Nose in a Book

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

One day as Gretchen Rubin was riding the bus, she realized that she hadn’t spent much time thinking about her happiness and how she might be happier. It was then that she decided to embark on her happiness project, a year spent working on various resolutions that she believed would make her happier. Each month she focused on a different area in her life that she felt could benefit from the extra scrutiny and set out some resolutions that would help her improve in that area. She created a list of Twelve Commandments for herself. She also came up with a “goofier” list of her Secrets of Adulthood – lessons she had learned as she grew up.  Armed with her resolutions, commandments and secrets, she set out to make herself happier. Along the way she also discovered four Splendid Truths about the nature of happiness.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It has really made me look at my life and wonder about the ways that I could be happier. I’m not about to begin my own happiness project but I certainly like the idea of some simple resolutions to make my life smoother and my family happier. I loved her Second Splendid Truth – “One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.” I agree with that statement 100%. I have seen it in action and I love the reminder that my attitude has a huge influence on the people around me. I remember in university we had a TA who was notoriously grumpy and unhelpful. I decided that I was only ever going to be nice to her no matter how she treated me. Pretty soon she was pleasant with me and would actually help me out with my assignments. It got so that the other students in my class would send me to ask her for help because they had noticed that she was pleasant and helpful to me as well. And all it took was a little bit of extra effort on my part. For me, this is one of the most important ideas in her book. One of her resolutions was to cut people some slack. This is something I think I really need to work on. I think I’m very quick to judge people’s actions without really considering why they might have acted that way and giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Another thing I really enjoyed about the book was Rubin’s willingness to share her successes and her failures. She didn’t come across as preachy or superior. She was just sharing her ideas of what made her happier. And she tried things that she thought might work for her and when they didn’t she had no problem just giving them up. One of her Secrets of Adulthood is “What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you – and vice versa.” Occasionally she’s try something that worked for others but did nothing for her and instead of ploughing through she’s just give it up. I, too often, see that as a failure, or as quitting. I’ve learned just recently that sometimes there are certain things that just aren’t worth finishing. (And I’m not saying that if something isn’t FUN it isn’t worth doing, just that there are things that aren’t worth finishing for many different reasons.) I have a compulsion to read every last word of every book I pick up and I’ve just realized that life is too short to read something that I don’t find worthwhile or interesting. I still have a very hard time with this and occasionally will find myself slogging through a book I’m just not enjoying and I just have to give myself permission to move onto the next book. And that is something that’s made me happier!

I really could just keep on and on with the self-analysis but this is supposed to be a book review! I loved this book and although I hate re-reading books, I’m sure that I will re-read parts of this book over again several times. Some of her ideas are things that I know I could work and and they would make me happier but some just aren’t for me. But never once does Rubin say that they should be. She’s very careful to say that these are the things that worked for her and that people interested in a happiness project should write their own resolutions, commandments and secrets. Overall, reading this book made me happy and I think that’s probably the best endorsement for this type of book, right?

Sunwing by Kenneth Oppel

Those who read my blog regularly will already know this, but I love Kenneth Oppel.  He’s definitely one of my favourite juvenile authors.

In this novel, a companion to Silverwing, Shade Silverwing is still longing to find his father.  He begins by travelling to the human building with a few other silverwings and his brightwing friend, Marina.  And that’s when the adventure begins and doesn’t stop until the very last page.  I can’t do much more than that for a summary without giving away some major plot details!

I don’t know how many more of Oppel’s books I can review because I find myself saying the same things over and over but I do love his writing.  I read this one out loud to my son and I always find that to be a really good test for the writing.  Sometimes I read books aloud to my son and I find the wording trips me up and doesn’t seem to flow but not with Oppel, and this book was no exception.  It was so fun and exciting to read and even though this one took us quite a while to get through (because we haven’t had much time for reading, not because it was boring) we never lost the momentum of the story.  Every time we picked the book up again after a long break, we were both swept up into the story again within seconds.

And even though the story was packed with action and adventure, it never seemed like too much.  It was just fun and entertaining.  My son and I loved this book and we can’t wait to read the next one!

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

After reading The Glass Castle, I wasn’t sure I would like this book but I actually really did.  This is kind of a prequel to The Glass Castle.  Half Broke Horses, called a true-life novel by the author is Walls’ maternal grandmother’s story.  Lily Casey Smith was born in 1901 in a dugout in Texas.  At five, she started helping her father train carriage horses, and at fifteen, she rode 500 miles on her horse all alone to teach in a one room school house.   And that’s just the beginning!

