The Living Room and the Dining Room

In this house, you enter directly into the living room. I know that's like bad Feng Shui and stuff, but it really doesn't bother me. We basically use this room for three purposes-- we entertain Home and Visiting Teachers here, the kids practice their instruments here, and I sometimes escape here to read a book when the rest of the house is in chaos.

For those that are interested, the birch tree paintings are by Leslie Graff, the truck painting over the piano is by Bruce Smith and was bartered for piano lessons in a deal with my mother-in-law (it's on loan from the in-laws), and the thing on the right side of the couch is a bunch of handkerchiefs with all the states we've lived in, an idea I stole from the Julie and Julia movie. The couch is from Room and Board, the chairs are from Overstock, and the tables are a KSL classifieds find, Eames for Lane.

The dining room is the least-used room in the house, and it's also my favorite. The chairs are Tolix. I'm glad that my mom talked me out of the bright yellow ones I'd fallen in love with at Design Within Reach in favor of these white ones. The table is an old yellow laminate number from the 1950s. I found the corner cabinets, unpainted, on Craigslist, and my mom and I painted them yellow and gray (you can't see the second one in these pictures, but it's also on the north wall). I had a small collection of plates on the wall in our Texas house, and when we moved in here, I knew I was going to expand it to fill the dining room walls. I had lots of help-- friends and family called me from the strangest places when they found something that might work on the walls, and we filled in the last bare spot about a year after we moved in.

The inspiration for the color scheme for both of these rooms was the San Francisco Victorian House cookie jar that you can see on the shelf the dining room corner cupboard. We lived in the Bay Area when I was little, and both my mom and godmother had cookie jars like this when I was growing up. I wanted one for my house, and my godmother gave me this one, which had belonged to her mother. If the house started burning down, I'd probably grab this cookie jar, in all its kitschy glory, on my way out the door.

Up tomorrow: Hallway, half bath, laundry room. Exciting times, friends!

Fancy House Pictures-- Introduction

Since moving into this house, one of my most persistent delusions has been that someone will see my house and decide to put it on a blog or in a magazine or something. I'd never actually send house pictures into Apartment Therapy or anything (fear of rejection?) but I've always wanted nice pictures, not crappy iPhone pictures, of the house. Leslie and her fancy new camera were here last week, and while we didn't have time to wallpaper any ceilings or sew any curtains (both of which were in the plans) in between cooking chaos (my mom was cooking for a wedding for 200 in the kitchen) and kid chaos, we snapped a few pictures. When she comes back in October, we'll tackle the rest of the house.

Book #99: State of Wonder

Title: State of Wonder
Author: Ann Patchett
Enjoyment Rating: 10/10 (!)
Source: Audible.com
Referral: Where haven't I heard about this book? I'm also a longtime Patchett fan. After this, I'd read her grocery lists if she published them.

I wish I had taken the time to write about State of Wonder as soon as I finished listening to it. It's now been several weeks, and I know I'm not going to be able to do the book justice. State of Wonder is an absolutely phenomenal book.

It's rare for me to get sucked into an audiobook in the first few minutes, but with State of Wonder, I kept listening after my runs ended, and found myself doing housework just so I could keep listening (State of Wonder got me through an obsessive organizing binge a few weeks ago). The book tells the story of Marina Singh, who travels to the Amazon to find out what happened after a colleague from her pharmaceutical company dies in the company Marina's former medical school mentor, the bizarre and elusive Dr. Anneck Swenson. The book follows Marina's journey from the wilds of St. Paul, MN to the wilds of the Amazon.

The book is beautifully written. Patchett does a fantastic job getting into Singh's head. I feel like I know her-- her anxiety, her wishes, even her dreams. Singh is someone who seems a little bit unknowable to those around her, so it's interesting for a reader to know so much about Marina. My only criticism (and this isn't really a criticism) is that at first, the end seemed a little abrupt (did she get pregnant? didn't she?), but after thinking about it for a little while, I think Patchett did exactly the right thing-- the experience in Brazil was done, and whatever came after would be a new story-- no need to wrap up all the loose ends neatly. 

Book #98: Nemesis

Title: Nemesis
Author: Jo Nesbo

I've been on a Jo Nesbo kick lately. When I discovered The Redbreast it was on a table at Costco next to a book called The Snowman, which has gained a lot of attention in the book world this spring and summer. So reading The Snowman has been high on my list. However, when I read The Redbreast (which appears to be the first of Nesbo's Harry Hole books translated into English-- there are a few early books that don't seem to have English translations), I realized that there were a handful of books written in between The Redbreast and The Snowman. I hate to read books out of order if I can avoid it, so that meant I had about 2000 pages of reading to do in order to get to the point where I could read The Snowman and know all of the backstory.

