April Blogging Book Club

Here are the books I read this month:

1.  If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't) by Betty White - This was a super easy read.  Did you know Betty White loves writing books?  She does.  I think this was her third?  What a charming lady.  This book is basically like she is sitting in your living room telling you stories from her life.  And, oh my goodness, she really likes animals. 

2. Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell - I didn't realize when I requested this book from the library that it was also a true story, a memoir of friendship.  I totally cried.  Everyone has a story and could write about it.  This was a story about two women who were soul mate kind of friends. 

Some quotes:

I totally got this part of the book -

"I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter.  Suffering is what changes the end game, changes death's mantle from black to white.  It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crushing weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death."

I totally got this.  Watching my mom in the hospital bed at the end - I totally wanted her to get better and get up and us all walk out of the hospital.  Then it suddenly changes, and I didn't want her to suffer anymore,  I didn't have the selfish desire to try and make her stay longer, I just wanted her to be free of anymore pain, suffering, and literally it's like you are "holding the door for death," wanting to help her through it. 

I thought this next part was interesting.  You see the author struggle with what she believes, whether there is a God or not, or whether this life is it, etc.  So, it's interesting to read her conflicts.  I don't remember if she ever really came to a conclusion of what she believed.  But, I think she decided that there must be something more just by how she acted in the rest of the book...  I liked this excerpt:

"Sometimes I would go into the small hospital chapel and sit there in the dark, wearing its silence like a shawl, and then shrug and go back upstairs to Caroline's room.  One especially bad night I remember staring at the light in the outside hallway and feeling the horrendous finality of this road - it seemed for that moment that the end was simply the end, like driving a car into a brick wall with nothing on the other side.  It was one of the most desolate moments of my life, I think, and I felt as if the only God in the room that night was a morphine drip.   And it came to me with cold comprehension that this was what is was to stare into nothing - a universe in which everything was pointless except the hardwired instinct to survive and endure and then die.  What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline's time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning that picture intolerable."

3.  State of Wonder by Ann Patchett - I enjoyed reading this book, towards the end it either started losing me, or the author ran out of steam, or something...  Out of all the ways that I thought it might end, it didn't end like any of them.  What about Easter?!  Anyway, as my friend, Jen pointed out in my last blogging book club post that this author always puts a weird hookup at the end of her books, this one had one too.  But, it wasn't even that that made the ending seem - eh - to me.  I don't know.  

4.  I Totally Meant To Do That by Jane Borden - I didn't realize this was a true story either when I checked it out from the library.  It's about a North Carolina girl moving to New York, and her experiences there, and her debate about which is better to live in.  As a southern girl myself I could totally identify with some stuff she wrote about being from the south, so that made it funnier for me.

Even this excerpt from her book that was about her aunt could have easily been about my Grandma:

"Jane, I want to tell you something.  This is important Don't wear your pearl earrings on the subway.  A criminal will rip them from your ears.  My friend Nancy Lily was in a taxi in New York and it was summertime, I guess because the window was down, and sombody reached in and yanked her gold necklace off her neck!  She could have been choked!   She wasn't; it broke.  But they ran off with it.  SO don't wear jewelry on the bus.  Or on the subway.  Just don't wear it at all.

Yes ma'am.

Now, costume jewelry is fine.  Unless it looks real, and then I wouldn't wear that, either. 

Yes ma'am.

And don't ride the subway after dark.  Promise me you'll take taxis.  Anytime after nine p.m.  Don't walk anywhere!

Yes ma'am.

Good.  And don't look at anybody!"

Except, my Grandma would add, "You don't want to live in New York City..."

5.  An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff - Easy, great read!  "It's the true story of an 11 year old panhandler, a busy sales executive, and an unlikely meeting with destiny."  Loved it.   At the beginning of this book the author talks about how she is a woman whose life runs on schedules.  It made me think of how sometimes we are too busy to serve.  We have blinders on (myself included) looking towards what we have to get done, what needs to be done, and don't see someone right next to us who needs help, or hear someone asking for help. We are too busy to serve, and to recognize the needs around us.  Just like this woman walked past this little boy, and then stopped and turned around.  I think I need to stop more.  Good book.  There are just some really great people doing great service in the world.


May Blogging Book Club - Finish the books I didn't finish from last month's post.