Top Ten Books I Wouldn't Mind Santa Bringing Me

This week the gals at The Broke and The Bookish have asked us to list the top ten books we wouldn't mind Santa bringing us. For me, this is purely an exercise in thinking which books I want to buy next since NO ONE in my family will buy me a book. Just because I could open a lending library of unread books doesn't mean I don't want new ones!

In no particular order, here's what I'd love to find in my stocking:

1. The Absolutist by John Boyne -this one was first brought to my attention by Ryan of Wordsmithonia.

2. The Whipping Club by Deborah Harry - Lisa at Bibliomaniac is the one who convinced me this one is a must read.

3. Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich - this one's been on my radar but Heather from Raging Bibliomania convinced me to read it when she called it "incredibly evocative."

4. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver - Diane, of Bibliophile by the Sea, compared the writing in this one to Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. That's all it took for me to need it.

5. Lots of Cake, Plenty of Candles by Anna Quindlen - just because I liked her last book so much.

6. Middlemarch by George Eliot - because, really, it's just time to get to this one.

7. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar - a girl can never have enough fairy tales!

8. Half The Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity by Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - I love to read books about women being empowered.

9. You Know When The Men Are Gone by Siobahn Fallon -well, my goodness, everyone loved it; what more do I need to say?

10. A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash - Santa's going to have to get me an ARC of this one since it doesn't come out for another month after Christmas. But when you compare the writing to Ron Rash and Tom Franklin, I know I need to read it.

What books would you like Santa to bring you this year?

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
Published June 2006 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: I bought the audio edition of this book at the Friends of the Omaha Public Library weekly book sale

Publisher's Summary:

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor. The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

My thoughts:

I've listened to a far number of audiobooks at this point. Some of the readers have all but ruined the book for me (Andre Dubus III's The Garden Of Last Days, for example), others have helped draw me even further into the book (Toni Morrison's a mercy). As narrated, in my (previously unknown to me) abridged version of this book, Boyd Gaines helps put The Dante Club squarely in to the second category. Granted, there were very few female voices for him to try to master (even those he managed just fine), and Pearl's writing makes it less imperative for him to have an absolutely unique voice for each male character. Still, Gaines has managed to do just that.

The Dante Club starts off fast and never lets down (at least not in the abridged version) but Pearl still manages to work in a great deal of detail about Dante and the members of the club as background. Along the way, Pearl throws in enough red herrings to throw the reader off, but also throws in enough clues to help the reader, at least looking back, think "oh yeah, I see that now." I'm a little frustrated to find that I have not read the full book but I also think that, for driving, the six hour length of this edition makes this one easy to follow along.

Sunday Salon - December 2

Greetings from sunny, warm Omaha. I can't believe I can actually say that in December!

Here's What I'm:

Listening To:  Junot Diaz' The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. The jury's still out on this one but the narrator is wonderful and really helping me feel the mood of the writing.

Watching: "Elf" - 'tis the season! Maybe it's because we only watch "Elf" once a year (well, okay, maybe we do watch it a couple of times but only in December), it's still funny every time we watch it and it's a movie the entire family enjoys.

Reading: I just started Dan Stephenson's The Underwater Window but haven't had much time to read this weekend so I'm not in far. It looks to be a quick read so I'll start Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers later this week for the Omaha Bookworms December meeting. What are you reading this week?

Making: I'm joining Trish's Pin It And Do It Challenge for the holidays and I'm on a roll, although not everything is holiday related. This morning I made herbed frozen oil cubes and coffee ice cubes. Later I'll be putting finishing touches on a couple of holiday decorative ideas I got from Pinterest. The Big Guy just rolls his eyes every time I say " I got this idea from Pinterest."

Planning:To remain calm and stress free throughout the holidays. Last year was such a terrible December for me; I'm bound and determined that this year will make me forget that. I did such a great job on enjoying the fall and I want to keep that attitude throughout December. I've prioritized things and made lists and a schedule to help

Grateful for: It's December 2nd and I have windows open!

Loving: Playing with new ideas for Christmas decorating. I'm usually too cheap to buy new things for decorating this time of year since I already have so much, but I'm having a blast being creative, using what I have and finding what I want to add on a budget.

Looking forward to: Holiday baking - my family and I do a lot of the baking together and it's one of my favorite things about the holidays. Do you have traditions that you especially look forward to every year?

I'm also looking forward to 2013. I'll be talking more this month about the things I'm excited about in the coming year.

