The Fence My Father Built = 52 down, 48 to go

Recommendation

The Fence My Father Built

Linda Clare

294 pages

We all go through that period in our life where we're not sure where exactly we fit in, where we belong. Muri Pond's marriage has just ended, and she has packed up her two children and moves them to a dilapitted trailer on an Indian reservation with her aunt and uncle. Muri's father, who was part Native American, has recently passed away and left his legacy to Muri.

After not haing seen her father since her parents separated when she was a young child, Muri finds that her father's legacy is a mixed bag. For years, he had battled alcoholism, but never lost sight of his connection to his daughter, his heritage, his people and the land.

Muri encounters challenges from her rebelious teenage daughter, being a newly minted single mother, her faith and trying to figure out who she is and where she fits in. She also encounters resistance from a local rancher who controls nearly the entire town and who wants to buy her land supposedly to obtain access to water rights for his cattle. After being blacklisted by most of the locals, Muri vehementhly fights and uncovers the rancher's true intentions - the illegal selling of priceless Native American artifacts originally uncovered by Muri's father.

During the book, Muri is on a journey to discover who her father was. As she digs deeper, she relives memories from her early childhood with her father and the many things she shares in common him - "If my father loved books, he couldn't have been ordinary at all."

The book also documents Muri's exploration of her father's Christian faith: "Had it been hard for him to separate his Native spirtual leanings from his Christian ones? How had he managed to embrace his ethnic heritage and still hang onto faith that had come from the very people who had robbed Indians of their lands? Had he been like me, undecided in what - or whom - to believe?"

It was an interesting book with insight into challenges that many of us face in our lives.

Miscellaneous = 51 down, 49 to go

So I finally came to terms that the chances of me catching up with blog entries on my past read books wasn't likely, here are my reads from the last month. 

Recommendation

Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
350 pages

Recommendation
Sleep Toward Heaven
Amanda Eyre Ward
304 pages

Recommendation
Little Children
Tom Perotta
368 pages

Short stories
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
320 pages

Biography/autobiography
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
288 pages

Movie
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane
400 pages

Oprah's Book Club
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages

Biography/autobiography
John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace
Johnathan Aitken
400 pages

Biography/autobiography
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
Stacey O'Brien
240 pages

Sookie Stackhouse Series = 42 down, 58 to go

I'm more than a little behind in updating this blog...like approximately 15 books behind in posting. So this post will be quick one as I need to get back on track. This entry counts as the remaining nine books in my fantasy category and one in my recommendation classification.

My friend, Robin, recommended the very excellent Sookie Stackhouse Series by Charlaine Harris.

Sookie Stackhouse is the main character and just your average barmaid...except for the fact that she's a telepath. She starts dating a vampire...you know, after vampires have come out publicly out of the proverbial closet after the invention of synthetic blood. And so begins the adventures of her life...vampires, were animals, fairies...along with her fair share of drama, violence and of course, a little romance and sex thrown in. 

Dead Until Dark
Living Dead in Dallas
Club Dead
Dead to the World
Dead as a Doornail
Definitely Dead
All Together Dead
From Dead to Worse
Dead and Gone
Dead in the Family

The bonus is that the HBO series True Blood is based on these books. Looks like it's time to rent some DVDs.

The Daily Coyote = 32 down, 68 to go

Other nonfiction
The Daily Coyote
Shreve Stockton
287 pages

Girl drives her Vespa across country, falls in love with Wyoming along the way, gives up plan to move to NYC and relocates her life to Ten Sleep, Wy., a small town of 300 and about an hour from the nearest grocery store.

Then girl meets a nice guy who brings her a 10-day-old coyote. Girl falls in love with said coyote (and maybe the guy) and so begins author/photographer Shreve Stockton's adventure with a coyote pup named Charlie. 

There were a number of things in this book that resonate with me, starting with the opening sentence, "The jewels in this life are the events we do not plan..." That is perfectly simple insightful statement.

There are many areas of the West that I love, including Wyoming, and within the book's first three pages, the author captures the beauty of the state and its landscape succinctly:

...magnetized to the land, to the red dirt and the Bighorn Mountains and the wide-openness I had no idea still existed in this country. The landscape around the Bighorns is like an ocean on pause, rolling with the subtle colors of rust and sage and gold, stretching to every horizon. These mountains are unlike other mountain ranges. While the Tetons are fangs of stone and Rainier is an ice cream sundae, the Bighorns are sloped and subtle, built of some of the oldest exposed rock in the world; rock that has existed, in its current form, for over three billion years. There is exquisite power in their permanence. 

But I guess it would be helpful to get past the first chapter...onto the soul of this book, Charlie, the  coyote pup that comes into the author's life after his parents are shot for killing sheep. This is just the beginning of the book's juxtaposition of the passion and love for an individual wild animal against the reality of wildlife management in the west. It pits an animal lover against the realities of living in areas of the West, which includes the government-supported elimination of many coyotes that are viewed as threats to livestock and the ranching way of life.

