Book Reviews

Here are the questions I ask and answer on the first of each month. Or on the second of each month, when I forget to write this on the first of the month because life gets too busy. Thanks for being understanding, all my many and sundry readers.

The questions, as always, are:

first, what are you reading?


what do you like best about it?


what do you like least?


what’s next on your list to read?

As always, I hope you’ll consider your current reads on your blog and/or sharing here in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter. Happy reading!

First, what are you reading?

Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus’ biography of picture book author Margaret Wise Brown.

For fun, I’ve got Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures because  I entered a drawing to receive a copy of it from GoodReads, and I won. (More on that later, especially the title).

What do you like best about them?

Awakened by the Moon has so many good lines about the writing of Margaret Wise Brown that I must quote:

“We speak naturally, but spend our whole lives trying to write naturally,” said Margaret Wise Brown.

Brown’s writing is “accessible but not predictable, emotional but purged of sentiment, vivid but so spare that every word felt necessary.” Yes.

Ursula Nordstrom, for a time an editor of Brown, had a habit of writing on less-than-great manuscripts: “N.G.E.F.Y.” The meaning? “Not good enough for you.”

I love that! I’m also hoping that people will refrain from doing that with my draft columns, blog posts and other writings. 🙂

Parenting with Crappy Pictures: Um, it’s really sweet (I’m going to talk about the title in what I don’t like). You just have to get over the title. Amber Dusick’s blog  is just so funny and clever for moms, especially moms of young kids, and actually very charming.

Her humor is fairly gentle, her parenting style tends towards the relaxed, and she just makes you laugh out loud. I dearly wish that I had had this book when I had smaller children, when you need to laugh out loud on a a regular basis or you are in trouble. Do you know me IRL? I’d love to pass it around to young moms.

What do you like least about them?

The sadness of much of Margaret Wise Brown’s life just breaks my heart, as well as the fact that she died so young, just as her personal life was moving towards happier and healthier.

The title of Parenting with Crappy Pictures is my least favorite, and basically the only thing I don’t like about it. It’s extremely funny and strange that I, of all people, would be the one to get this book in a giveaway. I’m really sensitive to language.

I realize “crappy” is not exactly “strong language.” I think this shows my sensitivity to language–it affects me to a pretty big degree, much like loud noises negatively affect some people. We are, for the most part, careful about it at our house partially because it bothers me, and partially to be sure kids don’t pick up bad habits.

For instance, when we are watching television and someone on, let’s say, Love It or List It says “crap” or takes the Lord’s name in vain, we all say, “impolite” because it is, and I don’t want my kids slowly picking up bad/impolite language from television. My kids (especially my younger kids) are actually better at this than I am, showing how I’m not as sensitive as I think, perhaps?

So I may wish the book had a different title, but it’s really funny and good, and encouraging for moms.

What’s next on your list?

I’m almost finished with Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan. It’s really good, and making me want to try out a lot of new recipes, like real sourdough starter, homemade sauerkraut, or homemade yogurt.

I’m reading Regina Doman’s latest novel, Rapunzel Let Down: A Fairy Tale Novel, and hoping it’s as great as her other novels for teens.

What are you reading this month?

Here are the questions I ask and answer on the first of each month.

The questions, as always, are:

first, what are you reading?

what do you like best about it?
what do you like least?
what’s next on your list to read?

As always, I hope you’ll consider your current reads on your blog and/or sharing here in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter. Happy reading!

First, what are you reading?

A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans.

Emma by Jane Austen for a book group.

What do you like best about them?

I find myself jealous these days when I read excellent prose, because I find writing painfully difficult, often impossible, this week/month/year, and I’m rarely happy with the result when I do finally finish a column/project/etc.

Rachel Held Evans writes really, really well, but I’m not holding it against her because A Year of Biblical Womanhood is so darn interesting. She spends each month of a year trying to live out a different biblical womanly virtue–obedience, valor, etc. It’s a bit artificial of a concept, but her writing carries the narrative. This book made me think of women in Scripture differently, it introduced me to the concept of “a woman of valor” (making Proverbs 31 a poem and a praise of all women do, not a “job description”–wow, that’s probably my one big take-away from this book), and just overall was a diverting, thought-provoking read.

Here’s just one great quote from this book (in the chapter on Proverbs 31: .

“Somewhere along the way, … we abandoned the meaning of the poem by focuing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an asignment, a poem into a job description.”

Most of all, reading A Year of Biblical Womanhood made me so enormously grateful to be a Catholic and understand that as a woman there are myriad ways to be holy. Evans is one of those non-Catholic authors who make me think, “wow, she’d be such an awesome Catholic.” I don’t mean this in a holier-than-thou way–she ponders more about spirituality and Scripture before breakfast than I do in a month–but imagine her writing and life informed by the saints (like, say St. Edith Stein, or St. Therese) and nourished by the Eucharist.

As far as Emma goes, it’s practically perfect in every way. I have a lot of great quotes highlighted. This is a terrific feature of reading a book on a Kindle App. You can highlight a sentence or two, and then pull up all those highlights on any device. This to me is a true advantage of e-reading versus real books.

One very fun expression I had not remembered from Emma was people being “come-at-able” because they were always willing to make up a dinner party at Emma’s house–they were willing and able to join in. Emma does not necessarily consider it a positive, but at this point in the novel she’s still in her clueless, teenage, “know-it-all” phase. And I do consider being “come-at-able” or flexible and willing to join others, is a good quality.

What do you like least about them?

A Year of Biblical Womanhood is not perfect. There are lots of examples of this, and I don’t want to nitpick, but if do read it you might find yourself annoyed at various points as I did. Here is just one “for instance”: she appears more tolerant of the conservative modesty and religious values of a Jewish woman than of conservative Christians, perhaps because her Jewish friend is able to articulate her point of view so well.

It also makes me unnaccountably sad that she and her husband do not want to have children.

Emma, can I say again, is near-perfect in every way, so nothing not to like.  Emma herself is fairly cringe-worthy at so many times because she’s young and clueless.  This time through, I am for the first time actually reading it from the perspective of Emma’s dead mother, rather than Emma herself.  Interesting, and also a transition.

What’s next on your list?

I’ve just started Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon by Leonard S. Marcus, and it is so good. I want Leonard Marcus’ job when I grow up:  to write thoughtful biographies about the authors of children’s books.

What are you reading this month?