And the winner is...

Time's up, friends!  Sorry if you missed the window to post your book preference to receive a chance to win the cute mini-journal, but I promise that I'll do more giveaways in the future.  I have a few ideas including a copy of an upcoming featured book, some fun crafts, and tea/coffee because sometimes you need a nice warm cup to really settle in to read :)

To be fair, I just wrote down everyone's name who voted within the time slot and drew a name out of a hat and the winner is...  Lindsey!  I'll get your address from you and ship the little journal tomorrow, weather permitting.  Yeah, I just said weather permitting in South Carolina.  Today we have had our first winter snow and before it even began and was still just a "threat of snow," all of the schools closed down and my boss sent me home an hour and a half early.  If this were Ohio (where I'm from), I'd still be okay to drive in it, but people go so nuts over snow here that I am afraid to be on the road with them.  So.  The prize will go out tomorrow or Thursday, Linny!  I hope you put it to great use!  :)

Lindsey was especially lucky.  Not only did she win the journal giveaway, but she was part of the majority vote!  Our next book will be The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  I'm going to begin reading it now.  I can't wait for everyone to start so we can talk about it!
 

Now to go make myself a cup of abuelita with whipped cream and curl up with my cat to read :)

On to the next adventure!

Okay, my friends.  It has been long enough since we chose a new book and I have had a few people asking what's coming next.  I'm sorry guys.  I have been in a rut, feeling blue lately and just not motivated to start a new endeavor.  But you know what?  Reading makes me happy.  Even reading ridiculously sad books makes me happy.  Let's get on to the next adventure together!

As I mentioned on facebook, I am going to try something new: a giveaway!  I wanted to do a handmade crafty thing for my first giveaway but I am currently short on supplies.  Not only that, but my sister is having my very first nephew in May and I need to focus all crafting efforts on things for that awesome baby.  You know?  Okay, so I'm giving away a sweet, lovely, and teensy little journal.  I think it's great to carry one in your purse or car (or pocket!) to write down quotes you want to remember, last night's dreams, or notes on your current read for discussion here!  The journal I'm giving away looks like this:

Cute or what?  It has a black elastic closure band, too.  Love it!  So how do you win this sweet little blank book?  Easy peasy.  Just cast your vote on our next book!  And the choices are:

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  This one was recommended to me by one of you!  It sounds like a very interesting read to me and I happened to find it cheap at Mr. K's Used Books :)  Check out the amazon synopsis here!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.  I know that I saw the film a while back and I think that I thought it was pretty good...  This book is very highly acclaimed, as is the movie.  If we read this one, I'm definitely going to give the movie another watch since I really don't remember very much about it.  Synopsis

The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  Here's that synopsis...  This one was a recommendation on NPR for adult Harry Potter fans.  You can check out that list here if you, like me, are a total Potterhead!

My final selection is Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok.  I found this one in the Barnes and Noble bargain section for like $5.00 and I had a gift card.  Bonus!  Call me lame, but I am using Amazon for all of the synopses because it's easy and they never give too much of the story away.  So, find a description of this novel here.

I haven't read any of the books before but I'm ready for whatever you pick!  Leave me a comment on which one sounds good to you and I will draw a name for the giveaway on Tuesday, January 28.  

Room and My Best of 2013 List

Alright.  I'm slacking.  I promised I wouldn't in 2014.  Maybe I never said it on the blog, but I promised it to myself.

On that note, what is the point of me making New Year's resolutions?  They never pan out.  Every year I vow to fix my posture, get in shape, do my dishes as I use them instead of letting them pile up into a dish nightmare (*sigh), walk my dog more for both of our health benefits, floss every day, wear my retainer when I should and not just twice a month so that it hurts like my head is giving birth (that may be a slight exaggeration.  I've never given birth, so that's just what I imagine it might feel like.  haha), use my gym membership for something other than yoga...

And it never happens, although I have flossed every day this year so far! I did not make it a resolution though.  Just in case.

