What are you reading?

 Let me make a list of places I have/had library cards to:

• Sgt. Bluff
• Sioux City
• Ames
• Orange City
• London
• Urbandale
• Johnston
• Grimes
• Des Moines Public

And if we throw in school library cards, I also would have ones to Northwestern, Iowa State, London City Metro Colleges, Gonzaga. Basically I collect library cards. I collect library cards like some people collect passport stamps. Fortunately, library cards, not counting library fines, are cheaper than traveling abroad :)

Needless to say, if I bought books I could potentially avoid piling up the library fines that I'm currently accruing at DM Public. And if Lance ever stops working downtown, I'm going to have to find someone else to make my twice a week library run. Lance has been working downtown for eight years, except for a short two month gap a few years ago. He loathes my library runs because he always feels like he's picking up or returning the oddest things - like I've Got Your Number by Sophia Kinsella (don't read, it's really a poor read) or the latest Justin Timberlake cd The 20/20 Experience. I like broad range of topics as illustrated below. I've made my way through most/parts of all these books and here's what I think.

1. Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures. Great laugh for those with toddlers or those who have been through the parenting game. There are some language things, but when your toddler just dumped pee all over the floor (again) or sneezed his nasty strep throat germs all over you (again) or your husband managed to somehow to sleep through the crying baby for the second night in a row, some language is warranted.
2. Bebe Day by Day. I'm still not convinced that French kids eat sardine mousse at the age of 18 months. In fact I don't know any 18 year-olds that would eat sardine mousse. But I didn't feel like I had any huge revelations, especially after having previously read Druckerman's Bringing up Bebe. Again, don't immediately go to babies when they are crying at night; PAUSE and see if they are truly in need of something. My second learning was that french daycare is AWESOME - cheap, supportive and they all have a personal chef. I might even consider moving to France for that very reason (despite a very apparent lack language skills - parlez-vous anglais?
3. The Condition.  Okay, I didn't read this one. I'm not sure I started it. Perhaps I did and found it depressing. But it must have been due before I really had a chance to dig in. Another day.
4. The Reason for God. Oh Tim Keller, you stretch me. We read this for our small group's "summer book club" and it was thought provoking and challenging. Basically it lays out all the reasons for people who have disbelief about Christianity and dispels each one of the reasons and then Keller gives the reasons why you should believe in Christianity. It's not a light read by any means. 
5. Calling Me Home. I really, really liked this book. It reminded me a bit of The Help in it's setting and era. It surprised, saddened and made me hopeful all in one setting. It's an easy read and enjoyable.
6. Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style and Everyday Fun. I miss daytime television. Daphne Oz is the author of this book and on The Chew. She's stylish and lovely and uber-healthy. It's not so much a cookbook as it's more of a lifestyle book. Which is fine if you like that sort of stuff, but I was looking for food and her recipes were a bit fussy and filled with ingredients that I doubted my family would like. I really wanted to like it, but it fell a bit flat.
7. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. Another blogger gone cookbook author. As a general rule I enjoy bloggers gone "authors." Perlman's pictures are beautiful and her recipes are lovely, but they were not where this family is at. I try to introduce adventurous items into the L&L's diets (lest they become picky Todd family eaters *shudders*) but I found that the recipes had "adventurous" ingredients and a long prep time. Not for this busy momma.
8. The Picky Palate Cookbook. Blogger author (have you noticed a trend in my reading patterns?) I think that I should check this one out again. Author Jenny Flake had a lot of good, practical recipes for families that seemed "normal." I didn't get a chance to do more than just flip through this one because it was due back to the library.
9. Garden Rescue. Not a book about food! Or chick lit! Probably my favorite thing about the summer is our garden. I love eating (yes, I know more food) fresh food picked in my backyard. What I don't love so much are the bugs and fungus that occasionally infest our poor plants. In our seven years of owning this house and our subsequent six gardens, we've learned a few things but we have a long ways to go in figuring out most of our garden issues. Lance hoped that this book would contain a magical solution to our terrible grass, but it didn't. I would tell you that solution is fertilizer and regular watering. Bam. Grass and lawn genius. Someone pay me $100 for my consultation fee. But I digress. This book had some helpful solutions and insights. Nothing earth shattering though.

