Reading List: The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

Positives:

This book shows a bit of WWII from the Soviet perspective, and that is very is interesting. 

This book also has a lot of teenage obsessive romantic mush. Total mush. The 16 year old girl in me loved it.

Negatives:

30 year old me was thinking, "Was I that psychotic as a teenager?" And I think the answer is yes. Sorry mom and dad.

Suggested Reading Environment:

Somewhere chilly with a small glass of vodka, comrade. 

The Amazon description:

The golden skies, the translucent twilight, the white nights, all hold the promise of youth, of love, of eternal renewal. The war has not yet touched this city of fallen grandeur, or the lives of two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanova, who share a single room in a cramped apartment with their brother and parents. Their world is turned upside down when Hitler's armies attack Russia and begin their unstoppable blitz to Leningrad.
Yet there is light in the darkness. Tatiana meets Alexander, a brave young officer in the Red Army. Strong and self-confident, yet guarding a mysterious and troubled past, he is drawn to Tatiana—and she to him. Starvation, desperation, and fear soon grip their city during the terrible winter of the merciless German siege. Tatiana and Alexander's impossible love threatens to tear the Metanova family apart and expose the dangerous secret Alexander so carefully protects—a secret as devastating as the war itself—as the lovers are swept up in the brutal tides that will change the world and their lives forever.

No One is Born a Great Cook

"And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.  This is my invariable advice to people:  Learn how to cook - try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun."

-Julia Child, My Life in France

All That is Gold Does Not Glitter

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring 

You are Not Alone

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."

Roald Dahl, Matilda

Good Thoughts

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

 --Roald Dahl, The Twits

Reading List: Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant by Veronica Roth

    

Positives:

Ziplining off the Hancock!

Negatives:

Teen angst.

Suggested Reading Environment:

At a coffee shop in the Merchandise Merciless Mart, with a piece of chocolate cake.

I tore through all three of these. Did you know that the author, Veronica Roth, is only in her 20s? Talk about making me feel like I need to hurry up and do something already. Too bad that making up annoying rhyming songs isn't bringing me fame and fortune --(it worked for Raffi, but so far, not for me.)

Here is the Amazon description:

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

Admit it... Divergent was better than Hunger Games. 

Reading List: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Positives:

Sweetly nostalgic.

Complex and large cast of characters.

ITALY.

Negatives:

Leaves you convinced that you need to quit your life and pack up and move to a small village in Italy, stat. 

Suggested Reading Environment:

On a terrace in Cinque Terre. 

Here is the Amazon description:

Beautiful Ruinsis a glorious read for book lovers. From the moment you pick up the novel, it conjures a world that you long to enter. The teal-blue Ligurian Sea laps against a jagged coastline filled with candy-colored houses and open windows. At first glance, you’re dying to get inside those houses and find out what’s going on. 

You needn’t worry. Jess Walter has written a sumptuous epic about the real people who make art, spinning illusion for fun, profit, and meaning. There are screen actors, a novelist, and Pasquale, an innkeeper, who keeps his patrons fed and watered on homemade wine and dreams. Among all the shimmer and hope are the lost souls who long to create something, anything. And just as Jess Walter introduces us to these characters, he follows them for fifty years. The journey will delight and captivate you. 

You will be crushed when the novelist, Alvis, tracks down a woman whom he believed saved him in his youth, only to take a long walk down a dark hallway into a room where everything he believes and all his hopes shatter in one exchange. Jess Walter can break your heart in one conversation. 

If you love the ancient charms of the Italian coast on the Ligurian Sea, if you long for Edinburgh and its cold rain and distant hot sun, and if you love stories of the dream factory that is Hollywood, you will not be able to part from this book until you are finished reading it. Even then, for months afterward, you’ll keep it close so you can reread a passage here and there that moved you. 

It’s all here, the illusion and reality, the joy and the shame of the creative life, of life itself. The ingenue Dee, the producer Michael, and the D-girl Claire take you into the world of making movies, the expectations and disappointments, and in an ingenious turn, the author pins the hem of the action with real Hollywood stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who are engaging in a drama of their own in Rome. 

Jess Walter has quietly and expertly built a career over six novels that puts him at the forefront of great American writers. Beautiful Ruins is the emerald among the pearls.

Reading List: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Positives:

Smart humor. 

Good vocabulary.

Captures teenagery-teenagerness perfectly and in unexpected ways.

Negatives:

Will, without question, make you cry.

Suggested Reading Environment:

At home, in bed, with a bottle of Champagne all to yourself. 

Here is the Amazon description:

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green has created a soulful novel that tackles big subjects -- life, death, love -- with the perfect blend of levity and heart-swelling emotion. Hazel is sixteen, with terminal cancer, when she meets Augustus at her kids-with-cancer support group. The two are kindred spirits, sharing an irreverent sense of humor and immense charm, and watching them fall in love even as they face universal questions of the human condition -- How will I be remembered? Does my life, and will my death, have meaning? Has a raw honesty that is deeply moving.

Reading List: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Positives:

Recommended by my mother.

Negatives:

Recommended by my mother.

Suggested Reading Environment:

Sitting at a bar at a sushi restaurant listening to opera on your headphones.

But really, mom was right. This is a pretty good book. It makes you think about Stockholm syndrome, wealth and power inequalities, and the way certain things have the ability to transcend cultural barriers. 

Here is the Amazon description:

Opera and terrorism make strange bedfellows, yet in this novel they complement each other nicely. At a birthday party for Japanese industrialist Mr. Hosokawa somewhere in South America, famous American soprano Roxanne Coss is just finishing her recital in the Vice President's home when armed terrorists appear, intending to take the President hostage. However, he is not there, so instead they hold the international businesspeople and diplomats at the party, releasing all the women except Roxanne. Captors and their prisoners settle into a strange domesticity, with the opera diva captivating them all as she does her daily practicing. Soon romantic liaisons develop with the hopeless intensity found in many opera plots. Patchett balances terrorism, love, and music nicely here.

Has anyone else read this book? Can someone please call me to discuss how weird the epilogue is?