Anyway, I should really stop slacking off.  My ranting about resolutions was not some little greeting to get you nice and comfy to settle in, thinking how nice it is to read about a real, live person who has already given up the resolutions this early in the year and make you feel soooo good about keeping yours in line...  Uhh, no.  It is me procrastinating from writing about Room by Emma Donoghue.  Surprise!

Anyway... Let me first say that this book was bombin'!  In a previous post when I declared this to be our next read (Lord, that was a while ago), I explained that I was cleaning my bookshelves up and flipping through lots of books to decide the next read and how this one's short two-page glimpse that I had given all of the others became a 20 page glimpse at an alarming rate.  So I knew.

Room is unlike anything I have ever read.  And if you plan to read it and haven't yet, I suggest that you stop reading this post now.  Really.  Now.  I can't talk about even the premise of the book without posting spoilers.  But I'll post a little summary anyway.

This is the story of a little boy who has known nothing but dysfunction.  Really, nothing.  He is the product, essentially, of rape, but let's back up.  Room is about five year old Jack who lives with his Ma in a sound-proof garden shed.  He has never been outside of it.  He was born in it.  He was conceived in it.  Jack has never met another human being, apart from his Ma.  He has heard only one other person, Old Nick, his Ma's captor, who comes to the shed in his backyard regularly to provide basic necessities for Ma and Jack and to get his sexual fill from Ma. Jack is hidden away in Wardrobe each night as the only protection Ma can manage from Old Nick.  But it is apparent that she has all but given up on keeping away from Nick herself.  In her tv interview later in the book, I found sense in it when she said Jack was her absolute everything, that she felt saved when he was born because she mattered again and that this made her be polite and agreeable to her captor so that Jack would be kept safe.   

Room, as Jack calls it, is normal to him because it is all he has ever known.  They are provided with a tub, food and means of heating it, clothing, and a television.  Ma protects Jack by leading him to believe that everything (houses, news stories, dogs, trees, airplanes, etc.) on tv is make believe and basically that they alone are real in a little room floating through space.  Though escape seems impossible and Ma has tried many means of it throughout her years of imprisonment in Room, she still has small, hopeless rituals she clings to including flipping the light on and off at night so that it may be seen in the skylight, screaming as loudly as they can at the ceiling at certain times of the day, etc.  It's been a long, terrible imprisonment for Ma, but they do find a means of escape not too awfully far into the book (or at least it didn't seem far to me while I sped through it!)

I found the emotions of the book to be very raw and realistic.  I can't imagine how depressed and scared and lonely I would be if I were Ma.  It's amazing how much she loves Jack and the daughter she lost before him though the father of her children is a twisted villain kidnapper and rapist.  Jack is still her saving grace and her reason to live.  I totally understood her having "gone" days when she didn't even get out of bed, but most of the time she was lively, making the best of the horrible situation by playing with her son, exercising with him, teaching him, and practicing an enormous amount of patience.

I wouldn't say that I was annoyed by these bits or really disturbed either; I understood them, but I guess they made me uncomfortable.  And by these, I mean the breastfeeding and Jack keeping Ma's rotten tooth in his mouth.  Okay.  There was no need to stop breastfeeding, as Ma later explains to her own mother, I believe.  I get that.  It was a connection to her son who needed her and depended on her alone.  It was closeness and provision, protection.  But that does not mean I enjoyed reading about "the creamy left" a thousand times.  (But again, in the interview Ma does, she sheds light to me:  "In this whole story, that's the shocking detail?")  I get the tooth thing, too.  Jack saw his mother's rotting teeth as her falling apart.  If he lost that bit of her, that's just it, he would be losing her bit by bit.  And so he tried to protect her in this way.  But... gross.

Great job, Ms. Donoghue, on Ma's explanations and patience with Jack when she finally confesses that Room is not all there is, that Outside exists with grass and people and animals and cars and buildings and oceans...  In Jack's stagnant life, it is only natural that he would fear change.  I have no idea how I'd explain the world to someone who has never been outside of one tiny room, never looked out a window, let alone a child who already has a limited capacity and still needs basics explained to him.  It's insane.

