Not my usual book

“Are you there Vodka? It’s Me Chelsea” is not my usual book. In fact, I don’t even like the Chelsea Lately show. Well, I can’t say that I don’t like it because I haven’t exactly watched the show in its entirety. I generally watch it for two seconds and then change the channel in disgust.

This book is an EASY read. Every chapter is a story of a predicament that the author, Chelsea Handler, has gotten herself into. My favorite chapter was the story where she was pulled over for a DUI and ended up in prison. Yes prison, not jail. The book is vulgar, highly inappropriate and not one that you would read to your mother (or maybe you would). In spite of the fact that her stories took a little too long to tell and ended without notice, the book had me laughing out loud.

The Road

Can you say "Disturbing?"  Disturbing.  Yes, that is the word for this book.  This book is short and well, not so sweet.  I can sum up the story for you very quickly: 

The earth has been destroyed

"Man" lives to take care of his "boy"

Man and boy scavenge for food

Man and boy hide from bad guys

Something that I can not tell you . . .

The End

Read it if you are in to dark and disturbing things such as: cannibalism and man's turmoil over possibly being forced to take both the boy and his life with his last two bullets.  If you are like me and you can't stop thinking about things like that then don't read it. 

I am NOT going to watch the movie.

Alice

Alice was a celebrity in her time. She had to escape the crowds through windows and was nearly crushed by her fans. Alice matured and was extremely intelligent and influential in the political arena.  Many people respected her opinion and knowledge of politics however, in my opinion, her relationship with the politicians allowed her to pull many strings.
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The day Alice was born, her mother and grandmother died. Her father, Theodore Roosevelt (a New York assembly man at the time) so overcome with grief left Alice in the care of his sister Bye for three years. It wasn't until Theodore Roosevelt married (his childhood sweetheart) that his new wife, Edith, sent for Alice. Knowing that she was not Edith’s biological child, Alice grew up feeling less loved then her other siblings ". . .Father doesn't care for me, that is to say one eighth as much as he does for the other children. . ."

Alice was a bit rebellious. Once such act of rebellion was when her Father was president of the United States. Theodore said that no daughter of his would smoke under his roof. In response Alice climbed to the top of the White House and smoked on the roof. Her comment was " I naturally . . .smoked to annoy the family." Alice was an avid gambler and overspent her "allowance" on numerous occasions.

Alice married the up and coming politician Nick Longworth. Nick was a notorious ladies man and alcoholic. Although Alice and Nick probably loved each other, the marriage was full of infidelities among both parties. Nicks philandering threw her into the arms of married Idaho Senator William Borah.  (Remember when I climbed Mt. Borah?) This affair produced a child, Paulina Longworth.

Although I find Alice's story lonely and sad, I also found it extremely fascinating. The book provided a 96 year historical view of Alice's life as well as the political movements over her lifetime.

The Politician

I love nonfiction, what I love more than non-fiction is non-fiction regarding current affairs and in this book, when I say affairs I do mean AFFAIRS.

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I had heard clips on the news about John Edwards infidelity over the years and really didn't think much of it because, sadly, it seems as though a Mistress is the latest accessory to our elected officials (I know, I should not generalize).

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One night as I idly flipped through the channels I came across the interview of Andrew Young and his wife. They proceeded to tell the interviewer of a wild story of how Andrew Young, John Edwards Aid, slowly became entangled in Edwards life and eventual John Edwards scandal and lies. For reasons beyond what I can understand, Andrew Young claimed the paternity for John Edwards love child. As a wife, I do NOT understand how Andrews wife let him get this far in over his head. Having said that, I do very much like Andrews wife. She saw Edwards for who is was from the beginning (that is why husbands should always listen to our intuition).

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Of course I wanted to hear more and rushed out to buy the book. To introduce the elephant in the room, in the prologue Andrew Young says, "My critics will say I am writing this book for money. They are partly correct. The Edwards scandal has left me practically unemployable, and as a husband and father, I have serious responsibilities I can meet by publishing my story." Then he goes on to tell the story in a very mater-of-fact way. It is not written in such detail that you get a visual, it is written in a way that he is just telling you his version of the story.

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To be honest if you watched the interview, you pretty much know all the juicy parts to the book. Overall it was a good quick read that left me feeling a bit sad. It would be very interesting if he wrote a follow-up book in 10 years. I would like to know if he thought writing this book made his life better or if it just continued the story making it worse for himself.

Handle with Care

After some time with no post to Page Nibblers I decided to share what I am reading. I am 88 pages into Jodi Picoults, Handle with Care. Jodi Picoult is also the Author of My Sisters Keeper, which we read in 2009.
Handle with care is about a family who has a little girl born with OI (Osteogenesis Imperfecta), also known as brittle bone disease. The story begins fast and furious and it sucked me in very quickly. I don't want to talk about the story because I think it will take away from you, the future reader. What I can tell you is that the story is good. In fact the only thing getting me through the book is the story about the little girl with OI. So, if I like the story then the book is good, right? WRONG.