I loved this book!  As soon as I finished I knew I had to have my book club read it and I can’t wait for the discussion we’ll have.  Lily lived an incredible life, through two world wars and the Great Depression, and she did it with amazing style.  Some pretty awful things happened to her and she just kept right on without feeling sorry for herself.  The story was amazingly upbeat because of the way she dealt with hard times.  Her father taught her that if she was going to help him break horses, she would have to learn how to fall and she applied this wisdom to her whole life.

Lily was a woman I would like to meet.  She was such a character.  Because she was a woman she was constantly being underestimated but she never backed down.  She was fired from more than one job because she wasn’t willing to compromise her values.  My favourite line in the book come when she approaches a pilot about taking flying lessons.  The pilot has never taught a woman before and isn’t sure if the “little lady” can handle it.  Lily responds with “Don’t you ‘little lady’ me.  I break horses. I brand steers.  I run a ranch with a couple dozen crazy cowboys on it, and I can beat them all in poker.  I’ll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell me that I don’t have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.”

It was particularly interesting to read about the life she and her husband led in the deserts of Arizona, first on a huge ranch and then in remote towns.  They ran the ranch through the Great Depression and made it because of their tenacity and resourcefulness.  During this part of the story, I found myself comparing the book to The Grapes of Wrath and the differences are quite amazing.  Half Broke Horses had none of the bleakness of The Grapes of Wrath even though they were dealing with the same hardships.  It could be argued that Jeannette Walls didn’t live through the Great Depression while Steinbeck did, so maybe her depiction is less accurate but I think most of the difference comes from Lily’s attitude.  She just refused to be beaten.

Another thing I enjoyed about the book was the imagery.  Most books I’ve read about the desert make it seem to bleak, dreary and lonely, but not this book.  Lily and her family were happy to be living in such a remote area and they found the landscape beautiful and by extension so did I.  It made me want to move out into the middle of the desert and work the land.  Walls definitely romanticized this hardworking lifestyle, but not so I thought it would be easy.  Just that it would be well worth all the hard work.

I really could go on and on about why I loved this book but I think I’ll leave it at that and let you all discover it for yourselves.  Also, if you’ve read The Glass Castle, reading Half Broke Horses is a must.  I found I gained a better understanding of Rosemary Walls and the choices she made.

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

In the 9th century, education and literacy were very rare.  Very few men learned to read and write and even fewer women.  Joan yearns to read and write and learn but finds that her sex stands in the way.  When her brother is murdered in a viking raid she seizes the opportunity and assumes his identity.  As she works her way up the ranks in the church she finds ample opportunity to pursue her love of learning.  Eventually, Joan is elected pope, where she serves for a very short time before she is exposed as a woman.

I had never heard of Pope Joan before I read this book so I’ll give you the condensed version in case you’re as ignorant as I was.  There’s a legend about a female pope who rose to power in the mid-9th century.  There is some evidence to support this legend but just as much, if not more, that does not support the theory of a female pope.  Apparently, historians have not able to reach an agreement on whether or not Pope Joan actually existed.

I found this book to be so-so.  My biggest complaint is that it was a little heavy on the details.  I just found there were far too many descriptions of places, things and ceremonies.  I realize that as historical fiction it’s to be expected but it was just too much for me.  In some parts I really felt that it took away from the story and made it seem drawn-out and boring.  When I was able to get past the extra detail and really get into the meat of the story, it was actually quite engaging.

And what an intriguing subject.  True or not, it’s definitely a fascinating idea.  And whether or not Pope Joan existed, there are certainly other examples of women who impersonated men in history.  It made me wonder how many others there were that we don’t even know about.  And who could blame them?  It made me realize just how lucky I am to be living in the time and place I do.  I don’t think I could handle being treated the way women were in Pope Joan’s time.  (Or the way they are in other parts of the world today, for that matter.)

I really know nothing about the 9th century and I had to do some research on the politics in the world at the time which was fascinating.  It’s a period of time that I’ve never read about before and every historical detail was new to me.  I’ve always kind of wondered what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire and this book filled in some of those blank spots for me.  I really wish that Cross had included a map of some of the places that were described in the novel.  (It was simple enough to look up online but it just would have been handier if it had been in the book.)

Overall, the book was well written, educational, and entertaining.  I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading historical fiction or women’s literature.

