the final four (book reviews of the year, that is)

I've finished almost all the books I had on tap - only two have to be reshuffled back into the general population. Not bad, all things considered. I'll have nearly 190 books on the TBR shelves for the year, so it will be another no-book-buying year. Hopefully it will also be a year in which I can unpack all my books and reorganize them on the shelves ... I suspect the unpacking will cause a huge backlog of books to be reread as each old friend appears.

At any rate, four more books to be reviewed before the end of the year ...

Brenda Little, Encyclopedia of Vegetable Gardening. A nice reference, with handy 1- to 4-page entries on all sorts of different kinds of vegetables and herbs, including tips on storing and serving. Well worth having handy on the shelf.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer. I tried reading this before, and was daunted by the early chapters. This time I made it through (and yes, enjoyed) the whole book ... but overall I find it to be not a keeper. In particular, because the character and sentiments of Deerslayer himself are so very dated, and not in a good way.

Christopher Lee, 1603. This one started off well, I thought I was going to enjoy it, but then lost it somewhere. Firstly, it might as well have been titled James I: The First Year of His Reign, or something like that. Yes, I'm sure James I was an important character in 1603, but the entire book was filtered through how the events of the year affected James and vice versa. Plus, it felt disorganized and a bit rambly. Not worth it at all.

Paul G. Bahn, 100 Great Archaeological Discoveries. A page-by-page guide to great archaeology around the world, with lots of wonderful pictures. Interesting, fun, an easy bit of reference if you ever needed to refer to archaological info, and has entertained pretty much the entire family, most of whom have picked it up and leafed through it at some point in the last couple of weeks. A 'way' keeper, to quote Miss Veronica.

And there we are! Another year's worth of reading - my book database is at 1147 volumes and counting. Seriously, my next house is going to have to have a separate building for all the books.

Happy New Year and happy reading!

resolution time

Okay, it's only December 30th ... but I have a moment, and really, what difference does two days really make? Unless life as we know it ceases to exist, and then I suspect my New Year's resolutions won't seem so important, even to me.

Last year my resolutions were to focus on improving intimate relations with my wonderful husband, and to have a manuscript packaged and ready to submit. As you might think, neither of them actually occurred. However, I think in both cases progress has been made, which frankly is about the best you can expect from a resolution.

This year, again, I have two goals that seem paramount:

Resolution #1: Complete a manuscript and submit it to agents.

Resolution #2: Get back in the running habit, specifically aiming for 2.5 miles a day, 5 days a week.

There are other, more minor goals as well, such as

- care taken with diet
- paying more attention to spending
- continuing to work on being more even-tempered and generally more pleasant
- playing with my kids more and yelling at them less
- spending more quality time with my wonderful husband

But from a personal development standpoint, running and writing seem the most important items to focus on.

I look forward to 2009 being my best year ever - Excelsior!

a year in blogging

Firstly, I'd like to celebrate - this is the first year the blog has had more than 100 posts in it. Woohoo!

Secondly, I'm going to retrospect. The following are the first sentence from the blog for each month of this year.

January: Alas, our boy is growing up.

February: Just an update, really.

March: I find it fascinating to watch my three kids interact and wonder what their relationships with each other will be like when they get older.

April: Whew!

May: A mom on a bulletin board I read asked about balance in the day - how to juggle all the things that need to be done and still have time for your own projects.

June: I am obsessed with houses.

July: I think I need to move a bookmark to this page into my blog folder, so I'll hit it on my way up the list every day.

August: Back from the second trip.

September: Technically, I had a nearly 5-day weekend - my better half was off Friday afternoon, and had to come home yesterday to help with the kids.

October: It may well be slow blogging month!

November: You may notice the political season has come and (nearly, thankfully) gone without any notice of it here.

December: I'm feeling remarkably on the ball this holiday season ... I'm not entirely sure why.

