This page is dedicated to the books that I have read or listened. These are my opinions and a description of the book incase you may be interested learning more about it. Sometimes my views are as simple as: Loved it!! Hated it!!
Feel free to add your opinions and debate me if you wish or add your hits and misses in the literary realm. Some day I’ll find a better format for this section but for now you are stuck with the blog formation. I’ll try to put my most recent book reads at the top, but let’s be honest. I’m a working wife and mother of 3 and my postings likely won’t exceed 4 a year.
Current and soon to be reads: “The Pact” – Jodi Picoult, ”Family Honor” – Robert B. Parker, “A Reporter’s Life” – Walter Cronkite, “The Yada Yada Prayer Group” – Neta Jackson, “Hold Tight’ -Harlan Coben, “Caught” – Harlan Coben
“Room”
by Emma Donoghue
I listened to this book on my ipod. It was fantastic! I finished it in a few short days. I had moments where I would sit in the car after I arrived home just to get to a good stopping point. I believe listening the cd made this story much more real for me. It was not your typical audio book. The cd had a variety of voices reading the story in character including the voice of 5 year old Jack. It is no surprise that I love children, just look at my job. But this story told through Jack’s perception, reminded me of the little one’s minds work. Too often we think of children as little adults, but this book tells the story of Jack’s life at 5 years old – how he sees the world and then how he views and related to the world as it expands. Also though not discussed in length, it weaves into psychology of how tragedy and circumstance effects lives directly and also those around it. I know this review appears very vague, but that it done on purpose. This book was such a fascinating journey, I don’t want to spoil a second of it by sharing the storyline. This book offers many things: simplicity of life, suspense, out loud laughter, and sorrow. If you begin to read this book, but don’t feel an attachment after the first chapter – go get the audio version. It will not disappoint!!
“29 Gifts”
By Cami Walker
My apprehension of this book was a “God Thing” and came to me via digital checkout at my library. I didn’t know anything about it when I began it, I was just trying out the new digital format from the library. I related to the main character in so many ways, that I just had to laugh, knowing that God choose this time for me to read this book. This auto biography follows Cami through her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis and the emotions and thoughts as she comes to term with the diagnosis. She learns through the counsel of a friend to give what she has and not focus on what she doesn’t. I enjoyed this book and it’s message so much that I decided to take the 29 Days of Giving Challenge myself during the lenten season of 2011. To read more about that challenge and my challenge for 29 days, please read the regular portion of my blog for March and April of 2011.
“FREEDOM”
BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
I read the book “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. It took me several weeks. Ok I listened to it and it was nearing several months by the time I finished. I was so excited to read an intelligent acclaimed novel. I was intrigued when I read the overview from amazon.com
A wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues–among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock’n'roll–and in some ways can’t be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. –Tom Nissley
It didn’t like it. As I read (or listened), I kept thinking this is going to get better. Does this mean I am not intelligent and don’t know a good novel from the Sunday comics? Does this mean I’m a prude? (Ok this one may be true) I don’t know what it was. This was character driven book and I didn’t care about any of them. I like read and see how a character develops and the impact that has on theirs and other’s lives. Truth – I just didn’t care.
I’m not giving up. I have heard wonderful things about this author and will reading his 2002 novel “Corrections” in the next few weeks.
“PARENTING IS HEART WORK”
BY DR. SCOTT TURANSKY AND JOANNE MILLER
I have completed reading “Parenting is Heart Work” by Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller. These authors were coming to speak at a Parenting Seminar in which I was involved and I wanted to become farmilar with their thoughts.
If you’re like most parents, you have developed your own parenting strategy—sometimes it seems to work, and other times—based on the way your child behaves—you wonder if it’s working at all. There are countless ways to try to get a child’s attention and to effect change—but here’s the truth—unless you deal with a child through his or her heart, you are not likely to see lasting change. In this breakthrough book, Dr. Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller, RN, BSN, reveal how you can learn to truly reach your child’s heart to teach, train, and build a tremendous relationship. Parenting is Heart Work gives you the practical tools an easy-to-follow steps that will revolutionize how you: · Turn Correction times into learning experiences. · Equip your children to accept responsibility for their mistakes and meditate on the right things. · Influence and adjust the values and beliefs your children hold. · Maintain relationship with your children through love and emotional connectedness. – Amazon.com
Though the book offered no huge new insights for me, it was filled with practical strategies on parenting and offered a good reminder to parents who get caught up in the day to day and may forget the reason we have been chosen to be parents. We believed it was so practical that we wrote and did a 4 week study on this book. I believe this book will become a foundational stone in our parenting studies at our church.
“DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE:A MEMOIR OF WAR, DISASTERS, AND SURVIVAL”
BY ANDERSON COOPER
Here is one of my favorite books I enjoyed this year, an Anderson Cooper biography. Amazon.com review:
In 2005, two tragedies–the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina–turned CNN reporter Anderson Cooper into a media celebrity. Dispatches from the Edge, Cooper’s memoir of “war, disasters and survival,” is a brief but powerful chronicle of Cooper’s ascent to stardom and his struggle with his own tragedies and demons. Cooper was 10 years old when his father, Wyatt Cooper, died during heart bypass surgery. He was 20 when his beloved older brother, Carter, committed suicide by jumping off his mother’s penthouse balcony (his mother, by the way, being Gloria Vanderbilt). The losses profoundly affected Cooper, who fled home after college to work as a freelance journalist for Channel One, the classroom news service. Covering tragedies in far-flung places like Burma, Vietnam, and Somalia, Cooper quickly learned that “as a journalist, no matter … how respectful you are, part of your brain remains focused on how to capture the horror you see, how to package it, present it to others.” Cooper’s description of these horrors, from war-ravaged Baghdad to famine-wracked Niger, is poignant but surprisingly unsentimental. In Niger, Cooper writes, he is chagrined, then resigned, when he catches himself looking for the “worst cases” to commit to film. “They die, I live. It’s the way of the world,” he writes. In the final section of Dispatches, Cooper describes covering Hurricane Katrina, the story that made him famous. The transcript of his showdown with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (in which Cooper tells Landrieu people in New Orleans are “ashamed of what is happening in this country right now”) is worth the price of admission on its own. Cooper’s memoir leaves some questions unanswered–there’s frustratingly little about his personal life, for example–but remains a vivid, modest self-portrait by a man who is proving himself to be an admirable, courageous leader in a medium that could use more like him. –Erica C. Barnett
I love this book. I do enjoy watching Anderson Cooper on his show 360, but I really enjoyed get a glimpse into the human side of journalism and reporting as well as a small glimpse of where he came from and the struggles and triumphs he endured in his life. But it was the human aspect of his view of Katrina that made me shake my head yes. Yes, this reporter is human and what a delicate balance it is the report the news and not become immune to the people and the feelings that are displayed during monumentous occasions. I’ll read this book again.