I was so stressed out when Jack was running down the road during the escape.  I was so worried when the paper Ma wrote was ruined, that he would never see her again because he didn't know where she was.  I was afraid Nick would go back and kill her before they found her.  And when I found out about the daughter Ma had been carrying before Jack, it was devastating.

The return to Room was hard on me, too.  And again, I get it.  Jack needed it.  Ma, though she hated it, probably needed it, too.

I don't claim to know everything or anything about gender roles, but it was interesting to me to see Jack had so many feminine characteristics.  His long hair had him mistaken for a girl a few times after the escape.  He was obsessed with Dora the Explorer and didn't care that the backpack or whatever was pink/a girl's pack.  He just wanted it because Dora was someone he knew and loved.  He is sensitive and intuitive, which I consider to be more feminine traits as well.  Since he had no knowledge of the masculine, it was fitting.  The long hair was another part of him that, in their captivity, Ma saw no need to change.  She also may have been clinging to some memory of the daughter who perished by allowing Jack's hair to grow long.  However, Jack's favorite stories were not girly ones of princesses, but of Jack Jack the Giant Killer and other masculine rescue stories.  Interesting.

What did you think of the book?  I could not put it down.  I'm definitely going to read it again one day.  I'd probably give it a pretty high score like a 9 out of 10 even.  It was that interesting, gripping, different, and well done in my opinion.


And now, my best of 2013 list.  I don't want to put them in order of what was the best and what was the worst, so I shall award them in categories, like the Oscars.  haha  Here are some of my notable reads of 2013:

Book I am proudest to have read in 2013: The Stand by Stephen King.  Not only was I afraid to read it because STEPHEN KING, but it is supremely long.  I think my copy was close to 1130 pages.  SMALL PRINT.  But really, it was a magnificent read that I'll never forget.  Graphic, startling, upsetting, but magnificent.

Book Sale Best: Moloka'i by Alan Brennert.  I'd wager that nearly half of the books I own (and almost 100% of the books I've acquired since moving to SC) have come from book sales.  At this particular sale, a girl near me amid the crowded shelves handed me this book and told me I would not regret reading it; that it was her very favorite book.  It's not the best book I have ever read in my life, but it was a good, easy read.  It's about a little Hawaiian girl who contracts leprosy and is sent to the quarantined colony on the island of Moloka'i.  I might have liked it more for the Hawaii scenery than what was actually going on.  Gosh, I miss my family.

Page Turner of the Year: It's a tie.  Room by Emma Donoghue and The Help by Kathryn Stockett take the cake, but Honorable Mentions should go to The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin and White Oleander by Janet Fitch.

Smilemaker: Kyle bought me all of the Little House books in 2013.  I had never read them before!  When Laura got engaged, I could not stop smiling.

Tearjerker: Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper.  Trust Cooper and her cat stories (whether memoirs of fictitious) to get my waterworks going.  Good, bad, and ugly. 

I'm not including some of the books on the blog if they were rereads.  Therefore, I'm sad to say that Peter Pan and The Dogs of Babel are disqualified from awards.

Let's be honest...

I've gotta be honest.  Writing this blog is not what I want to be doing right this second.  As lame as it seems, I actually would rather be watching the (extremely addictive) Say Yes to the Dress!  WHYYY?

I don't know.  I think I let it go too long because of Christmas and all that it entailed (lots and lots of homemade gifting as well as shopping, wrapping, and watching Christmas movies because that is a freaking must) as well as a very brief and last minute trip to Ohio for New Year's Eve.  Can you believe that this is my second trip to Ohio in a row in which I did not get the benefit of Handel's ice cream?  I can't.  I was extremely disappointed that the THREE locations I tried on New Year's Day were closed (they all said See Other Locations, so I have no idea which ones were actually open)...

Anyway, the long and short is this: this post is going to be lame, so prepare yourself.

