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My library: A love letter of sorts

September 29, 2015 by Jana 29 Comments

I know you guys are thinking “oh, holy hell. Not another library post. What can she possibly tell me about the library that I don’t already know?”

It’s not really that kind of post.

I mean, you guys already know that the library is filled with all kinds of awesome things like free books and eBooks and audiobooks and magazines. You already know that it’s a great resource for workshops and children’s programming and book clubs. You already know that there’s free wifi and computers and a quiet place to read or relax.

So there’s no need to repeat all of that.

But what I do want to tell you about is my library. My third home (I’d say second but that’s really the child’s cheer gym although if I had my choice, they’d reverse themselves in order but unfortunately that’s just one of those things that really not in my control so I just deal with it and maybe also complain a little). The place that, when it sends me emails, I get all kinds of giddy.

Who doesn't love seeing this? Also, I know it says 9 items requested. Don't judge me. — Who doesn’t love seeing this? Also, I know it says 9 items requested. Don’t judge me.

Because my library is pretty kick ass.

First of all, it’s old. Really old.

Sorry for the miniature picture. If you can't read it, it says it was established in 1847. — Sorry for the miniature picture. If you can’t read it, it says it was established in 1847.

Which means it has really old books and a whole bunch of history so if you geek out over stuff like that, you’re basically in nerd heaven.

It’s a contract library which means that it’s part of the state system but also independent. So it can pretty much do whatever the fuck it wants.

Doing whatever the fuck it wants means that it gets to host really cool library and community oriented fundraisers, like painting and wine night. That’s right. You can paint. And drink. And eat. IN THE LIBRARY. That’s badass.

And when you pay your fine? Doesn’t go to the man. It goes to the library to buy more books and things the library needs. Really, it’s the only time I don’t mind paying a fine for something that’s totally unavoidable (seriously, does anyone else have a problem with forgetting to renew, online, their library books?)

There’s garden seed exchange program. True story. There’s a little filing cabinet filled with all kinds of seeds that you can take for your own growing pleasure. Then, when you get a chance, you just replace the packet. And, as an added bonus, there’s usually the literal fruits of people’s labor in baskets on the circulation desk during the summer months.

Let’s not leave out the librarians. I love these ladies. As a lifelong patron of libraries, I’ve become acquainted with many a librarian. None like these. To start, they know me and my daughter by name, without having to look at our library cards. Then there’s the fact that they actually have conversations with you. Pleasant conversations. Not just a “here’s your book and here’s when it’s due” conversation. Also, they are more helpful than any librarians I’ve ever encountered. Oh, you need a book the entire state doesn’t have? Let’s see if we can get it from somewhere else! Oh, you need a book renewed that maybe has a hold on it? Sure, we can help you out! Oh, it’s a little too loud in here? No big deal! It goes on and on. Far cry from the clinical, stereotypical librarian you normally encounter.

Essentially, my library is the Cheers of libraries.

Alcohol included.

I accept your jealousy.

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Literary Ladies Summer Reading Challenge final check-in

September 23, 2015 by Jana 22 Comments

This summer, I participated in the Literary Ladies reading challenge hosted by the lovely Kay, Kristen, and Kari (pretty much the only acceptable time KKK is acceptable). I posted my original list in June (you can read it here), I reviewed the books I read throughout various Show Us Your Books linkups (which you can access on the archive page), and here’s how my final list ended up.

Some changes were made due to issues with the library being completely uncooperative but the main point is that I finished and I remembered to check in this time so that’s a double win for all of us, really. Even if I didn’t win the contest. Which is fine because this is literally the first challenge I’ve ever completed so it’s a personal victory. And I rewarded myself by reading more books.

Seems like an appropriate prize, right?

And, on another note, I want to say that I love these types of challenges (Erin, I promise I’m going to work on your next one) because they get people reading books. Lots of books. Books that they might not have otherwise read. All reading is good reading, and diverse reading is even better (that said, if anyone is putting together a reading challenge and needs some category ideas, I’ve got them aplenty). So thank you to the hosts of all the challenges.