The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn

The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn
Published September 2008 by Penguin Group
Source: I bought my copy after reading Flinn's The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

Publisher's Summary:

This is the funny and inspiring account of Kathleen Flinn’s struggle in a stew of hot-tempered chefs, competitive classmates, her own “wretchedly inadequate” French, and the basics of French cuisine. Flinn was a thirty-six-year-old middle manager trapped on the corporate ladder—until her boss eliminated her job. So she cashed in her savings and moved to Paris to pursue her lifelong dream of attending the venerable Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.  

My Thoughts:

Having read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, I had some idea going into this book what Flinn's writing style would be; even so, I was surprised by her willingness to be self-deprecating. I admired her courage in pursuing her dream, a dream she had had since she was a little girl. When you were having a play tea party, she was running a pretend restaurant. But she is the first to admit that she was woefully ill prepared for the coursework and for living in Paris.

The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry is as much a book about Flinn's romance with her now-husband, Mike and I must admit that I could have done with a little less of the romance and a little more about their time spent exploring Paris when Flinn wasn't in school. When Julia Child's wrote My Life In France, she found a way to meld  her life with husband, Paul, with the culture and food of France beautifully. On the other hand, I learned a lot more about the way the school teaches from Flinn than I did from Child. I also learned that I like to buy meat that retains no resemblance to the animal it came from. In France, apparently, rabbits are sold whole, skinned but with the head still intact...so you'll know you're not buying a cat. Really.

Some reviews have given Flinn some grief for using food as a metaphor for life lessons. Which seems a little silly to me; this is, after all, a person who was making major life changes while spending every day with food. Give the girl a break people. And it's true, the sharper your knife, the less you cry. Also the easier it will be to get stitches. Just sayin'.

As with her previous book (well, not her previous book but the book she'd written later but which I read first - would have been much faster just to name it; I see that now), Flinn includes recipes at the end of every chapter. These are more complicated, but definitely scaled down from the inspiration food prepared in the chapter and there are definitely some here I will be trying.

That wraps up this year's edition of Fall Feasting. Once again I didn't get anywhere near to reading all of the foodie books on my shelf. Which, as it turns out, sets me up perfectly for one of 2013's reading challenges. Or next year's Fall Feasting.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Originally published in 1945 by Viking
Source: Sometimes it's a good thing my husband never got rid of a book in got in college - that's where we got our copy which was published in 1981 by Bantam

Publisher's Summary:

Cannery Row paints a picture of West Coast neighborhood life in the era following the Great Depression. Mack, the leader of a group of local bums, decides that he wants to do something nice for Doc, a marine biologist and neighborhood genius, so he throws Doc a party in his lab. When Doc returns home—late because he was doing research on the seashore—the party is already over and his lab has been trashed. Ashamed of the mess they’ve made, Mack and his friends make another attempt at celebrating Doc, this time with more success. A series of vignettes, introducing other residents such as Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer who extends credit to help Mack with his party, and Dora, the kind-hearted madam of the local brothel, complements the main story and offers a rich panorama of life on Cannery Row.  

My Thoughts: 
Well color me embarrassed. I've avoided Cannery Row (much as I have all of Steinbeck) for decades because I had this impression in my mind that it would be a story dripping with testosterone and depressing as hell. Well, sure it is a novella largely populated by men, but it never feels like a book solely written to appeal to men. And it is not, in any way, depressing. It is, at it's heart, about friendship, camaraderie, and being content with the life you have. There is a couple that lives in an old locomotive boiler for heaven's sake, and they are just fine with that.

Using a series of vignettes to introduce his characters, Steinbeck weaves their subplots into the greater plot. Although, to be honest, it's not really much of a plot, more of a way to tie all of the characters together. And what great characters they are. Most are more flawed than not but Steinbeck takes care to portray the good as well as the bad. Mack and his friends have no qualms about stealing the things they need or manipulating people to get what they want yet they twice work together to plan a party for Doc.

And let's be honest, nobody writes like Steinbeck, whether or not you like his stories:

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust, and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots, and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses."

You can just picture it, can't you? Three Steinbeck novellas, two successes. I think I'm just about ready to tackle one of the biggies. Anyone up for an East of Eden readalong?

