A Four-In-One

Before you get all super impressed with me that I am writing a blog post just three and a half weeks after having a baby, let me tell you three things:

1) I have the easiest kids ever. Sorry. It's true. (At least until they hit six; then they get mouthy.)
2) I really love writing of any kind, and this is way easier than working on a novel.
3) This one-sided conversation will be one of the longest adult convos I've had in about a month.

And if you weren't super impressed with me...maybe you should be just a tiny bit.

So here goes, four books worth of what's been rattling around in my head.

Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

Memoir by Marie Brenner

I did a report on apples in elementary school. I learned about buds and branches and varieties and seasons, at a fourth grade level of understanding. This book is part continued apple research, part Psychology Today article, part family drama. The author is writing about her relationship with her brother after having been semi-estranged from him and then reuniting to help him as he fights cancer. They grew up in Texas, she lives in New York, and he lives in good old Wenatchee,Washington (my home town, FYI,  in case I have any readers who aren't related to me). For me this book was a little dichotomous. There are too many story lines as she jumps around in their family history, her time in their three homes and on trips together, and in her feelings about her strange brother. She's also fairly critical of Wenatchee, over-using the words "apple country" and emphasizing the cheesiness of the hotel wall paper and frumpiness of the women's clothing. Interesting story but not my favorite memoir by far.

The Island
Novel by Elin Hilderbrand

This is the book I was waiting for. Two months ago. This would have been PERFECT to read while on vacation at the lake. It was pure pulp. The characters are rich and skinny and they drink crisp cold white wines and their romances all work out, eventually. The story is simple: a fifty something mother takes her two twenty something daughters and her fifty something sister back to the remote island where they summered all their lives but haven't been in 15 years, hoping to reconnect after various personal tragedies. It's full of beautiful people with posh names and only semi-serious problems. I ate it up like the many bowls of ice cream I've consumed this summer. It's a total no brainer and boy, did I need that.

The Light Between Oceans

Novel by M.L. Stedman

I thought this was going to be a metaphorical light, and in many ways it is, but it's also an actual, physical light house. In Australia. Just after World War I. The lighthouse keeper and his wife steal a baby (no plot spoiler there, it says so on the back cover) when a rowboat washes up on their tiny island, containing the baby and a dead man. The story tells their sweet and heartbreaking background, and the sweet and heartbreaking aftermath of the baby stealing. It has beautiful imagery and an engaging plot, but I thought it was a little slow moving at times. I'm just glad it wasn't called "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife." Enough with the wife stories.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar
Compilation of Advice Letters by Cheryl Strayed

I have to admit I only read about a third of this book. It's a collection of advice columns, which sounds horrible but is really kind of fantastic because of the author. Cheryl Strayed wrote "Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail" which I discussed here. Strayed writes the advice column for therumpus.net, a website by writers, and she brings her own distinct flavor to her advice. She is both tender and hard, saying essentially "Sorry, sweetie, but you need to just do what you know you need to do" to most of the advice seekers. And she adds her own vignettes to most of her advice, making it real and poignant. So why didn't I finish reading it? Well, the stories of the advice seekers were just so sad. And also, it gets a little old, reading small segments of an online magazine over and over. It's why I don't like short stories--they're just too darn short.

Next up, I'm almost done with "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" by Jan-Philipp Sendker. It's intense; in book karma, it makes up for my gobbling up a pulpy beach read and quitting on another book and reading "The Monster Returns" to my two year old five times in one night (true story).