Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

I was extremely excited to read this book based on its title. I was expecting a fun "fish out of water" type memoir. Instead, Rhoda Janzan's book is more serious. Raised as a Mennonite, Janzan had been living a secular life as an academic, married to a atheist. When her troubled marriage abruptly ends (as her husband leaves her for a man he met online and then sinks into depression) and she is seriously injured in a car accident, she returns home to her Mennonite family. Janzan has a clear eye for both her own foibles and those of her parents and siblings. Although the book has moments of humor (describing her cheerfully daffy mother), she also seriously examines why she stayed in such a bad marriage, why she chose to step away from the Mennonite faith and why her brothers did not. The book jumps from topic to topic and could be more clearly organized. Although it's a decent read, the title is still the best part.

Flashlight Worthy

This web site has dozen of reading lists, including "Books for Book Clubs who Actually Discuss the Book" Check it out and get reading!

Book Meme

Stolen from Crowinator

What books are your comfort reading--the ones you slink back to in times of stress?
Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon books, The Time Traveler's Wife, Lonesome Dove, early collections of Bob Greene columns

What was your favorite book as a child, and why? The Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the Ramona books, as to picture booksI liked the Dorrie the Litte Witch books, Corduroy, Blueberries for Sal

What was your favorite book as an adolescent, and why? as I got a little older the President's Daughter books and the Cherry Ames Nurse books (a Nancy Drew-esq series)


What is the most unread category of books gathering dust on your bookshelf--the books you've bought but just never get around to reading?
Non-fiction, particularly twentieth century history

What kind of books would you like to say you read, but never do?
Classics

What's the oddest book you've ever read?
If on a Winter night, a Traveler.. by Italio Calvino, too experimental for me!

What book were you never able to get through, despite the recommendations of people you respect? My husband would like me to finish a Neal Stephenson


What's the book it took you a couple of tries to get into, but was as good as promised once you finally made it?
Um, Twilight? That's the rare book I put down and picked up again (because of hype), even though it was solidly "eh" rather than good. Maybe The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

What's your favorite short story--or do you even have one?
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies has some great ones

The desert island. Three books (and collected works don't count. If you want the Lord of the Rings it'll cost you all three slots). Go:

War and Peace (It's long, baby, it will last a long time), the Bible (so I can memorize it and be armed and dangerous in debates with conservative) and Desert Island for Dummies.

The Know It All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person In the World

A.J. Jacobs set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in 2003 and the wrote this memoir documenting the experiment. About one third is traditional memoir, recounting he and his wife's attempts at having a baby, his job as an editor at Esquire magazine, and his family. The rest is devoted to various Britannica entries that make an impression on him (such as the fact that many famous people including Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Darwin married their cousin), and some adventures he would not have embarked on but for the Britannica project, most notably appearing on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". He ruminates a lot on the difference between intelligence and knowledge and generally gives the impression of guy who's bright, but also able to realize he's not THE brightest and to feel inadequate in the presence of those who outshine him. I enjoyed it, especially as the encyclopedia style entries were perfect reading for the last few nights when I was suffering from insomnia.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris is a sure thing in my book. This is his latest collections of essays and five minutes after I got the email announcing it, I had ordered the audiobook version. This isn't quite as heart wrenching as Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim or as funny as David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall
(which should carrying a warning about the danger of car accidents due to laughter). It is still a great book and made me laugh harder than I have in a long time. The two discs are one piece, about traveling to Japan to quit smoking and possibly the highlight. Listen to it rather than read it, at least the first time.

Entertainment Weekly's New Classics

Above is the link to EW's top 100 books of the last twenty five years. I've read 41, and you? and anything you feel is over or underrated? The omission of Time Traveler's Wife is the first that comes to my mind.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

I can't really fully explain why I enjoyed this book so much, but here goes. Blue Van Meer is a teenage girl whose mother died when she was five. Since then she and her father have lived in dozens of nondescript small towns as he serves as a visiting professor at various crappy regions colleges. Because of their frequent moves, Blue does not make friends but instead reads book after book, from movie star biographies to sociological and physiological treatises. She drops quotations from these books (real and imaginary, according the reviews) as she tells the story of her senior year in high school. For the first time she and her father spend a full year in one town, and Blue joins the circle of students that have a bit of a cult built up around Hannah Schneider, the school's film studies teacher. Hannah takes them on a camping trip and then disappears before she can tell Blue a secret. Hannah is later found dead and Blue fights to prove her death is murder, not a suicide. It took a long time to get to the mystery and I see how some could find the citations a bit much, but I thought it was the best book I've read in a quite while.