Reading in the Garden

Timeless Book, Short-Lived Bookstore? Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery is a sweet story of an eleven-year-old orphan girl who is adopted by a middle-aged spinster and her brother on Prince Edward Island.  Matthew Cuthbert is in his sixties and together with his sister, Marilla, they decide to adopt a boy to help on the farm.  The orphanage mistakenly sends Anne instead.  Anne is a happy-go-lucky, red-headed little girl who likes to talk—a lot.  Matthew, the shy and quiet type, takes an instant liking to Anne and asks Marilla if they can keep her.  But Marilla is a little more strict and unyielding than Matthew and declares that Anne must be sent back.  At the agency, the newly available orphan is almost instantly snapped up by a “shrewish-faced woman” who’s looking for some free slave labor. Fortunately, Marilla shows a softer side and just can’t put poor Anne in that situation. So Anne finds a home on their bucolic farm and slowly, sometim...

Saving Books Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman is a delightfully fun and easy, feel-good book about a twelve-year-old girl who, after her mother passes away, moves in with her great-aunt in Savannah, Georgia. There she settles in her new and unfamiliar surroundings and gets to know her long-lost aunt as well as a quirky set of Southern characters.  Tallulah Caldwell is CeeCee’s great-aunt “Tootie.” A kind widow who was never blessed with kids of her own, she makes room in her heart and home for CeeCee.  CeeCee can’t help but care for Aunt Tootie, and it isn’t long before she also forms a special bond with the maid, Oletta. Then there’s the glamorous and sometimes mischievous neighbor, Thelma Goodpepper, who has a real live peacock and a claw-footed bathtub in her backyard.   She likes to relax in the tub and watch the stars. Miss Hobbs is another neighbor, but she is not so congenial. She puts on airs and CeeCee has a bit of fun at her expense.   For a g...

“Bone Appétit!” This week we have looked at amazing pets. There was the true story of Modoc the elephant and the fictional classic of Flag the deer in The Yearling.   Today I thought we’d look at the most beloved of pets, the common dog.  Only this particular dog was not common at all. She was a great big loving dog named Grace Dane. Amazing Gracie by Dan Dye and Mark Beckloff is a heart-warming and humorous quick read about a man and his dog, how they formed a family and a business.  Dan was trying to get over the loss of a relationship, a loving eighteen-year friendship that ended when his dog, Blue, passed away.  He wasn’t looking to replace Blue, but eight weeks later, Gracie stepped into his life and turned it around. Gracie, an albino Great Dane was deaf and partially blind.  But she was also lonely and lovable and fit right into his home with his roommate, Mark, and Mark’s “girls,” Dottie and Sarah, a Dalmatian and a black lab mix. At first the...

Oh, Deer The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is a classic, first published in 1938 and still in print today.   Jody Baxter is a boy growing up with his mom and dad in the backwoods of Florida during the turn of the century, the former one, not Y2K. Jody is an only child in a poor family who desperately wants a pet.  Ma Baxter, however, is a tough nut.  She’s lost half a dozen kids before Jody and lives a hard life. She’s no softie. There’s not enough food to feed an animal. So Jody learns that “no” means “no”—sort of.  One day Jody finds a little fawn, whose mother was shot by Jody’s own father, no less, leaving the baby deer a little orphan in big country. Jody reluctantly gets permission from Pa to keep the fawn with the stipulation that he release him when he’s a yearling. Ma is not thrilled, but she tethers her tongue for a bit. Instead she packs a wad of "I told you so" inside her cheeks like tabaccy, building up the juice of her ire and holdi...

Those Amazing Animals My daughter and her boyfriend just got a puppy, a mini Wiener dog, and I gotta say he’s the cutest little guy!  He’s so tiny and soft and calm. He’s just adorable with his long snout and those floppy ears.  Whenever she comes over I get to hold Waldo and cuddle with him, and I’m amazed how good he makes me feel. There’s something about the way pets look at us, trust us, and love us unconditionally that makes us open up our hearts to them. I’ll admit I wasn’t always an animal person. I don’t like cleaning their poo. I don’t like them slobbering or jumping on me and leaving hair all over me.  I especially don’t like it when it’s not my dog.  So, when the kids were little and kept begging me for a dog, I kept telling them I was allergic to animals.  Funny how that was since I never sneezed or scratched once when I was around my sisters’ dogs.  The kids never caught on. Or if they did, it didn’t matter anyway.  We weren’t g...

