24-Hour Read-A-Thon is coming.

Yes it is and I am probably the last person in the blogosphere who only now posts about it :)

Initially, I didn't plan on writing about my preparations for this super event but then I felt guilty that I didn't so here I come.

This is my very first Read-A-Thon and it will probably be my last for at least another year because next year there will be an infant in the house and I will be trying to catch up on sleep any chance I get. That's why I decided to join now. I wanted very much to do it last time but was afraid I wouldn't last and if there is one thing I hate, it's not finishing what I started (maybe because it's happened to me one time too many?). Anyway, I do have a list of books that I might want to read and I will present it below but before I do that I just want to say that I am in no way committing myself to this list, lol! I will most likely change it in the process but it's good to have one if only as an insurance against my "I don't have anything to read" whining. I put aside six titles, and while I realize not all six of them will be read since I am a rather slow reader, at least it's a good mix from which I will be able to choose if I get bored with one book or the other. Mainly, my goal is to catch up on some of my challenges and the books below are all part of three of them: What's In a Name - 2, Mystery & Thriller Reading Challenge, 999 Reading Challenge.

1. The Mosaic Crimes by Giulio Leoni

2. The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison

3. The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale

4. The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

5. No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer

6. The Fourth Hand by John Irving

Have you signed up yet? Try it if you haven't. All you have to do is visit the website, commit yourself by signing up and then just be super excited. I think we all are, the readers and the cheerleaders alike. It is a great fun where we have a chance to meet other bloggers that we maybe haven't heard of and to entertain each other (maybe even steal book ideas). Oh, and you don't really have to stay up 24 hours, you can sleep and you can take breaks as long as you're honest about it. I know I will need my sleep :). I'll see you there!

2-in-1: Amazing Grace & I Do Again

For today’s edition of 2-in1 I have two Christian non-fiction books. And this is pretty much where the similarities end.

1. Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris

It is Ms. Norris’s recounting of her struggles with going back to the Christianity. What seemed to have kept her away from it for many years was the language that is used in connection with this religion and the misunderstandings stemming from it. Amazing Grace is a memoir of sorts with many personal and very endearing stories in which Kathleen rediscovers the meanings of words such as ‘dogma’, ‘antichrist’ or ‘annunciation’. There is also a lot of theology and etymology woven through this memoir which surprisingly is very captivating to read about.

I am a member of the Roman-Catholic Church and I for once found a book where author didn’t bash this close to my heart religion. As soon as I realized that Amazing Grace is more about opening one’s eyes to the art of living with the abstract and turning it into reality of everyday life, I began treating it more seriously than I initially intended. Obviously, I heard and encountered all the words talked about in this book many, many times in my life but I experienced ‘Aha’ moments in pretty much every chapter. I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the way Kathleen writes about her own understanding, her faith and her struggles that brought me closer to the faith I thought I was pretty much close enough. Probably, the best part of the book is that there is no discrimination, no ridicule and no off-putting passages that could otherwise turn an atheist or non-Christian away.

2. I Do Again by Cheryl & Jeff Scruggs

This one is part memoir, part self-help for broken couples and marriages. Cheryl & Jeff write about their paths coming together to join them in marriage and how those paths went separate ways after a few years. Cheryl felt misunderstood and really unloved on a deeper, spiritual level, which pushed her into the arms of another man. What came next is what happens to so many couples nowadays: a painful divorce that affected not only Jeff & Cheryl but also their twin daughters, their families and their mutual friends. That’s the memoir part. The self-help part is that they actually got back together and remarried after seven dreadful years of divorce and are now actively working together to help other couples find the spiritual path to a happy marriage, no matter how broken they might appear to be.

I mentioned above that I am Catholic. I am also a divorced and remarried person, although not to the same man. Talk about two things that cannot possibly exist together. But yet, here I am. Needless to say, this book brought upon a lot of feelings of guilt and sadness. I Do Again might be good for people who are better Christians than I am and want to fix their marriages before it’s too late. But I also felt that there was no place for people like myself in this book. The Srcuggs’s apparently are full of faith that every marriage can be fixed if there is God in a relationship. But what about a person like myself, who from the day of the wedding until the day of divorce knows that the marriage is a mistake? I was pushed into marrying, even though I knew this wasn’t what I wanted. I honestly felt like the biggest sinner in the world while reading this book and kept asking myself what was wrong with me that I couldn’t fix my relationship even though I had been a spiritual person. So, all and all, this book might be a saving grace for someone who is teetering on the verge and wants to turn to God for help. But if you already are past the divorce and (God forbid) building a life with someone who should have been your partner all along, then I think you should skip this book. You might otherwise be thrown into a guilt trip of your life.

