challenges – Page 2 – Peaceful Reader

2010 Challenge Up-Date and 2011 Challenges-Yes, Let's do it again…

In 2010 I participate in three challenges and finished…drum roll please-none of them. I could be morose about this or hide it under the proberbial rug but it was my first time participating and I just didn’t accomplish it. I do have a busy life, two busy children and a husband in overdrive 90% of the time. Like I tell my children: “oh well, these things happen.” The thing is I am more than willing to try again. I plan to finish my 2010 challenges while working on the new ones…full circle. I signed up for this last year at J. Kaye’s blog which is now Home Girl’s book blog. My stats are here-2010 Reads. I read 86 books-some fantastic and I’m happy about all of them. The key is I want, really want to get to 100+ and I’ll keep trying until I do. I’m awed by people like Janssen (200 books) and Tina (250+)

This year I’ll be logging here with my reading numbers and reviews.

Find the details here at My Overstuffed Bookshelf

I did this one last year hosted by Diane and also failed miserably but I want to keep going to finish the stack not read and I’ve added some new titles. What this challenge did for me was to curb my desire to buy books. I sought other sources-like I’m now a full-fledged member of Paperback Book Swap. I never have an excess of money so I’ve always been slow to purchase brand-new hardcovers but found it incredibly easy to buy paperbacks or second-hand-I’ve slowed this down cuz my stacks were too tall. So I’ve gotta keep going with this challenge, making up for unfinished reads. Here are my stats(19 out of 50, so sad, can only go up from here) for this challenge-Reading from my own shelves list. See my new list tomorrow.

Home Girl’s Book Blog, formerly J. Kaye’s blog hosted this last year and again I made not a great showing. I’m going to finish the titles on this list but am not signing up for it again. Here are my stats (33/50)-Support your local library challenge.

How did your challenges go this year? Let me know with a comment. Happy Reading!

Beets, Beautiful Beets!

Beets are a favorite root vegetable here at this house. I know this is rare. I have other friends, even farmer’s market-type friends, who turn up their noses at the lovely beet. The beet is nice and simple. I roast them with their skins on, olive oil drizzled, just enough so they don’t stick to the Corning Ware dish. The outer skin just rubs right off except you are trying to get it off while they are steamy hot! Once I get them peeled I sprinkle with some sea salt and serve them piping hot. Sometimes a small dollop of sour cream adds to the eating experience. We’ve been eating them frequently as they were easy to find at our last remaining markets.

Beets and Jitterbug Perfume go hand-in-hand. I started rereading Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins this week for my fourth book in the 451 Challenge, which finishes up at the end of November-I’m in a bit of a book-reading crunch as I have to catch up by two books (The Everafter and A Curse Dark as Gold) for my long distance book club and have to read My Abandonment by Peter Rock for my other book club. I hope to get all four of these books done before Thanksgiving.

This book has been one of my favorites since I read it the first time in my early twenties. I’ve read most of Tom Robbins books and his other’s are good but this one takes the cake or well, the beet! It is a love story that transcends the normal confines of time and place. It entertwines several lives, including a few mythical characters, from New Orleans, Seattle and Paris and they all come together over perfume, immortality and beets. Yes, beets.

From the beginning:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

and another three paragraphs about the wonderul characteristics of beets!
The beet is unusual for sure and Robbins’ choice of this blood red veggie adds much charm as the beet is a character in this novel as much as any other.

Are you a lover of the lusty beet?
Have you read any Tom Robbins?

This post is connected to Weekend Cooking hosted by Beth Fish Reads.
Here’s a great post about the nutritional value of beets at The Lunch Box Bunch.

5 Titles

As promised here are snippets about the five books I read in bed while laid flat with the pinched nerve in my lower back. These are all books from my own shelf, required reading from exact same reading challenge hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea and they all needed the same qualities-easy to read, low level of comprehension needed so I could understand it in my vicodin swirly, twirly brain as I napped and read and napped and read.

My feel-good-five

Home to Italy by Peter Pezzelli: A friend gave this to me last summer with the warning that it was easy fluff reading and she was right. Sweet story though about Peppi exploring a new life in Italy after the death of his beloved wife, Anna. He moves back to the same village he grew up in and stays with an old friend who runs a candy factory. Peppi meets the old friend’s daughter and Italian sparks fly!! 3/5 stars

Never Change by Elizabeth Berg: Myra Lipinski (what a classic name) is a fifty-one year old self-proclaimed spinster who almost happy with her quiet existence. As a visiting nurse she is assigned a new patient who she knows from high school. Chip Reardon was the bmoc (big man on campus) and Myra adored him (along with the rest of the class, I’m sure) now she has a chance to meet him on her level as he becomes her patient with a brain tumor. This one actually had some amazing life lessons. 4/5 stars Click on the author’s name above-she has a website worth exploring.