Maybe I do have a few notes, but they are mostly not worth mentioning.  Can I just tell you that when I posted and spread the word that we'd discuss Lord of the Flies, I had a lot more reaction than I think I've gotten on any book so far.  A lot of people read it for their English classes in high school.  A lot of people were supposed to read it for their English classes in high school but didn't.  A lot of people truly hated this book when they had to read it.  I think only one or two told me that they'd actually enjoyed it.  And most everyone gave me a warning... that it's a brutal read, or that they hated one character so much that even though they have read only a few books ever and probably don't remember what they were about, this character still grated that person's nerves so much that he was almost angry at me for bringing him back to the surface.  So I'm curious... what did YOU think?

As a young adult read, yes, I agree that it was somewhat brutal.  However, I read the Hunger Games series a few years ago with little disturbing my mind and this year I successfully completed The Stand by Stephen King, which had, in my opinion, much a much more graphic nature in the gritty bits.  Still, the hands-down most disturbing book I've ever read has got to be Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber.  That book kept me up all night not because I was afraid of the paranormal or anything like that.  It made me cringe as I thought about what was wrong with people in the world that they were able to inflict such abuse on others.  I realize that there is now a book out there stating that Sybil was a bit of a hoax and the many personalities were not real, but I have not read it and therefore do not know if the abuse from her mother was made up.  I honestly don't think that could have been made up as it was just that terrible and nauseating.  I suppose a very ill person could come up with some of it, but I'm digressing.  Anyway, comparatively, Lord of the Flies was almost a cake walk.

That said, I did not enjoy reading this book.  I found it dull and repetitive and difficult.  There were multiple instances in which I became so bored that I did not realize I'd read something important and had to go back and reread it, such as Simon's tragic and pretty disgusting death in the vicious "dance."  However, I did find a few bits worth mentioning, such as the CONSTANT use of the color pink in the beginning.  The boys' had pink faces, fingers, noses, etc.  The island was also full of pink.  But as the novel progressed, the children became more brown than pink.  The almighty conch also became bleached of its pink color to white.  Pink being the color representing innocence, these changes represent the loss of innocence.  Obvious, as that is the premise of the novel.

On page 39 in my copy, the boys are building the fire and Jack and Ralph find themselves working together.
"At the return Ralph found himself alone on a limb with Jack and they grinned at each other, sharing this burden.  Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure, and content.
'Almost too heavy.'
Jack grinned back.
'Not for the two of us.'"

This small conversation alludes to the fact that if the boys could have worked together as from the beginning, if Jack's jealousy of Ralph for being elected leader, if his animal instinct to kill for meat could have been buried in teamsmanship, if Ralph could have controlled his anger at the first instance of the fire going out, it could have worked.  They could have remained the innocents they began as.  I saw this conversation as one not about the log, but about the situation at hand.

On 54 I found the simple truth and theme of the book in the line, "He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were."  This becomes more and more apparent as the children become ever more savage.

I could talk to you about the conch and its small inclination of civility and how it shattered, basically died, with Piggy's death.  I could talk to you about Piggy, annoying as he was, as the voice of reason and how he provided, through his references to his auntie's wisdom, the only female voice in the story.  I could talk about the final climax of the story, that while Ralph ran from his imminent death at the hands of Roger and his stick sharpened at both ends (which actually was pretty disturbing), or about Simon's visionary realization that the beast they hid from was them all along--that they were becoming more and more beastly as they turned from civility and let the rescue fire go out in favor of doing things their own way...  But I just don't feel like writing about it and I honestly didn't the whole time I read it.  I did find a quote that Golding wrote about his novel to be interesting.  It was included in the notes at the back of my copy of the book:  "The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end when adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island.  The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way.  And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"

Who indeed?  Are people inherently evil creatures?  Golding thinks so.  What do you think?

I will do a post on Room by Emma Donoghue a bit later as I know I am two books behind.  I enjoyed it much more and it may make for a bit of a longer post than this one.  Please discuss Lord of the Flies and your thoughts and opinions with me.  Just because I did not particularly enjoy it does not mean I don't want to hear what you thought!  :)