Monday, March 23, 2015

Monday - Books

 This is a busy Spring here and if you aren't busy yet you will be!  The songbirds are back, the sun is shining and all is right with my world!  And my daughter is on Spring Break this week so there will be more "phone time" than usual which is a good thing as we tend to motivate each other.  So, if Spring hasn't arrived yet in a neighborhood near you...just be patient.....it is coming!
Meanwhile, the reading continues......not as many as last week though.  I only finished one but it was a great one!  I'm going to be making a list of my TOP 10 Books of 2015 and I'll put it on my blog sidebar and this one will definitely be going on it!  I will probably do one for last year too since I kept track of my 2015 reads.
Ms.  Trigiani did not disappoint with this one.  She's such a flawless writer and storyteller that I would probably love anything she writes but I do have my favorites and this is one of them.
I think she wrote a lot of it from family history as she divulges some correlations in the epilogue and what a great family history to have.  I related to much of it and that generation which would have been my parents generation and their parents.  The hard work ethic, the feeling of responsibility to your family and showing love through caring for them.
"This heartfelt story of the limits and power of love chronicles the remarkable lives of the Castellucas, an Italian American family over the course of three generations."  I think you will enjoy it very much.
This is a book I bought years ago and it is a non-fiction about nature but anytime people praise a book as highly as this by "those in the know" I find it disappointing.  So far it seems to me her writing sounds like she's smoking something!  Some of it makes sense and then some sounds like she's in a dream state.  I've only just begun reading it so maybe it will become more understandable as I get further but right now it's a struggle.  Definitely not a "relaxing read" more like one of those required in school. I read Shakespeare and all the Greek tragedies etc. and in my mind if I have to sit and figure out what the writer is trying to tell me then the writer is at fault....not me! LOL!  I'm a realist and I don't deal well with "skipping around the bush" or symbolism...spit it out!
I just chose my next fiction book this morning and this is it......
I got this at a library book sale but I can't remember when.  I buy many books based on the cover and the blurb on the back.  It looks to be one of those book club books which are usually pretty good.
 "A funny and poignant novel about having your heart in the right place even when everything else isn't."
"Newly divorced Dana Stellgarten has always been unfailingly nice --- even to telemarketers---but now her temper is wearing thin.  Money is tight, her kids are reeling from their Dad's departure, and her Goth teenage niece has just landed on her doorstep.  As she enters the slipstream of post-divorce romance and befriended by the town queen bee, Dana finds that the tension between being true to yourself and being liked doesn't end in middle school....and that sometimes it takes a real friend to help you embrace adulthood in all its flawed complexity."
I'm still listening to the audio of Agatha Christie short stories thus I haven't started The Secret Garden audio.  That's it for this week!  What are YOU reading?
Happy Trails!