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

After reading Still Alice (Genova’s first novel) for book club last April, I was pretty excited when I was contacted by the publisher and offered a review copy of Left Neglected.

Sarah Nickerson, mother to three, has a high stress life and she loves it.  She spends most of her spare time working at her extremely demanding job, even her commute.  One morning, while multitasking in the car her attention is turned from the road for just a second and she crashes.  The accident leaves her with a condition called Left Neglect as a result of an injury to the right side of her brain.  Sarah no longer perceives information from the left.  She is also unaware of her left side.  She knows she has a left side but she just can’t find it.  And for the most part she isn’t even aware of her missing left side.  The rest of the story is about her struggle to rehabilitate her brain and basically her life.

I have to admit, the book started out slow and I didn’t love the writing style but it grew on me and the story definitely picked up after the accident.  I think partly the reason I didn’t like the book at the beginning is because I just didn’t understand her lifestyle.  She worked so much and spent so much time stressing about her job and I just couldn’t relate to that.  (I used to work as a high school science teacher and with two kids that was too much for me so I quit. Sarah did have a full time nanny but still.)  Anyway, after the accident, Sarah was forced to give all that up and rely on her family and therapists to her her get dressed and walk down a short hallway – a huge change for her.  Her estranged mother shows up out of nowhere and insists on helping Sarah and ends up becoming a huge part of her life.  I really liked that part of the book.  I know there are lots of people out there that don’t talk with their mothers but my mom is one of my best friends and it made me happy that Sarah was able to reconnect with her mother.

I liked the characters in this book, they were all so real.  There were times when I thought Sarah’s husband, Bob,  was being kind of a jerk and it bothered me, but then I realized that that was probably pretty realistic.  He actually was a really great guy and dealt with the huge change to his life quite well.  Sarah herself was also a good character.  For the most part she was pretty determined to overcome her condition but she got discouraged and cried just like most people would. But she was always able to get herself back on track, usually with the help of her mother.

It was also interesting to read about her recovery.  This is a little spoiler but she doesn’t ever fully recover by the end of the book. She is able to come to terms with it and make a new life for herself.  I like that although at the end she wasn’t back to normal, she was happy with where she was and what she was doing with herself and her family.

Probably the most interesting thing about this novel was reading about Left Neglect.  I’d never heard of this condition before (although I believe my great-grandmother may have had it after she had a stroke when I was much younger).  I can’t imagine what it must be like to live life without left.  And to not even be aware that it’s missing until you try to walk or something.  That’s what I like about Genova’s books.  She tells a good story but she also opens up my eyes to a condition that I’d never really thought about too much before (or even heard of).

I do have one tiny little complaint though.  I really don’t like Genova’s writing style.  It’s not bad, it’s just not for me.  It kind of feels more like she’s writing a report or something rather than a novel.  But it wasn’t cold or unemotional just maybe a little too technical feeling.  Anyway, I got used to it and I liked the book and I will definitely read another one if she writes one!

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel

Shade is a silverwing bat.  It’s nearing the end of the summer and it’s time for Shade and his colony to travel to Hibernaculum where they will spend the winter hibernating.  Unfortunately for Shade, he is swept out to sea during a storm and separated from his mother and the rest of the silverwings.  Shade is lucky that his mother sang him the colony’s sound map before he was separated and he and a brightwing bat named Marina undertake to find Shade’s colony.   Of course there are obstacles along the way the biggest ones being two vampire bats named Goth and Throbb who plan to follow them to the colony and eat the silverwings over the winter.

Now, I know what you’re thinking because it’s exactly what I thought before I read it the first time – “Who wants to read a book about bats?  It’s so weird!”  But actually the book is amazing.  As anyone who regularly reads this blog will know, I think Kenneth Oppel is brilliant.  His stories are always captivating and well written.  And this one is no exception.  It’s definitely intended for a younger audience than anything else of his that I’ve reviewed on this blog but that did not affect the quality of the novel at all.  I remember loving this book when I first read it (as an adult) and I loved it again.  I read it to my seven year old (who is already a huge fan of Oppel’s) and he liked it too.

The other thing I like about Oppel’s books is his ability to write to different age levels.  As I mentioned before, this one was aimed at a younger audience and the language reflected that.  But it wasn’t unreadable for an adult either.  The same goes for the story.  The target audience is children but it’s still an enjoyable read for adults.

