Posts About books & reading

Book Club: Olive Kitteridge By Elizabeth Strout

November 9, 2009

Gush, gush, gush, gush, gush! I LOVED this book. Go read it, now! Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’ll tell you a little about it: Olive Kitteridge is a retired schoolteacher in her early seventies living in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. She is sometimes harsh and sarcastic, sometimes witty, sometimes feisty and possessive, sometimes strangely compassionate and intuitive. She is deeply flawed, and yet I loved her. Each chapter in this novel is a story unto itself. In many of them, Olive is the main character, but in some she just passes through, or is briefly mentioned. We learn about her husband Henry and her grown son Christopher, as well as a…
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Ten On Tuesday

October 27, 2009

My friend Chelsea (I can totally call her my friend now because we had dinner together once!) has started a weekly feature called “Ten On Tuesday” where she comes up with ten random questions and answers them. I haven’t had the time to participate for the last two weeks, but today I made it a point to because the questions are always interesting. 1. What are you going to be for Halloween? In all likelihood, I won’t dress up at all. I work that day, as well as the day before and after, so I don’t plan to be going anywhere. I think I may have only dressed up for Halloween twice in my entire life. Boring, I know. 2….
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Rainy Day

October 26, 2009

Today has looked like this: Hard to capture in a photo how grey and rainy it is, but it is. So I took off my running shoes and spent the morning reading blogs. Then I made some Christmas cards: And when I finished with that I unabashedly read for a few hours, switching off chapters between these two books: And spent some time cuddling with these girls: And that’s about all the day was good for, which is okay by me. Tonight David and I are going over to Scott & Vanessa’s house (David’s brother and his wife) for the first of our dinner exchanges. We decided to formalize these since we had pretty much been doing it anyway. On…
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Book Club: Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

October 15, 2009

Midwives is told from the point of view of Connie, the 14-year-old daughter of Sybil, a lay midwife in northern Vermont in the early 1980’s. Sybil is an experienced and respected midwife, a hippie who is passionate about what she does. One terrible night she finds herself at a home birth that goes terribly wrong, and she is unable to transport the mother to the hospital due to a storm. Sybil makes the decision to do a C-section on the mother, who she believes is dead, in order to save the baby, which she does. Later, her assistant and the father of the baby second-guess her and claim that the mother was not, in fact, dead. This book is the…
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Book Club: Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

October 15, 2009

Midwives is told from the point of view of Connie, the 14-year-old daughter of Sybil, a lay midwife in northern Vermont in the early 1980’s. Sybil is an experienced and respected midwife, a hippie who is passionate about what she does. One terrible night she finds herself at a home birth that goes terribly wrong, and she is unable to transport the mother to the hospital due to a storm. Sybil makes the decision to do a C-section on the mother, who she believes is dead, in order to save the baby, which she does. Later, her assistant and the father of the baby second-guess her and claim that the mother was not, in fact, dead. This book is the…
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