Shogun #1

Shogun is going to take me a while.  It's over a thousand pages and more than a little daunting.  I decided I need to break it up into a series of smaller posts.  Otherwise, you may never hear from me again until August.

My husband read this, years ago, and he suggested I read it too.  This is the copy he read.  I love that about saving books--when you read the exact same copy that someone else read you feel the history in it.  

This book appears to be a sweeping epic (that sounds a little phony but I think it applies here) about an Englishman who winds up in Japan during the early 1600s.

I am in the first two hundred pages and I've just started to really get into it.

The names are super complicated and there are lots of them.  I'm having a struggle figuring out who is who.  The first 50 pages are hard to get into...but that's not unusual.  And all the old Japanese customs and rules are a little daunting.  But, slowly, I'm adjusting.

Blackthorne is an English ship pilot working on a boat full of Dutch men.  He convinces them to sail past the Straits of Magellan and make an attempt at reaching Japan.  The guys who are left in his crew, after a very long trip, grudgingly go along.  Unfortunately, they get caught in a storm and don't land on Japan in the best circumstances.  

The Dutch crew serves as a chorus.  They emphasize themes and actions that are important for the reader to pay attention to.  Their names are also somewhat difficult.  

This certainly isn't high literature.  It is good story telling, though, and has it's value.  The historical aspects of this book make it worth taking a stab at...I have a feeling I will be well educated on the Samurai code by the time I'm through.  

Now, back to reading...

Summer Reading

This week at the library I picked up the kids's summer reading game boards.  They read some books, tear off a coupon, and are able to pick from such fabulous prizes as vials of slime or rubber ducks in rain coats.  They are thrilled and motivated to keep reading.  

While I was standing at the desk I noticed coupons for adults to turn in for each book that they read.  I grabbed a few to fill out and maybe fill out for my husband (who is on a reading roll).  Each coupon is entered in a drawing for various prizes.  I am usually incredible skeptical of drawings but recently a friend told me her son won an iPad in a drawing at his school.  Our luck has to hit sometime, right?  

I want to set a few reading goals for the summer to keep me motivated.  The more coupons, the better chance I have of winning a mountain bike or vitamix.  

The first thing I've done is pull a bunch of my friends from various circles into a book club.  Summer is usually a bad time for book clubs, but I figured, if we start now, at least I will have the pressure to finish whatever books are picked, even if I can't go to the meetings.  Brilliant.

Ambitious to say the least...

Next, I've gathered a bunch of books (grown up books and tween books for my other blog) that I want to read so I can just plow through them, without having to wait for new materials to come.  I mean, amazon prime shipping is such a nuisance ;).  I'm going to try not buying any books in July or August and just reading through the ones I've stacked up to get through this summer.  

Aside from book club, and Shogun (which my husband recommended to me), I will not be taking suggestions on what to read for the next two and a half months.  I get tangled up with books I'm not really that interested in because a friend passes me the novel they've just finished or insists I check out this life changing book they loved.  I enjoy reading what others suggest but usually the books I pick for me to read compel me to finish much quicker.  That being said, I am using this guideline to work through my books this year and it is kind of fun to try to find a way to fit a book into this list.   

Finally, I am being practical and making a flexible daily schedule for summer since I will have four kids at home.  Part of this schedule will include DAILY reading time.  And I will force myself to read then too.  I try to read at the pool sometimes, we spend so much time there, but I usually wind up running into someone I know and then my book goes untouched.  

I'm excited about summer and hopeful that I will finish some great books and some books I've been meaning to read for a while.  How do you manage reading time during the summer months?  What books are on your 'to-read' list?  

Some Luck

June 10, 2015

I am 63% done with Some Luck (thank you good reads).  A friend gave it to me and said she had enjoyed it and so had her mom.  She explained that it gives a very accurate depiction of life in the midwest and is the first in a series of three.

I had been excited to read Jane Smiley.  She won a pulitzer for one of her works and wrote a book on one of my all time favorite authors.  I had never actually read any of her work but, I figured, this book was in front of me, it was a good place to start.

This is meant to be a family saga.  Clearly Smiley is prepared to go the distance with her characters.  Taking them from the early days of the twentieth century into modern history is a tall order and you must have a plan.

But I can't see her plan.  

It is frustrating to read characters who you don't particularly like and can't relate to.  But when the plot is quite dull it makes reading the book almost impossible.  

Lately I have been toying with the idea that perhaps Smiley is making a statement on the mundane nature of family life.  Or maybe life in the midwest is really that dull and the flat characters are a parallel to the flat landscape and the flat story line.  I think I may be giving Smiley too much credit though.

I will push on.  I will finish this.

Today I did read my favorite line, though.  And I believe it will prove to be my favorite line in the entire book.  "On a farm, you knew that you could die from anything, or you could survive anything.  'Why?' was a question that his relatives never asked--they just told the stories, clucked, shook their heads."  (page232)

It just perfectly captures farm life and how farmers cope with life and death.

June 15, 2015
I did it.  I finished Some Luck.  I certainly wouldn't recommend this book.  Well, unless you like long stretches of boring prose.  Or, if you really wanted to read about the mid west in the early to mid 1900's.  If you fell into one of those two groups, perhaps you should read this.  

The conclusion wasn't particularly different from the rest of the book, though I did find myself not as miserable as I had been in the first part of Some Luck.  Because I knew the characters after 300 pages, I was curious about how they would turn out.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't rooting for anyone to be happy and well adjusted.  

One aspect of the last fourth of this book that I found somewhat interesting was the use of memories.  Occasionally, a character would reminisce about an episode that had happened earlier in the novel.  It rang very true of a family get-together and it's not something you read every day in a book.  I do believe it could have been done in a better way, maybe to reveal something (one character's fond memories are really torturing another character), but it did make me stop and think about the nature of holidays with big families.  

I doubt I will be reading the next book in the series that was recently released.  But, I am curious to see if others had the same experience as me with this book or if it just wasn't meant for me but is widely loved and adored.  

Everything I Never Told You

Do you ever have an experience where you keep seeing a book...on blogs, in your instagram feed, with random people at the park?

Well, this was my experience with Everything I Never Told You.  I checked it out of the library once and didn't even crack it open.  Then, a few weeks later, I kept seeing it all over the place.  I requested it from the library again and got to reading.  

Another experience that is all too common in my life is that I like to check out library books and return them unread or unfinished.  I have a few, rare exceptions (The Flavia DeLuce Series) but I always over-borrow from the library.  Surely, I'm not alone in this.  

However, this time I was resolved to complete this book.  

I did it.

I can see why this book is so popular.  The story is captivating and combines mystery with family drama.  The prose is well written but not in your face.  Anyone who likes a good mystery could enjoy this read, and those looking a little deeper at the text will find some interesting techniques.  For example, in multiple places, Ng used a word in close proximity with two different meanings..."digit" as a finger and a number.  

The family drama was like watching a train wreck.  It seems many books are like that lately (The Girl on the Train).  There were times I just couldn't put it down and stayed up late reading so I could find out what would happen next, but it was also a little dark and pretty sad.  

I'm not sure if I would recommend it.  I mean, I enjoyed it.  And I wouldn't discourage someone from reading it.  Lately, I've been getting so many recommendations from friends and family that I've become a little more cautious in what I would tell you to read.  I think this would make for an excellent book club discussion (the lives people keep secret from their loved ones, how things get found out, etc...) but it likely won't be something I'm telling all my friends to go buy immediately.  

On my nightstand now:  Some Luck, Tatoos on the Heart, Shogun