These are just a few things I read this summer. I also re-read the entire Anne of Green Gables series, The Secrets of Happy Families, The Tao of Martha, My Berlin Kitchen and a few others. I'm trying to get Lance to finish reading Parenting with Love and Logic. Because we need to figure out the best way to parent Lucan and not screw him up :)
What's been on your nightstand?

Pride & Prejudice & Jane Eyre as children's books?!?

I don't understand. How do you condense Jane Eyre into a children's book?

Especially an illustrated one? Do you leave out the part where Bertha Rochester stabs her brother with a knife, tries to burn Mr. Rochester in his bed, or finally succeeds in burning the top story of the mansion down in its entirety? Or do you just gloss over the whole wife is a raving lunatic locked in the attic? Or maybe you just leave out the whole polygamy part ...



Here's the item description:

Cultivate a love for classic literature with this sweet set of two books. Inspired by Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, this darling duo is designed to help little ones learn to count with the help of two timeless tales.

Includes Little Miss Austen: Pride & Prejudice and Little Miss Bronte: Jane Eyre
Written by Jennifer Adams
Board book / 22 pages
Recommended for newborns to age three years

Don't get me wrong, I love Jane Eyre, I list it as one of my favorites. But it's a little twisted for a children's book, especially ages newborn to three years old.
If you are interested in purchasing these two books and letting me know how they've been made age appropriate, they are on sale for $11.99 at zuily today!

I knew I was going to be a literary foodie

At a young age, I was destined to be a foodie. (Completely disregard the fact that I was a horribly picky eater, refusing to eat any pizza besides cheese pizza, turning my nose up at all beef products, and was convinced that drinking water would probably result in a sudden and painful poisoning. Truth be told, I'm not sure how my mom and dad put up with my antics)

But anyway, I was predisposed to be a lover of food. Just not in my early years. My favorite children's book, as a kidlet, was the classic Tawny, Scrawny Lion.

The idea behind the story is that the lion was always hungry because he would always have to chase down animals for his meals. The camels, bears, elephants, and zebras that were the lion's dinner, sneakily asked the cute little bunny rabbit to try and convince the lion to stop eating the big animals for supper. The rabbit makes the lion carrot soup and then the lion is no longer hungry because he has delicious carrot soup to eat!

I used to wander around my backyard with a bucket, gathering rocks, leaves and berries in an effort to recreate the rabbits' "carrot soup." I also vividly recall forcing my little neighbor friends to play this game with me. What can I say, I've always been a bit bossy :)

When I started reading longer chapter books, my favorite foodie book was Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy. My parents can attest, I couldn't read this book without first having to find a snack. Those pioneer farmers, man, did they eat good! Things like baked potatoes roasted in bonfire ashes ... freshly churned butter ... pies. Dear me. I should also note that in one of the other Little House on the Prairie books she mentions making candy using maple syrup and snow. I can't tell you how many times I made a mess in the yard, trying to make candy this same way.

This was a book I read in 4th grade. This book, in hindsight, is totally implausible. I mean really, how many parents do you know who would consent to letting their child go live completely by himself on the side of a mountain? But I thought this book was soooo cool. The main character carves out the side of tree for his home, teaches a falcon how to hunt, and eats turtle soup! Totally awesome.

And my love for foodie books hasn't stopped. Last year I read and reviewed in this post The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love.

My friend Nicole just lent me French Women Don't Get Fat. It combines recipes with non-diet advice. I'm looking forward to reading through this!

Book Review: The Dirty Life

I became a voracious reader the summer of my third grade year. I was being ostracized by a group of mean girls at my summer daycare and had nothing to do the entire summer but read. I believe that summer changed my entire academic path. I've never been academically brilliant, but I know how to persevere and utilize my resources. That was the summer that my brain caught fire to the escapist world that fiction provides. I read anything that I could get my hands on. This love of literature has followed me into my adult life. Again, while I would never categorize myself as "gifted" I have excellent reading comprehension skills that can be traced back to my summer of reading . One of the first series that I devoured was the Little House of the Prairie series. I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder's vivid word pictures about a life that was so foreign to me.

