Chapter One Hundred Forty-Three: The Grift

I encountered The Grift by Debra Ginsberg when I was browsing at the local library, and the title caught my eye.  I wondered what exactly a grift is--and, handily, there is a little epigram at the very beginning defining it as a swindle, basically, and the theme of honesty is certainly central to the book.  The story follows a woman, Marina, who makes a living as a psychic, but she does not believe in psychic powers--until one day she suddenly starts being able to see into other people's lives--past, present, and future.  Her whole world is rocked, of course, and she's also suspected of a murder, there's quite a lot going on in this novel.  I wasn't blown away by The Grift, but it held my interest pretty well, and it was an engaging read in general.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Two: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

With this post, I will finally be caught up with my backlog of blog posts and my next post will not happen until I've finished the book I'm working on now!  But I'm getting ahead of myself--for now, I want to write about Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer.  I found this book while wandering at random through the local library, trying to find something that caught my interest.  I was intrigued by the title, which I found rather mysterious, and even though the subject-matter seemed a bit darker than I wanted, I was snared by the narrative voice of one of the main characters (the narration switches between them) and decided I'd give this book a go.  On the whole, I'm glad I read it, even though it was a bit dark.  Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots tells the story of a teenage girl and an older woman who meet at just the right time.  The girl, Lorca (like the poet) is trying to avoid being sent to boarding school by her distant mother after she's kicked out of public school for cutting herself.  The woman, Victoria, is trying to deal with the death of her husband, who had been the center of her life for years.  Victoria and Lorca are brought together by cooking, and it's the story of their separate struggles and their newfound relationship.  It's not as corny as I'm afraid I'm making it sound, but neither is it unduly edgy.  I was absorbed into this story and couldn't let go until I got to the end!

Chapter One Hundred Forty-One: The Boston Girl

So I really lucked out that I was able to get my hands on Anita Diamant's most recent novel from the library so quickly, since it's been popular enough that all of the copies are generally on hold.  And then I was stuck with a terrible summer cold, so I had nothing better to do than spend an afternoon reading The Boston Girl.  It was an absolutely delightful afternoon!  (Other than the cold...)   The Boston Girl is the story of one woman's life in Boston and Rockport from 1915 until the mid 1930s, as the main character (Addie) narrates it to her granddaughter.  Addie makes for an excellent narrator: she's thoughtful but not too serious or somber, even when recalling the darker moments of her life, and her narration feels really fresh, like she's reliving her life as she tells it.  The story is her attempt to answer her grown granddaughter's question of how she became the woman she was, and the fictitious Addie--the only American-born daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants--certainly has an interesting life to recount, starting from the time she was 15 and first started to experience some independence from her parents through settlement house programs, particularly a book group and a summer retreat in Rockport.  If you like historical fiction or just a really good story, I'd highly recommend The Boston Girl.  I can see why it's been earning so much praise!

Chapter One Hundred Forty: The World's Strongest Librarian

So the full title of this book by Salt Lake City librarian Josh Hanagarne is The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family.  As the full title suggests, this is a memoir written by a librarian with Tourette's Syndrome.  He was raised Mormon in rural Utah and Nevada and has spent a lot of his life trying to figure out how to deal with his Tourette's--ultimately, he finds extreme strength training to be the most helpful in managing his condition, hence the title The World's Strongest Librarian.  This is a fascinating life story, well-written and thoughtful, and I really enjoyed reading it.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Nine: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman (Trilogy)

So I was in the mood for some lighter fare when I encountered this trilogy by Pamela Aidan while working at the library, and I simply couldn't resist!  I haven't read much in the way of Pride and Prejudice spinoffs or fan fiction or related works or whatever you want to call them, but this trilogy, which retells the events of Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy's perspective, exceeded my expectations.  Of the three novels--An Assembly Such As This, Duty and Desire, and These Three Remain--I only felt the middle installment lagged a little, as it covers the time in Pride and Prejudice during which Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy don't interact at all.  Naturally this is where Aidan's story has to go farthest from the original, and while the plot has a bit more period political intrigue than I'd like, she does an excellent job of fleshing out Darcy's character and personality.  As a casual fan of Pride and Prejudice (I'm certainly not an Austen junkie, not having read any of her other works), I really enjoyed reading this trilogy and found it a lot of fun and an excellent casual summer read.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Edward Eager's Tales of Magic (Half Magic, etc.)