But outside all that seriousness, Stockton pulls back the curtain and shows us the fun and antics, as well as trials and tribulations of balancing the responsibility of raising while not fully domesticating a coyote pup into beautiful adult. Every chapter is a new month and a new adventure in Charlie's development and growth.

This was a wonderfully refreshing book and very appropriately subtitled "A story of love, survival and trust in the wilds of Wyoming."

If you'd like to follow Charlie's journey, Shreve Stockton maintains a blog, which was the origination for the name of the book, The Daily Coyote -- where she posts regular photos. You can also subscribe to receive a new photo of Charlie every day or week.

An Old-Fashioned Girl = 31 down, 69 to go

Classic
An Old-Fashioned Girl
Louisa May Alcott
360 pages

One of my favorite classicbooks is Little Women, so since I'm not permitted to reread any stories during my year-long challenge, I decided to seek out another book by Louisa May Alcott.

An Old-Fashioned Girl originally began as a short six-chapter book where the main character, 14-year-old Polly, spends time living with her friend Fanny and her family, the Shaws, a wealthy city family. Polly is exposed to a more fashionable, expensive lifestyle much in contrast to her more modest, moral-focused, middle-class country upbringing.

The author added to the original chapters by picking up the story six years later with Polly returning to the city. She secures rooms for herself and establishes herself as music teacher. Similar to her original stay with the Shaws, as an adult, she battles being happy with the life she has built for herself with the contrast of the privileges, clothes and parties of the Shaws. 

But her new life in the city shows her glimpses of situations that remind her to be grateful for what she has.

She had heard of poverty and suffering, in the vague, far-off way, which is all that many girls, safe in happy homes, ever know of it; but now she had seen it, in a shape which she could feel and understand, and life grew more earnest to her from the minute. So much to do in the great, busy world, and she had done so little...Polly asked for the strength of an upright soul, the beauty of a tender heart, the power to make her life a sweet and stirring song, helpful while it lasted, remembered when it died.

When the Shaw family members find themselves faced with bankruptcy, selling their family home and downsizing their belongings and lifestyle, Polly is the balancing force that reminds the family that they have everything that is important - family, love and one another. 

This book, whose target reader is much, much younger than I, uses an idealized view of life. Using an engaging story, it reinforces 19th-century morals and the importance of appreciating the gifts one has been given. Though the internal battles that Polly deals with do resonate with those that face young adults today, I can see a teen in the 21st century being challenged to apply the lessons of the story to their modern lives. 

But if you are a true romantic at heart, you will appreciate the end - where the Shaw son, Tom, loses an enormous sum gambling, heads out west to find himself and financial stability, and returns to the east coast mature and ready to marry his one true love, Polly.

"Do you want to know the name of the girl I've loved for more that a year? Well, it's Polly!" As he spoke, Tom stretched out his arms to her, with the sort of mute eloquence that cannot be resisted, and Polly went straight into them, without a word.  

Never mind what happened for a little bit. Love scenes, if genuine, are indescribable; for those who have enacted them, the most eleborate description seems tame, and to those who have not, the simplest picture seems overdone. So romancers had better let imagination paint for them that which is above all art, and leave their lovers to themselves during the happiest moments of their lives.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow = 30 down, 70 to go

Classic
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving
76 pages

As the story of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane is well integrated into the U.S. psyche, I'm not sure I need to to spend any time on the story line of the legendary Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 

There aren't many books that I know the exact end before I even crack the cover, but it was interesting to read the nuances of the story that didn't make it into the cartoon version, which is how I was most familiar with the story.   

I enjoyed the descriptions of the area located outside of Tarry Town, New York. 

I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud, for it is such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. 

Serial = 29 down, 71 to go

Recommendation
Serial
Jack Kilborn and Black Crouch
eBook

So I may be fibbing just a bit in classifying this one as a recommendation, unless I count it as a recommendation from Amazon when I looked up "free" books. And it's probably cheating since it's such a short book, just about 8,000 words from cover to cover.

But I was incredibly intrigued by its literary concept - two authors decide on a storyline, each writes a part of the book on his own and then they write the third part in 100-word increments via email. Amazon's description of the book was way more interesting than anything I could commit to screen:

Remember the twin golden rules of hitchhiking? #1: Don't go hitchhiking, because the driver who picks you up could be certifiably crazy. #2: Don't pick up hitchhikers, because the traveler you pick up could be raving nutcase. So what if, on some dark, isolated road, Crazy #1 offered a ride to Nutcase #2? When two of the most twisted minds in the world of horror fiction face off, the result is SERIAL, a terrifying tale of hitchhiking gone terribly wrong. Like a deeply twisted version of an "After School Special," SERIAL is the single most persuasive public service announcement on the hazards of free car rides. Beyond a thrilling piece of horrifying suspense, SERIAL is also a groundbreaking experiment in literary collaboration. Kilborn wrote the first part. Crouch wrote the second. And they wrote the third together over email in 100-word exchanges, not aware of each other's opening section. All bets were off, and may the best psycho win. 

After reading into the first part of the book, I almost put it down. It was very violent and very graphic. This story is definitely not for the faint of heart.. But the approach to its creation was novel to me and worth a read if the concept intrigues you.