Bloggiesta Ole!

It's that time again - the time when book bloggers more or less say to our non-blogger readers "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" as we tinker with our blogs to make them better and more useful for our readers.

Bloggiesta started this morning and lasts through Sunday so you're going to be seeing a lot of Pedro this weekend: plan, edit, develop, review, organize. There will be mini-challenges as bloggers educate each other and we all work hard to learn something new that will improve our blogs. I'll be doing some learning and working to update some areas of my blog this weekend but mostly I'm going to be working to organize things. Here are my plans:

* clean up my labels   - done with this as much as I'm planning on doing (or not-looks like this will be ongoing)
* create a comprehensive list by title of all of the books I've reviewed here - in progress
* get caught up on my feed reader and clean it up
* learn to use Google tools to organize my review books better
* clean up my email
* create new header
* check out at least five of the mini-challenges and try to join in some of the Twitter conversations

Mini-Challenges:
1. The Bluestocking Society's Five Ways To Spiff Up Your Blog Challenge
2. Fiction State of Mind's Events Challenge
3. Melony's Musings Five Tips To Write Book Reviews Faster
4. Katie's Book Blog Twitter & You (finally feeding my post directly to Twitter!)
5. Beth Fish Reads:  Labels and Tags (oh, sure I found this one after I spent hrs on my tags & gave up on them--now back to it!

This is certainly less ambitious than the list I usually put together but I've absolutely got to get my taxes done this weekend and those pesky FAFSA applications completed (for those of you without college students, these are the apps for loans and they take even longer to complete than my taxes do!). Plus we'll be celebrating Easter with my side of the family Saturday so my time is limited. I'll likely stretch Bloggiesta out for the coming week as far as completing my personal projects!

***On a whim, because I thought it sounded like a lot more fun than cleaning up my tags, I decided to redesign the blog and FINALLY create a header that is more personal. I'm pretty happy with the result but dang, people, that was NOT fun!

Elegy for Eddie: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear

Elegy for Eddie: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
Published: March 27, 2012 by HarperCollins Publishing
Source: this copy courtesy of the publisher for TLC Book Tours

In this ninth book in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie and her team are hired by a group of costmongers (fruit and vegetable street venders) to investigate the suspicious death of Eddie Pettit. Maise grew up in the same neighbor hood as Eddie and knew him to be a kind, gentle, if somewhat slow person who was what we would now call a horse whisperer. The police refuse to investigate what appears to be merely an accident but these men Maisie has known all of her life are convinced that Eddie's death was no accident. As Maisie and her team begin to investigate, they quickly discover that there is much more to this case than simply the death of a common man. Set in 1933, Winspear brings the behind the scenes build up to the coming Second World War right into Maisie's life as her probing leads her to question a friend and brings the press and a certain Mr. Winston Churchill into the fray.

As with The Mapping of Love and Death, Elegy for Eddie is as much about Maisie as a person as it is about her as an investigator. In this book, Maisie, who appears to have a propensity for introspection, begins to question the motives behind her acts of kindness, her feelings about her new wealth and, above all, her feelings for Viscount James Compton.

Both of the Maisie Dobbs books I've read this month, could very easily be books about Maisie and her circle of friends that happen to have a mystery included as mystery stories that happen to rely heavily on the characters involved. For me, this is both a great asset to the books and a deterrent. Any time you write a series with recurring characters you have to make a choice - will the reader absolutely need to start at the beginning if they want to know what's going on with the characters or will you figure out a way to get new readers up to speed in each book. Winspear has made the latter choice, a choice I very much appreciated when I read The Mapping of Love and Death but here I did find it to be a bit in my way as I read. Still, easy enough to skim over those bits and get on with the lives of Billy, Sandra, Priscilla, James, Frankie, and, Maisie as they move forward with their lives, loves, and difficulties.

For other opinions about this book, check out Word Lily's review, Ryan's review at Wordsmithsonia, and Leeswammes' review. Thanks to TLC Book Tours for letting me help celebrate "March is Maisie Month!"

Whatever You Love by Louis Doughty

Whatever You Love ... can be taken away: A Novel by Louis Doughty
Published March 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: my copy was provided by the publisher for participation in a TLC Books Tour

"One thing I feared, and it befell,

and what I dreaded came to me.

