Sunday Salon: Summer Is Officially Over and So Is My Summer Reading

My oldest child has been off at college for three weeks. My younger two have been back at school for three weeks also. Labor Day was this past Monday. Pools all over the area have closed for the season. My WNBA meetings have started back up again. All of this means that, despite the continued high temps here in the sunny South, summer is officially over. So now it's time to check in and see how I managed to do on my overly ambitious summer reading list. There is little rhyme or reason to what I managed to read and what I didn't (except to me) but based on the original list, here's my tally:

Finished reading from the original list (link to my review if applicable):

Worthy by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky
Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman
George's Grand Tour by Caroline Vermalle
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave
In a Dark Wood by Joseph Luzzi
Love Maps by Eliza Factor
The Door by Magda Szabo
Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle
The Appetites of Girls by Pamela Moses
The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
Whisper Beach by Shelley Noble
Summer Secrets by Jane Green
It's You by Jane Porter
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
Newport by Jill Morrow
Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
When the Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi
The Road Home by Kathleen Shoop
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia
The Invisibles by Cecelia Galante
Stepdog by Nicole Galland
The Reinvention of Albert Paugh by Jean Davies Okimoto
Anchored by Bridgette Quinn
Making Nice by Matt Sumell
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Spinster by Kate Bolick
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Bread Alone by Judith Hendricks
The Race For Paris by Meg Waite Clayton
Fishbowl by Bradley Somer
Satisfaction by Andee Reilly
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler
Baker's Blues by Judith Hendricks
White Dresses by Mary Pflum Peterson
A Window Opens by Liz Egan
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County by Amy Hill Hearth
Little Woman in Blue by Jeannine Atkins
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

Finished reading but not on the original list:

Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number 8 by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
Landfall by Ellen Urbani
Henna House by Nomi Eve
The Coincidence of Coconut Cake by Amy Reichert
The Woman in the Photograph by Dana Gynther
The Baker's Apprentice by Judith Ryan Hendricks
On the Rocks by Erin Duffy
X Marks the Scot by Victoria Roberts
Two Across by Jeff Bartsch

Still has a bookmark in it:

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson

Just didn't get to 'em but will eventuallly:

Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
Famous Baby by Karen Rizzo
The Nurses by Alexandra Robbins
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth
Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey
Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

How did you do with your summer reading this year?

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Vintage by David Baker. The book is being released by Touchstone on September 22, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: “Vintage is at once a mouthwatering culinary tale, an evocative look at the strength it takes to create the life we want, and a delicious adventure.” —Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, MFK Fisher Award–winning author

Good ingredients, an open heart, a dash of tenacity and a pinch of courage...

Food journalist, wine connoisseur and onetime bestselling writer Bruno Tannenbaum has long believed these are the elements of a full life. The rest will take care of itself. But lately, nothing’s going right for Bruno. His career is floundering, he’s separated from his wife and their two daughters, and is drinking his way through a dwindling bank account, certain all that’s left of life is a downward slope into obscurity.

Then Bruno stumbles on a clue leading to a “lost” wine vintage, one of the many bottles stolen and smuggled out of France during WWII, now worth a small fortune and sought after by wine collectors throughout the world. Bruno realizes that finding this bottle could be the key to restoring his career—maybe even writing his comeback book. But his discovery is not a secret for long; as word of his finding spreads, nefarious characters interested in the bottle start appearing at every turn. Bruno scrapes together his final resources, calls in favors he may ultimately regret and sets off on a grand adventure.

From the rolling hills of Burgundy to a raucous wedding in Moldova, from a Beaune bacchanal to the graying walls of a Russian prison, Vintage is a hilarious food-filled debut about redemption, sacrifices and making one last effort to follow your dreams.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme has been hosted by Sheila at Book Journey and I hope will be again one day.

Books I completed this past week are:

Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County by Amy Hill Hearth
On the Rocks by Erin Duffy
Little Woman in Blue by Jeannine Atkins
Two Across by Jeff Bartsch
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller

Reviews posted this week:

Spinster by Kate Bolick

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

The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox
The Door by Magda Szabo
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
Landfall by Ellen Urbani
This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia
Henna House by Nomi Eve
Love Maps by Eliza Factor
Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle
The Coincidence of Coconut Cake by Amy Reichert
Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks
Fishbowl by Bradley Somer
The Woman in the Photograph by Dana Gynther
Beneath the Bonfire by Nickolas Butler
The Baker's Apprentice by Judith Ryan Hendricks
X Marks the Scot by Victoria Roberts
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County by Amy Hill Hearth
On the Rocks by Erin Duffy
Little Woman in Blue by Jeannine Atkins
Two Across by Jeff Bartsch
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrival:

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman came from a friend for a postal book club I'm in.