The good news is that Nemesis was enjoyable to read. While Harry Hole is pretty much your stereotypical murder detective who drinks too much, is always on the outs with his boss and can't keep a romantic relationship to save his life, I like him as a main character. I also think that this book, more than the others, develops Hole's character. In Nemesis, one of Hole's old girlfriends shows up and asks him to dinner. With Rakel (the current girlfriend) out of town, Harry agrees to meet her for dinner, and later that night he discovers that he has no memory of the evening. The next morning the woman turns up dead. Then other people turn up dead. Harry has to both solve the crime and divert attention from himself. With Rakel's custody battle and Harry's growing obsession to solve the murder of his former partner (killed in The Redbreast), it's no wonder he struggles with sobriety and personal issues. Nemesis is entertaining, but honestly, I read the book a couple of weeks ago and all of the stories have melded together in my mind, so while it was good, the story doesn't particularly stand out.

Book #97: Magdalene

Title: Magdalene
Author: Moriah Jovan

If you're not the kind of reader who would be open to the idea of a story about a straightlaced Mormon bishop who falls in love with a foulmouthed former prostitute, then Magdalene isn't the book for you. But Moriah Jovan is as up front about her subject as her main character, Cassie St. James, is about her past-- she tells us on the very first page that Magdalene is unlike any of the romance novels you'll find on the shelves at Deseret Book.

As a full disclaimer, I don't know much about romance novels. Yeah, I've read a few LDS offerings for the Whitneys, but they're never a genre I pick up on my own, and I'm probably too chicken to head into that section of Barnes and Noble for fear that I'll pick up something pornographic. This book definitely had its, ahem, descriptive moments. And I liked them.

I think that the biggest strength of Magdalene is that the kid gloves are off-- the Mormons in this book are flawed, some of them probably more than they needed to be for the sake of the story (Trevor swears in just about every sentence he utters, and just a few times would get the point across just as well). I also think that because Jovan doesn't make most of the characters seem overtly holy, the ones who are truly good (like Prissy and Louise) are more believable. In general, I thought her characters were pretty believable. Unfortunately, the only exceptions were Cassie and Mitch. I know that Cassie tries to be hard but she's really a big softie inside, but the crying/allergies thing started to wear on me after a while. And Mitch? Seriously? He is one complicated man-- like Bruce Wayne and Batman and Steve Jobs and Mitt Romney all rolled up in one tight-assed little package. I wanted him to be a little less surprising, a little less perfect. It would have been nice if he had bad breath or something to knock him off his pedestal. The extensive corporate talk in the first few chapters were also pretty boring (and did, in fact, made me consider abandoning the book). But I persevered, and my quibbles really are pretty small. I consumed this book greedily, and put it down with some extra tricks up my sleeve, if you catch my drift.

Book #96: The Redbreast

Title: The Redbreast
Author: Jo Nesbo

I started listening to Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast at the beginning of our cruise to Alaska, and for a while, I wasn't sure I was ever going to be able to finish it. I usually listen to books while I run, and early in the morning on the cruise ship I ran about a zillion laps around the promenade deck of the ship, fighting the walkers and the deck swabbers, and although it definitely beat running on the treadmills up in the overheated gym, I thought I might have a Pavlovian experience every time I listened to the book and start running in circles. 

But I'm glad I stuck it out because The Redbreast was a great read. In fact, it was so good that I ordered the next two books in the series (Nemesis and The Devil's Star) and I'm not letting myself dig into either one until I finish my blogging backlog. I started blogging book #83 this morning, so that may be an indication of how much I want to start reading Nemesis. Anyway, the first few hours of The Redbreast are a little confusing, with Detective Harry Hole working in the present in Oslo (the year 2000) and a story taking place in World War II, but eventually the stories come together and the book picks up the pace and the end is pretty thrilling. I know others have compared the books to Steig Larsson's books (must be the Scandinavian thing) but I actually think that The Redbreast is better, and less overtly gory. Of course, Harry Hole drinks too much and can't be reined in by his bosses like the protagonist all good police procedurals, but the book didn't feel too formulaic.

I will say that if you're unfamiliar with Norwegian names, it might not be a great idea to listen to the book. I think that I was slow to warm up to The Redbreast because I had such a hard time keeping track of who was who in the early chapters (although Nesbo names the main protagonist at the beginning of each chapter for dummies like me). In fact, although I love both my digital reader and my Audible subscription, I always feel the loss of being able to thumb back through a book for a quick recap whenever I feel a little bit lost in what I'm reading. But anyway, I have one more book to blog today, and then I'm losing myself in Nemesis.