Sunday Salon - November 25

Good morning, all! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and survived Black Friday. We were remarkably sane in our Black Friday shopping (having had such a miserable experience last year) even though we did head out the door at 5:30 a.m. We refused to shop on Thanksgiving - we were all in agreement that employees should not have to give up that day - and we were not in the least interested in being at any store when the doors opened. We may have missed a couple of things we were interested in but all came home with plenty of great buys and our sanity.

Here's What I'm:

Listening To: Oh yeah, it's Christmas music time! One of my favorites is Neal and Leandra's "Listen To The Angels." Have I mentioned before how much I love this duo? Yeah, I probably have.

Watching: "Gone With The Wind" and "Midway" with my extended family the way only we can do it. Which is to say that "Gone With The Wind" is now R-rated and politically incorrect. "Midway," a very serious World War II movie by any standard, is a raucous comedy (and also politically incorrect) complete with prop flotation devices and [candy] cigarettes. For next year's annual viewing goggles and scarves will be added. It's our own "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

photo courtesy of Lora Higgins

Reading: Still Cannery Row. Haven't picked up a book in more than two days. I will finish it today and then I really am getting on to The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn to finish up Fall Feasting. What are you reading this week?

Making: The house look Christmasy this week. Just when I got all of the storage boxes into their new homes, it's time to pull them all back out again. It's going to take a while this year as I'm planning on changing things up and adding some new things.

Planning: Despite a rather extended reading slump which I still haven't worked my way through, hope springs eternal and I'm starting to make reading plans for 2013. I'll no longer be hosting the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge (even I haven't done a good job with it) but I am pondering a challenge for great American authors (you know, Steinbeck, Welty, Wharton, Twain, Hemingway). What do you think?

Grateful for: Family - the one I was born into and the one I was blessed to marry into. 

Loving: Albuteral. I've caught a bug that's set off my asthma and I spent the entire week sounding like a person with a 60 year, 2-pack a day habit but at least I had the thing I needed to keep going. How did asthmatics survive without this??

Looking forward to: Well, I think that's pretty obvious! Last year I had such a miserable December between working eighty hours a week and battling gallstones. This year I am bound and determined to savor the season just as I've enjoyed the fall.

What are you looking forward to this week?

Guest Reviews: C.B. DeMille: The Man Who Invented Hollywood by Robert Hammond

C.B DeMille The Man Who Invented Hollywood by Robert Hammond
Published August 2012 by New Way Press
Source: our copy courtesy of the author in exchange for this review

When this book was offered to me, I knew I wasn't going to have time to get to it in, say, the next couple of years. But I thought it might be something The Big Guy would like - and it's just his length! I'm not sure the publisher's summary makes it clear, but this is a novel, not a biography.

Publisher's Summary:

The epic adventure of visionary filmmaker, Cecil B. DeMille who established Hollywood as the film capital of the world. DeMille was the creative force behind Paramount Pictures with seventy feature films to his credit, including such epics as The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, and the Greatest Show on Earth. C.B. DeMille reveals his struggle to make Biblical epics against the greed of New York moneymen and the allure of California starlets.
 
The Big Guy's Thoughts:

This book states that it is a novel and has a lengthy disclaimer discussing that it has certain situations, characterizations and conversations that were created for literary entertainment and educational purposes. It reads more like a biography in that it has mostly believable conversations, settings and facts that seem consistent with the time frame and how one would believe a Hollywood mogul to speak and act.

Being a cat of the attention deficit variety that I am, I appreciated the novel.  It was a way for me to get what I presume are fairly accurate facts and a flavor for C.B. DeMille, his family, some of the actors and the Hollywood setting over the course of his life.  I was able to get all of this in a 160 page book with fairly large print that can be easily read in a few evenings.   In most biographies we have to wade through gallons of facts and figures and learn all details of the subject's life from the time they are pooping their pants until they are again pooping their pants.

I can tell Mr. Hammond was a screen writer as he boiled it down to the essential parts like a movie, where time does not allow for excess and the dialog is tight and believable. For those like myself that like history, the movies and the aura of California from bygone years before the term Californication was invented it was an enjoyable romp.

ROBERT HAMMOND is an award-winning writer, producer, and screenwriting instructor. He has authored ten self-help books and is a popular national speaker on the subject of personal and professional achievement. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and develops literary properties for film and television. Hammond is the author of Ready When You Are: Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments for Success and the novel/adapted screenplay C.B. DeMille: The Greatest Showman on Earth - soon to be a major motion picture.

Thanks Big Guy - another unique review! Although after the "pooping their pants" comment, I may have to relegate you to reviews of children's books!