Reading in the Garden

Motherless in Seattle Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford is set in Seattle in 1934 as a twelve-year-old boy sees a woman on a movie screen he believes to be his mother who abandoned him five years prior.  With the help of a friend, a blind girl living in the same the orphanage, he sets out to find and reconnect with his mother. The story flips back and forth between William’s quest and his mother’s story in the 1920s, revealing why she would leave the son she loved behind. I liked this book.  It held my interest with the heart-wrenching story of Willow Frost intertwined with the Great Depression, racial suppression, as well as Chinese tenets and superstitions. This was a book club selection and my fellow readers also liked the book.  All around it held everyone's interest.  We were outraged at the  prejudices of the times and the hardships that women in particular had to endure.  We were saddened at the orphanage system and incidents in t...

Banking on Books Reading Reward I found this challenge on the “Let’s Read” blog at http://momobookblog.blogspot.com On her wonderful book blog Marianne posted the following challenge in English, which she discovered and translated from a German blogger.  For every book you read, put $2.00 (or whatever you deem affordable) in a piggy bank, envelope, jar, etc.  Don’t touch the money until the following fiscal year and you will have some money to splurge on something fun. --  Probably not on books since that’s not a splurge, it’s a necessity, in my opinion.   :) Marianne reads A LOT. Last year she read 72 books and saved $144.00 Euros!  I would have saved about half that, but that’s fine with me.  http://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-piggybank-challenge-2015_5.html?showComment=1427815554230#c6156727557336032934 This challenge is similar what I did to try and bribe my kids to read when they were small: for every two books they read, t...

Murder or Misfortune? Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson is about a murder trial—the accused a Japanese American man in 1954 on an island in the Puget Sound.  As the trial is chronicled, we jump into flashbacks of the people involved in the case—flashbacks of life on the island off Washington state, of love, war, and internment camps.  The full descriptions brought me right into the lives of hardworking farmers and fishermen.  It also defined the racial tensions before, during, and after December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Even years after the war, racial tensions against Japanese Americans were strong, but were they strong enough to taint justice for the man accused of murdering a white man? Or —did Kabuo Miyamoto really kill Carl Heine?  This was a good book. I enjoyed slowly learning the backgrounds of the key players, the possible motive of the accused, and the emotions of everyone involved.  As the trial unfolded and fact...

Felicitous Festival of Phraseology Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn chronicles the island nation of Nollop and the outrageous laws enacted to omit certain letters of the alphabet in spoken or written form when those particular letters fall off a monument of local hero, Nevin Nollop, creator of the pangram The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog . Written in epistolary format, we follow the absurdity and consequences of these restrictions. Ironically, this tiny nation is dedicated to the education and celebration of language, which is evidenced in their eloquent and rich usage of speech. Their letters sound like correspondence from a different century.  So what can the islanders do in a race against time before they lose their ability to communicate?  You’ll have to read and see. This is a high l y creative , fu nn y read .  I th o r o ugh l y e n j o yed it a n d eve n f o u n d m yse l f l aughi n g o ut lo ud .  After fi n ishi n g t...