Sunday, January 31, 2010
Fiction February Part I: Contest & A Theory of All Things
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Mennonite in a Litte Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
I did enjoy it a lot although it was not exactly what I expected. I envisioned Mennonites to be a lot like Amish. I thought Rhoda Jantzen was going home to bake her own bread, darn her own socks and drive a horse and buggy. In fact, the Amish broke away from the Mennonites because they were too darn liberal. A fact I found out in the interesting appendix at the end of the book where Ms Janzen answers a lot of questions about the Mennonite lifestyle that I thought would have been woven through the book.
Janzen writes a very funny, lively and smart book about her own 40 something life, newly divorced and coming home to her Mennonite roots. This reminded me a lot of a book I blogged about last week by a forty something mother who is experiencing a mid-life crisis.
I find this phenomena of we middle aged women looking at our sweet lives through these funny and often profound lenses to be empowering. By telling our own true stories in such a frank and funny way, maybe we will figure this whole thing out after all.
So I agree with the smart write-ups about this book, it is laugh out loud funny and very touching in all the right places. But it is a very personal inner search and not a comedy of errors about using an outhouse after years of modern plumbing. There is a long waiting list for this at the local library. If you are in town and would like to borrow my copy please let me know.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
Friday, January 15, 2010
The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon
"The roads are dark. The air smells of jasmine and moon. Parents become children and children become parents. The membrane between life and death stretches thinner every day, but still we are rich.”
--Melanie Gideon from the Slippery Year
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Book Lovers
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Stylized
Friday, January 1, 2010
Four Points of View
Reading memoir can often be frustrating because one never hears the other side of the story. A child who is bitter about their upbringing and writes the horrors of their youth is telling one version of truth. A good memoir acknowledges good and bad and paints a dynamic picture of their story.