Trail of Crumbs by Kim Sunee

I have a strange attraction towards memoirs. I think they at once draw me away from my own life and give me many reasons to somehow compare my life to the person a memoir is about. When it came my turn to pick the next read for my book club, I knew right away it would be a memoir. Trail of Crumbs by Kim Sunee was the one democratically chosen. I was both glad I read it since it had been on my reading list for a long time and slightly disappointed with it.

Trail of Crumbs is a story of Kim’s life from the day she was abandoned by her Korean mother and adopted by American parents at the age of three until the time when she is in her late twenties going back to New Orleans, the town she grew up with, after ten years of living in Europe. It is also a food memoir as hunger and the need to make wonderful food are two of the main forces in Kim’s life (she finishes chapters in the book with one or more recipes of very elaborate and sometimes complicated recipes). The whole memoir is mainly focused on Kim’s life when she enters the world of adulthood and decides to study and live in Europe. She takes us through the cities of Paris, Stockholm and then back to France as she grows more and more apart from her adopted family, especially her mother left in America. Kim finally lands in a place she thinks might be her true home. She moves in with Olivier, a wealthy founder of L’Occitane and tries to take on a role of the mistress of his beautiful house in Provence and a step-mother of Olivier’s eight-year-old daughter, Laure. But even having what most people can only dream of, Kim is still unhappy and still searching for the ‘real’ idea of home she claims she never really did get to grasp.

I’ll get right to the bottom of it all and put on the record I did not like Trail of Crumbs. It’s difficult to explain why because it is a memoir and it does deal with real people not some fictitious characters. I hate getting personal in my critique but Ms. Sunee is the main reason I didn’t like the book. Granted, she certainly has a talent for writing. It’s obvious from the first pages to the last. There really isn’t much, if anything that I could frown upon in terms of quality of the book. In that respect, Trail of Crumbs reads like a breeze.

However, if I was supposed to feel sorry for Kim I am confused because I didn’t. I did sympathize with her and did feel a lot of her pain initially when reading about how she was left by her mother on the sidewalk with only a piece of bread in her hands. The scared, three-year-old Kim spent three days on that sidewalk waiting for her mom to return. It did break my heart a little, I admit. But then, the whole book turns into a sort of bashing of Kim’s adopted parents, especially her mom, and Kim’s wallowing in how unhappy she is, how she can’t find her true self and how her life is pretty much worthless. Forget about having an opportunity to live and study and then work in not one but two beautiful countries in Europe. Forget that she used this opportunity when she was barely twenty (when most of us peons are stuck doing menial and boring jobs just to get us through college with as little debt as possible). And finally, don’t even pay attention to the fact that at the age of twenty one she captures the heart of a very wealthy man who gives Kim anything she wants, and I mean anything (he even buys her a bookstore just for poetry books, which brings nothing but financial loss)and truly loves her. I guess I did start to dislike Kim because of how selfish she turned out to be and how she would stamp on other people’s lives just because she couldn’t figure hers out. I hope that nowadays Ms. Sunee is able to look at how egocentric she really was in those days of what could have been pure happiness had she made an effort.

As far as food goes, the recipes were truly yummy and I would gladly eat the dishes if someone else prepared them for me. I am guilty of hating cooking. You have no idea how many times I have been told by others to start cooking because it had therapeutic qualities. Well, it doesn’t for me. And as delicious as all the dishes talked about in Trail of Crumbs must be, I am still not convinced or encouraged to try any of them. 

