people are persistent and when I found it was a Nook Daily Deal for only a couple of bucks, I bought it. A Goodreads readalong scheduled for February and March convinced me to read it sooner rather than later.

Soooo....yeah, after 764 pages, I'm not really sure how I feel about Outlander.

On the one hand, it turned out that the time travel thing didn't really bother me (although I think it might if I continued with the series). In fact, I enjoyed seeing how Claire juggled her modern sensibilities and medical knowledge with the knowledge that she couldn't let the truth about where she came from be known. Certainly it is a rollicking adventure, filled with intrigue, narrow escapes, very bad guys, and lots and lots of sex (frankly, well more of it than I needed to read about but which I know a lot of people really enjoy about this book!).

Clan MacKenzie tartan

What held me back, then, from thoroughly enjoying Outlander? The violence and brutality. I know, I know, it was a much different time and place. Still, three attempted rapes on the same character seemed excessive to me. And when Jaime literally beats Claire to teach her a lesson, my feminist hackles were raised, especially when she forgave him and he admitted to being turned on by it. Later he even says to her "...dinna suppose anyone's tried to hurt ye on purpose before, Sassenach." What??? He had just don't exactly that earlier! Don't even get me started on all of the brutality inflicted on Jaime. And every bit of every scene of violence is told with excoriating detail, including what it takes to try to mend the damage. It began to feel more than a little gratuitous to me.

The question now becomes, will I continue the series? You know by now that I'm not good about reading series any way, so even if I had loved this book, the chances are good that I never will pick up Dragonfly In Amber (the second book in the series). But...there's a part of me that really does want to see how Claire deals with the dilemma of changing the past and her own past (which is actually the future). And will she ever go back to Frank, her first husband? I suppose it comes down to this - if Dragonfly In Amber shows up as a Nook Daily Deal or on Barnes and Noble's clearance shelves or someone puts a copy in my hand, yes, I'll read it.

What might make me change my mind? The upcoming Starz series by the same name. The scenery, sets and casting look great and I'm a sucker for anything set in Scotland. Heck, the actor playing both Jack and Frank Randall even comes from the same clan as my ancestors. Now I just have to talk The Big Guy into paying the extra for the Starz channels!

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith
Published April 2014 by Spiegel and Grau
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
A beautiful young woman appears fully dressed in an overflowing bathtub at the Frangipani Hotel in Hanoi. A jaded teenage girl in Houston befriends an older Vietnamese gentleman she discovers naked behind a dumpster. A trucker in Saigon is asked to drive a dying young man home to his village. A plump Vietnamese-American teenager is sent to her elderly grandmother in Ho Chi Minh City to lose weight, only to be lured out of the house by the wafting aroma of freshly baked bread. In these evocative and always surprising stories, the supernatural coexists with the mundane lives of characters who struggle against the burdens of the past.

Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Kupersmith by her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background of them all is a larger ghost—that of the Vietnam War, whose legacy continues to haunt us.

My Thoughts:
As a person who grew up with the Vietnam War (and it's resulting unrest in the U.S.) as a fact of life, I've always been fascinated by this country and its history. It's no surprise, then, that I jumped at the chance to read this book, even with my spotty record with short story collections.

As with all short story collections I've read, there were uneven place in this collection but, overall, Kupersmith did not disappoint. Vietnamese culture and traditional ghosts and superstitions blend with the more recent ghosts of the Vietnamese war as Kupersmith tells the stories (and often lets her characters tell the stories) of those who live in Vietnam, those who fled the country and those who have returned. To be honest, some of the stories left me wondering if I had missed a deeper meaning, or at least some clue in the story that would have made me understand it better. But I'm a literalist (yes I did just make up a word), less inclined to allow myself to just fall into the fantasy so I'm sure some of that is on me, not Kupersmith.

In the opening Boat Story, where a Grandmother asks if we can ever really escape our past, Kupersmith reminds her readers that we all have our own ghosts even as she begins to introduce readers to a Vietnamese mindset that allows the unbelievable to be the means to explain the unexplainable.

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for allowing me to participate in this tour. Kupersmith is a young writer (younger than my oldest!) and I'm looking forward to reading more by her. I'm hoping she'll continue to draw on her own heritage for inspiration; she has a talent for making it come alive on the page. For other opinions about this book, check out the full tour.

Violet Kupersmith was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1989 and grew up outside of Philadelphia. Her father is American and her mother is a former boat refugee from Vietnam. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College she received a yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to teach and research in the Mekong Delta. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Life: It Goes On - March 23

Is it spring? Is it winter? Apparently Mother Nature's just not sure yet. Which, I suppose, is par for the course in March. But after the coldest winter EVER (okay, maybe not EVER, but in decades), I'm ready to be able to throw open windows, haul out the flower pots, and enjoy evenings on the patio.

In the meantime, 40 Bags In 40 Days continues and having to be inside is helping me make great progress with that. From things as small as reducing what I'm carrying in my purse to the pickup load that The Big Guy took to the landfill today, I'm making great progress. All this from someone who makes a regular habit of purging "stuff!"

Here's What I'm:

Listening To: I'm essentially caught up with podcasts so this week I'll start listening to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It's one of the books on my Classics Club challenge list. I've got some doubts about it but have given myself permission to give up on it early if I'm not enjoying it.

Watching: Miss H and I watched a couple of episodes of "Orange Is The New Black" on Netflix but mostly it's been a lot of basketball for this girl. My Husker men got knocked out early but the women are moving on and our Creighton Bluejays play their second game tonight. But I'll watch any game...and I have!

Reading: I finally finished Outlander and will have a review this week. Right now I'm reading The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith, also for a review this week.

Making: We're back to comfort food this week: asparagus/mushroom soup, brownies, homemade mac and cheese, and steel cut oatmeal.

Planning: We've been doing some major furniture rearranging this past week and we'll be getting that wrapped up this week and 40 Bags In 40 Days will continue. Even BG is getting on board!

Grateful for: A job where I could decide at 11:30 on Friday that I wanted to leave to go home and watch basketball and it was okay.

Loving: Seeing green in my lawn!

Feeling:  A lightness every time I finished sorting through a new area.

Thinking: I need to kick it up a notch on the working out and kick in with my new eating plan.

Looking forward to: Starting some building projects - shelves in a couple of rooms and a platform bed. I cannot find the shelves I need so I'm just going to have to make them. I have never used a power saw before - this could get interesting!

What have you been watching this week?

The List - Spring Reading

I missed the Top Ten Tuesday the other day where bloggers were encouraged to list the books they're hoping to read this spring so I'm  jumping on the bandwagon here.

I'll spend the first couple of weeks wrapping up my chunksters, Outlander  and  The Goldfinch and have a couple of TLC Book Tours on tap. Then I'm going to throw in a few books for review and try to finally get to my mysteries.

1. Casebook by Mona Simpson for a TLC Book Tour

2. The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith for a TLC Book Tour

3.  Paganini's Ghost by Paul Adam for Mystery May

4.  The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

5. The Kings and Queens of Roam by Daniel Wallace

6. There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband And He Hanged Himself : Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

7. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Silly me, I'd thought to list ten. Then I remembered spring is really only about two months long. This will do. I'll save those other books for summer...it will be  here before you know it! What are you looking forward to reading in the next couple of months?

Why No Reviews This Week?

Why no, no I have not finished one single book in the past two weeks. These two biggies are killing me! Now that I'm caught up with The Goldfinch, I'll finally be able to finish Outlander but The Goldfinch is getting set aside for a while to read a book for a scheduled review. So, maybe next week I'll actually have two reviews!