One of my favorites from the series was "Farmer Boy."

My parents can attest to the fact that I would read and re-read this book, even into my high school and college days. Truth be told, I enjoyed her descriptions of all the food and the harvest process. I never could read this book without having to stop and get myself a snack. I mourned the fact that my snacks never sounded as good as Amanzo's - no freshly made bread, spread with sunshine yellow butter and served with a tall glass of farm-fresh cream. No, my snacks were more along the lines of microwave popcorn and a Diet Coke. :)

Recently I came across a modern day version of "Farmer Boy" in the non-fiction work of Kristin Kimball's "The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love."

The author regals her transition from being a freelance written in Manhattan to a farm wife in upper New York state. She meets a man on a writing assignment who has abandoned modern farming techniques - chemical fertilizers, tractors, hormones, etc - and has started his own CSA program using conventional farming techniques - compost piles, horses, free-reign farm animals, etc. This man dumps her world upside down as she leaves her old life behind and joins him in his farming adventure.

It reminded me of my childhood favorite with a modern day twist. I highly recommend "The Dirty Life" if you have even a slight interest in farming, food, and love!

Reader's Choice

I love reading. I've been doing a lot of make-up reading for the past two years of not being able to read anything that I wanted to read. Fiction, non-fiction, recipes, the side of my Caribou Coffee cup, magazines, blogs, ingredient lists - you get the point. I love to read. Except insurance manuals. Heaven help me. Insurance is not exciting. Here are some of the things I've read this summer:

• House Rules by Jodi Picoult


• I loved, I lost, I made spaghetti by Giulia Melucci


• Same kind of different as me by Ron Hall


• The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman


• The Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving


• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann


• The Choice by Nicholas Sparks


• The Piano Teacher: A Novel by Janice Y.K. Lee


• Return to Sullivans Island by Dorothea Benton Frank


• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

I'm also currently reading The Outside Boy by Jeanine Cummins and Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World by Joanna Weaver. I'm about 60 pages into The Outside Boy. If it doesn't start picking up soon I'm abandoning it. I also started The Ames Girls earlier in the summer and abandoned it because it was dull. Favorites of the above mentioned books: Same kind of different as me and The Last Night in Twisted River.

I wished that I like running as much as I like reading. Alas. Reading doesn't make me any thinner. I suppose in that respect, neither does cooking.

So ... 10 books. Not too shabby. What are you reading? What recommendations do you have for me?

2010 Reading List

I'm a voracious reader. There's no way around it. I've been that way since the third grade where I was dropped off at a summer daycare where a clique of girls decided to ostracize me and reading was my only opportunity to pass the time. In 2008 I made a goal of reading 100 books. I came really close. I think by the end of the year I was at 87. That's pretty freakin amazing because it means I averaged around two books a week. Well, in 2009 my reading dropped off pretty dramatically with the onset of school and required reading. Amazingly enough, my consumption of non-fiction is much slower than my consumption of fiction. At least the stuff I'm assigned to read for school :)
When Lance and I moved to Des Moines I started going to used book sales. Previously, I had the tendency to only purchase books that I had read previously and loved because who needs to waste money on something I'll never read again was always my philosophy. Too bad I can't apply that philosophy to textbooks ... But book sales. I started picking up things I had heard good things about, but never read. Well, it's been a dangerous practice because for the first time in my life I have a stack of books that I've purchased but have no idea if I like them or not. It is my goal for 2010 to finish that stack. And here is the list:

1. The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen Carter
2. Family Tree by Barbara Delinsky
3. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
4. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
6. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
7. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
8. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
9. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
10. The Secret Between Us by Barbara Delinsky

As you can see, no rhyme or reason to my list. Just thinks that I've picked up the last couple of years that I thought would enrich my life. And then of course whatever books my book club reads and other random books that strike my fancy. Will I get the list done? What are you reading?