What I'm Reading

I found this one at the library and I've been completely in love with it. 

Years ago I had a vision about Octopuses and I've been fascinated with them for a long time. 

I've learned so much and I'm more in love with them then ever, wishing I could have one for a pet. Hoping at some point in my life I get to pet one and bond with one, I need to volunteer at the aquarium. Here is just one little fact, did you know an octopus tastes with it's skin, every bit of it's skin can taste. If you touch one or one touches you they can taste your hair, your skin, your blood, your bones, they can taste the person that you are, you. I think I need to own this book.  

The MP and I watched this show on Netflix and tried some of her recipes, simple and delicious. 

So I decided to pick up her book, it's lovely. So full of beautiful photos and step by step recipes. I'm excited to try out a bunch of new ones and have some dinner parties. I love having people over in the backyard during the summer, in fact The Cowboy is out here stringing lights on the patio right now in preparation for a dinner party we are hosting in a few days. Loving how this summer is starting out. 

Also just picked this one up, I'm so excited to jump in and make some life changes. Just a couple of weeks ago I talked the kids into picking ten favorite toys and then we got rid of the rest. It feels so clean and amazing. Every time I walk into our kid zone I now feel at peace when I use to feel so crazy with the mess and confusion of endless toys. Hoping this book will inspire me to empty out our life even more, I've always dreamed of becoming more minimalist. Maybe this will be the push to actually get there? We shall see. 

Over the years I've gotten pretty good at letting things go. 

And I'm getting better all the time of letting go of future fear. 

I think it's how I keep happy and remain an unsinkable optimist. 

Books!!

This week The Cowboy's school had a library clear out and he brought home 

4 boxes of books for me, it feels like Christmas!! I've been having so much fun 

going through all the books, he picked out some really fantastic ones. We need to set up a library in the basement soon. So super happy to have all these books to read over the next year or two. 

These books from the Shopaholic Series have been such a fun easy read lately, we've had a stressful year so having some fun escape reading has been very nice. I don't own them but love the library for letting me borrow all of them.

Book Club Read

It was fantastic!!

I'm all for donating my body to science after I die. 

And I'm really hoping to live in a place that accepts death pods to grow into trees, 

a memory forrest is so lovely compared to the haunting cemeteries so many currently choose. 

Book Club Pick this Month

"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."—Entertainment Weekly

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

I really loved this read, it was funny and super interesting. I decided long ago I'd most prefer to be cremated and this book has confirmed it is the right decision for me, I do also love the fertilizer idea. But now I'm also more interested in having my body donated to science then I've ever been, the book is a very good read and should make for an interesting conversation next week at book club. 

What I'm Reading

Rose Cottage, a tiny thatched dwelling in an idyllic English country setting, would appear the picture of tranquility to any passerby. But when Kate Herrick returns to her childhood home to retrieve some family papers in the summer of 1947, she uncovers a web of intrigue as tangled as the rambling roses in its garden. The papers are missing. The village is alive with gossip. Did her elderly neighbors, suspected of being witches, really see nighttime prowlers and ghosts in the cottage garden?

            Kate's search for the truth brings her together with many childhood friends and neighbors, some suspicious of her return, but most eager to help. It also leads her down a trail of family bitterness, jealousy, and revenge--and into an exploration of her own past. She ends up discovering a long-hidden secret that will change her life dramatically--along with romance in a place she least expects.

            First published in 1997 and a major bestseller, Rose Cottage is, to date, the last and most mature novel from one of Britain's greatest writers.

Mary Grey had come from Canada to the land of her forebears: Northumberland. As she savored the ordered, spare beauty of England’s northern fells, the silence was shattered by the shout of a single name: “Annabel!” And there stood one of the angriest, most threatening young men Mary had ever seen. His name was Connor Winslow, and Mary quickly discovered that he thought she was his cousin—a girl supposedly dead these past eight years. Alive, she would be heiress to an inheritance Connor was determined to have for himself. This remarkably atmospheric novel is one of bestselling-author Mary Stewart’s richest, most tantalizing, and most surprising efforts, proving her a rare master of the genre.

Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World brings us a rich and loving novel about a non-traditional family in the aftermath of a terrible accident.When Aaron Maciver’s beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers a head injury in a bicycle crash, she is left with the mental capabilities of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own. Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest and exquisite portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes the boundaries of love.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Neel Mukherjee delivers a powerful, epic story of a family and a nation.

The aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family preside over their large household, made up of their five adult children and their respective children, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. Each set of family members occupies a floor of the home, in accordance to their standing within the family. Poisonous rivalries between sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business threaten to unravel bonds of kinship as social unrest brews in greater Indian society. This is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. The eldest grandchild, Supratik, compelled by his idealism, becomes dangerously involved in extremist political activism—an action that further catalyzes the decay of the Ghosh home.