Final List

YA Book: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Book by a non-US Author: The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

Book recommended by a blogger: Dirty Rush by Taylor Bell (recommended by Steph)

Book on my TBR list for more than a year: Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

Book with a kickass female lead: Let It Be by Chad Gayle (I was disappointed by the amount of kickassness of the female lead but later in the summer I read Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart, which has a completely badass female lead–in fact, the book was about one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the U.S.–so even though it wasn’t an official substitution, I feel like I legit completed this category)

Book that is or will be a movie or TV show: The Long Home by William Gay (you can see here for the casting for this one)

Book by a comedian/celebrity: I Regret Nothing by Jen Lancaster (original pick was Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg which I just received from the library last week, right before I left for Charlotte)

Book with a one word title: Confess by Colleen Hoover

Suspenseful/mystery/thriller book: Trust No One by Paul Cleave (original pick was Radiant Angel by Nelson DeMille which I just received from the library yesterday)

Book about summer/with summer in the title: Summerlong by Dean Bakopolous (who followed me on Twitter last week and I *might* have screamed)

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Interview with a bookworm recommendations: The complete list

September 16, 2015 by Jana 10 Comments

One questions I asked all the interviewees in the Bookworm series was “what books do you always recommend?” because I like to know what books make other people happy. There were about 2 dozen (or more. I can’t count lately) to keep track of so I put them all in one place.

This is that place.

Prepare your Goodreads.

Beach Music–Pat Conroy

The Poisonwood Bible–Barbara Kingsolver

Pride and Prejudice–Jane Austen

The Book Thief–Markus Zusak

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society–Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer

The Heroin Diaries–Nikki Sixx

The Great Gatsby–F. Scott Fitzgerald

Slaughterhouse Five–Kurt Vonnegut

Shotgun Lovesongs – Nickolas Butler

The Piper’s Son–Melina Marchetta

Choke – Chuck Palahniuk

Jessica Darling series–Megan McCafferty

The Joy Luck Club–Amy Tan

Everything I Never Told You–Celeste Ng

Is Everyone Hanging Out with Me?–Mindy Kaling

Tuesdays with Morrie–Mitch Albom

The Rescue–Nicholas Sparks

Where the Heart Is–Billie Letts

Yes, Please–Amy Poehler

Stephanie Plum series–Janet Evanovich

Dharma Bums and On the Road–Jack Kerouac

Middlesex–Jeffrey Eugenides

The Wilder Life–Wendy McClure

The Girl on the Train–Paula Hawkins

All the Bright Places–Jennifer Nevin

The Outsiders–SE Hinton

The Alchemist–Paolo Coehlo

For the Love–Jen Hatmaker

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking–Susan Cain

Authors: Gretchen Rubin, Rainbow Rowell, Jodi Picoult, Michael Crichton, Dean Bakopoulos

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Judging Covers with The Husband, first edition

September 15, 2015 by Jana 16 Comments

This entry is part 1 of 11 in the series Judging Covers

You might have seen or heard about a site, Judgey, that lets you judge a book by its cover. I did it an I got pretty damn judgy which is pretty damn accurate. It’s a fun little time waster and I highly encourage you to take a few minutes and play it.

This post is not about that.

This post is about what happens when I show my husband a book cover and he decides the content. Not if the book is good or bad. Just the plot. It all started a few years ago when I read Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed which he calls “the flying kid book”. It’s sort of become a thing between us and now, we’re sharing it with you.

This is how it works. I show him a book. He tells me what he thinks it’s about. I’ll add the Goodreads summary for you guys.

Hope you enjoy it.

Note: All of these books are currently on my nightstand and I’ll be reviewing them in October for Show Us Your Books.

Book #1: Dietland by Sarai Walker

The husband says: Sweets will kill you.

Goodreads says: Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. With her job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls’ magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. Only then can her true life as a thin person finally begin.

Then, when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself falling down a rabbit hole and into an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. There Plum agrees to a series of challenges that force her to deal with her past, her doubts, and the real costs of becoming “beautiful.” At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called “Jennifer” begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women, and as Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive.