About a woman who comes home from her tour of duty in Iraq, irrevocably changed and suffering from PTSD, and the impact it all has on her family, especially her beloved brother, this sounds incredibly painful but important too.

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday Salon

As summer winds down, I have been in a tidying up sort of mood. Unfortunately this hasn't managed to spill over into making my book shelves look pretty. Of course, those are so often in flux that as soon as I finish they will be a disaster all over again and I could start over at the beginning. I'll be honest, it's also an overwhelming task! Here are a few of the shelves on the first floor as they look today.  Note the books stacked in front of the tidily shelved bits.



And those shelves are much tidier than the ones in the public basement areas:



And if these are the ones that anyone coming to my house can see, you will just have to imagine how disastrous the ones in the non-public areas of the house look. (I do have pictures but I'd like to hang onto them and only share them once I've cleaned up the horrendous mess--which possibly means never.)

Maybe cleaning these up will be my fall/winter project, at least the publicly viewable ones. Then again, my daughter wants to move into her older brother's room now that he's gone off to college and he doesn't object so I might just be moving two rooms instead of doing book things!

This past week, I have traveled all over in my reading. I went to Naples, Florida in the 1960s as the members of the literary society there tried to stop development in the Everglades. I went to the beach in Newport, Rhode Island as a woman tries to meet men after her former fiance dumped her via Facebook. I went to Concord, Massachusetts and France as the youngest sister of Louisa May Alcott strives to be taken seriously as a painter. I went to Washington, DC and Boston and Providence, Rhode Island as two spelling bee champions meet, marry (maybe), and cross into and out of each others' lives for years. I am also still in the midst of St. Malo, France during WWII with a blind French girl and a German soldier who specializes in radios and in London and the woods with a survivalist father and the daughter he's taken into the woods with him. Where have your reading travels taken you this past week?

Review: Spinster by Kate Bolick

The word spinster has very negative connotations to it. It is not used as often in this day and age as it used to be but it still carries the suggestion that the woman to whom it refers is a failure. She has failed to get married, which must, of course, be the goal of any right thinking woman. Except that marriage is no longer necessarily a goal; nor is it expected. Once upon a time, women did have to rely on men financially and so marriage made sense. With women fully able to support themselves, you would expect that marriage would no longer be such a coveted goal, and yet, in many cases, it still is. Kate Bolick has set out to examine why, to find inspirational women who point to another way, to reclaim the word spinster, and to share her own experience as an unmarried woman in her new book Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own.

This book is part memoir, part biography, part sociology. As she discusses her own life and the societal expectations up against which she runs time and time again, she talks about five women who inspire her, the women she calls "awakeners," whose own paths were unconventional, who helped her find her voice and to stay on the path she's chosen. Essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman are the women who guided her, whose lives she examines not only in conjunction with her own but also in contrast to the world they lived in as well. Interestingly, all of her awakeners did in fact marry at some point in their lives albeit unhappily so while they might have been disapproved of in their own times, they would not have been called spinsters.

It is very clear that Bolick greatly admires the women she's chosen but trying to knit her own life into the mix felt forced and as if it all didn't fit nearly as well as she wanted it to do. The narrative tone is inconsistent with portions of the book sounding quite pedantic while others were much more personal, perhaps a result of too many foci here. Also, the fact that she talks about her own status as always single is a bit disingenuous given her almost constant involvement in long term monogamous relationships, one after the other. If she's calling that single, she has a very narrow definition of coupled, one narrower than most people these days. There are some interesting tidbits buried here and she has clearly done a huge amount of research to compile the sociological and biographical portions of the book. An interesting concept for sure, I really wanted to like and be engaged by this a whole lot more than I did.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

This Is Your Life Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison. The book is being released by Algonquin Books on September 8, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years, now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned. But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease on life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriet’s past.

There, amid the overwhelming buffets and the incessant lounge singers, between the imagined appearances of her late husband and the very real arrival of her estranged daughter midway through the cruise, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life. And in the process she discovers that she’s been living the better part of that life under entirely false assumptions.

In This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Jonathan Evison has crafted a bighearted novel with an endearing heroine at the helm. Through Harriet, he paints a bittersweet portrait of a postmodern everywoman, her story told with great warmth, humanity, and humor. Part dysfunctional love story, part poignant exploration of the mother-daughter relationship, nothing is what it seems in this tale of acceptance, reexamination, and forgiveness.