Taken all together, these sentences remind me that it was a busy, happy year filled with family fun but during which I managed to work toward my own goals. Looking forward to another year filled with more of the same.

book reviews

Here we are in the mid-holiday chaos. Due to late-arriving relatives, we have yet to have the full free-for-all. The kids continue with a present a day, and the parents have gotten to rip the paper off a few. (Mommy received two pairs of earrings, carefully chosen by her boys, and the almost-perfect robe, carefully chosen by the biggest and best of her boys.) Santa did extra-good this year - Greyson has been glued to Lego Batman on the Wii nearly constantly, Charles went cuckoo for his Lego castle (or, as he calls it, the "$114 toy"), and Veronica shrieked with delight when she saw her Playmobil dollhouse. They each also got a new Looney Tunes ornament and a game from Daddy. Very exciting so far. What's left? I confess, I can't entirely remember.

Meanwhile, I've been pushing through on the last seven books I'm trying to finish before New Year's Day. (Don't get too excited - the TBR shelf still numbers about 185.) I just finished one (while playing Order Up! on the Wii, which has proven to be another of Santa's hits), so 6 to go. I might finish two of them, at the rate things are going.

So without further ado:

William C. Davis & Joseph G. Rosa, The West. This is a lovely coffee-table book with a comprehensive and well-illustrated overview of the history of the American West. Davis is one of my favorite historians, and the book is an extremely good reference.

Oscar Wilde, The Essays of Oscar Wilde. Pretty hit-or-miss, but interesting overall. It's part of a set - with beautiful gold-stamped leather covers - and therefore worth keeping.

Anne Perry, Bluegate Fields. Nice story, good characters, decent plot ... a solid entry.

Charles Heath, The A-Team 4: Old Scores to Settle. Yes, you read that right: a novelization of the A-Team. Also, the 4th novelization. It was quite enjoyable ... although I grant you, not as good as the first one.

a moment of quiet

Right now, I'm sitting here in the living room, bathed in the white light of the snow-covered land outside. (You know the kind of light I mean - the one you wake up to in the morning and your whole being smiles and thinks "Snow Day!!") Downstairs the saw is going as my father-in-law cuts wood for some basement-related project or other. Outside, my better (?) half is on his way to work, hopefully to return sometime before bedtime. Upstairs, my two boys are engaged in a serious battle of good vs. evil, in which characters from many different universes are engaged. My little girl is 'helping' her Grandma get dressed.

So here I am all alone in my living room ... which begs the question: Why am I watching Sesame Street?! (Answer: I'm too lazy to get up and look for the remote.)

In present updates: Monday, there were none given out, as my children did not behave in such a way as to deserve them.

Last night, however, presents were had:

My Charles got a look-and-find book from all over the world. Unfortunately for him, Mommy was so entranced by the concept that she forgot to look inside, and it turns out the book won't be much use to him until he can read. Er, motivation, right?

Miss Veronica got a big Dora doll to dress up. (As usual, she bears so little resemblance to the cartoon that Veronica didn't even recognize her. How hard is it, I ask you, to make merchandise that resembles a cartoon?) Veronica was pretty pleased, though.

Greyson got a big, elaborate book, Mythology. He had asked me to buy it for him when I was working the book fair at his school, I said "Oh, I don't know, it's so expensive", and then as soon as he was on his way to class I bought it for him for Christmas. The reaction was well worth the subterfuge.

Tonight there will be more gifts. There is a stack of 7 books sitting on the table that I am trying to get through before midnight on December 31.

And that's the state of my world in this moment that would be quiet if I could only find the remote!

an old-fashioned Christmas

I think that's a term that covers a huge number of concepts. In my case, this old-fashioned Christmas is made up of several things:

- constant snow. The world is lovely and hushed and white with the new-fallen (and -falling) snow.
- lots and lots of good food. No diets here, and happy to say it!
- lots and lots and lots of presents. Mommy and Grandma both went a bit overboard this year, and we don't apologize for it. As they get older, they're going to get harder, less fun, and more expensive to buy for. I'm enjoying every piece of plastic.
- the golden light inside, the white light outside, the cheery plastic snowmen smiling outside and the colorful Christmas lights and decorations inside.

That's my old-fashioned Christmas, and I'm loving it so far! We've already done some present-opening (see above and the overboard!).

Friday, with the blizzard, the boys each got a wooden 3D animal puzzle - a bear and a wolf - and Veronica got a magnetic wooden dress-up princess doll.

Saturday, Veronica got a Hawkgirl action figure, Greyson got really nice Prince Caspian and Peter Pevensie figures, and Charles got Peepiceek the mouse, Glenstorm the centaur, Mentius the faun, and somebody-or-other the minotaur. He nearly burst with joy, he was so, so happy.