Ambitious, rich, and compassionate, The Lives of Others anatomizes the soul of a nation as it unfolds a family history, at the same time as it questions the nature of political action and the limits of empathy. It is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force.

"I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening." ––Sue Monk Kidd

For years, Sue Monk Kidd was a conventionally religious woman. Then, in the late 1980s, Kidd experienced an unexpected awakening, and began a journey toward a feminine spirituality. With the exceptional storytelling skills that have helped make her name, author of When the Heart Waits tells her very personal story of the fear, anger, healing, and freedom she experienced on the path toward the wholeness that many women have lost in the church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore, to monastery retreats and to rituals in the caves of Crete, she reveals a new level of feminine spiritual consciousness for all women– one that retains a meaningful connection with the "deep song of Christianity," embraces the sacredness of ordinary women's experience, and has the power to transform in the most positive ways every fundamental relationship in a woman's life– her marriage, her career, and her religion.

Library and Books

I love our little library (may have even interviewed for a job there recently... the hours didn't work out)

Just finished this one it was a lovely story. 

Still getting into this one I'm a few chapters deep. 

What I'm Reading

This one was a fantastic read, so highly recommended 

all about a women who gets early onset alzheimer's. 

Very interesting slow paced read about Harper Lee.

This is on my to read list, I need to recommend it for the library to order. 

What I'm Reading

Four U.S. Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS--Luttrell--made it out alive.

What sane woman would consider becoming any man's ninth wife?

Bess Gray is a thirty-five-year-old folklorist and amateur martial artist living in Washington, DC. Just as she's about to give up all hope of marriage, she meets Rory, a charming Irish musician, and they fall in love. But Rory is a man with a secret, which he confesses to Bess when he asks for her hand: He's been married eight times before. Shocked, Bess embarks on a quest she feels she must undertake before she can give him an answer. With her bickering grandparents (married sixty-five years), her gay neighbor (himself a mystery), a shar-pei named Stella, and a mannequin named Peace, Bess sets out on a cross-country journey—unbeknownst to Rory—to seek out and question the wives who came before. What she discovers about her own past is far more than she bargained for.

The Ninth Wife is a smart, funny, eye-opening tale of love, marriage, and the power of stories to unlock the true meaning of home and family.

What I'm Reading This Week

Just started both of these but so far so good!

Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has.

 

Only he’s not so sure he was right to go. He’s been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he’s working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn’t told his family—what’s left of them—that he’s back. Not yet.

 

He’s also not far from his uncle Eric, another one who left—for love this time. Stevie’s toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his mother, Lindsey . . . well, she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie, too.

 

Moving between Stevie’s contemporary Glaswegian life and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Without your past, who are you? Where does it leave you when you go against your family, turn your back on your home; when you defy the world you grew up in? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Yearning to belong exerts a powerful draw, and Stevie knows there are still people waiting for him to walk home.

 

An extraordinarily deft and humane writer, Rachel Seiffert tells us the truth about love and about hope.

In GO WILD, Harvard Medical School Professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning reveal that although civilization has rapidly evolved, our bodies have not kept pace. This mismatch affects every area of our lives, from our general physical health to our emotional wellbeing. Investigating the power of living according to our genes in the areas of diet, exercise, sleep, nature, mindfulness and more, GO WILD examines how tapping into our core DNA combats modern disease and psychological afflictions, from Autism and Depression to Diabetes and Heart Disease. By focusing on the ways of the past, it is possible to secure a healthier and happier future, and GO WILD will show you how.

What I'm Reading

Just started this one, so far so good. 

A beautiful scarf, passed down through the generations, connects two women who learn that the weight of the world is made bearable by the love we give away....

September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries…and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she’s made. Will what she learns devastate her or free her?

September 2011. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Towers…the same day a stranger reached out and saved her. Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open Taryn’s eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?

This one was written by a friend who lives in my town, it's a young adult novel

so I'm excited to dive in, so far I've only read the first chapter, starts off with instant adventure. 

Sharp, sleek, and golden. Like the dagger she has worn since childhood, eighteen-year-old Aeva is all three of these things. But there is something else that this mermaid and her prized weapon share - they are both hunted. Hidden within the caves off Iceland's dark shore, Aeva waits to take her place as the next ruler of the Meriads. But when Aeva uses her potent and alluring song to save a drowning human, she disrupts a delicate balance. Realizing she has unexpectedly bound herself to Gunnar, Aeva is torn between duty and love. Aeva severs one life to begin another, and soon finds herself not only rejected by the sea, but also stalked by an old enemy. As the worlds of myth and man intertwine, Aeva will challenge fate to protect her own sacred relic and the man she loves. But legend and lies cast an intricate net. With time and safety quickly unraveling for Aeva and Gunnar, there is only one clear course: Find and defeat Delphine before she can shift again.

