Reading in the Garden

“Fisherman Up” I read  The Old Man and the Sea  by Ernest Hemingway  because I had it one of my piles of books. What I really was looking forward to reading was the novel I had ordered,  The Hundred-Foot Journey  by Richard C. Morais .  It was due to arrive in the mail in a day or two, so I didn’t want to start another book.  Then I spotted “The Old Man” and thought, what the heck.  I’ll read this book in between, because it’s very short and  it’s a modern classic. To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting all that much.  I know it’s supposed to be this great novella.  After all, Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize for it, so it couldn’t be all that bad—but it was about fishing.  I have about as much interest in fishing as I have about what’s under the hood of my car. But brevity is sometimes a great lure (no fishing pun intended), so I dove right in.   Surprisingly, I did   like it.  It wasn’t just  ...

“Semple-y” Delightful Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple was one of those books that I had been meaning to read for a while now but never got around to it—until a friend loaned me her copy. I’m sure glad she did. As I dove right in, I felt this refreshing splash that sent revitalizing waves throughout my brain. It’s a totally unique and absolutely fun book.  It is about a teenage girl and her relationship with her parents, specifically her mother, Bernadette. Bernadette is an antisocial woman who has her family living in a deteriorating mansion on a hill in Seattle overlooking Elliot Bay.  She is incapable of handling even the smallest tasks and has a virtual assistant in India doing her every bidding for seventy-five cents an hour.  Her husband, Elgie, works at Microsoft and is rarely home.  In the middle of it all is Bee, a smart-as-a-whip girl who wants to go to Antarctica over the Christmas break.  This book is written in a semi-epistolary sty...