Post 300! Booking Through Thursday multi-reads

For something different, I’m borrowing a question from … here! One of the very first questions ever at Booking Through Thursday. Back from 2005 when Laura owned the blog but, because it was so new, it didn't get as many responses as it does now … so, why not revisit?

Here’s the question:

Some people read one book at a time. Some people have a number of them on the go at any given time, perhaps a reading in bed book, a breakfast table book, a bathroom book, and so on, which leads me to…

Are you currently reading more than one book?
If so, how many books are you currently reading?
Is this normal for you?
Where do you keep your current reads?

My 300th post today! In a little over 2 years of having this blog, it seems both a milestone and kind of pathetic at the same time. Shouldn't I have been able to do more? But it has been a crazy two years, so I guess I should say I've done my best and let it go at that. I hope people have enjoyed coming here as much as I've enjoyed working on it.

Today's BTT, after three awesome weeks in a row, frankly doesn't do much for me. I guess it's because it doesn't require a lot of thought on my part, and I don't have anything very interesting to say.

I typically read just one book at a time. I used to be able to read more of them at once when I was little. I used to check out as many as I could carry from the library and have two or three going at a time, plus a re-read. Somewhere along the line, my habits changed. In graduate school, I (oddly) had little access to pleasure books, so all I did for two years was re-read. I barely re-read at all now. And whenever I try to get multiple books going, all that winds up happening is that I abandon the first one I started for the second one. So right now, I'm a one-book woman.

Technically, I'm not reading any books at the moment. I just finished the one I'd been working on for the past couple of days. Then I came upstairs to do my blog post. (I will tell you all about what I was reading a little later). As for where I keep them? Wherever I was reading them last. Usually this means either:

a. on the couch
b. on the end table next to the couch
c. on the coffee table at the foot of the couch
d. on my night table
e. on the bathroom vanity

I'm told that my grandfather, who passed away when I was only five, was a big reader too, but was not like this. Apparently, he had them stashed everywhere: bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, car. I bet if you looked in the toilet tank, he'd have a book sealed up in plastic bag in there. He could read multiple books at once. I never like to be too far away from a book. I carry a book whenever I'm going somewhere with a potentially long, boring wait: mechanic shop, hairdresser, eye doctor, etc. But it's usually the one I'm reading at the moment, or a new one I want to start.

Light Fare

A man and a woman have been best friends since grade school. They both reach their
30th birthday completely unattached, each with a less-than-proud history of meaningless, disposable relationships and/or one-night-stands. They make a bet to work harder on finding someone decent to settle down with: first one to enter into a relationship that has a plausible chance of becoming long-term owes the other 100 pounds (the book's set in London). Quick, who do you think they'll end up with?

Well, you're right. Lisa Jewell, in Thirtynothing, employs the most shopworn, predictable plot ever. There have been a bajillion movies, books and TV shows that use this same plot. I think they continue to succeed or fail based on the strength of the two main characters. Jewell's Nadine and Digby are interesting folks. Nadine is an eclectic professional photographer who works for "Lad mags" (I guess Maxim would be a close American cognate) and lives in an apartment with candy-foil wallpaper. Digby, who's called Dig, is an A&R man for an independent record label whose apartment is a haven of clean lines and anal-rententiveness that Jeff Lewis himself would die for.

Their relationship over the years, has been a tragedy of timing. First Dig got a girlfriend in high school, which shattered his closeness with Nadine. They went to different schools prior to college, finally got back together for one weekend before Nadine left for college...and got a boyfriend of her own. After that, they were just good friends for a decade. Until their thirtieth birthdays, and it became time to get serious. Both of their exes explode back on the scene in the course of the novel, but ultimately prove little more than a diversion to Dig and Deen's true destiny.

This novel is typically everything I dislike in a book. Lame plot peppered with ridiculous coincidences and characters who would act much differently in real life, and a denoument to gag on. But for some reason, I loved this book. It's not great literature by anyone's standards. None of Jewell's books are, although the other two I've read had much more originality. But I liked Dig and Deen. I liked Dig's self-centered gorgeous ex Delilah. I liked Deen's slimy con-man ex Phil. And in an era where there's bad news virtually everywhere you look, sometimes it's nice to read a simple novel where everyone winds up happy.

It's like it was made for me! Today's BTT on Libraries and You

Suggested by Barbara:

I saw that National Library week is coming up in April, and that led to some questions. How often do you use your public library and how do you use it? Has the coffeehouse/bookstore replaced the library? Did you go to the library as a child? Do you have any particular memories of the library? Do you like sleek, modern, active libraries or the older, darker, quiet, cozy libraries?