Book #2: Ally Hughes Has Sex Sometimes by Jules Moulin

The husband says: She wrote the title in lipstick on a mirror. The book is exactly what the title is. It gives me nothing. You told me the plot.

Goodreads says: Life isn’t easy for single mother Ally Hughes. Teaching at Brown, her class load is huge and her boss is a menace. At home, she contends with a critical mother, a falling-down house, and a daughter who never misses a beat. Between taking care of the people she loves, teaching full time, and making ends meet, Ally doesn’t have time for a man. She doesn’t date. She’s not into flings. But then she meets Jake, an eager student, young in years but old in soul, who challenges his favorite professor to open up her life, and her heart, to love. It doesn’t work. In fact, his urging backfires.

Ten years later, Ally’s still single. Jake reappears and surprises her in a brand-new role: He’s dating Ally’s now-grown daughter. In this hilarious, heartrending tale, Ally is finally forced to concede (not only to herself) that an independent, “liberated” woman can still make room in her life for love.

Book #3: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

The husband says: People have romance on phones. Without electronics you can’t find love.

Goodreads says (well, partly because the Goodreads summary is loooong): At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated?…

But the transformation of our romantic lives can’t be explained by technology alone. In a short period of time, the whole culture of finding love has changed dramatically. A few decades ago, people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood. Their families would meet and, after deciding neither party seemed like a murderer, they would get married and soon have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-four. Today, people marry later than ever and spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.

Book #4: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

The husband says: It’s about a 3AM infomercial about losing weight. Or it’s about a mortuary. That’d be a lot funnier.

Goodreads says: A woman known only as A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality dating show called That’s My Partner! A eats mostly popsicles and oranges, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials— particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that exists only in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a local celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up a Wally’s Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile, B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who in turn hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction. Maybe something like what’s gotten into her neighbors across the street, the family who’s begun “ghosting” themselves beneath white sheets and whose garage door features a strange scrawl of graffiti: he who sits next to me, may we eat as one.

Book #5: $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer

The husband says: Someone trying to eat on $2/day and all they can afford is milk. And they’re clean.

Goodreads says (again, abbreviated because long summary): After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children.

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Show Us Your Books–September edition

September 8, 2015 by Jana 29 Comments

Remember how it felt like an eternity from July to August’s Show Us Your Books? Did it feel like the exact opposite this time? Like we just did this last week?

I thought so.

Still, though, I managed to read 9 books in the weeks since last month’s linkup (and, once again, thank you to everyone who continues to link up with me and Steph and welcome to anyone joining us for the first time) which is a little high, even for me. I still haven’t finished A Little Life or The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (I’m committed to doing that this week) but here’s a recap of what I did read. For those who are interested solely in which ones I most recommend, skip to the end.

I Regret Nothing by Jen Lancaster. Her newest humor memoir which, thankfully, redeemed her a little bit from her past few efforts (I still haven’t read her newest fiction but I’m in no hurry to do that). It still has the bitchy, entitled attitude as all of her memoirs but this one seems to circling back to the introspection that was present in her first few. I actually like how she created her bucket list and, if I’m being honest, she’s the reason the husband and I have decided to walk a 10K in the spring.

Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova. I’d been wanting to read this book, by the author of Still Alice, since I first learned about it. It did not disappoint. The story bounced back and forth between two perspectives–Joe, a former cop, diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, and his youngest daughter, Katie. This book did remind me of Still Alice and since the author has a PhD in Neuroscience, I appreciated the painstaking accuracy of the disease because it contributed to a beautiful story of family, pain, and love. I could have done without one of the sons, the ending made me angry (I felt cheated) and it also left me wondering why no one ever commented on the wife’s horrible cooking (it’s mentioned quite often).

Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone. A YA book about a popular girl with OCD (it’s actually what drew me to the book. OCD is not a disease that’s often a central character in a book). Samantha befriends a new girl, Caroline, joins a secret society of school misfits, Poet’s Corner, and makes amends with many people she and her former friends had hurt (including one, AJ, who she develops a huge crush on), and all the stuff you’d find in a typical YA book ensues. It was an easy read, not too memorable, and there was a bit about Sam experiencing hallucinations that bothered me and was way too glossed over.

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart. I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and I am so glad I did because this book KICKED MAJOR ASS. It’s based on a real woman, Constance Kopp, one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the US, and her two sisters. The women get into an unfortunate buggy accident with a man who turns out to be a huge asshole. I don’t want to give too much away but you really need to read the story to find out what happens and how Constance is such a freaking bad ass and how she handles the bullying. You know how sometimes you read a book and you’re like OMG THIS BOOK IS AWESOME AND I AM SO GLAD IT’S IN MY LIFE? That’s how I felt about it. Quick note: it can be a slow read if you’re not as intrigued by the story as I was.

Confess by Colleen Hoover. A fine weekend read. Nothing too special. Typical romance, chick lit type book, perfect to read in between heavy books or to pass the time on a day where it’s too hot or cold to go outside. I did like the concept of paintings based on secret confessions, I did enjoy the conflict between Auburn (I hated her name, though) and her son’s grandmother, and I did like the way she tied all the main characters together at the end, that was kind of cool, but I am really tired of the “woman being attacked and being saved by the man she thinks she loves” story line. It’s boring.

Love May Fail by Matthew Quick. I think Steph is reviewing this book this month as well and I’ll say right off the bat that I did not like it as much as my co-host. Don’t get me wrong. The hairband mentions and plot points and references were awesome, Chuck and Sister Maeve rocked as characters (I could read a whole book about either of them), and overall, the story was fun and engaging to read. I felt sadness when I was supposed to, happiness when I was supposed to, and I liked the elements of realism he threw into the story. But there were a bunch of gratuitous plot points I could have done without (and they were threaded throughout the book, which is why they irked me) and I really wanted there to be less of Mr. Vernon.

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers. I heard of this book via a Book Riot post about banned or challenged books so of course I had to read it. You guys, this is such an important book and I implore you to read it. It is ugly, painful, way too real, and necessary to read. It centers on a sexual assault and how one girl in a popular clique uses it to bring on the demise and excessive, horrible, vile bullying (verbal and physical) to the victim (also a member of said popular clique). I felt like crying for most of the book, either because of sadness or anger, and as a parent, it makes me scared for my daughter. I mean, I know it’s fiction, but not really. This kind of stuff actually happens.

Hyacinth Girls by Lauren Frankel. Another book about teenage girl bullying. Another important read. Not quite as good as Some Girls Are but definitely close. I don’t even know how to talk about this book properly except to say holy shit, girls are awful and parents, don’t always think your kids are the good, innocent ones. There is a bit of mystery element to this book that makes sense but did detract from the story a bit but it wasn’t so distracting or irrelevant you wanted it to stop and by the time you get to the end, it makes sense why it’s there.

Trust No One by Paul Cleave. The fact that a thriller was a nice come down from back to back books about teenage bullying says a lot. It helped that this book was great. Well written with just the right amount of fucked-up. Alzheimer’s is a very personal disease for me so I was skeptical of using it as the baseline for a story but the author handled it well, without making fun of the disease and painting a very realistic portrait of someone suffering (albeit in a very different way than Alice in Still Alice) while still creating a great suspenseful plot. Jerry’s Madness Journal was probably my favorite part of the book because it was such a unique way to tell this kind of story. Also, this was my last book of the Literary Ladies Summer Reading Challenge!

Read these: Girl Waits with Gun, Some Girls Are, Trust No One, Inside the O’Briens

Now it’s your turn! Link up and Show Us Your Books (also, if you tweet about the post, use the hashtag #showusyourbooks. That way it’s easy to find)

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My library: A love letter of sorts

Literary Ladies Summer Reading Challenge final check-in

Interview with a bookworm recommendations: The complete list

Judging Covers with The Husband, first edition

Show Us Your Books–September edition

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