It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I don't know what's been up with me this past week. I have started a million books and finished only a few. I haven't been able to marshal my thoughts to produce coherent reviews. In short, I have been scattered and this round-up definitely shows that! This meme is hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books.

Books I completed this week are:

The Season of Second Chances by Diane Meier
The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm
A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova
Petals From the Sky by Mingmei Yip
The Writing Circle by Corinne Demas

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Great Lakes Nature by Mary Blocksma (this is going to take me all year as I read her year's entries on the corresponding days of this year)

Reviews posted this week:

Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney
The Girl Next Door by Elizabeth Noble

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

You Suck by Christopher Moore
The Mediator 6: Twilight by Meg Cabot
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes by Randi Davenport
Billie's Kiss by Elizabeth Knox
Hardly a Husband by Rebecca Hagan Lee
Critical Care by Theresa Brown
College in a Nutskull by Anders Henriksson
After the Rain by Karen White
Spellbinder by Helen Stringer
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
The Season of Second Chances by Diane Meier
The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm
A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova
Petals from the Sky by Mingmei Yip
The Writing Circle by Corinne Demas

Giveaways on the blog this week:

Men and Dogs by Katie Crouch

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Huck by Janet Elder came from Angela at NAL.
I am a total sucker for dog books. One that promises hope and community and a happy ending is just icing on the cake.

After the Fall by Kylie Ladd came from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
A book about friendships and marriages blown apart by infidelity, this sounds like a devastating and powerful read.

The Ocean Between Us by Susan Wiggs came from Chelsy at Big Honcho Media.
A military family grappling with the sacrifices and life that they have led for years face up to a long held secret on the eve of their father's latest deployment. I'm looking forward to seeing what military life is like.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Marcia at The Printed Page and enjoy seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday Salon: Keeping Up with the Vanderbilts

My husband arranged to take me away for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. His location of choice was the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC both because it wasn't too far away and because he knew I was interested in seeing the famed house. While I enjoyed the house tour, imagine my glee when we walked into the library and discovered that I am a mere thousand or so books behind the Vanderbilts. And I assure you that my house doesn't come close to the grandeur of the Biltmore. But I have almost as many books stashed in every corner of my house. Heh. :-) I was also most disappointed that the velvet ropes ensured we unwashed masses couldn't read the spines of the books, most of which looked unread to my always discerning eye.

After our tour of the house and grounds, we went back to our hotel, cheerfully grabbed our books, headed out to some likely looking chairs, and settled in to read. Imagine my surprise when a friend and neighbor found us there. She was walking past on her way back to her room and thought my profile looked familiar. The fact that said profile was completely engrossed in a book clinched the deal for her. D. thinks it is hilariously funny that we can be a couple of hours away from home and what makes a friend certain that it is me is the ubiquitous book. She even managed to take a couple of pictures of us reading that we never noticed being taken. How's that for immersed in a book?

I did manage to read a few more books this week than I thought I'd get through thanks to our mini vacation. But per usual, I took far more reading material than I needed. My husband pretended outrage that I would take four books for what was supposed to be a romantic long weekend but he knows me well enough to know that was positively restrained for me (I only finished two but started the third). After all, I took 10 books on my actual honeymoon so it's not like anything has changed about me in 15 years (well, nothing that can't be directly laid at the feet of gravity, age, and children!).

Saturday Shout-Out

On my travels through the blogging world, I find many books that pique my interest. I always add them to my wish list immediately but I tend to forget who deserves the blame credit for inspiring me to add them to my list (and to whom my husband would like to send the bill when I get around to actually buying them). So each Saturday I'm going to try and keep better track, link to my fellow book ferreter-outers (I know, not a word but useful nonetheless), and hopefully add to some of your wish lists too.

Sweet Misfortune by Kevin Alan Milne was mentioned on Bookworm With a View.

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons was mentioned on Bookworm With a View.

A Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden McClure was mentioned on Library Love Fest.

The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek was mentioned on Booking Mama.

What goodies have you added to your wish lists recently? Make your own list and leave a comment here so we can all see who has been a terrible influence inspiring you lately.

Review: The Girl Next Door by Elizabeth Noble

An ensemble piece, this novel by Noble invites readers into the lives of very disparate characters connected only by the fact that they live in the same co-op building in New York City. There's Eve and Ed who have moved to New York from England for Ed's job. There's Violet, an elderly British woman who has kept herself aloof from others in the building until she meets the desperately lonely Eve. There are the Kramers and the Schulmans, both of whom are suffering marriage crises of different kinds. There's the disolute, unemployed, mid-twenties son of wealthy parents who falls in love with a gorgeous, driven woman in the building. Charlotte is a shy romantic who lives vicariously through her friends. Madison is a predatory man-eater whose major goal in life is to snag a wealthy husband. And these are only a few of the residents. Some of their stories intersect but not all of them do, with characters living tandem lives that never touch.