A book with a bat as the main character could very easily be a difficult one to get into and feel a part of but not with Silverwing.  I felt just like I was there with Shade, soaring way up above the forests or roosting in the giant tree they called home.  It was simple things like measuring distance in wingbeats or the imagery of echo vision that made me forget that I was human for short periods of time.  My son and I can’t wait to read the next book in the series, Sunwing.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

Read for: Canadian Book Challenge 4

John Thigpen, a journalist, is fresh off a visit to the Great Ape Language Lab when he hears that the lab has been bombed, one of the scientists seriously injured, and the apes sold off in secret.  Isabel Duncan, the injured scientist, has made this project her life’s work and considers the apes to be family.  When she is sufficiently recovered from her injuries she is devastated to find out about the disappearance of the apes.  She does everything she can to find out what has happened to them or who is responsible for the bombing but finds nothing, until she sees the ads for a new reality tv show.  All of the apes are being recorded and broadcast around the clock.  The television show becomes the latest big story and John Thigpen is sent to get the story.  Isabel also heads to the site of the taping to try and protect her apes and hopefully get them back.

I really enjoyed this book for the most part.  The main story was entertaining, thought provoking and well written.  What bothered me were the sub plots.  Actually just one sub plot in particular.  John and his wife were having some issues that seemed unrelated to the rest of the novel and detracted from the story.  Also, John got involved in some weirdness that came out of left field and didn’t work in the flow of the story.  He also befriended some strippers that lived in the hotel he was staying in and while I can see where Gruen was trying to go with that relationship it just didn’t seem realistic.

Other than those small details though, I loved the book.  My favourite was reading about the apes and their interaction with each other and the humans in the book.  It was so interesting.  In the Author’s Note at the end of the book Gruen says that she was able to meet with the apes at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa and many of the portions of the book that dealt with the apes were based on that experience.   She also says that most of the ape-human interactions in the book are based on actual conversations with great apes.  This book and Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel (which I reviewed just last week) have educated me and made me very interested in learning more about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

The novel also got me thinking a lot more about animal testing.  This is something that I don’t normally think about but both Ape House and Half Brother are about the morality of using animals for testing drugs or in the entertainment industry.  My eyes were certainly opened when reading about the conditions that the animals are subjected to.  These issues are things I don’t know enough about to comment on but it’s definitely something I’d like to learn more about.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and it gave me a lot to think about.

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Read for: Book club, Canadian Book Challenge

Kavita, a young Indian woman has given birth to two daughters.  After her husband took the first one and killed it, she was determined to save the second.  She manages to get to an orphanage in Mumbai where she leaves the baby before returning to her village.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Somer is coming to terms with her inability to conceive a child.  Somer’s husband (who is Indian himself) suggests they adopt a baby from India.  They travel to India and (surprise, surprise) adopt the girl Kavita left at the orphanage.

The story is told in short little chapters from the point of view of several of the characters.  This bothered me.  If the story had been told from the perspective of just the three women, I think it may have worked better.  Also, the chapters were so short, I didn’t have a lot of time to get involved in the story or get to know the characters very well.  It really broke up the flow of the novel.

Also, I kind of hated the characters.  Granted, they had some seriously emotionally troubling issues to deal with but I just found them to be kind of whiny and annoying.  Through most of the book I just wanted to smack Somer and tell her to “slap out of it.”  (Cougar Town, anyone?)  And Kavita, well she was just the stereotypical downtrodden woman.  And I’m not saying this isn’t realistic (how would I know, I grew up in Canada) but she just wasn’t likable, I felt no sympathy for her plight.  (Unlike women like Mariam in A Thousand Splendid Suns or Aminata in The Book of Negroes.)

I also found the book to be a little bit on the cheesy side.  I think it actually had a lot of potential but something about the writing just made it seem so movie of the week.  I can’t say exactly what made it feel this way but it was there.

Now I’ve made it sound like I hated the book.  I actually didn’t and to be honest I couldn’t put it down.  I really did enjoy the story and I think the characters made some important realizations and redeemed themselves in the end.  For a first novel, I think Gowda did a good job and I will be interested to see what she writes about next time.

