Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

I think this was my first graphic novel this year. Discovered through Books on the Nightstand, episode 300, I am SO happy my little library had this.

I always find it difficult to review graphic novels, so I will just say the graphic portion is well done.

Now the meat of this book and why I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads:

I cried. I cried like a kid. Chast presents to us a memoir of her parents end-of-life portion of aging and it was heartbreaking. They were the same age, met as kids and married. They had one child, Roz, and lived well into their 90s together, completely dependent on one another and liking it that way. The novel details their decline and their transition from Brooklyn apartment to nursing home.

It is truly a great novel to read and might not affect everyone the way it did me. Reading this brought back many memories of my dad's decline with Parkinson's Disease. His dementia (much like Roz's father - oh, I felt her pain) that led to falls and finally a nursing home. Virtually everything in her book was very familiar as my dad passed away only 5 years ago.

So I cried.

And it was cathartic.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

I picked this book from my first postal book club and ...

damn....

I don't think I realized what I was picking!

The first story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, seems simple enough. Family goes on vacation (road trip!) and grandma is nervous about a killer on the loose. The writing is amazing, every word drops into a perfect place, and the story tugged me along until it beat me over the head. Dark, I tell ya. I was surprised at what I read and had to stop.

And then I went back....

The River was another that surprised me at the darkness at the end. Was anything sacred here?

No, not really. I kept on reading: through the strangers encroaching on innocent people and turning their worlds upside down, through women trying to survive on their own with devils on their shoulders shouting at them, through religion being brought up over and over and causing me to wonder if these people would be better off without it.

Dark turns and twisted paths. And, frankly, it all mimics the real world. The Displaced Person actually sounded like it could have come from some members of my family (deceased and/or no longer in touch with). The real world is dark and twisted and O'Connor sums it up quite amazingly in this book.

Revival by Stephen King

I've been looking forward to King's 63rd (!) book and I wasn't disappointed. It was a truly good book that told a wonderfully good story. However.....


It didn't frighten or scare me as much as the hype led me to believe it would. I easily see where some folks will not be able to handle the ending but it was just a good story to me.  As King said in his interview on the Today Show "People with faith have a lot further to fall"

http://www.today.com/books/stephen-king-talks-about-god-afterlife-what-scares-him-1D80281763

I think the Terrible Sermon and the things that are said about faith and religion will be upsetting to some, but I'm on the leaning that no one, not even Stephen King, knows what will happen after death. No One. So why sweat it? Don't be an asshole here on earth and live your best life and where you end up is where you end up.

Pastor Jacobs wasn't content with this philosophy. After a terrible tragedy (written very much in King-style) befalls Jacobs, he changes. Jaime Morton is the young boy who knew Jacobs before the tragedy and keeps ending up crossing paths with him for the rest of his life. The crossings are not happy circumstances.

There are no monsters in this book. Once again, King has made the humans the monsters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/books/stephen-kings-revival.html?_r=0

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

I picked this up through Audible.com and loved the narrators. They really made the book, although the book itself was pretty fantastic too.

We are set in 1986 and are following 2 high school students, Eleanor and Park, over the course of a school year. If there was anything to bring back the horror and misery of high school, this is the book.

Eleanor is new to the school, is a misfit with bright red hair and outlandish clothes. Park is a punk Asian kid who listens to Fugazi and knows martial arts. It seems very typical high school until we delve deeper into their lives as they begin to fall in love (over comic books and mixed tapes!).

Park's family is relatively normal, but he still has doubts and misgivings being Asian in a predominantly white neighborhood and school. Eleanor lives with her mother, stepdad, and 4 siblings in a tiny house, doing her best to stay out of the evil stepdad's way (and yes, he truly is evil and I hated this man).

Listening to the book, I remembered the reasons I hated high school. But I was happy for Eleanor and Park because I did not have the booming first love that they experienced.

I don't want to give anything away because you should experience this without knowing anything up front.

Deadline by John Sandford

It's another Fuckin' Flowers book!!!!!!

If he wasn't just a character in a book, I would marry that man.

So Virgil is on a dognapping case, which actually upset me more than the people who were getting killed. Poor pups. Flowers is with his friend, Johnson Johnson, and trying to find the dogs that have been stolen before they are sold off to bunchers for medical laboratories.

But then....

They stumble on to a meth lab operation that means getting the DEA involved and putting the dognapping case on the back burner.

But then....

A body of a local newspaper writer shows up dead in a ditch, shot 3 times in the back


And then more bodies pile up, the school board is unraveling as Flowers gets closer and closer to their embezzlement scheme and, seriously, they have no issues with killing people who get in the way. I hope real life school boards aren't this blood thirsty and money hungry.

Without giving away anything, the action with all 3 cases ramps up to high gear and made me take a longer lunch than usual because I just couldn't stop reading.

I love that Flowers.

Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson

This sounded intriguing. A book about how we have basically genetically altered our food into un-nutritious oblivion.

Not quite. True, this book does go through a lot of wild fruits and veggies vs the ones we have now to pick from the supermarket. It also gave some really good advice on how to pick the best fruits and veggies from markets and farmer's markets.

The chapters are broken up into fruit and vegetable families: wild greens and lettuce, alliums, corn, potatoes, root vegetables, tomatoes, crucifers, apples, berries, citrus, etc.

She includes quite a few charts that you could take with you when you go shopping so you know what are the most nutritious kinds of produce to buy. There are a lot of hints about storing produce and the best way and time to eat everything. I had no idea that if you cut garlic, you should let it rest for 10 minutes before you heat it so you can get the maximum amount of allicin ( a cancer fighting enzyme). If you heat garlic immediately after chopping/pressing for even 30 seconds, 90% of the cancer fighting enzyme is gone. Kind of disheartening when you think you've been doing something good for yourself!

I've made a few changes to my diet based on this book, including drinking purple carrot juice daily (it's amazing what this stuff has been shown to achieve in studies). Some of the advice, I will probably never do even if it does help me, just because of time, or lack thereof, on my part.

Well worth reading and keeping as a reference. I originally got this from the library but ended up buying the kindle version to keep.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I've been picking up books and putting them back down after a few pages A LOT lately. I wandered through my library's online ebook catalog and saw this one. Eh. Give it a try, I guess.

Pretty much from page one, I was sucked in.

Jacob is 16 and thinks his grandpa is the best adult ever, despite the strange stories and photographs he has from his childhood. That's all Jacob thinks they are: stories. One day, Jacob gets a frantic call from his grandpa while he is at work and rushes to his grandpa's house. He witnesses .... is it.... a monster.... near his grandpa's dying body. His grandpa whispers some cryptic words before he dies.

Jacob is left feeling crazy and disoriented because he knows what he saw, but no one else saw the monster and no one believes him.

From this point, he's determined to figure out his grandpa's last words and find the orphanage his grandpa ended up in during WWII. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

Jacob and his dad travel to the fairly deserted island where the home was and Jacob, literally, tumbles down the hole that leads him on a peculiar and thrilling adventure.

This is the first in a series and it did end with a bit of a "What?? What happens next?!?".  I'm excited to read the next book, Hollow City.