As far as I know, there is no official title that includes all seven children's books that Edward Eager wrote, but unofficially they are sometimes known as the Tales of Magic, which is how I came up with the title for this post.  Eager's seven books, in the order in which they were written, are: Half Magic, Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, and Seven-Day Magic.  I had read all of the before except for Seven-Day Magic, which somehow I had missed, but I am glad to have read it now (especially because it features a library book).  These books are all chapter books intended for kids, and they are light fantasy at some of its best.  Eager makes very clear that E. Nesbit is his inspiration, and his books are in that vein.  They all take place in the real world (and in America, for that matter, which is refreshing as so much fantasy is set in Britain) and follow real(istic) children who find magical adventures in everyday life, usually by finding a magical object.  Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers are perhaps the least fantastical or the most realistic, but I always feel that they have a magic of their own when I'm reading them, and I certainly enjoy them as much as I do the rest of the series.
Another of the things I like about this series is Eager's use of intertextuality, sometimes referencing other books--often those by E. Nesbit, but not always--and sometimes referencing other books in the Tales of Magic group.  I won't go into the details of the plot or characters for all seven of the books--most of the groups of characters appear in two books, except the characters in Seven-Day Magic don't appear in any other Eager book, because the overall feel of the books is really what connects them.  There is a certain nostalgia, found in a certain kind of children's book, to them, which I enjoy every once in a while, and while the characters face their fair share of magical and non-magical problems, in general these books make the world feel simple and safe and surprising.  They're traditional, comfortable sort of books and while in some ways they are very much of their time (mid-1950s to early 1960s), in other ways they still feel relevant and worth reading.  They remind me in a lot of ways of The Green Knowe Chronicles by L.M. Boston, which I re-read last August, and if you enjoy those you'll probably enjoy these (or vice versa).  If you know a kid who likes light fantasy or if you want some easy, quick, light reads for yourself, consider Edward Eager's books.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Thirteenth Tale

After the rather gloomy The Magicians, I didn't know what to read next and solicited suggestions from my library co-workers.  I said I wanted something happy!  (Yes, I said it with an underline.)  Anyway, one of them came up with Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, a novel I probably wouldn't have come upon otherwise (unless I was checking it in or out or reshelving it--I've found a few good books that way).  But I digress!  The Thirteenth Tale follows the stories of two women: a famous and very popular (fictitious) British author near the end of her life and the middle-aged woman she hires to write what will be the only true biography of the reclusive and mysterious author.  Much of the novel takes place at the remote country home of the author, Vida Winter, as she slowly unveils the true story of her childhood and adolescence to her would-be biographer, Margaret.  As Vida's tale unfolds, it intersects in interesting ways with Margaret's life story, shedding light on Margaret's past as well as Vida's.  An emotionally-focused, intriguing novel, it's not perhaps happy, but despite the pain in the story, there is also happiness, and (unlike The Magicians), it left me with a good feeling at the end, a quality I appreciate from a story.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Magicians

I've heard so much about The Magicians by Lev Grossman for so long that I finally bit the bullet and checked it out from the library.  In fact, since I'd had it recommended to me by two people during the previous year and since the cover was so intriguing, I decided to check out the whole trilogy so I could just tear through them with no interruptions.  Alas, I couldn't bring myself to bother with the second or third books, although I did finish The Magicians (the first in the series).  The problem was partly that I hated most (maybe all) of the characters, who never seemed to change or learn anything or even to really be happy, and also the narrator (not one of the characters, as far as I could tell) seemed totally devoid of emotion or caring, which I found rather off-putting (and slightly psychopathic--I'm not sure whether that was intentional).  The plot was interesting and original enough, but I just couldn't enjoy or get into a story with so little emotional attachment.  The Magicians felt to me like an attempt to create an edgy, adult hybrid of The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, but I love those books because they are neither edgy nor adult--that's not what I want from this kind of story (or for most kinds of stories, for that matter, but that's just my preference), so The Magicians left me feeling cold.

Chapter One-Hundred Thirty Five: The Library of Unrequited Love

The Library of Unrequited Love, by Sophie D'Ivry, is a very long monolog translated from the French.  This strangle little book came into my possession thanks to my grandmother, and as someone studying to be a librarian, it was particularly resonant, as the monolog is spoken by a somewhat disgruntled French librarian.  She works in the geography section (located in the basement!) of a small library in a smallish French town, and one morning she finds someone who was accidentally locked into her part of the library overnight, which provokes the monolog that is The Library of Unrequited Love.  Our heroine explains her love-hate relationship with the library's classification system (UDC, or Universal Decimal Classification, a slight modification of the Dewey Decimal System), her unrequited and probably unknown crush on a young man who frequents the library, her personal quirks and likes and dislikes and past, and her reverence for the French Revolution, among other things.  This is kind of an insane little book, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, especially since it's fairly different from what I normally read.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Four: The Montmaray Chronicles