No peace had I, nor calm, nor rest:

but torment came."  - The Book of Job 3:25

Laura Needham opens her door to find two police officers on her front porch bringing her the worst news that a parent can hear - her nine-year-old daughter has been killed. For Laura, who has been grappling the past couple of years with the disintegration of her marriage, this loss brings on unimaginable grief and anger. As the days following her daughter's death stretch into weeks and then months, Laura spirals further and further out of control. Her rage toward the driver who accidentally killed her daughter drives Laura to discover just how far she will go to revenge the loss of her daughter.

"Most of the time, the knowledge of Betty's absence is a complicated pain, a mixture of anger and confusion and disbelief, but every now and then, there is a moment like this-pain as unalloyed as a sliver of glass, a moment when I cannot believe that I do not die of it as surely as I would die if someone thrust a very thin knife through my chest and out the other side."

There is so much more to the story than just the death of nine-year-old Betty. Laura has grown up without her father (who died when she was an infant), she has spent most of her life nursing her mother (because of Parkinson's disease) and the betrayal of her husband (who has left her for another woman).

Doughty spends much of the book on the relationship between Laura and her ex-husband, David. I was so invested in Laura's grief that, as much as the story of Laura and David fascinated me (it was a relationship that was at once childish and obsessive), I was a little put off by it interrupting the very real pain of Betty's death. Then half way through the book, Doughty hit me with this: right up until the day the police showed up at her door, Laura was able to survive the divorce because she knew that she would always have Betty. When Betty "went away," Laura lost that anchor. And a light bulb went on over my head. That is exactly how I would feel in the same situation. Much has I am almost certain that I would feel the same combination of numbness, pain and rage that Laura felt.

I am just knocked out by the effect that Doughty's writing had on me. When I sat down to write this review, there were so many post-it notes sticking out of my book, I didn't know where to begin.

"...there are things we know in our brains and things we know in our bones. I've learned to trust the bones. Eventually, the bones sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the bag containing my newly heeled shoes and my mail toward me, delicately, as if it was a box of chocolates I had been saving as a treat."

Whatever You Love is, cliche as it may be, one of those books that I could not put down. Until 300 pages into the book and then I, literally, dropped the book. I could not, still cannot, believe where Doughty went with the story. I said that word that my mom doesn't like me to say - which wasn't entirely my fault because Doughty had just used it as well. We had definitely reached a point in the story that I could not imagine being my reaction to what was happening. When I finally picked the book back up, though, I found myself racing through the last 70 pages, now completely unaware of where Doughty might be heading with the story. And you know what? I liked that just as much I loved the way Whatever You Love had made me feel completely connected to Laura.

Not for the faint of heart, but I would definitely recommend Whatever You Love for book clubs.  For other opinions about the book, check out the full tour at TLC Book Tours. To learn more about Louise Doughty's other books and writings, check out her website.

Guest Post - Rainbow Rowell, Author of "Attachments"

Please join me today in welcoming to Lit and Life Rainbow Rowell, author of Attachments, which comes out in paperback this today. My review of Attachments can be found here; I found it to be a lot of fun with unexpected depth. Penguin Group has kindly offered a copy of the book to one lucky winner. Please leave a comment telling me about something funny that's happened to you at work, by Sunday, April 1 (U.S. residents only). It's not a surprise that the book is fun - Rainbow is a lot of fun! Here's what she has to say about developing her characters for this book:

"When I started writing Attachments, I felt it was a story about friendship. Specifically the way email has changed women’s friendships.

When I was a kid, my mom would have marathon phone calls with her best friends. It’s how they stayed caught up with each other’s lives.

But email changed that, especially for women who work outside the home. When I need to update my friends on my life, I turn to my keyboard.

So I imagined writing this book that captured a digital friendship. Beth and Jennifer’s relationship really lives in their inboxes. Most of their joking, hanging out – even comforting each other – happens screen to screen.

I wrote all of their email conversations first, always knowing that there would be a third character in their story – Lincoln, the IT guy whose job it is to monitor their company’s email.

But I didn’t give him much thought. He was just “the guy who’s going to fall in love with Beth.” Once I’d written the Beth/Jennifer parts, I went back to the beginning of the book to write Lincoln . . .

That’s when I realized that I was writing a book about a guy.

Though Beth and Jennifer are important, Lincoln is the main character of Attachments. Everything happens from his point of view. I wrote Beth and Jennifer through their fingertips, but I had to write Lincoln from inside his head.

Which was really scary.