This morning, the boys got Vikings shirts and Veronica got a purple sand-stuffed snake. Veronica was quite happy (as I knew she would be), and Charles was quite unhappy, having wanted more toys. Little does he know what is yet to come ....

book reviews

Further adventures in reading. :)

Anne Perry, Bethlehem Road. This one was pretty good, I thought, although it also seemed that a lot of the side plots got left behind unfinished. Perhaps because there were too many? But I liked the plot and found it an enjoyable read. (One thing I am noticing, though, is that Perry's style is a little too ... overwrought? for sustained reading. I couldn't take a stack of her books to a desert island without throwing a few of them in the ocean. They're much better taken one at a time interspersed with other books.)

Thomas Fleming, West Point Blue and Gray. If you'll recall, after I expressed my disappointment with Washington's Secret War, I was worried about whether I would like this one. Turns out, it's quite a good read. It's a fairly brief overview, but he makes his points concisely, illustrates them with anecdotes - including several that are fairly little-known - and overall contributes a solid piece of scholarship that is broad enough in scope to be an excellent reference.

MacKinlay Kantor, The Guntoter. I was fairly impressed with Kantor's Andersonville, and if anything, I liked this book of short stories a little better. They all take place within the same community and they really illustrated the richness of that community. Simple stories, simple people, but there's still a huge complexity to their lives.

Maggi McCormick Gordon, The Book of Home Sewing. An excellent all-purpose sewing guide, no question about it. And well worth keeping around for reference. But sadly, I've had to accept that sewing is one of those things I'd very much like to think I would enjoy and in fact have found I don't have that much interest in or aptitude for. Once you've shopped for the fabric, you're pretty much done with the part I find enjoyable. Nonetheless, it's a good book and well worth keeping just in case.

book reviews

Doing a big push this month to clear as much of the TBR shelf as I can.

Sterling North, Rascal. I've read this one over and over again. It's a simple story of a young boy who adopts a raccoon as a pet during the last year of World War I. Well-written, touching, funny ... well worth reading over and over again.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. I love Collins, and this one is a good one. (As a side note, Lou and I saw the musical in London a few years back, and while the character of Count Fosco was remarkably well-done, the character of Marian was atrociously badly served. One of the great female characters of British literature reduced to a simpering love-addled idiot. For shame, Andrew Lloyd Webber!) Intricate plot, good characters, good solid book.

Farley Mowat, The Boat Who Wouldn't Float. Mowat's a good and funny writer, and the book is a solid entry in his bibliography.

Rose Wilder Lane, Free Land. The story (by Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter) reads like a catalog of events from LIW's works. It's well done, the story is told reasonably ... but I have to admit that something about RWL's writing leaves me cold. Her mother's is warm and personal and her characters are real people you can love, but RWL's characters are somehow not as lovable or memorable.

let there be lights!

After a day and a half of no power, it is a tremendous luxury to be sitting here with my computer on my lap, the heat burbling through the baseboards, the fish happy with heater and filter, Scooby-Doo playing in one room while the boys play Wii in the other. I had a hot shower, hot coffee, and pancakes out of a refrigerator that is actually keeping things cold. The washer and dryer are back in use, which is a good thing because I have nothing to wear! My children all slept in their own beds with their night-lights on, and my alarm clock went off this morning. (All right, so that wasn't really a luxury!)

What's my point? Well, I like electricity and the things it runs. The past is fun to read and write about, but I wouldn't want to live there. And I am really, really grateful for, among other things, living in New England where this kind of thing doesn't happen very often.

book reviews

Doing a big push before the end of the year!

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers. My second reading of the second book - I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I always wish the two parts were reversed. I really find most of Frodo's adventures tedious, and the rest of them do far more interesting things. But overall it's quite an enjoyable series. I'm sorry I didn't get to it sooner!

Henry Reed Stiles, Bundling: Its Origin, Progress & Decline in America. 'Bundling', of course, is the practice of couples to court while lying in bed together. The treatise (written in 1872) doesn't cover the subject as thoroughly as I had hoped. Mostly, it's made up of attempts to find proof of the practice's existence, coy winks at the practice, and various peoples denial that the practice ever occurred amongst them. Not really all that satisfying.