The Montmaray Chronicles is a young adult, historical fiction trilogy by Australian author Michelle Cooper.  (The individual titles are A Brief History of Montmaray, The FitzOsbornes in Exile, and The FitzOsbornes at War.)  The cover design of the books caught my eye on the library shelves, and I'd been wanting to read this series for a while, and when I finally got around to it, I was more than rewarded for my wait.  These are certainly the best young adult books I've read in a while, and they might very well be the best books of any sort that I've read this summer.  Why do I like them so much?  As is happily becoming more common, The Montmaray Chronicles feature a female protagonist who is, like so many of us, generally strong but with a few weaknesses that she is aware of and works on over the course of the books.  I also really liked that our female protagonist is also the first-person narrator of the stories, which are told as her diary entries, which encompass the years between 1936 and 1948.  I enjoyed the settings (a fictional tiny island kingdom off the coast of northern Spain and also WWII-era England), which felt very real to me, and the plot was more than enough to hold my interest and keep me guessing as to what would happen next, on the whole.  In short, I found this trilogy to be totally and completely absorbing--I could hardly put them down!  If you are at all fond of historical fiction of WWII in Europe or of excellent young adult fiction, then I would heartily suggest Michelle Cooper's Montmaray Chronicles.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three: Cat out of Hell

Cat out of Hell is a novel by Lynne Truss of grammar manifesto Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame, and I have to say that I think I preferred Eats, Shoots & Leaves (though I am something of a grammar nut, so maybe it's not that surprising).  Anyway, when I discovered Truss had recently published a novel about talking cats (liking cats about as much as I like grammar, which is rather a lot), I decided I had to read it.  While Cat out of Hell has its truly hilarious moments, mostly it's darker than I expected it to be from reading the dust jacket--at times it is quite dark, in fact, rather more so than I would like.  Darkness aside, this is also one of the stranger books I've read, and while I'm fairly open to the strange, Cat out of Hell was nearing the limits of my strangeness tolerance.  Still, the characters and plot held my interest, and I was certainly kept guessing until the end of the book, so on the whole, I guess I would recommend Cat out of Hell with the reservation that you need to be open to reading quite an odd little book about evil talking cats.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Two: Megan's Island

Okay, so I haven't quite managed to post once daily--but I'm posting today, at least!  Anyway, Megan's Island, by Willo Davis Roberts, is a chapter book for upper elementary school kids, and sometimes it's described as a mystery.  It doesn't feel like an adult mystery novel, exactly, but there is certainly a mystery at the heart of the plot, which is also rather suspenseful.  I read Megan's Island at the behest of one of my coworkers, who remembers it as a childhood favorite of hers.  (I had already convinced her to read A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorites as a kid, and still as an adult, so I felt it only right to reciprocate.  Also, I like reading books that people suggest to me, because they're usually not things I would have read otherwise.  But I digress!)  If you're looking for a decent kid's book or a very light mystery, Megan's Island is probably as good a choice as any, and the fact that it was written (and set in) a time before cell phones and helicopter parents makes it interesting if for no other reason than as a reminder that, yes, there was a time when people lived perfectly happily without cell phones.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One: As Texas Goes

This fairly recent (2012) nonfiction book by Gail Collins is as smart and entertaining as her other nonfiction works that I've read (but not posted about here, it was too long ago) and as her New York Times columns always are.  It provides an interesting look at how politics in Texas have been influencing national politics.  Normally I would be totally bored or depressed by this topic (or both), but Collins makes it both interesting and funny (though with a rather dark undertone).  If you want interesting political nonfiction, read it before it becomes too outdated to be pertinent.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Once again, I've fallen grossly behind on updating my blog--I read Pioneer Girl back in June!  To make it up, I am committing myself to posting at least once daily until I am caught up.  In all fairness, though, July was crazy as I was taking two summer courses at once.  But, still...

Anyway, Pioneer Girl.  I loved it!  I can't suggest it to anyone who is not deeply interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House books.  But if, like me, you enjoy the Little House books (despite some of their views that are very much of their time and distasteful in ours) and want to know more about the woman (women?) who wrote them and about the actual childhood of the actual Laura (rather than the fictional one) then this is guaranteed to be a fascinating read.  Photographs of the Ingalls family and the many places where they lived abound and add to the interest of this work.  It's fascinating to read this early draft of what became the Little House stories and to get an idea of how they evolved.  It's also fun to learn all sorts of other facts about the life and times of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  So as I said, if you're a Little House or Laura Ingalls Wilder junkie, this book is not to be missed!