I don’t know what it’s like inside of a 28-year-old guy’s head. Just thinking about it made me set my manuscript aside for a few months. I thought that my narration would sound like a woman who was trying to sound like a man. Like writing in drag.

I did get over that eventually. I just thought of all the male authors I knew who wrote great women characters. “Lincoln is a man,” I told myself. “Not a unicorn. You can do this.”

Once I started writing Lincoln, his point of view felt completely natural to me. I felt so comfortable in his head that the entire story shifted around him – it became his book…his story.

Though Attachments is still a book about friendship – it’s more about purpose.

All three of the characters, but especially Lincoln, has reached that point in their late 20s where they realize that they can’t just wait for life to deliver the things that they want: Love. A family. Fulfilling work. Lincoln has been waiting for these things to fall on his head, but he’s never put himself out there far enough to get hit.

Attachments, through Lincoln’s eyes, became a book about vulnerability – about getting in life’s way to make sure that it doesn’t pass you by."

Thanks, Rainbow! I can't wait to get my hands on the next book, Eleanor and Park!

Sunday Salon - March 25

As I'm typing this up (at a ridiculously late hour on Saturday night or ridiculously early hour on Sunday morning, whichever way you prefer to think of it), I'm smelling my breakfast cooking in the crockpot. One of the things I've discovered about blogging is that I'm learning about all kinds of things other than books from the bloggers I follow. When Trish, from Love, Laughter and A Touch of Insanity, was enacting Operation Use My Crockpot, she tried and shared a recipe for steel cut oatmeal. I've been wanting to try steel cut oats since first reading about them in Peter Geye's Safe From The Sea and Trish finally gave me the push I needed. The recipe I'm using has apples, raisins and cinnamon and smells fantastic!

I was looking through my calendar today (or, again, yesterday, depending on your point of view) and see that I'm starting to dig myself a hole with review books again. I had been doing such a great job of saying "no" and making a dent in my commitments. But dang, there have just been so many great books available lately. You may have noticed that this has not stopped me from signing up for another challenge and even upping the number of books I'm going to try to read for the Historical Fiction challenge. For those of you who are musical fans, I feel a bit like Ado Annie..."I'm just a girl who cain't say no" (except not in that easy virtue kind of way!).

I've got a couple of reviews coming up this week, which means I need to go to bed so I can have the energy to finish the books in time. I'll be finishing up for review Jacqueline Winspear's Elegy For Eddie, the latest Maisie Dobbs book, for later this week and Wednesday I'll be reviewing Louise Doughty's Whatever You Love. Of course, I'm still working away on Bleak House so Friday will be an update for that. What are you reading this week?

Once Upon A Time VI

Ever since I began blogging, I've been intrigued by the RIP Challenge, hosted by Carl of Stainless Steel Droppings, in the fall. I have no idea how I've missed that Carl also has been hosting a spring challenge called Once Upon A Time. This is a challenge custom made for me - there are four genres of books that are included in the challenge: fairy tale, folklore, fantasy and mythology. Given the number of books I've committed to for review in the coming months, I'm hesitant to jump into this challenge. But since I can also make it work with other challenges I'm participating in, I'm going to push myself a bit a join at the Quest the Second level which means that I'll be reading one book from each category between now and June 19th.

 

There is also a Short Story Quest and Quest on Screen and I'm planning to participate in both of those as well.

As you know, I'll have no trouble picking out books for the fairy tale and mythology genres and I think I've already chosen my folklore book but I need your help with the fantasy book. What would you suggest?

Bleak House Read-a-Long Week 4

Once again, this week I found myself begin grateful that I'm working on this one as part of a group, with a sense of obligation to keep reading so that I can join the discussion. During the same period I was trying to wade through this week's chapters, I was also
reading The Sun Also Rises. Boy, did Dickens give me an appreciation for Hemingway's succinct style!

What I Liked This Week: 
Some of the characters are starting to overlap stories. The household Jarndyce chanced to meet up with Lady Dedlock, a new character brings up a tie to Esther that Guppy learns about, and a mysterious "servant," who is clearly a lady (methinks Lady Dedlock) asks Jo to show her the haunts of Nemo, a character we have only met in death.

What I Didn't Like This Week:
Really, Dickens? More new characters?  At least this time there appears to be a reason for introducing them but did we really need so much buildup of them? My husband read this book as part of a college English literature course. I can't imagine trying to keep track of all of these characters and be able to ascribe a purpose for their inclusion even as you are trying to race through the book to get it read in the short period of time you have to read a book in school.