Booking Through Thursday: Cereal

From Booking Through Thursday, here's this week's question:

If you’re like me, you grew up reading everything under the sun, like the cereal boxes while you ate your breakfast, the newspapers held by strangers on the subway, the tabloid headlines at the grocery store.

What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever read? (You know, something NOT a book, magazine, short story, poem or article.)

This is good stuff. I am ravenous for words, and my eyes seek them out anywhere they can find them.

Which means I find myself reading without realizing I'm reading.

Once at the airport, I was reading the article on the back of some guy's newspaper (which contained an article about Lindbergh! How could I resist?) and he caught me (which made me realize I was reading some random man's newspaper) and he was very kind and gave me his newspaper after he'd finished reading it. It was kinda embarrassing and kinda very nice, too.

The thing I'm surprised to catch myself reading these days is quilt fabric. I was in a quilt shop recently, and I kept getting pulled in by fabric with words or letters printed on it. Wonderful swirly script, and weird funky letters, and Scrabble letters printed on fabric.

I love the stuff. When I sewed myself a knitting bag, I lined it with cream-on-cream fabric covered in French words, most of which I can't even interpret. (My French is about as good as my knitting. We'll just leave it at that.)

First quarter report

I like the idea of quarterly reports. It appeals to something corporate in me.

Actually, prob’ly I just like lists, and this is one.

Reading Madly—Finished reading 4/7 books. I’m loving this challenge. (Yes, it’s my own, but still I’m wildly fond of it.)

U.S. Presidents Reading Project (lifelong challenge)—Still at 22/44, which turns out to be 0/22 this year of the remaining presidents. Yes, that’s right. This year I have not read a single thing about a president about whom I’ve not read before. Instead, am on a complete LBJ kick and may not read about any other presidential types all year long. (Yes, I said that just so it won’t be true.)

100+ Reading Challenge—Finished reading 29/100

eBook Challenge—Finished reading 4/12 eBooks. Right on track. (Also: sufficiently Type A to be worried that I’m not ahead of the game)

I Want More Challenge—Haven’t read a ding-dang thing yet. 0/2. I have a plot to pick something up during the Read-a-Thon, though.

Whisper Stories in My Ear Challenge—Finished reading (listening to) 6/12.

Nonfiction Challenge—Finished reading 2/7. I read lots of the same types of nonfiction (hello, history and biography!) and that’s stifling my progress on this challenge, which rewards readers of different types of nonfiction. Challenge, indeed. Probably should read a blah-blah food or travel book.

Pub Challenge—Finished reading 2/11. It’s early days, though, peeps. I've had only 3 months' worth of 2011 publications to choose from.

The 3Rs Challenge—We’re 1/1-6 here. Not horrid.

Library Challenge—Finished reading 24/100. Guys! I’m behind! (See what reading those free eBook ARCs will do to a person’s statistics?! The peril of eBooks -- don't underestimate it!)

Historical Fiction Challenge—Finished reading 4/10. Amazing, considering my sour attitude toward this genre. (Is it a genre? Discuss!)

Feeling OK. Not really feeling too much like Wonderwoman or anything, though. But I'll take it.

Real Short Re-Cap: The Best of Everything

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

If the writers of Mad Men and Sex and the City didn’t read this book, I’ll eat my hat. This 1958 novel is filled with characters and situations that have cropped up on both shows.

It’s also one of those books that pulls you in slowly, and then you can’t leave its world. (I’ve been strangely focusing on one book at a time lately, and this book was definitely part of that trend.)

It follows several young working women in New York in the early 50s, and they encounter the expected sexism in the workplace (and out of it), and they have tragic love affairs and do all kinds of dumb lovestruck stuff even though the guys tend to be cads who are unworthy of their attention. (Even the one guy who I found likeable was stepping out on his wife to be with the female character we know!)

So, yes, the characters make some bad choices, and that made the whole thing feel very real.

Just like with Mad Men, I sank happily into this novel’s melodramatic depths and didn’t really want to leave.

Thanks to Bybee for recommending this book on her blog. I wouldn’t have come across it without having read her review.

Dresses in books are *good*

The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean

Joy! A book I stayed up too late reading, and for which I foresook all other books.

This thing is a delight.

(image credit: Library of Congress)

Previously, I’ve confessed my love of novels that feature vintage clothing.

So when I saw a review of this one, I was all Happy Girl. And when I was reading it, I was even Happier Girl.