The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by e.l. konigsburg: My favorite book in my pre- teen years was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I reread it two years ago to make sure it truly was good and I still loved it. Because I loved her other books I picked up this one publishished in 2007-a time far removed from my pre-teen years. This story, while different, gave me a little deja vu feeling as I read (maybe it was the vicodin) Amedeo Kaplan is new to town and looking for a friend and a mystery. He wants to find something that means something; a discovery noone else has made. He finds both as he meets William Wilcox, William’s mother and Amadeo’s neighbor, Mrs. Zender and what they find dates back to Nazi Germany and the artists that were forbidden by Hitler. 3.5/5 stars

The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: Okay I had deja vu reading this one also but I think it was because I had read parts of it years ago. This is a work of fiction that reads more like a hilarious memoir. It tells the nonlinear story of Jane Rosenal, first as a teenager befriending her older brother’s older girlfriend to her own affair with an older and famous editor in New York, and all told with incredible wit! The part that affected me most was her relationship with her father and his illness which took me sweepingly back to my own father’s pneumonia. Curious about what Bank has written more recently, I came up with Shop Indie Bookstores“>The Wonder Spot, published in 2005. 4/5 stars

Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen: I grabbed this one off the shelf because I knew I could rely on Dessen to take me away and it did. Abandoned by her alcoholic mother, Ruby is hoping to stay under the radar for a few months until her 18th birthday liberates her. She keeps it all balanced until the dryer breaks and the landlord comes to fix it and turns her in to social services. Social Services sends her to live with her next living relative, her sister, Cora, who left the house 10 years ago without looking back. Cora and her husband, Jamie, have money and provide Ruby with a much easier life. This new life shows her things are not always as they seem even in the nice part of town. Dessen’s books are a joy to read because she has a good grip on the dynamics of a teenager, from which great characters are born. I’ve read almost all of her collection with just two left; The Truth about Forever and Along for the Ride. 4/5 stars

I love how books can sweep you away into someone else’s life and your own life can be forgotten just for a few moments of reading-I needed that last week so a deep thank you to books and the beautiful shelf near my bed so they could be close at hand for easy grabbing!! I hope in this list you maybe find a title or an author to try…

The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden and The Year the Swallows Came Eary by K. Fitzmaurice

I’ve not read one book yet for the 451 Challenge I signed up for, which is such a shame because it’s an interesting challenge and I only have 6 to read. I’m finishing up the very wonderful elementary chapter book, The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice but am also a few pages into The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. I’m going to share a few lines from both today for my teaser selection.

The bells on the glass door to the Swallow chimed as I pushed it open. Inside the smell of flour tortillas and cinnamon greeted me. Add to that all the onions, peppers, and chilies heating up on the stove, and you could tell it was th ekind of place people liked coming to. p. 31 The Year the Swallows Came Early (2009)

and

The garden was light, but it was a young light without sun, clear and stained green by the shrubs and trees. The peace I had felt at the gates of Les Oillets filled me again and I could have whistled like the birds for well-being and joy. Then, as I stood there in my pajamas looking down, a man came down the iron steps. p. 32 The Greengage Summer (1958)

Two very different books but similar feelings evoked from both random chosen passages…I didn’t notice the similarities until I typed out the second one. And I love that she’s wearing her pajamas!

To check out the 451 Challenge-click here.

To check out Should be reading’s Teaser Tuesday-click here.

Click for Kathryn Fitzmaurice’s site.

Reading with my girl

Peaceful Girl and I finished reading Wild Girl by Patricia Reilly Giff, the author of Eleven and Nory Ryan’s Song amongst many others. I am amazed at the variety of Giff’s story- telling topics! Her latest book is about horse racing and Brazilian immigrants. I’m not a fan of horse racing but years ago I had a Brazilian exchange student stay with our family. Peaceful Girl loves horses as millions of other little girls her age and beyond do! I knew when I picked it up at the library the horse theme would transport PG and it did-we also enjoyed Lidie’s story, which begins with Lidie preparing to leaveJales, Brazil for New York to join her family. She has been living with her aunt and uncle for 4 years, after the death of her mother and the departure of her father and brother for the United States.

Mad at her father for leaving her behind and disappointed because the men in her family see her only as the little girl she was when they left, Lidie finds it difficult fitting in to their world. She’s wanted to be with her family so much but once in New York she feels lost:

I lay there listening to the soft clank of the radiator bringing up the heat. But how quiet this house was. In our kitchen in Jales, Titia Luisa would be singing as she prepared our rice and beans. On the porch, Tio Paulo would be clucking over the news in the papers, the pages he’d drifting down the steps. And outside, Santos the dog would be barking as he chased animals he could never catch. The only quiet one was Gato the cat, up on my bed, staring down into my face, while Maria the canary…p. 25

Eventually she finds her own way to communicate all her hopes for her family, even getting her dad to laugh a little. Lidie just wants them to be together as they were in Jales-happy, talking, sharing in each other’s troubles. Immigration and that outsider experience make the book more than just a horse book or a family story. Rafael and Lidie both share how difficult it is to learn how to fit in to daily life. Even though this was meant for an older audience-beyond a sweet seven-year-old- PG got it and it created good conversation about being a newcomer to this country. Peaceful Girl found it difficult to imagine a world without her mom though and thought life would suck with just her dad and older brother. She enjoyed Lidie’s strong spirit matched together well with her horse spirit as well. If you have yet to read any of Giff’s books she has an outstanding collection. Click here for a list of PRG titles.

Highly Recommended

Middle Grade Fiction

4/5 peaceful stars
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