Roping Dummies and Kate Morton (or how I spent my 15th wedding anniversary)

The Chief Roping Dummy and I have been married 15 years today.  While we could have gone out to celebrate, we opted to stay in (it's a school night, ya know).

The RD and band members were at the house running through sets for their CD release party.  And here it is!

to listen go here.

Meanwhile, the CO Boy and I snuggled upstairs with the pups.  I was at the ever so critical part of a book - you know, when you've got, say, two chapters left. 

Man.  The ending was great.  Loved it.  While The Distant Hours, is probably still my favorite of Kate Morton's, The House at Riverton, was quite good.  Didn't see the conclusion coming until I was almost upon it!

Next up:

This is a children's mystery series I've thoroughly enjoyed.  Enola ("alone" spelled backwards) is a much younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes.  Raised by their Suffragist mother she lives in London, always dodging the brothers who try to get her to attend a proper girls school.  Great fun.

Library Love - The Little Stranger and Halcyon Crane

I've been listening to this audio book in the car.  It's one I've been meaning to read but decided to give it a go in the car so I could finally get to it.  I love it.  All the gothic ingredients that I love so much.  Dilapidated house, in thise case Hundreds Hall.  Family secrets, don't know what they are yet. 

Sarah Waters is a wonderful writer and her ability to describe makes the narration even better.  Simon Vance is the narrator.  I understand he is a popular narrator for books, but this being only my second audio book, I didn't know that when I began listening.  Here's the back cover blurb:

One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall.  Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in it stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine.  It's owners - mother, son, and daughter - are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their won.  But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life?  Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

I'm reading this one.  It's actually pretty good.  At times, I'm not in love with the writing the way I am with Sarah Waters, but the plot is very intriguing and keeps me going and she isn't a bad writer, just not as descriptive in the same way as Waters.  Here's the blurb:

When a mysterious letter lands in Hallie James’s mailbox, her life is upended. Hallie was raised by her loving father, having been told her mother died in a fire decades earlier. But it turns out that her mother, Madlyn, was alive until very recently. Why would Hallie’s father have taken her away from Madlyn? What really happened to her family thirty years ago?

In search of answers, Hallie travels to the place where her mother lived, a remote island in the middle of the Great Lakes. The stiff islanders fix her first with icy stares and then unabashed amazement as they recognize why she looks so familiar, and Hallie quickly realizes her family’s dark secrets are enmeshed in the history of this strange place. But not everyone greets her with such a chilly reception—a coffee-shop owner and the family’s lawyer both warm to Hallie, and the possibility of romance blooms. And then there’s the grand Victorian house bequeathed to her—maybe it’s the eerie atmosphere or maybe it’s the prim, elderly maid who used to work for her mother, but Hallie just can’t shake the feeling that strange things are starting to happen . . .

Work has been stinky as we have a big event coming up this weekend, so I've been dealing with that.  Additionally Cub Scouts is starting up and lots to do there.  So the reading/listening is a lovely escape at times.

 



Book Love

The Postmistress was somewhat of a dissappointment, I'm sorry to say.  The payoff wasn't big enough at the end to justify the build up, so I wouldn't really call it commercial fiction.  But the prose didn't really jump off of the page in a way that would break your heart or make you want to re-read sections again, so I wouldn't really call it literary fiction either.  Sort of a middle ground.  Either way, I found myself rushing through pages to get to something else.  I picked up the book because of the endorsement on it from Kathryn Stockett (The Help), and I really wanted to like it.  And while I wasn't crazy about it, I liked her writing well enough to want to read another of her books, Grange House.  We'll see if that one flies.

I like biographies and this one is fascinating.  I don't know a lot about the Captains of Industry who brought us U.S. Steel, Standard Oil and the like.  Titan is quite readable and Chernow does an admirable job of making you see why JDR was both greedy and philanthropic. 

This one is more like an act of praying for me.  I am not a gardener but I would like to be.  I think one of the problems for me is the ambitious nature that takes over when you go to the garden store in April and get all these fabulous ideas.  You buy the stuff and then you realize you don't have the time to plant/care for all the things like you thought you would.  This is my problem.  I'm hoping to make a small foray into the gardening world with this idea of square foot gardening.  From what I've read, it makes a lot of sense.  If later this year, I'm able to post of picture here of a bunch of Swiss Chard, we'll know it turned out well. 

Royal Flush is the third book of the series and I'm just now ready to crack it open.  It's so much fun to read these.  Rhys Bowen is so great at creating characters.  Two of my favorite characters in the book are Binky (Georgie's brother) and his wife, Fig.  They're so funny and uptight.  I've already cast Colin Firth as Binky and Harriet Walter as Fig. 

Tonight I have Cub Scouts so perhaps I can sneak in chapter one before bed time!

Library Love - The Dust Bowl in photographs and then some

Most everyone has seen this photo taken by Dorothea Lange in the thirties. 

For those of you who haven't heard me gush about our new library, well...it's just the best thing ever.  The selection is like a bookstore and I wander the shelves finding the most interesting things.

This past week, I checked out "The Dust Bowl through the lens: how photography revealed and helped remedy a national disaster," by Martin Sandler.  Lots of Dorothea Lange photographs are included as she was part of the WPA work at the time.  The book is a wonderful combination of visual history with a text that is just as interesting and readable.  Yes, I knew about the hard times.  Yes, I knew it had an incredible impact on those who survived.  But this book put such an amazing light on it and showed the power of the photo in terms of making others aware of the issues.  Issues from ploughing up all the grass, leaving nothing but dust, to families having to make the decision to pull out of their homesteads or try to stick it out when they'd just sold the tires off of their car for food.

I know things are tough right now for so many people and we are calling this The Great Recession.  But look at the photos in this book.  It will put it all in perspective, I think.

And for some lighter reading, I just turned the last page on Rhys Bowen's first book of "Her Royal Spyness" series.  What fun!  It's 1932 and Lady Georgiana is about 28th or so in line to inherit the thrown but also penniless.  She finds a dead body in her bathtub and sleuths to find the murderer before he murders her as well.  If you like historical cozy mysteries, you'll enjoy this one. 

Finally, I'm starting a Kate Morton book, "The Distant Hours".  Here's the blurb:

Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoonwith the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.  Evacuated from London as a thirteen year old girl, Edie’s mother is chosen by the mysterious Juniper Blythe, andtaken to live at Milderhurst Castle with the Blythe family: Juniper, her twin sisters and their father, Raymond,author of the 1918 children’s classic The True History of the Mud Man. 

It was a holiday weekend with MLK day yesterday, and the extra day was just enough for me to pore over my books.  But tomorrow it's back to work and just maybe I'll be able to steal a moment to read a chapter each night.  I'm not hopeful but we'll see!

If you're reading something wonderful that I need to know about, please chime in.  And if you're reading something dreadful and would like to warn me, by all means...chime in-:)