The story is this: Dora returns to her North Carolina hometown when Mimi, her grandmother who raised her, has a stroke and is hospitalized. Mimi is the owner of a vintage clothing shop and, for years, has been amassing a wardrobe for her granddaughter that Dora herself has ignored. Until now.

As Dora takes over at the shop, she begins wearing the clothes her grandmother has selected for her, and her until-now-aimless life begins to acquire a new direction.

And she discovers that some of the dresses in the shop have a “secret life”—a perfect little mini short story that accompanies the dress. And even some of the dresses in Dora’s wardrobe have a secret life story written on a thin sheet of paper found in their pocket.

Plus, there’s a young guy named Con who is remodeling the apartment above the shop, and he is kind and helpful (and handsome, to boot).

This book feels like all the goodness that is found in Isabel Wolff’s A Vintage Affair, with a little bit of the magic of Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen.

Author Erin McKean blogs at A Dress a Day, which is completely fun to peruse. And the blog contains an archive of “Secret Lives of Dresses,” with a photo of each dress! Her own not-so-secret life involves lexicography, which makes the wonderful paragraph in which Dora lists Mimi’s least favorite words (including the dreaded “moist”) make perfect sense.

Read this book.

Booking Through Thursday: Serial

The question at Booking Through Thursday this week is:

Series? Or Stand-alone books?

I could cop out and say, Both. But I'm not gonna do that.

Instead, I'll say This but also That...

I prefer stand-alone books usually.

Except... for genre fiction, and then I'm a sucker for series.

Why stand-alones?

With general fiction, series tend to bore me by book #3. Apparently my attention span is a problem. (In fact, usually sequels* bum me out. Why do authors seem to want to throw a horrible wrench into the works in book 2? Why torment the poor characters you allowed to be happy at the end of book 1? Why?!)

Why series?

But with mystery (and, to a lesser extent, romance and science fiction), I get all overjoyed about series books and feel kind of bummed if I've encountered a stand-alone.

* Witness: books 2 that depressed me badly: Loving Chloe by Jo-Ann Mapson, Big Cherry Holler by Adriana Trigiani, and Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos (I actually liked that last one, just not what it did to the central characters' relationship)

Secrets in the Archives

(first -- doesn't that post title sound like a good title for a Nancy Drew mystery? I thought so, too!)

The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer

Brad Meltzer was a big deal from his very first book. And, 14 years later, I’ve finally gotten around to reading the guy. And found that this book is pretty darn good!

Not sure what I was expecting, but I found the first-person voice to be young and fairly refreshing. The story line was a bit out-there, but conspiracy lovers will eat it up with a spoon. Me, I simply suspended disbelief.

Beecher White is a young-ish archivist at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. (Oooo ooooo oooooo! [that’s my National Archives squeal of joy])

Beecher helps Clementine, a long-lost love of his youth, determine her father’s identity, and what they find ain’t good news.

Also, the two of them stumble across a secret, coded historic book that reveals the existence of a secret ring of operatives whose goal is to protect the presidency. Which puts Beecher and Clementine in danger. And reveals some serious secrets under the surface of the supposedly staid Archives.

This puppy rips right along, and it does all the proper political thriller moves—creating a feeling of uneasiness and lack of confidence about which characters to trust. It did everything it was supposed to do, plus a little bit more. The characters are fairly well drawn, and that was a nice surprise. And there were a couple of very fine sentences that expressed some meaningful thoughts about life. (For real. I'm not being snarky.)

So here’s my advice:

Pick up this book, set disbelief to “Suspend,” read, and enjoy.

The good folks of NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing made the ARC available, so I downloaded it as an eBook. Since I feel like turning pages fast when I eRead, this worked well.

Jacqueline Kennedy: Reader

Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books by William Kuhn

Thanks to Ann Kingman of Books on the Nightstand for this recommendation. Even though I’m a Kennedy-o-phile (dear God, what a horrid construction), seeing the reviews of this book (and other similar one recently published) didn’t really tug at me. Till Ann’s rave review, and then I caved.

So glad about that.

(photo credit: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum; that's the First Lady's bedroom in 1962. I'll betcha she read in there.)

There’s way more Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis biography here than I would have thought.

And this book, more than any other I’ve ever read about her, helped me understand her.

Really quite something, that.

There are links here between the literature she loved and the men she chose to marry. And for the first time, I got why she married each of them, even as she knew their failings. Strange how that never made sense to me until now, but the way Kuhn explains it, it just makes sense.

The other remarkable thing is this: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a reader. I swear to you, I’ve never thought of her in that way. As a style and fashion icon, yes. As a famous wife and mother, yes. But as a reader… I just missed it, guys.

