Book #102: 22 Brittania Road

Title: 22 Brittania Road
Author: Amanda Hodgkinson
Enjoyment Factor: 5/10
Source: Holladay Library
Referral: Amazon's "Recommended for You"

I was not particularly impressed by the first chapter of this book. The author wrote with too many adjectives. It felt too flowery. But I decided to press on. Here's where  you'll probably expect me to say that I'm so glad I kept reading because the book was awesome. And I'm not going to say that. It wasn't a terrible book. Hodgkinson tells he story of Silvana and Janusz, a young couple living with their baby boy in Warsaw before the outbreak of WWII. During the war they're separated for seven years and they find their reunion and relocation to suburban England more complicated than they anticipated because they both carry scars and secrets from the years they spent apart.

More than any other, it's stories of separations and reunions that get to me. So I expected this one to hit me hard. And it didn't. I'm not sure why-- the writing was a little flowery, but not terrible. Hodgkinson did interesting things with narration-- the three members of the family all told the story, both during the war years and during the year of their reunion. But I never really grew to care for them. They were strangers to each other (which made the reunion difficult) and ultimately felt to be strangers to me. I felt little hope at the end of the book that the family was going to be able to go on as a successful unit, and I'm not sure that was the ending Hodgkinson intended.

The Family Room

We spent most of our time in the family room, so I knew it had to be comfortable and functional. It also had to have a lot of room for lounging, and our favorite pastime, watching television. I found a Room and Board sectional I LOVED, but since that one was more than $5,000, we settled for one from Macy's at less than half the price. It works for now, but a few months ago I went to Room and Board and actually sat on the couch I really wanted, and I had a little moment of silence for what could have been. The chair is also from Macy's, and so is the ottoman (which usually functions as a coffee table but is all skewed and crazy in the picture). The bookshelves are from IKEA and if you look closely, you'll notice that they're backed with the same fabric that's on the benches beneath the windows on the south side of the house. This room is always in a state of chaos, so it's nice to see it looking (mostly) nice for a change. Leslie painted the yellow and orange branch paintings near the back door.

 

Next time: I'll take you upstairs!

Book #101: Turn of Mind

Title: Turn of Mind
Author: Alice LaPlante
Enjoyment Factor: 7/10
Source: Kindle for iPad
Referral: Amazon's "Recommended for You"

While reading Turn of Mind, I became fully convinced that I had Alzheimer's. Every time I had to wait a second to find the right word or forgot what I went into the laundry room looking for, and I just knew that I was going to end up in an assisted living center by age forty. My own neuroses aside, Alice LaPlante does a great job getting in the head of someone with Alzheimer's. If it's not accurate (I honestly don't know how accurate it is) then at least it's very convincing.

In Turn of Mind, Dr. Jennifer White has a good daughter, a bad son, a dead husband, and a recently-murdered best friend. She also has early-onset Alzheimer's, which has forced her to leave her job as a hand surgeon to be cared for first in her home and later in assisted living. Pretty soon, it becomes evident that Dr. White is the prime suspect in her friend's murder. It would have been pretty unbelievable to have her figure out who the real murderer was, which is what I was expecting would happen, so I was pleased to watch the story unfold without having her sleuth it out (in the other books I've read this summer where the protagonists have memory problems-- and I've read a few of them-- this is what has happened). Because Dr. White is not going to get better. She realizes this, and I think that ultimately her friend's murderer realizes the same thing. Turn of Mind is an interesting book written from a unique perspective. I found myself as surprised by the identity of the murderer as I was intrigued by Jennifer's descent into the fog of Alzheimer's.

Hallway, Half Bath, Laundry Room

After passing through the living and rooms, a visitor to our house enters the hallway, which happens to be the spot of one of my most prized possessions. My Aunt Kate Gorman, a fabric artist, made this quilt and we bought it about a year ago. It took a while to figure out how to accessorize it, but I think we finally got a subtle sexually-charged theme working for us. There's space beneath for some of our favorite coffee table books.

When I finished covering a zillion pillows, we had a lot of fabric left over. I'm not one to keep scraps of fabric, so having the fabric in my sewing cupboard made me all twitchy. I'd seen some fabric-covered hoops in different places and decided to try to use them in this bathroom. They're colorful, cheap, and hung just high enough that the boys can't spray them with an errant pee.

I always imagined that when we moved into our "forever" house we'd have a mudroom with lockers for the kids. Although this house doesn't have a mudroom, it does have a nice big laundry room, which was a big, empty laundry room for the first year. Last year I decided to add some organizational stuff, and lockers for the kids. Because of an air-conditioning vent on the floor we had to mount the lockers, which are an IKEA hack (Expedit bookcase turned on its side with some of the shelves taken out). In fact, the room is basically all IKEA, from the kids' art display to the table to the cupboard next to the washer and dryer. The prints are from Leslie's "domestic series." The Donkey Kong piece is by Bryce Miner.

You may notice that we have only four lockers. I haven't figured out how we'll fix that when we have five kids!

Up tomorrow: The Family Room (but not the messy kitchen!)

Book #100: The Devil's Star

Title: The Devil's Star
Author: Jo Nesbo
Enjoyment: 7/10
Source: Ordered new from Amazon
Referral: The next in the series of Nesbo books

I wish that I had a great review for my hundredth book this year, but I don't. That's not to say that The Devil's Star wasn't an interesting read, because it was. The book definitely kept me reading. I actually think it may be my favorite of the three Harry Hole books I've read so far. But I don't remember the details well enough to do the book justice. In The Devil's Star, women start turning up dead in Oslo. One has a ring with a star-shaped red diamond on her severed finger, another has a star-shaped red diamond placed under her eyelid. Pretty soon it's evident that there's a serial killer at work in Oslo, and it's Harry Hole's job to find him, which distracts Harry from what has been his main objective for several years-- finding his former partner's killer.

Harry's lucky, because in The Devil's Star, he's finally able to figure out what we have known since The Redbreast-- the identity of the killer. And Harry's also lucky because the two investigations converge in The Devil's Star. The book is exciting and a little gruesome and while it's painful to watch Harry in a tailspin (he's in an alcoholic stupor for much of this book) it's also fun to see him be able to put one of his ghosts to rest. One of the things I've realized while reading the Harry Hole books is how connected Norway is to the former Eastern bloc countries. This is the second book that has a significant connection to Eastern Europe (and the next book continues in the tradition). The books have made me want to visit Oslo in a big way.

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.