The Tudor Rose by Margaret Campbell Barnes

European history, or really any history at all, has never been my strongest forte. I couldn’t tell you why exactly but I struggled with that subject even in my college years. I do however love historical fiction because it allows me to get familiar with history the only way I know, through reading. Even if a book is not necessarily historically 100% accurate, if captivating enough it makes me want to look up the facts afterwards. The War of Roses, or the period immediately preceding the Tudor era is one such subject I am not greatly familiar with. Therefore I was really excited to read The Tudor Rose by Margaret Campbell Barnes, because this is the time this novel is set in.

The subtitle to the book is The Novel of Elizabeth of York but it’s really not only about her. Elizabeth is the oldest daughter of Edward IV and a sister to two brothers who were imprisoned in the Tower by their uncle Richard as he usurps the throne of England after his brother’s untimely death. In the novel, the boys get murdered on the order of Richard who thinks that this will clear his way to be the ultimate ruler without any pretenders to the throne. Well, he got that wrong, since there is his niece Elizabeth and she is seen by the people of England as the legitimate Queen. Richard can’t really murder her therefore he proposes a marriage, as incestuous as it is. But there is one more candidate to the throne and to Elizabeth’s heart. This person is a Lancastrian, Henry Tudor. It is now up to Elizabeth to decide the fate of England and make the unthinkable decision to merge Yorks with Lancasters and give birth to a new dynasty.

As with every historical novel, it is a difficult task for a writer to create something both historically accurate and captivating to an average reader. And then there comes a question of how we really deem what is true and what isn’t. Every few years new facts are discovered, new theories made and so what might have been accurate fifty years ago, doesn’t necessarily have to be today. Ms. Barnes wrote The Tudor Rose in 1953 and besides portraying some characters differently to what contemporary historians agree on, I think that all the major facts she really did get right. And I appreciated the fact that she breathed life into this period of history that until now was shrouded in mystery for me. I guess this is just a convoluted way of mine to say that I truly enjoyed The Tudor Rose. It brought me closer to the period of British history that just may be far more interesting than the pounded-into-our-heads-in-all-the-media Tudor era. I will admit here that I was getting slightly sick with Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I. For that reason, I read Ms. Barnes’s that much more eagerly.

Putting all the accuracy questions aside, The Tudor Rose is a very entertaining read. For the first time in months (I’m not exaggerating) I read a book in two days and was extremely upset when I had to stop reading because my daily life called. Ms. Barnes was a skilled writer that managed to give personality to figures who were long dead. And what complicated personalities they were. Not one person was purely good or all evil. I couldn’t even bring myself to hate Richard despite his awful deed or completely admire Elizabeth despite of what she had to go through or sacrifices she made. It’s just like real life; we are all a mixture of both. I think this book is definitely worth recommending especially for people who do not read historical fiction because they think it’s boring, or harrowing to get through. The Tudor Rose is not. It is instead an interesting glimpse into history with action flowing smoothly until you’re at the end and want to know more.

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Special Thanks to Danielle J. from Sourcebooks, Inc for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Note: If you read and reviewed this book on your blog, please let me know, as I would love to link it to my review to give readers as full a picture as possible.

Book Info:

Author: Margaret Campbell Barnes

Title: The Tudor Rose

Published in : 2009

By: Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc

ISBN: 9781402224683

Wondrous Words Wednesday

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme, started by Bermudaonion where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. Feel free to join in the fun.

This week's words come from The Tudor Rose by Margaret Campbell Barnes, which I am actually enjoying very much.

1. obsequy n. pl -quies: a funeral or burial site (usually used in plural)

There were all the outward forms and ceremonies to go through, the solemn obsequies in the Abbey to be borne.

2. impecunious adj.: having very little or no money usually habitually

And woman-like, she let her tender heart yearn a little over her impecunious but practical husband, so that it drove her out into Goldsmiths Row to empty her own slender purse in exchange for some of the brightest jewels she could find.

3. extortionate adj.: 1. characterized by extortion 2. excessive, exorbitant

And the people who were left alive found it rather a poor one anyway, because Archbishop Morton and Sir Reginald bray not only set their underlings to collect the promised sums from every individual, house by house, and town by town, but were so extraordinarily thorough and extortionate in their demands that they were soon suspected of having enriched the King's coffers by a sum far in excess of the agreed amount.

Have you heard these words, have you known of them? And what interesting words did you learn this past week?