There are two wonderful sentences in this book that drive the point home:

“This slightly offbeat Jackie, her beautiful hair smelling not only of perfume but also of the cigarettes she sometimes liked to smoke when she was working, scribbling in the white space along the edge of a manuscript, is the Jackie we know when we understand that first and foremost she was a reader.” (p. 17 of the eBook)

During her marriage to Onassis, an insider said she “disappeared every afternoon while others napped to read by herself” (p. 25 of the eBook).

She was not like Us, but actually, in a way, she was. Gotta like that.

P.S. Just before posting this, I was over at A Work in Progress and saw a posting called "Are You as Well Read as Marilyn Monroe?" Given the whole Jackie/Marilyn thing, it was nice timing. And interesting to see that they both were readers.

Baseball novel. I don't think I've ever read such a thing before.

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Yeah, so there’s this weird baseball reading thing going on with me these days.

(image credit: Library of Congress; image is of real guys; book is about fictional ones)

And this book was an early part of it.

I was trolling for an eAudiobook that I could listen to on my iPod, and I found the magical baseball/eAudiobook combo with The Natural. And the book wasn’t half bad, neither.

So this book. As I was listening, I was kind of aching to know if it’s a view into the male psyche. So I Googled it and found SparkNotes and learned that I’m badly, badly, badly un-edu-ma-cated. Apparently there are harkenings-back to all kinds of legends and lore, and blah blah blah.

But I was just listening to it as a story, and I kept wondering if the story was doing some sort of postmodern thing and starting itself over with Roy Hobbs entering the major leagues under different circumstances. (The answer is: No. It wasn’t doing that.)

And I also wondered why Roy was so darn dumb about women.

And I kept feeling very sorry for him, because bad and demoralizing crap just kept happening to him. Also because he seemed more like a boy than a man, even as the world was throwing all kinds of grown-up problems at him.

Apparently curses are a big old thing in baseball, and it sure seems that Roy Hobbs had one of them. This story is tragic.

Audiobook comments: Christopher Hurt read this audiobook, and he made it easy to hear. The narration didn’t knock my socks off, but nothing about it failed to work.

Number of hours: 6.75

Ranch love

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story by Ree Drummond

Since I’ve got this recurring fantasy/nightmare of living on a ranch*, this story is, for me, a combo of a fairy tale and cautionary tale. And it’s funny as hell.

Ree Drummond (aka Pioneer Woman) had posted the beginnings of this book on her blog some while back, and I gulped it down one weekend when I barely left the computer because I wanted to find out what happened Next.

And—pleased to report—the published book is Even Better.

Ree’s story is a dramatic and wonderful romance, except that it’s real life. With cow manure.

She was a city gal all set to move to Chicago when she met a gorgeous hunk of a cowboy (Marlboro Man, who also is kind and decent--and can such a paragon of such goodness really exist?), and mere weeks later, they were full-on in love and she wasn’t going nowhere (except to the ranch).

The good news about this whole thing is this: Ree’s voice is lively, and she doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at herself. I like that in a person.

And besides that, she is, as I mentioned, funny as hell. I laughed for 5 minutes straight (unusual reading behavior) when reading about her sweat gland attack while attending a wedding with Marlboro Man.

And the delightful thing is that a person isn’t left stranded after the book ends, because her blog rages on.

This book. I loved it.

*All I have to do is remind myself that a ranch ain’t nothing but a farm with a fancy name, and I sober up fast from those rosy dreams. Farms are hard work. And farm animals, they are odiferous. And libraries full of books are far, far away from farms. And ranches.

Do you doodle?

Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office from the creators of Cabinet Magazine

Quick! Name a president who’s a known doodler.

If you named darn near any president, you got this one right.

But the big names in this area are Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Reagan.

For the lover of random presidential trivia (me, me, me!) this book is pure gold.

Some of the doodles are unsurprising; for example, one would guess that FDR and JFK would be prone to draw sailboats, given their love of the sea—and Reagan drew horses (especially when he was super bored, apparently).

But who’d’ve thunk that Hoover would be such a doodler? I gotta say: I was shocked.

And he was known as a doodler even in his day. In fact, his doodles were transferred onto fabric and sold as “Hoover Scribble Rompers.” That is crazy, dude. (And actually, the rompers are frighteningly cute.)

The authors/compilers of this book stretched the definition of “doodle” a little bit, and I’m glad they did. Here’s what I mean: they also include illustrated notes and letters sent by presidents to their loved ones. And the notes written by Ronald Reagan to Nancy just about break my heart, they’re so cute. Like him or not, that man loved his wife.

This is the sort of book you can pick up and open to any random page and find something interesting. Hugely browse-able… if you can put it down.

Real Short Re-Cap: The Audacity of Hope

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama

Does this count as reading? I listened to the abridged audiobook, read by the author. (I like to think that the author’s voice makes up for the abridgement.)

I laughed when he described some of the indignities of campaigning and cried when he described his meeting with Senator Byrd. And I liked the last chapter, “Family,” best—it sounded more like talking and less like a speech.

Getting all wiggly about the Read-a-Thon

OK, guys, I'm excited about this.

The Read-a-Thon approacheth, and lots of us are going to be reading till our eyeballs dry out.

What, really, (REALLY?) could be better?

Since I love books and I love lists and I love organizing, I already have the beginnings of a reading list.

But I'm not telling about it yet.

Later.

I know. The suspense is maddening.

Here's what to do in the meantime:

Start your own reading list, block off Saturday, April 9 and Sunday, April 10 (recovery day -- let's be honest about this -- The Day After ain't gonna be no fount of productivity), and pop on over to the Read-a-Thon mother ship to sign up.

Then go bleat about it on your blog. I tell you, it's refreshing.

Mad reader

Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy

Perhaps my purest example of “Reading Madly”—

This here book was mentioned on an episode of Mad Men (during Season 3, methinks) because it was published in 1963 and got all the ad guys all talking. So we got here a book from the actual time period, mentioned on the actual show.

David Ogilvy is a pretty darn entertaining writer. Of course, he is: He’s an ad man, so you’d expect that he’d grab your attention and hold it for at least a little while, right?

The book presents itself as a primer on how to write copy, how to build great campaigns, etc., but it’s got the word “Confessions” in its title, so you know it’s more than a dull old guidebook. Ogilvy seems like a larger-than-life character at the helm of one of the big agencies, and he’s got stories to tell. Nothing scandalous or shocking, but there are some great advertising anecdotes here.

And some of his sentences are just plain fun to read. Here are two examples that made me smile:

“But however well-documented our presentation may be, however thoroughly our planners have assessed the marketing realities, and however brilliantly our copywriters have done their work, horrible things can happen at The Presentation.” (p. 67)

(I’m a morbid thing. It’s not funny that something horrible would happen, but still I grin.)

And then there’s this:

“Don’t sing your selling message. Selling is a serious business. How would you react if you went into a Sears store to buy a frying pan and the salesman starting singing jingles at you?” (p. 133)

OK, that second one there is just plain hilarious. It makes a shy person positively recoil to think of being approached by a singing salesman. I’d be outta there so fast…

Reading this book left me with a lot of questions, such as:

How many of these precepts are still considered useful in advertising?

Do the Mad Men writers use this book as a source of ideas for the show?

Ain’t it intriguing that a TV show caused me to read a book I never would’ve picked up otherwise--and liked so much?

The perfect day

I've seen this YouTube thing posted on 2 book blogs thus far, most recently at Sophisticated Dorkiness, where I actually watched it.

I swear, it's my idea of the perfect day: rearranging my bookshelves endlessly.

(And I love the banana that shows up midway through. Also when the little dragon figure thing starts traipsing around on the table!)

Book as object

We got a weird topic on the table today: some comments about a book as a physical object.

Normally in my reading life, I shun this kind of thing; the whole book-as-artifact/valuable-book-collector thing is really puzzling to me. I’m all about the text. Whether or not it’s a first edition matters to me, as a reader, Not One Bit. (As a librarian, there are other considerations. But as a reader, just give me the words!)

But, I gotta tell you, I had a book-as-relic moment recently.

I got a copy of Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy from a nearby public library, and it’s the original 1963 edition (which would be the same edition mentioned on an episode of Mad Men; I think maybe Ken Cosgrove said something about the book while riding in the elevator).

And the edges of the pages of this copy of the book are velvety soft, reminiscent of the pages of so many books I borrowed from the library when I was a kid. It’s even got that library book smell. So it took me back to those wonderful days.

And then I opened to the Table of Contents page and saw there, along the inner margin, a penciled marking made by a library staffer when the book was received: “11-6-63.”

And it stopped me for a while.

I was thinking about the fact that this book was received during the Kennedy administration, which would last only 2 ½ more weeks.

Damn. Pencil marks in a book throwing me into a melancholy reverie.

Anyway, more about this book (as a text) on Friday.