Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick ✔✔✔

This title won Book Browse's award for the best children's book of 2011, and the comment was made that it was good for both adults and children, so I reserved it at our library here. When I went to pick it up and saw the size of the book -637 pages, I said "Oh no, how am I going to get this finished?"

Then I saw that there were pages and pages of illustrations, and for a few seconds I thought the whole book was drawings, but then I found some text, so I decided to give it a try.

It's a story of two people fifty years apart. Ben's story is told in text, Rose's in drawings, and you are gradually drawn into their stories, especially when you realize that even though they are told in two different times, Rose's in 1927, Ben's in 1977, that they are similar.

Both are deaf, and both are on their own, trying to find their way in the world. How their stories intertwine is really quite amazing, and the art work ( all in black and white pencil drawings) is quite impressive.

Certainly a different format for me, but enjoyable. I just marvel at the imagination of some of the writers today!

Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli ✔✔✔

The author, a radio journalist in Los Angeles, was looking for a change in her life, and a chance encounter led her to travel to Bhutan - said to be one of the happiest places on earth - to volunteer her expertise to help develop a youth-oriented radio station. And for this reason, in her own words: " I longed for a way of life in which people made it a priority to look into each other's eyes and communicate, soul-to-soul....I yearned for meandering conversations about all things important, all things banal. Bhutan, I imagined, might be as close as you could get on earth to what I'd been craving - a real,live, actual community, where being wired took a backseat to being present, face-to-face, experiencing the here and now"

The book is mainly a travel memoir, and gives a good look at this remote Himalayan kingdom, and it certainly had some interesting people in it. The trip from the airport alone would be enough to keep me from going! But what I enjoyed most of all was the preface to the book, for in here Napoli describes a positive psychology workshop that she took while in LA, and some of the questions used by the workshop leader to help people discover "what we appreciated in ourselves, and what inspired us about others":

1. Describe in detail a person you love - and why.
2. 'write a toast to four difficult periods in your life and how you handled them
3. Summarize your life story as if you were 90 and telling a child.

He also assigned them a nightly exercise to teach them how to appreciate life in its most basic terms. Every night before going to sleep, review your day and make a short list of three things that happened that were good. "I want you to see that every single day, three good things do happen. It will help you discover that goodness exists all around us, already". Those good things are the most nourishing to our life. It's like a gym for the brain: over time this ritual with strengthen you.

And what did Lisa learn? "I was learning to slow down, to sit with myself and the uncertainties of the future. To enjoy not knowing what was next, instead of fearing and panicking over what might be. To appreciate the successes I'd had, instead of dwelling on my failure to have accomplished more".

Good stuff and worth thinking about.

Pearl of China by Anchee Min ✔✔✔

Pearl S Buck was the author of The Good Earth, a story of China written by an American woman who was actually more Chinese than American, although both her parents were American. This historical fiction novel tells the story of Pearl's friendship with Willow, who is actually a fictional character developed by the author to tell Pearl's story.

The following is taken from Book Browse:

In the small southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two young girls bump heads and become thick as thieves. Willow is the only child of a destitute family, Pearl the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries. She will ultimately become the internationally renowned author Pearl S. Buck, but for now she is just a girl embarrassed by her blonde hair and enchanted by her new Chinese friend. The two embark on a friendship that will sustain both of them through one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.

Moving out into the world together, the two enter the intellectual fray of the times, share love interests and survive early marriages gone bad. Their shared upbringing inspires Pearl's novels, which celebrate the life of the Chinese peasant and will eventually earn her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. But when a civil war erupts between the Nationalists and Communists, Pearl is forced to flee the country just ahead of angry mobs. Willow, despite close ties to Mao’s inner circle, is punished for loyalty to her 'cultural imperialist' friend. And yet, through love and loss, heartbreak and joy, exile and imprisonment, the two women remain intimately entwined.

In this ambitious new novel, Anchee Min brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who is now hailed in China as a modern heroine. Like nothing before it, Pearl of China tells the story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, from the perspective of the people she loved and of the land she called home.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan ✔✔✔✔

Take Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, cast them both in a post-scourge America where church and state have become one, there are no prisons, and the chief form of entertainment is watching convicted criminals living from day-to-day on television and you have When She Woke.

These convicted criminals are "chromed" - their bodies are chemically altered to cast them a vivid colour so they are immediately identifiable not only for their crime, but also the nature of it.

Hannah Payne is red because she had an abortion and therefore, according to the state, is guilty of murder. She is in prison in solitary confinement for three months then cast out into the streets to make it on her own - knowing that her every move is subject to whoever feels like watching her on TV.

The novel is a form of science fiction but the scary part of it, plus the reason you keep reading it is because it could
SO easily happen.

Lots of room for a lively discussion here. I'm not sure I liked the ending, and I thought Hannah would have suffered a bit more from PTSD - she seems remarkably adapatable to many different situations - but the book certainly has a lot of food for thought in it.

Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens ✔✔✔

I thoroughly enjoyed Chevy Stevens' first thriller, Still Missing,( see January,2011) so I was happy to hear she'd published a second one, entitled Never Knowing. Sara is a 30 yr old woman who was adopted at birth, and has recently taken steps to find her birth mother. She does find her, but also finds out that this person was the victim of a serial killer who survived her attack, although she was raped. Sara is the child that was born, and this story is about how her father - known as the Campsite Killer - finds her and tries to establish a relationship with her.

This was a real thriller - I couldn't put it down. Maybe the ending was a little TOO tidy, but it was good nonetheless.

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn ✔✔✔✔

One of the most informative book I've ever read about cooking, this title was first mentioned in a Chatelaine magazine. I put it on my Christmas list.

The Author, a graduate in culinary arts from France, put together nine volunteers who lacked confidence in their cooking skills, and offered them a teaching session over one summer. There were lessons in how to use a knife, how to braise a chicken, make an omelet, make a pasta dish, use items already in the kitchen cupboards, and so on.

I underlined like crazy in this book, and learned lots, like how to measure flour properly, to shake a pan after a fish or chicken has been put into it to saute it, how to chop an onion - the list goes on and on.

Just tonight I made an omelet - I wasn't planning this for supper, but this book has persuaded me to clean out the things I have. I just followed her suggestions and it was very tasty. Somehow I always thought an omelet was hard to cook- it's not, you just need to have courage! Bravo, Kathleen Flinn!

Tomorrow I'm going to tackle onions!

FAVORITE READS OF 2011

I read a lot of non-fiction this year, much of it so good that I find I'm continuing to read it. When I pick my favorite reads for a year, there are several reasons why a book might be chosen. Sometimes in non-fiction it's the subject that is so fascinating - Elvis Presley, for example, or Gina Welch, who "embedded " herself in Jimmy Swaggart's church in West Virginia. Sometimes it's the human spirit that endures despite terrible hardship, as the "Unbroken" or in "The Boy In The Moon". There are only four novels on this list, and one of them is a Christmas novel, but each of these spoke to me in different ways. The Christmas novel was probably the best-written of all of them, but Ian Brown in Boy In The Moon comes pretty close. Anyway, before I get off on a "why and how I read" tangent, here's my favorites for this year, in the order in which I read them.

1. Unbroken by Lauren Hillebrand ( also the top pick of the year on Book Browse)
2. Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan ( the story of the Bronte sisters)
3. Elvis Presley: Careless Love and Last Train To Memphis by Robert Guralnick
4. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
5. The Art of Racing In The Rain by Garth Stein
6. In The Land of Believers - Gina Welch
7. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother - William Shawcross
8. The Boy In The Moon - Ian Brown
9. Mrs. King by Charlotte Gray
10. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
11. Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb