* What's Everyone Reading, 5/12? *

Avatar for cl_ladibbug
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Registered: 03-26-2003
* What's Everyone Reading, 5/12? *
33
Tue, 05-10-2005 - 10:13pm

... and pls share the author's name, genre and a bit about the book.

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Registered: 10-27-2004
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 1:03am

I just started Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell. I'll probably be working on that for awhile.

Julie

Avatar for guili12737
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Registered: 08-23-1997
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 9:24am

_Loud and Clear_by Anna Quindlen. It is NF and is just a compilation of her columns from Newsweek and the NY Times over the past several years. I love everything she writes so I am really enjoying it. This is also the perfect book for busy ppl (or bathroom readers ;) b/c each column is only a couple of pages so you and start and stop any time. The columns are arranged according to categories.

Here is an example of one of the columns. Someone posted this whole thing on another board I frequent. It made me cry. I'm sure all of us who are moms here can relate.

On Being Mom by Anna Quindlen

If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they
ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black
button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow
ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the
lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.
ALL MY BABIES are gone now.
I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in
what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing
in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to
be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes
tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor
blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more
than I like.
Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move
food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for
the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep
within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the
past.
Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling
rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all
grown obsolete.
Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are
battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust
would rise like memories.
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the
playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me was
that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is
presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice,
until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one
knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another
can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet
trained at 3, his brother at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on
his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit- up. By the time my
last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on
sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is
terrifying, and then soothing.
Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research
will follow.
I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful
books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of
infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet
codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with
his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was
he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year
he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He
can walk,too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes
were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall
of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not
theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late
for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp.
The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on
her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted
I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through
speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window.
(They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons
for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while
doing, we don't live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the
moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three
of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on
a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate,
and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when
they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to
the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing
a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and
what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday
they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect
they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand
ways that I back off and let them be.
The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and
I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with
the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone
to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books
never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.
It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2005
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 9:41am
Honestly I started rereading some Harry Potter to be ready for the upcoming book!
Avatar for tammywith2kids
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Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 9:42am

I'm just about finished with...


A Window To The World


Here is the dramatic story of two young girls, Megan and Jen, who meet in first grade and quickly become inseparable friends.Inseparable, that is, until one of them is snatched away by kidnappers as the other young girl watches helplessly. The remaining child grows up with the haunting memory of her friends abduction and absence from her life. Then, sixteen years later, the stunning truth of the disappearance is revealed. And once again, lives are changed forever. This wonderful and heartrending second novel endears the reader to every character in this intriguing story. A testament to Gods ability to work all things together for good. A smashing follow-up to the authors well-received first novel, Why the Sky Is Blue.


I am in love with this book. It is such a good spiritual (in a subtle way) story. I recommend it to everyone.


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Avatar for qmquack
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Registered: 10-13-2004
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 12:39pm

Oh, WOW, Anna Quindlen is just astounding!!

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Registered: 02-09-2000
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 2:17pm

I just finished Stephen White's The Program a couple of hours ago...


"From the moment DA Kirsten Lord walked into his office, Alan Gregory could sense the tension in his new patient's face.

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Registered: 11-19-2003
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 4:02pm

I'm waiting for the May read book that I ordered from amazon to be delivered and just started "The Opposite of Fate, Memories of a Writing Life" by Amy Tan. I really love her novels. I'm about 100 pages into it and it's really good so far - she has had such an interesting life and the stories of her mother are amazing.

Monica

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Registered: 01-27-2005
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 6:55pm

I just started the Elizabeth Berg novel for this month's group read - not far enough into it yet to pass judgment.

I finished "The Footprints of God" by Greg Iles this weekend. If you haven't read any Iles novels yet, I highly recommend him - my favorite was Spandau Phoenix, his first novel. Footprints wasn't the best of his books, but it kept me engrossed. Here's the blurb from Amazon:

The shoot-'em-up potential of spiritual subject matter has recently been profitably exploited by a number of writers (most notably James BeauSeigneur in his Christ Clone trilogy). In this compelling, science-based entry, Iles (Sleep No More; 24 Hours; The Quiet Game) gives his own particular spin on biblical mayhem. "My name is David Tennant, M.D. I'm professor of ethics at the University of Virginia Medical School, and if you're watching this tape, I'm dead." Tennant works for Project Trinity, a secret government organization attempting to build a quantum-level supercomputer. Using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques, Tennant and five other top scientists have supplied Trinity, the experimental computer, with molecular copies of themselves as models for a neurological operating system. As Trinity comes to life, the men who control the experiment begin to split into competing factions, each determined to use the computer for his own ends. When Tennant tries to shut the project down because of ethical considerations, he is marked for death by the beautiful but physically and psychologically scarred Geli Bauer, head of security. Iles writes himself onto a high wire that stretches over a dangerous fictional chasm as Tennant begins to have narcoleptic seizures and see life through the eyes of Jesus Christ. That this talented author makes it to the other side without falling is testament to his ingenuity and intelligence. Armageddon looms as nuclear missiles streak toward the United States, and the fate of mankind rests on Tennant's ability to reason with the omnipotent Trinity. Readers interested in the exploration of religious themes without the usual New Age blather or window-dressed dogma will snap up this novel of cutting-edge science.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Registered: 09-26-2003
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 8:06pm
I have Steven White's Privilege Information.

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Registered: 09-26-2003
Wed, 05-11-2005 - 8:40pm

I think I will be reading Dennis Lehane's A Drink Before the War.

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