But Enough About Me...

We discussed The Fig Eater at our most recent book club. Only two of us finished the whole book and one woman read about half of it. It was a strange book, lots of references to gypsies and their superstitions. I would say that overall I didn't like the book, but it was fun to discuss it. There was a lot of "how about that part when the woman did this" and "why would somebody do something like that" and I think the other women at book club that night were wishing they'd read the book so they had some idea what we were talking about. I suggested the three books for next time:

The True & Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, by Elisabeth Robinson (this is what we're reading)
The Quality of Life Report, Meghan Daum
A Hole in the Universe, Mary McGarry Morris

I've read several other books recently. The first, On Wings of Eagles, by Ken Follett. This book had been on my shelves with the other Ken Follett books and I had assumed it was fiction. I was surprised to find when I started reading it that it was a true story. It was a story about breaking two men out of an Iranian prison. The crazy thing was that they worked for Ross Perot's company and he was the one who decided to pursue the rescue mission after diplomatic efforts failed. It's still not clear why they were detained, but it appears that the Iranian government didn't want to pay for work that had been done and also thought that Perot's company had been involved in bribing officials. I really enjoyed the book and can't believe a movie wasn't made of this crazy story.

I also read But Enough About Me... by Jancee Dunn. This book was laugh out loud funny to me at various points. The parts I enjoyed most were her stories of growing up in New Jersey with her family and some of the interviews that she described. She grew up in the 80s so a lot of the things she described I remembered from my own childhood. It was very funny. She also went to the University of Delaware, which was a coincidence.

This morning I finished Nearlyweds by Beth Kendrick. It was cute and an interesting premise. Three women find out that the paperwork for their weddings wasn't properly filed and they're not really married. Two of the women stay with their "husbands" and one doesn't. It was predictable in that the two I hoped would stay together, did. I enjoyed it though.

Someone posted a link to this on LibraryThing and I thought it might be fun to do. A friend of mine posted this, or something similar, on her blog a while back but I never finished it.

Instructions: In the list of books below, bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won't touch with a ten-foot pole, put a + in front of the ones on your bookshelf and * the ones you've never heard of. The books in regular font I haven't read and am not sure I want to.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. +Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. +To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) a favourite
15. +Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. +Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. +Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. +The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. +1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. +The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. +Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. +Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. +The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime & Punishment(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. +War and Peace(Tolstoy)
64. Interview with a Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) -
69. Les Miserables (Hugo) Saw the play, does that count?
70. +The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. +Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the time of cholera (Marquez)
73. +Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. +The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. +Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. +Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. +Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. +The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. +The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

The Fugitive Wife, The Calling & The Fig Eater

The last book I read, The Fig Eater by Jody Shields, was the one I liked least of the three most recent books I've read. It's our book club book for this month and we meet on Monday. I finished it much sooner than I usually do b/c another woman in my book club asked to borrow it. There were a lot of things I didn't like about it. I didn't really like a lot of the characters, I didn't like all the flashbacks and the sayings that were spread throughout the book. It just seemed like a lot of different things were thrown together, and then not really followed up on later in the book. I'll be interested to see what other people thought about it on Monday.

I did like both The Fugitive Wife and The Calling. In The Fugitive Wife, by Peter Brown, Essie has run away from her husband and ended up in Alaska. You don't find out until quite a ways into the book why she ran away, and it wasn't as a result of a single, dramatic event. It seems like it built up for her and then after her son died, she had just had enough and couldn't go back. Even though Leonard sounds like an awful husband, I couldn't completely dislike him. When he shows up in Alaska and she chooses to stay with him instead of Nate, I couldn't really blame her for her decision. I wanted to believe that he had changed, and at least wanted to have a good life with Essie. Then again, I wasn't too upset when she ended up going to Nate after all. I skimmed some parts of the book, mainly dealing with the birds, but did enjoy learning about life on the farm and in Nome.

The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns by Catherine Whitney was very interesting. I didn't go to Catholic school so I haven't had much experience with nuns. I'm fascinated by them and was interested in learning more about how exactly they live. One thing that surprised me was learning that, at least in the order that she was describing, they did not receive support from the diocese and had to support themselves. One question that she asked that wasn't answered was whether or not this type of life is dying out as fewer and fewer people join these orders. It seems like that will eventually be the case.

I'm not reading anything right now, but have a few books waiting for me at the Library. Hopefully one of them will appeal to me. I have to pick out three books to present at book club on Monday night and really don't have anything in mind yet.