I feel like I am reading My Sisters Keep over again. You have the little girl with a disease, an older sibling with issues because the moms energy is spent taking care of the sick child, a husband who is a cop (remember firefighter in MSK?), AND a lawyer. HWC has so many parallels to MSK that it is pure torture to read. However, I am sucked in by the story of OI so I I will complete the book and may have more to say about it when I am on page 477.

What are you reading??

It seems our dear Page Nibblers reading group has somewhat fizzled. But that's only a matter of definition. It's true that we've all sort of gone off in different directions for our reading. If we name "SUCCESS" as all of us reading the same books at the same time and then eloquently discussing the themes of said books, we're a flop.

I tried to read Little Women. I really did. But it just didn't capture me. So after slogging my way through several chapters out of a sense of commitment, I finally bailed.

Initially I was drawn to some non-fiction. As I told Mimi in an email I sent her at the time, I was itching to read real words spoken by real people. So I gobbled up two or three volumes...Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris among the most powerful. Since then I've read a bunch of other stuff...most recently the novel "Restitution" by Lee Vance which was an absolute page turner.

Now we are on to September. For the life of me I don't know whose pick it is for this month or what we were scheduled to read.

But honestly, I'm not sure I care.

We are all at different places in our lives right now. Maybe we aren't up for a typical book club where we read the same thing. But that doesn't mean we have to discard this effort all together does it?

What I like BEST about Page Nibblers is that it gets me thinking, helps me CONSIDER different books that I might not have otherwise read, and give me a place to talk about those books. We are a fairly diverse group, each of us different ages, different religions, different political views, different lifestyles, different family status (from no kids to young kids to older kids to grown kids). But the one thing we have in common is our love of reading.

So I say let's keep it going, even if we don't read the same stuff.

Tell me what you ARE reading and what you think of it. Because really, sharing our ideas about books is the draw for me. We can still SUGGEST books for each month if others want to join in. But I hope no one will feel bad if their book doesn't snag others. (Mimi, THANK YOU for being so gracious when I bailed on Little Women...I really did not want to let you down, and felt bad at first when I opted out. It helped a lot that you were so nice about it.)

I rather like the idea of a gathering place to talk about books with NO guilt, NO demands, NO expectations. We have enough places in our life where we have to Keep Up with someone else's priorities. Let's let this be a place that NOURISHES our love of reading rather than adding more stress.

Now, I'm not queen bee... this reading group is a collaborative effort with no specific leader and no one IN CHARGE. I certainly do not presume to change the rules when honestly there are no hard fast rules. We do this for the fun of it. We are a delightful literary anarchy. So if the rest of you DO want to keep making an effort to read books in unison, by all means, go for it. I just don't think that fits for me right now.

SOMETIMES when I hear what you are reading I may want to read it too. Sometimes not.
And I think that's just fine.

But I truly am curious. What are you reading these days?

Little Women, Chapters 1-9

Ok, I’ve come up with a few questions – go ahead an answer some or all in the comment box. As I was telling the lovely Marsha, if a discussion gets particularly good, I’ll probably pull it out of the comments and make a new post. And, I’m taking some feedback requests – is anyone worried about spoilers? I’m worried about how this will feed into a Blog reader for those who haven’t read it before. Please let me know before we move on if you need me to come up with some filler…

On that note, a bit about Louisa May Alcott from The Louisa May Alcott
House website.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May were educated by their father, philosopher/ teacher, Bronson Alcott and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now Hawthorne’s "Wayside").

Like her character, Jo March in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy: "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, " and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences...."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens."

At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"
Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa determined "...I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.
Louisa’s career as an author began with poetry and short stories that appeared in popular magazines. In 1854, when she was 22, her first book Flower Fables was published. A milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863) based on the letters she had written home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC as a nurse during the Civil War.

When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher Thomas Niles in Boston asked her to write "a book for girls." Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England. Jo March was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality; a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction.

In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of stories. She died on March 6, 1888, only two days after her father, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

Ok – questions:

1) The first chapter ends with a discussion between the four girls and their mother about Pilgrim’s Progress and how it applies to their lives. For those who have read Pilgrim’s Progress – how does your recollection of it match up with the way that the March family approaches their lives? For those of us who have not, how does the family approach match our impression of the book. For all – does this make a good framework for the story?

2) What is your impression of the four March girls? Which one most closely matches how you see yourself? Are the characters realistic?

3) I’m intrigued by the character of Beth. My mental impression of her has been that she was always sickly, but upon this reading, I am seeing a different character. What has struck you about the character of Beth, and does it match your previous impression of her?

4) For those who have read the book before (spoiler alerts in this question and answer) – knowing how it unfolds, are you seeing foreshadowing? If you have not read the book before – what is your impression of where the novel is going?

5)What did you think about Marmee and Jo’s discussion about anger and besetting sins? Do you think what Marmee said about the continual wrestling with a passion resonated with you and your experience? What did you think about Marmee and Mr. March’s agreement that he’d help her learn to curb her anger?