Well, as anyone who comes here often knows, I make frequent use of my public library. I've done so pretty much everywhere I've ever lived. I have library cards for about four or five different systems in my state. I patronize them quite a bit and pay enough late fines to have my own wing in some of them. I've been going to the library all my life. I think I got my first card when I was around five. It was a paper card with my signature on it. I spent hours in our Pizza-Hut looking local library (was about the same size as a Pizza Hut too). I can't claim to have read all the books in it, but I'm pretty familiar with their offerings.

When I was living and working in Central New York, I had four libraries at my convenient disposal. One was right at my workplace. It worked entirely on the honor system. It wasn't staffed. They kept a binder in the room, and if you wanted a book, you wrote down your name, what you were taking, and the date you took it. You kept it as long as you wanted and brought it back when you were ready. If it had been a while, the librarian would hunt you down and give you a gentle reminder that maybe someone else would like to use that book. It was great. The town library was within walking distance of where I worked, on the same road, so I went there a lot, too. I joined their book club and went faithfully, even had my own session once. Around the corner from my apartment building was yet another library, but it was a pretty crappy library. I only went a couple of times. It had extremely limited hours and selection. Both times I was there, I was the only person in the joint.

As to what type of library I prefer? I'm not sure. I thought I liked the sleek, modern huge one in my area the best. Then before vacation, I went to the one in my hometown. Although it falls into the sleek and modern category too (the Pizza Hut one was abandoned in favor of a new building and now houses the school district's admin offices), it's smaller and more manageable. I did much better there. I wasn't rushed because of parking limits. There weren't a million people there. The selection was less overwhelming -- I could actually see everything -- and I walked away with a fair number of books. I felt the same way about the library in Stockbridge, MA. It was small, but it was in a beautiful old buidling and it had a terrifc selection, particularly for its size. Oddly, I have more trouble getting the books I want from the large library I generally go to than I ever did in Stockbridge or in my hometown. So I'm going to cop out and say that it's good that there are both. Just like IKEA serves its function, but so do local boutique furniture and housewares stores.

I don't think the library will ever be replaced by the bookstore/coffeehouse. People may use libraries a little differently now. It may have become less of a hangout than it used to be. Families with young children will always patronize them because picture books are expensive and it doesn't take kids long to get bored with them. Students doing reports will patronize libraries as long as there's information in books that can't be culled reliably from the internet. It's a great place for any book lover on a budget.

I think libraries represent some of the best values of our society: open access to information and education, trust in one another, sharing resources with the community. I feel good every time I go to the library. I never want to see them go away. So everyone, enjoy National Library Week. Keep patronizing them, and keep speaking up for them when your voice is needed.

Keeping the House

image from amazon.com
It's funny, when I was looking for a good vacation book, I specified that I didn't want to read anything about a woman who wants a new living-room set and a baby. But I guess Keeping the House by Ellen Baker could fall broadly into that category, even though it's so much more than that.

The book weaves multiple stories at once. Dolly is embarking on her career as a housewife in 1950, and her husband has moved her to the small Wisconsin town of Pine Rapids, far away from her family and friends, to start a car dealership with an Army buddy. Dolly's having a hard time fitting in, in many respects. Not only are most of the women in the town old enough to be her mother, but Dolly's not so sure she's cut out to be a housewife. She has dreams and ambitions of her own. She misses her family and friends. Her husband is not much company, spending most of his offtime alone or with his buddies, noticing his wife only when he's feeling hungry or horny.

Dolly's ripe for a diversion, and she finds it not in the Quilting Circle, but in a beautiful abandoned house. The builders of the house, the Mickelson family, helped build the town as well, and have long been a source of envy and gossip. There was supposedly a curse on the house, placed there by an Indian chief who buried his daughter there after her suicide, that anyone who disturbed her resting place would be as unlucky in love as his daughter was. Slowly, Dolly teases out the story of the house and how it came to be abandoned, going back fifty years, when a young, spirited woman (much like Dolly) left her friends and family to marry the son of the man who built it and ultimately colliding with the present day, as Dolly takes it upon herself to become savior and caretaker of the ramshackle home and comes face to face with one of the famous Mickelsons.

Baker was curator of a World War II museum, and her work informs the book beautifully. The book explores war and gender roles, and in a way asks the question: who had it rougher in early twentieth century America, the men who were constantly forced by society to prove themselves over and over, or the women who were never even given the chance? It also explores the very idea of "the curse," and what it means to be lucky in love. At 400+ pages, it's definitely a project, but it's a worthwhile and enjoyable one.

Better Pictures of My Tin Dishes

It's weird. The more I work on this blog's appearance, the more ideas I have for posts and such. I'm pretty excited about the week to come at the moment as far as the blog goes, but kind of feeling like a low-impact post today. So, I realized it had been a while since I did a cool stuff one.