Now, on a slightly unrelated note, I read this review on the Globe and Mail and I just have one small bone to pick.  The author of this review calls Secret Daughter chick-lit.  I know this has been a big issue in the literary world recently but I just have to add my two cents.  Why is it that just because a book is written by a woman, or for women it gets labelled chick-lit?  There are plenty of books out there written by women that are decidedly not chick-lit.  And, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with chick-lit.  I love myself some good chick-lit and there are some very talented writers that have devoted themselves to this genre.  (Nicolas Sparks, for instance…just kidding, he doesn’t write chick-lit — ha.  Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Sophie Kinsella and Meg Cabot).  Anyway, this topic has been discussed to death in the book blogging world so I’m going to leave it at that, but seriously?  Notice how I’m not tagging this review chick-lit?

Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

Oh, how I love Kenneth Oppel.  I was unsure about this one to start, but I should not have doubted!

Ben’s dad, a behavioural psychologist, has just transfered from the University of Toronto to Victoria to start a new, exciting research project.  The plan is to raise a chimp as part of the family and see if they can teach him ASL.  At first, Ben wasn’t too thrilled about having a new little brother or being that weird family with the chimp.  But very quickly, Zan (the baby chimp) became very important to him and he to Zan.  (I feel like this is a bit of a spoiler but it’s right there on the book jacket so here goes…)  Eventually, Ben’s dad decides that the project isn’t going as well as he had hoped and he decides to shut it down.  Of course, the question now becomes, what will happen to Zan?

I loved pretty much everything about this book.  First, I loved the characters – they were so real.  I’ve never been a teenage boy so I can’t say for sure, but Ben seemed pretty typical to me.  There were parallels between Zan and Ben that were so fun and at times funny to read about.  With Ben starting at a new school he decides that in order to survive, he’ll have to become the alpha male.  And it actually seems to work for him.

Ben’s dad was also a strong character.  For the most part, he was pretty unlikeable but that was the point.  He had a hard time relating to his son and that was made even harder by the fact that after telling Ben that Zan was going to be a member of the family, he proceeded to treat him as nothing more than an experiment while Ben was busily bonding with him.  When they shut down the project, for reasons that Ben couldn’t understand, he was extremely unsympathetic to Ben’s protests and alienated him even more.  I can’t say whether or not they worked that out without any spoilers but I’ll just say that it was real.

This story was about so much more than just a chimp living with a human family (which, really, could be a pretty interesting story right there).  It’s about relationships, Ben’s relationship with his parents, his friends, Zan.  It’s a coming of age for Ben and for Zan.  It’s about the issue of animal testing and where to draw the line.

I just have to address one more issue.  The book takes place in 1973 and I read a review in the Globe and Mail that stated that the book may be inaccessible to teens because of the absence of cell phones and facebook.  First off, I don’t think that gives teens enough credit.  It’s pretty lame to say that they might not be interested in the book because there are no cell phones in it.  But more importantly, I hardly noticed.  The time period really wasn’t all that important to the story.  There was only once that I thought “Why don’t they just use their cell phones?”  and then remembered that they didn’t have cell phones in the seventies.

Overall, this was a great read, of the quality I’ve come to expect from Kenneth Oppel.

Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs

Spider Bones is the thirteenth Temperance Brennan novel.  You don’t need to read the first twelve to enjoy the book but it helps with some of the characters and back history (although Reichs is pretty good at filling in the gaps).  Anyway, the novel starts out in Canada where a body is pulled from a pond.  When they run the prints they get a hit – to a guy who supposedly died in 1968 in Vietnam and is buried in North Carolina.  This leads Dr. Brennan to North Carolina to exhume the body and then to Hawaii to JPAC (the US military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, whose mission is to find and identify missing soldiers).  In Hawaii, Brennan becomes involved in a local case and as usual manages to annoy some criminal types who come after her and her family.  Pretty formulaic but not in a bad way.  Of course, Brennan finds a way to invite her on again-off again boyfriend and partner, Andrew Ryan and his daughter to the island as well.

As I said before, these books are pretty formulaic and when I read the first twelve all at once, it got old, fast.  But reading this one a whole year later I actually really enjoyed it.  I couldn’t put it down.  Reichs, at times gets a little technical and her “easy” explanations aren’t that great either.  For example, in this book she explains a DNA sequencing technique that I actually know about and she managed to confuse me.  But most of the time the technical stuff isn’t important to the story and you can just skim over those parts if you’re not interested (or confused).

Overall, I liked this instalment a lot better than some of the previous ones but as I mentioned earlier that could have something to do with reading them all at once.  If you’ve read any crime fiction, it’s just what’s expected and it’s entertaining and educational to boot.