Anne Rivers Siddons, Downtown. I kind of gave up on Siddons at the end of the '90s - she got a little repetitive and sensationalistic for me - but when she was on, her books were compulsively readable, her characters interesting, her plots certainly colorful. Downtown is one of those.

Vivian Schurfranz, Danielle. This is part of the Sunfire series that came out for teen readers when I was one. Laugh if you will - at the time I had the whole series (it was a series set in various points in American history, of course I did). And many of the books still hold up to rereading. This, however, was not one of them. Overwritten, entirely too many superlatives ... not at all worth rereading.

awww, my boy

My big blond boy is turning into quite the kid.

Last summer, he turned a major corner on the road to reading. We'd been giving him little books to read, the super-easy variety, and he mostly took it as a chore, finishing them dutifully so he could play his favorite computer games. Then we gave him a little book called Sam the Minuteman (yes, I may have mentioned all this before - I'm getting on in years, you know), and everything changed. Apparently, Greyson learned from Sam that books actually contain fun and interesting stories ... and learned it so well that on his Thanksgiving turkey this year, he wrote that he was most thankful for "my books" and "my family". I'm just glad the rest of us made the list!

Yesterday we were decorating the tree. Mommy took a back seat this year - I unwrapped the ornaments and handed them to my boys, who then hung them on the tree. I even managed not to micromanage the ornament placement! After a while, Greyson disappeared upstairs into his room. I thought he was making his own ornament. But instead, he came back downstairs with a piece of homemade wrapping paper wrapped around ... Sam the Minuteman, with a tag already made out to Charles. All on his own idea, gave his favorite book to his brother. My wonderful boy.

what a waste

My mother was an extraordinary woman. She sparkled. She was witty, and smart, and articulate, and she loved and hated with fierce passion. You could walk into a room and listen closely, and hers would be the voice that emerged from a crowd. (And not necessarily in an obnoxious way.) People were drawn to her, and once drawn, they stayed. Even in the later years, as the alcohol problem grew and began to take over her life and personality, people came into her circle and stayed there. She had a warmth and an attraction that are rare among people.

And she threw it all away because of an addiction to alcohol.

Alcohol is a dangerous drug - more dangerous than others because it's supposed to be "okay". It kills people. It kills families. I don't say there ought to be a law ... but there ought to be universal disapproval of people who abuse alcohol, people who drink to drunkenness (or tipsiness, frankly) in front of children - and certainly harsh penalties for every person who tries to drive a car after drinking.

I wish my children could meet her. I wish I understood why she chose it. I wish she had seen herself clearly enough to know that she was something to live for.

holiday prep

I'm feeling remarkably on the ball this holiday season ... I'm not entirely sure why. Possibly because my in-laws will be back on the 16th and I want to get a lot of my holiday work done before they get here? Possibly because I only have one journal in right now and I want to have the holidays well taken care of before the next wave comes in? Possibly because I'm so relieved to not be moving and unpacking this year? Surely some combo of all three, plus something else entirely.

At any rate, I've finished the largest part of my Christmas shopping (actually, as a matter of fact, I think I've finished ALL my Christmas shopping); I have a shelf full of wrapped presents (not all of them are wrapped, but a decent amount); I'm about halfway through the prep, addressing, and mailing of Christmas cards. Lou not only added to my collection of outdoor decorations, but has started putting them up. About the only thing we haven't done yet is work on the indoor decorations ... although we have figured out where to put the tree this year, which is a relief. (Last year we had it in the hallway in front of the front door ... but having spent the larger part of this year trying to train the UPS guys who come here every day thanks to Lou and his girlfriend Amazon.com to leave the boxes at the front door, I'm not about to lose the use of it during the Christmas season.) Still have to figure out where to get the tree from. We aren't quite sure where the best place is to buy one from, and we have quite a few junipers in the easement area, so we could use one of those if we wanted.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the Christmas season. I anticipate a flurry of paper at present-opening time, some lovely snow (can't forget it, especially while watching Bing, Rosie, Danny, and Vera-Ellen singing about it on DVD right now), lots and lots of good food, teaching the kids some Christmas carols, watching all my favorite Christmas movies ...

Merry Christmas to all! (Or whatever gift-themed winter holiday you may celebrate.)