This is part of my collection of old tin toy dishes. I've been interested in them for a very long time, ever since my Aunt Helen gave a bunch to my sister and me to play with when we were kids. Even then, I thought they were cool and different. I always wanted to collect more of them someday. For a brief time, I did, until the market just went right through the ceiling. I officially stopped looking at them on eBay the day I found a set listed at $1000 and bid up to nearly $1600.

But I really enjoy the ones I have. My favorites were produced by the Ohio Art company, generally between 1930 and 1960. Fern Bisel Peat was an artist for them, and her designs are particularly fun and colorful. Sometimes she signs them. I don't think any of mine are signed, though. I love the red and yellow tray with the little boy and little girl. I also like the Humpty Dumpty set because it came from my Aunt Helen, and the little Mexican boy eating the banana (they weren't always PC.) My complete collection isn't pictured here, but this post has inspired me to change out the ones I have on my shelf!

Wealth, Power and Tragedy: Behind the (fictional) Scenes with the Kennedys

One of the books I took with me on vacation was Laurie Graham's wonderful
The Importance of Being Kennedy. Because of it, she's made my favorite authors list, as observant readers may have noticed already.

Taking bags and bags of books on vacation is somewhat of a family tradition of mine. When I was growing up, there was a wonderful campground on the Canadian side of Lake Erie that we went to every summer. We'd pack our swimsuits, our beach towels, our sand toys and our books. I still remember one summer, my mom had a book called The Kennedy Women. When I asked her how it was, she said "Don't marry a Kennedy when you grow up."

Graham's behind-the-scenes fictionalized version of the early lives of the nine Kennedy brothers and sisters adds another voice to that particular chorus. Always believing their children were marked for greatness, Joe Sr. and Rose pushed them relentlessly, isolated them socially, and never allowed even a momentary lapse in the high standards they set. You can imagine the difficulties this would have meant for a child with an iconoclastic bent, or worse, one who did not have the capabilities to meet these standards. The book focuses mostly on two like this.

Those who pick up this book to learn fictional nanny Nora Brennan's take on the more famous brothers, Jack, Bobby and Teddy, will be disappointed. They're in there, all right, but they're minor characters. Nora left Ireland as a young woman to seek a life in America with more options than marrying a farmer and having lots of babies. She got a job as a nanny with the Kennedy family, and there was lots of work to do. The two children that especially captured Nora's heart were Rosemarie and Kathleen. I've never really read much about the Kennedy family -- like the royals in England, it's sort of the story every American just knows -- but I was always under the impression that Rose Kennedy was well-liked. It was surprising to me that Nora reserved a great deal of vitriol for her, painting her as an overbearing cheapskate with a cold heart, who only loved based on potential.

I didn't know much at all about the early lives of the Kennedy children, so it interested me to know exactly how many there were, and where the family got their money and fame. I'd always viewed Joe Sr. as a notorious womanizer with some questionable business associations, but Nora (and Graham) paint a surprisingly forgiving picture of him. He's largely absent, though, and a catalyst to the story. Maybe that's how the children primarily experienced him: the man who came around once in a while and handed out candy and told them how proud he was of them and how they were shaping up to be winners already, then whisked them away to Hollywood or to England.

The story really picks up when the family moves abroad. Joe Kennedy had been given the post of Ambassador to England, and the family went along. This is also where Nora begins to get a story of her own, as she meets a man who works at the country house of a duke in the course of chaperoning the energetic Kick (Kathleen). I liked this aspect of the book. It made the story more believable. It's a common device in historical fiction, to invent a character that was privy to the events the author wants to relate. It's less common to see them as characters with lives and desires of their own, rather than human camcorders switched on at an opportune time.

World War II keeps coming up in my reading lately, and I may do a Books of a Feather on it sometime soon. Graham captures much of the chaos, the fear and excitement existing simultaneously, and the feeling that one could do whatever one wanted to do because soon it wouldn't matter anyway. Some of the Kennedys get caught up in these feelings. Others, particularly the parents, do not. This is where the title of the novel really starts to take force. The kids were raised with certain beliefs about what Kennedys do and do not do. As they blossom into adulthood, the beliefs start to conflict with their personal desires and (in the case of Rosemarie) their own capabilities. At the start of the novel, Nora's nephew explains that Nora never believed in "the Kennedy curse," that Joe and Rose brought the calamities upon their kids with the attitudes they raised them with. In some cases, proving their Kennedyness led to disaster, other times to glory, and in the case of Joe Jr., both simultaneously. If you're interested in the Kennedy family or in World War II, this book is a good read, and offers a bit of a different perspective.