What I'm Reading

Le Divorce meets The Elegance of the Hedgehog in this hilariously entertaining mega-bestseller from France

When her chronically unemployed husband runs off to start a crocodile farm in Kenya with his mistress, Joséphine Cortès is left in an unhappy state of affairs. The mother of two—confident, beautiful teenage Hortense and shy, babyish Zoé—is forced to maintain a stable family life while making ends meet on her meager salary as a medieval history scholar. Meanwhile, Joséphine’s charismatic sister Iris seems to have it all—a wealthy husband, gorgeous looks, and a très chic Paris address—but she dreams of bringing meaning back into her life. When Iris charms a famous publisher into offering her a lucrative deal for a twelfth-century romance, she offers her sister a deal of her own: Joséphine will write the novel and pocket all the proceeds, but the book will be published under Iris’s name. All is well—that is, until the book becomes the literary sensation of the season.

Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in American, and not above bribing his way into the Senate.
Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company.
All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend’s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew—a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself.

Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Outis a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition and self-delusion beneath the Great American con.

Free Range Learning presents eye-opening data about the meaning and importance of natural learning. This data-from neurologists, child development specialists, anthropologists, educators, historians and business innovators-turns many current assumptions about school-based education upside down. The book's factual approach is balanced by quotes and stories from over 100 homeschoolers from the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Mexico, India and Singapore. These parents and kids are the true authorities on alternative learning. Written for interested parents and educators, Free Range Learning will also encourage and excite those who want their children to have the benefits, but who are timid to approach homeschooling. This is the only book anyone needs to make the choice and start the process of homeschooling children, and is applicable for young people from pre-school through high school. Studies indicate that adults who were homeschooled are: * More likely to vote, volunteer and be involved in their communities than graduates of conventional schools. * Read more books than average. * More likely to have taken college level courses than the population as a whole. * Tend to be independent and self-reliant. Free Range Learning presents the simple choice to homeschool as something much more significant than a homespun method of education. Weldon asks us to consider this choice as participation in a cultural shift toward redefining success; and as a form of collective intelligence with major implications for the future of education. Children are naturally "free range" learners, she says. They build knowledge and skills naturally, within the full spectrum of their daily lives, while observing, exploring and pursuing their interests. This book guides any parent or educator in assisting that process. Free Range Learning demonstrates: * that children and teens can best be nurtured outside of restrictive educational systems * that we can restore what is heart-centered and meaningful back to a central place in education * how networking with others enriches the learning experience for our kids * how homeschooling has become a force of positive social change-making the community a better place for everyone.

What I've been Reading

This one is very good, it was our book club choice and lends to a great discussion. 

Interesting little love story, fun read. 

Super interesting story about early feminists I'd never heard off, they seem lost in history. 

Love the photos and the story is so super good. 

Book Club in May

I've yet to read any of these three, they all appeal to me so I'm having a hard time deciding which book to assign? I might just hurry and read all three then make my choice? Hoping for nice weather to host outside. The past few weeks have been terribly lovely. 

What I'm Reading.

Just finished all three of these. 

This one is for my April book club. It was super fast and fun

historical romance. I really did enjoy it and think I may check out 

the Authors other historical romance novels in the future? 

This one was fun. A friend lent it to me and I enjoyed the read, 

especially the conclusion. Religion is a funny thing. 

Also read this one as a random pick from the library.

It was a sweet little story about overcoming loss and 

being true to yourself even if that requires breaking family 

culture. It's about taking charge of our own stories, especially the endings. 

What I'm Reading

Loved this little story. Wish I had an Island with a crazy Aunt to run and escape.

Almost finished with this one, it's been very interesting. 

Love Chieko, she is one of my hero's. 

I devour all of her books. 

Just started this one, it's already breaking my heart. 

About to dive into this one, it's nice and plump. 

Just re-read this little book. Super helpful and informative, a great first read for 

families stepping into a life with Tourette's Syndrome. 

A friend dropped this off for me to read so we can discuss. 

It was a super fast, interesting read. I love the beginning. I found the

middle and end much harder to digest. Love it as a work of fiction. 

Midway through this one, so far it already has some good advice. 

So many of us suffer from anxiety. I didn't even recognize mine until I was 

in my early 30's! Life has changed dramatically now that I have it under control. 

Super excited to start this one, yesterday it was on sale for $1.99 on 

the kindle. I've been wanting to dive into it for a while. Only heard good things, we'll see?