Five on Friday: A Book Maven's List of Summer Reads

This week I can't really say "tgif" because it's my turn to work the Saturday shift. But that's okay, because I'm not stuck in a job where I'm counting down the minutes until the weekend.

And at least I have weekends, usually. In my last job--which was also my first official librarian gig--I didn't have weekends. I had days off: Sundays and Wednesdays. Absolutely brutal, and not exactly inducement for exploring the Southern California region.

But I digress.

It's been a fairly busy and productive week, all things considered, except in one very important area: reading. I didn't finish any books this week, nor did I make too much headway in Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in This House or The Dead Travel Fast. A cardinal offense for a librarian! So, to begin atonement, I present this week's Five on Friday: A Librarian's Summer Reading List

The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
It's non-fiction, which is a weak point of mine. I feel compelled to pause every 30 seconds and take notes, a most disturbing and lingering habit from college. But this has a certain memoir-feel to it; combine with that the distinct flavor of self-help and the fact that there's a rather intense blog about it and it's very orderly, and oh yes, the cover is a lovely shade of blue (librarians' collection development secret revealed!) and I give up, it's going to be the first book in the book group that I will establish this summer!
(Note to self: Establish book group this summer).

The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron
My eldest sister Thing One and I will both be reading this book and the accompanying workbook this summer. She's a frustrated artist, and I am a deeply intimidated artist-wannabe, and again, the self-help nature, combined with the planned lesson format (and did I mention there's a workbook?) make this a deeply appealing read for a very Gemini person.
We'll be starting it on the Summer Solstice.


Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay.
Okay, so this one actually is assigned reading. The Library's book group invited me to lead a discussion on Atonement last year, and I didn't suck! I didn't suck so much that they invited me back this year to lead the discussion group on this WWII historical. Um, yes, please? Book group is in August, so I've got a wee bit of time to read this and work up another not-sucking discussion.


The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Confession time: I never read this. Come on, High School English could only cover so many books! And anyway, how many of you have read Bleak House AND enjoyed it? So there. I kind of intensely dislike Salinger and suspect that he was a very wily sexual predator. But what the heck, I'll read his stinkin' book. I'm a librarian, after all. I'll rise above. And possibly grumble a little as I'm rising.


The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
We're all about the positive around this here blog, so this is a good one to hitch on to. Randy Pausch wrote this little gem--based on his final lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams", delivered at Carnegie Mellon University as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. We're also all about the tear-jerking around this here blog, too, apparently. I've heard a lot about this book, and figure it's a nice way to round off the reading list.



Of course, I'll read other stuff, but these five are the primary goals for the summer.

What's on your list?

Wives in Books: Julia and Julia; Cleaving

March--otherwise known as the Month of the Thousand Library Programs--has passed, thank god. I survived, more or less, but it appears that I did so only on the strength of an unholy pact between me and my body--a pact that was made without my conscious knowledge. My body agreed to get me through March, only on the condition that it would be allowed to collapse come April 1.

And so, despite my responsible and vigilant ingestion of many vitamins and minerals (I smell like an herb garden right now, I think), I am now at home, buried under a pile of unwashed quilts, nursing a sore throat and feeling very sorry for myself indeed. The cats look askance at me, as if they are wondering why I am home in the middle of the day and not feeding them.

Life is hard.
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So. Book review time.

Two books, one author: Julie Powell, known in some uncharitable circles as "a soiled and narcissistic whore." I'll refrain from such judgments, mainly because A.) Hey, we've all been there, and B.) It just takes way too much energy at present. And plus, there's an absolutely adorable egg whisk on the cover--which I actually registered for! Heh.

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. If for some reason you've been living under a rock for the past few years (or, the other alternative that can explain a disconnect from pop culture, have been attending grad school), and haven't heard, it's a book based on the blog of a woman who, on the eve of turning 30, decided that she had done very little worthy in her life and so proceeded to spend the next year cooking up every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Powell documents her experiences in her blog, expands upon them in her book, eats a lot of butter, and drives her sainted husband crazy. Defying all odds, she gets noticed, her book gets published, and a movie is made out of it.

Both the book and the blog have a refreshingly honest--and caustic--tone and text, to say nothing of a supremely quirky wit. As well, Powell offers up a more than a few domestic details which I find utterly beguiling. As an almost-30 almost-wife, I understand career frustrations and the feeling of abject terror that comes when I realize that the only thing standing between me and middle age are ten tenuous, flimsy, easy-come-easy-go years. Julie Powell's been there, and her book is a good companion to light the way.

Her husband, Eric, is along for the ride, and he certainly benefits--and suffers--from the project. He practically gave her the idea for it, and he certainly provides her with a great deal of support (and manpower) as she cooks her way through the year. More than once, I found myself thinking, "That is a marriage I'd like to aspire to."

That is, until I read Cleaving.

Powell is taking a lot of flak for this book, perhaps not unjustly. It's a very different kind of book from J&J...it's more specialized (meathooks and butchery, anyone?), it's not as funny, and in fact, parts of it are pretty darned sad.

You see, Julie ends up cheating on her husband. Not just for a one-night stand, but for a long time. A couple of years' worth of time. And her husband knows. And they stay together, the whole time pretty much, and eventually Julie and her lover (who's a real toad of a guy, btw) part and Julie's devastated. And so she goes off and learns butchery.

Here's the real departure--butchery. Because once you get past the screamingly obvious metaphor (Helen Keller couldn't have missed it) of Powell butchering her marriage, the meat stuff is pretty boring. I actually skipped over most of that, because to me, the redeeming parts of the book were Powell's reflections on her marriage, her husband, her affair. She pondered Eric, the strange, secret language of their relationship, the past and the future of their marriage. She tried to come to terms with the sick nature of her obsession. I'm still not sure if she succeeds at any of it. The final lesson--in fact the only lesson--about marriage that I can take away from this book is that there is no happy ending, ever. Each marriage is a story in progress, without end until the ultimate end--death or separation. Each day the marriage evolves, and the only way to evolve with it is through vigilance.

And fidelity. I'm just sayin'.

Back on the air...again.

After close to a month of doing reading for work (bah!) I'm now able to spend my off hours reading for myself again--which means lots of self-absorbed chick-lit or anachronistic historical fiction about people who rubbed shoulders with randy kings.

I think it might be time to branch out a little.

Recently I watched the movie Julie and Julia. I have a very low threshold for what makes a movie something I will enjoy (does shit get blown up? do people fall in love? are there sumptuous costumes? is Christian Bale donning a batsuit?) and so, unsurprisingly, I enjoyed J&J very much. So much so that I went to work the next day and placed myself on hold for the book. And it came in, and now I'm almost at the end of the book, and I've come to a few rather interesting realizations:

1. Talented blog writers can take their most mundane, quotidian lives and make them into something that I WANT to read.

2. If I had a nickel's worth of sense (which I don't, as all my nickels are being squirreled away to finance my increasingly expensive honeymoon) I'd actually try to knuckle down and try to update my damned blog on a daily basis and maybe, just maybe my life will seem a little more fabulous.

3. What the hell should I blog about? Librarianship, with a little bit of my personal life tinging in? My impending marriage? Seems like the best blogs all have some sort of theme.

3. I have a tendency to adapt my inner voice to kind of echo those who I am most recently reading (Julie Powell's sarcasm, Crazy Aunt Purl's self-deprecation, my sister's whimsical artsiness). My writing style (I feel like a poseur even trying to imply that I have one) is, as of yet, extremely undefined.

4. Fucking wah.

5. I really dig the whole "blog to books" genre. I think it might be time to pull a Gemini and obsessively study it and then promptly forget all about it.

Over and out.