Theft for Life In the book, City of Thieves by David Benioff, seventeen-year-old Lev and twenty-year-old Kolya are sentenced to death in Russia during WWII. Lev for theft and Kolya for deserting his unit.  Their only hope for survival is for them to obtain a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of a powerful Soviet Colonel’s daughter. Only then will their lives be spared.  But the Colonel may as well ask for the moon.  There is no food, not even a bran muffin to be found (and Kolya could really use one). People are starving and freezing.  This book takes the duo through some hair-raising and horrifying adventures. Their courageous journey is heart-breaking as well as humorous and will keep you turning page after page. This book is not so much about war as it is about human endurance and friendship. I was so enthused about the book that I gave it to my husband and daughter to read after I was done and both gave it a resounding thumbs-up.  Now just so you ...

Winter Blues In a continuation of winter reading, I would like to recommend A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. Set in the early 1900s, Ralph Truitt was a lonely man living in seriously cold and miserable Wisconsin.  This was not a hot dating spot.  People apparently went mad at one point or another randomly maiming and killing neighbors, friends and relatives or cutting off their own legs. As the narrator in the book says, "Such things happen.”  Remind me never to go to Wisconsin.  They may have good cheese, but I hear California cows are much happier. Who would sign up to live in that crazy cold place with a complete stranger?  Well, it’s probably not a Sunday school teacher.  Catherine, who answered the ad, came with a bag full of secrets and a few bottles of poison to boot.  Her plan was to become Ralph’s  wealthy widow.  Don’t let the long description at the train station at the beginning of the book scare you off.  It had ...

Bookless in Vegas Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a good book that took me two years to read, or more accurately, two years to finally open it.  This book was a panic buy. Two years ago I was heading back from Las Vegas to North Idaho when I realized that I was almost done with my book and would probably finish it midflight.  If I finished my book on the plane, I would have nothing to read! Nothing to read! I was panicking!  My heart began to pound. What was I supposed to do for all those hours?  My breathing became shallow. I started to twitch. I was going through the beginning stages of withdrawals.  It brought memories flooding back to when I was pregnant (and hormonal) in 1991.  I was already in bed reading when I finished my book.  I had no more books in the house and I began to get cranky, very cranky, pregnant cranky.  I complained to my husband.  By this time in my pregnancy, he was used to my mood swings,...

Reading Outside the Box Book clubs are wonderful things. I am part of a small club, what I like to call “café size.”  I get to meet with the girls about once a month, have a coffee, laugh, laugh, laugh, and talk, talk, talk. Eventually we even talk about the books. Technically we are two sets of sisters, eleven daughters, eight mothers, five grandmothers, and a couple of friends. An intimate group really if you consider several of us play double or triple roles. In reality there are only eleven in the group, three of them long-distance members. Structurally loose, no member is kicked out for not having completed or even started a selection.  We don’t adhere to rigid  rules like including two biographies, one non-fiction, three classics, etc. into our reading lists. We have not planned any pilgrimages to Connecticut where we can wander through the Mark Twain House and Museum then pop over across the street to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. In other words, we’re q...

One of My Favorite Books Who doesn’t love a circus?  It conjures up memories of childhood, of popcorn, candy, exotic animals, clowns, ladies in dazzling sequined outfits, and amazing high-wire acts.  When I think of a circus, I think of two things:  the wonderful book Water for Elephants and the time I took my two-year-old son to the circus. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is one of my all-time favorite books!  The story is told by an old man looking back on his life in the circus during the Great Depression.  As a young man he joins the circus after his parents died in a car accident. There he discovers a whole new and strange world in the small traveling community.   He learns the hard work involved in the back scenes of a circus, as well as the harsh and sometimes tragic lives of the workers. It isn’t long before he falls in love with the beautiful Marlena, one of the star performers.  Things are complicated though.  She...