The vast cast of characters and plot lines give this an episodic feel as each chapter focuses on the lives of different residents of the building. The danger, of course, is that some characters get short shift and that is definitely the case here. The lives of the characters vary in their ability to interest the reader as they range from everyday issues to bigger problems like infidelity and great tragedy. Because the narrative moves back and forth so frequently, it is difficult to become fully engaged with any of the story arcs although, British transplant Eve seems the most fully realized and her story the most engrossing overall. The biggest disappointment for me was the superficiality of each segmented part as the characters moved from hurdle to hurdle in their own rather insulated lives. The writing was reasonable though so this might make a decent beach read for those so inclined.

Katie Crouch in North Carolina and a giveaway

Do you live in North Carolina? Author Katie Crouch, whose books are set in South Carolina, will be in the Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham areas in two weeks to promote her latest book: Men and Dogs.

From Booklist via amazon:
Following her embraced debut, Girls in Trucks (2008), Crouch offers another southern tale in which Hannah Legare finds herself back in her hometown, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, as her marriage, business, and life in San Francisco crumble. She soon begins to puzzle over an old mystery: her father Buzz’s mysterious disappearance more than 20 years earlier. Hannah retraces old ground, hoping to glean insights from the recollections of her mother, stepfather, brother, and family friends. Yet most residents of the town prefer to remember Buzz fondly, and view his disappearance during a routine fishing expedition as a tragic accident. Hannah, however, is still haunted by her father’s absence and the thought of the family dog drifting alone in the boat. Her quest to discover her father’s true fate provides clues to Hannah’s current problems, including her trouble being faithful to her husband, even as she realizes she may find information she never wanted to know. At least she will finally begin to piece together her own story.

Ms. Crouch's North Carolina appearances are:

May 25th, 7pm
Park Road Books in Charlotte

May 26th, 7pm
Regulator Books in Raleigh-Durham

May 27th, 7pm
Barnes and Noble, Cary Commons, in Cary

I know I plan to be at the Park Road Books event (even though it is my anniversary) and thought that if anyone else was going to be in the area, we could meet and maybe catch dinner, if we find time amongst all the book browsing (since I am congenitally unable to go into a bookstore without shopping).

And if a fun author opportunity isn't enough, Henry at Hachette Book Group has offered to let me host a giveaway of Men and Dogs. I have three copies of the book to giveaway to folks with a US or Canadian address (sorry no PO boxes). To enter, just leave a comment below. Entries will close at midnight on May 24th.

While you gear up for the event, check out Katie Crouch's author website. I suspect that her canine assistant probably isn't making the southern leg of her tour, but she does have one gorgeous dog. Go look!

Review: Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney

Perhaps my Irish blood has been too diluted or maybe it has been recalled entirely but I don't seem to enjoy Irish storytelling with all of its attendant divagations as much as I probably should given my heritage. Odd this, given my own propensity for rambling far afield of the topic. But the wandering digressions present in this book, as in so many Irish tales, made for a slow and meandering read for me. Couple this with much information about the political situation in Ireland in the 1930's and, well, I put the book down as often as I picked it up. Of course, the narrator tells us early on that both digressions and frank discussions of politics are deeply woven into the heft of the Irish character. Obviously my own sketchy connection to Ireland, traced back to a single great grandparent, is too small to count anymore since these two things are as scantily represented in my reading as possible. Occasionally I even forget to wear green on St. Patrick's Day for heaven's sake.

Ben MacCarthy is only 18 when his father takes him to see a traveling show. His father is enamoured of the show's headliner, Venetia Kelly, a young woman magnetic, charming, beautiful, and far too young for him but who welcomes the older MacCarthy into the crew of the show that evening, leaving young Ben to go home alone and break the devastating news to his mother. Ben's mother asks the impossible of her only son: to go and bring his father home. And so begins Ben's adventure through the world of vaudeville, dirty politics, and a doomed, incendiary love affair. While Ben grapples with his father's obsession for Venetia, a political charlatan and proponent of Fascism is stealing the family farm from right under Ben's mother's nose. Flipping between the situation with Venetia and that of the farm, Delaney weaves the personal and the political together tightly.

The narrative is being told by Ben many years after the events of the story and includes research about the people involved which he didn't know when he was freshly 18. The form works although it does allow for increased digressions and less of a sense of urgency than would have been likely had his character been telling the story in the thick of the events. There is an large cast of characters as well and the narrative jumps around to follow different people as their impact on the story waxes and wanes. So while it is told in a basically linear fashion, there are all sorts of tendrils creeping away from the central plot line. Ben's character addresses the reader throughout the narrative, making the reader feel as if he or she was sitting listening to a master storyteller beside the fire. And while the scope of the novel is sweeping, Delaney's narrative choice makes if feel smaller and more personal than it might.

As I mentioned above, I personally had some difficulty with the meandering of the tale but many other reviewers found the digressions added immeasurably to their experience. In pulling in so many greater issues, in terms of the politics and the national character of the Irish, I found myself at a remove from the characters which made it hard for me to feel sympathy for them in their situations, even when the most naive and trusting among them were being manipulated. Although the ventriloquist's dummy named Blarney was important symbolically, his inclusion outside the parameters of the show itself was a bit disturbing. Over all, I have to say I was a little disappointed in the book, perhaps less for what I read than for the loss of my expectations. And maybe I should go back and check my Fran's nationality again because I don't seem to have inherited the Irish adoration of theater, politics, and divagation along with my freckles.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for my copy of this book to review.