Book #95: Dreams of Joy

Title: Dreams of Joy
Author: Lisa See

Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Lisa See's 2009 novel Shanghai Girls and takes off exactly where the last novel leaves off, with nineteen-year-old Joy getting on a plane for China after she learns that the woman she actually thought was her mother (Pearl) is actually her aunt and her favorite aunt (May) is actually her mother. Joy is also reeling from her father's suicide, and she feels that she may have inadvertently played a part in his desperation. Joy sees life in America as too complicated, so she decides to find her birth father and embrace the glories of communism in China.

Of course, she finds that life in China in the 1950s is represented differently in propaganda than it is in real life. In Dreams of Joy, she encounters many of the hardships that faced rural Chinese in the 1950s. Pearl and ZG (Joy's birth father) also play a pivotal role in the novel.

In general, I liked the book quite a lot. Sometimes, when I think about adopting from China, I wonder if our daughter will be resentful at being plucked from what will soon be the nation with the largest GDP in the world and plopped down in an aging superpower past its prime. But when I read Dreams of Joy, I saw what life was like in the 1950s in China, and feel that it's quite possible that life is still fairly difficult for many of those living in rural China. The book is a quick read and very engrossing, although there are times when I felt characters could have been a little richer (Joy's husband Tao, for instance) or things came together a little too neatly (the end reads a bit like a Shakespearean comedy). All in all though, a good read and one that I appreciate better than I did when I was reading Shanghai Girls purely for entertainment value.

Book #94: In the Garden of Beasts

Title: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Author: Erik Larson

This book is part a history of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and part a history of Martha Dodd's sexual exploits while living in Berlin with her father, the American ambassador to Germany. If I were a good and virtuous person, I would probably be more interested in the history of Nazi Germany, but in truth, the chapters about Martha's love life were much more interesting. Larson does a great job showing Ambassador Dodd's transformation from U of Chicago professor to whistleblower (even though no one in America seemed to be listening) and in keeping the story moving by giving us a little bit of Martha's love life every few chapters. I'll be honest and say that I was sometimes confused by which Nazi was which, but I was never confused by which boyfriend was which. 

Book #93: Vernal Promises

Title: Vernal Promises
Author: Jack Harrell

Jack Harrell's Vernal Promises focuses on the Mormons I don't see much in my ward on Sunday. Or maybe I focus so much on the people who look like me and went to school at the same places I did that I just don't notice them. Harrell's main characters, Jacob and Pam Dennison meet at a keg party outside of Vernal and get married a few months later. When the book opens, they've been married about six months and they're both working dead-end jobs (him at the grocery store and her at the cable company) and living in a trailer park, when Pam has a miscarriage. After the miscarriage, they decide to return to activity in the Church, which Jacob finds stifling and boring, so he beats a retreat from all of the responsibilities of his life. While I didn't really like the climax of the book, I felt like it showed an interesting insight into Jacob and Pam and the working-class residents of Vernal. For me, my faith has always been a quiet constant, but for Jacob, it brings him to highs and lows that are a little bit hard for me to understand and identify with, and I wonder how much of his retreat from his family and the Church stems from the way he feels trapped by the economic and social realities of his life. I felt like Harrell focused a lot more on Jacob than on Pam, although her story of wanting to reactivate after her marriage was also really interesting and worth exploring.

Book #92: Into the Wild

Title: Into the Wild
Author: Jon Krakauer

Okay, I'll admit that I ventured north to Alaska without ever having read Into the Wild. I feel it was a great sin of omission and I'm publicly repenting. Once we got to Alaska, most of our tour guides alluded in some way to the story of Christopher McCandless, the young Emory graduate who disappeared from society after college and drifted around the western US before heading up to Alaska to have a great adventure living on his own. Two months later, he was dead. 

I think that McCandless's story is interesting, but what made this book really memorable for me is Krakauer's obsession with the story. When he was assigned to cover the story for Outside Magazine, he realized that McCandless's life had many parallels to his own life, so in many ways probing the story of McCandless's life and death was an exploration of what could have happened to him if the circumstances had been slightly different. The book is well-written, but I disagree with Krakauer's assertion that McCandless didn't have a mental illness-- his whole lifestyle (drifting from job to job, hitckhiking, not keeping any money on principle, severing all ties with his family) doesn't seem healthy or normal to me, but whatever, I am not a psychiatrist. I've often bristled at Krakauer professionally (I thought Under the Banner of Heaven was a bit of a cheap shot, using the strangest branch of a fundamentalist sect to represent mainstream Mormonism, and I think he's being downright nasty to Greg Mortenson), but I can't read this book without admiring his writing. And it's short-- so bonus.