Thursday Thirteen #4 - Sing, Sing a Song

Here's another list brought to you by no creativity minus no creativity = this list. By way of explanation, I love music a lot. My musical tastes are slightly schizophrenic, but here are 13 songs that have personal meaning for me, that I associate with certain important moments of my life, or well...that I just really, really like and can't seem to get out of my mind. Most of the links are to lyrics unless otherwise noted.

Thirteen Songs That I Love 1. I'm Movin' On - Rascal Flatts - This song came out my senior year of high school when I was so ready to get away and be somewhere else and be somebody new. How fitting. "I've lived in this place and I know all the faces each one is different but they're always the same. they mean me no harm but its time that I face it; they'll never allow me to change." 2. Boston - Augustana - "I think I'll go to Boston, I think that I'm just tired I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind... I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of the sunset, I hear it's nice in the Summer, some snow would be nice..." Because I did move to Boston to start a new life... 3. Home - Daughtry - ....and then I came home. And I'm pretty sure that on the whole I don't regret it, except for when I do, obviously. "But these places and these faces are getting old, So I'm going home." 4. River of Dreams - Billy Joel - I almost moved to Montana, too. My dad and I drove there in the dead of winter in my ancient and not as decrepit as we thought Subaru which made it from Pennsylvania to Montana and back. For some reason I remember listening to this song during some of the prettiest part of our trip through eastern Wyoming with the sun setting and snow falling on the mountains out in the distance. *sigh* 5. One Last Drink - Enter the Haggis - Last year I fell in love with Celtic rock music (partly as a result of my lingering memories of a trip to Scotland - see #10 - and partly as a result of The Departed)...and this song. It made me smile. It still does. The song title link is to their MySpace if you happen to be interested in hearing the song... 6. Only Hope - Switchfoot/Mandy Moore - "When it feels like my dreams are so far, Sing to me of the plans that You have for me over and over again." 7. I'm About to Come Alive - Train - This was last year's song and this year's, too. I feel like I've been in limbo since I graduated from college, and I'm waiting to come alive again. "Don't give up on me, I'm about to come alive..." 8. Damn - Matchbox 20 - "This old world well, don't it make you wanna think damn?" Well, I've had tons of days where I couldn't argue with that line... 9. Both Sides, Now - Joni Mitchell - Come on, who do you want to listen to when you want to be depressed? And gosh, it's depressing when most of your best friends graduate and you've got one year left. Other things are depressing, too, but that's what I was depressed about when I was really into this song... 10. I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers - My best friend and I went on a Haggis tour of Scotland in my junior year of college. What an awesome time, including a few appropriately overcast misty days and one sparklingly, blue-skied astonishingly beautiful day while on the isle of Skye. Our slightly cracked yet hilarious Scottish tour guide really got a kick out of making us all sing this song while he was driving crazily around the mountain roads of the Highlands. You know your bus driver is truly a out of control when you wake up one morning to find one side of your body is sore from gripping the seat in front of you trying to hold yourself in your bus seat all day, right? 11. The Dance - Garth Brooks - This one goes way back. "And now, I'm glad I didn't know the way it all would end, the way it all would go. Our lives are better left to chance; I could've missed the pain but I'd have had to miss the dance." Because lately I've been enjoying things for the experiences...definitely not the outcomes. 12. Both Hands - Ani DiFranco - My college had an acappella group, the Four Scores (in Gettysburg...get it? I'll pause here so you can groan and roll your eyes if you get the idea) that recorded this song and I couldn't get enough of it. I learned the lyrics, and it's still one of my favorites for singing in the shower, of all places. 13. Life for Love - Enter the Haggis - "No man, no man is an island way out on the water all alone to stand, but I am tired of the dry land, ready for a new shore, ready to expand."

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Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

Books like Snow Falling on Cedars are so hard to review. For one, I loved it, and any book I absolutely loved is hard to review because I can't possibly hope to say, nor should I say, everything that made me love it. For another, there was so much going on in it that it's hard to bring it down to something nice, neat, and concise to stick on ye olde blog. That and I promised myself I would retire the phrase "brings to life" for a while, and it's going to be hard to avoid with this book. This all being said, my best advice to you would be to scrap this feeble attempt at a review and just go grab a copy of this book and read it. If I haven't deterred you, here's the review all sad and short and revealing very little of the awesomeness.

Snow Falling on Cedars, set on a scenic island off Washington state known for its fishing and its strawberries, begins and ends with the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto who is charged with the murder of fellow islander and fisherman Carl Heine. As the testimony in the trial proceeds, we meet and become intimately acquainted with many members of the community of islanders which is divided between its white citizens and its significant population of Japanese-Americans. Taking place just after World War II, the novel deals with lingering prejudices from wartime when the island's Japanese Americans were "resettled" in California for the duration of the fighting and when even those white islanders who might have once been favorably disposed to their Japanese counterparts struggle to reconcile their post-war relationships with their Japanese neighbors after fighting the Japanese during the war.

Guterson takes on so much with this novel and does it beautifully. Starting at the center with the trial, Guterson works out throught the entire community exploring a forbidden affair, intense prejudice, war wounds of both the physical and emotional sort, hopes, dreams, struggles, and finally healing for a community that is coming to terms with itself. Guterson's narrative flows seamlessly between past and present between trial testimony and deeply personal memories. His prose is vivid and makes it totally possible to see, smell, and even taste the unique surroundings of San Piedro Island. The greatness of this book lies in the community that Guterson creates and his immense talent for perfectly capturing moments we might have some sense of but could never describe so deliciously.

He captures the feel of a thunderstorm...

Late in the afternoon, at about four-thirty, heavy clouds shadowed the strawberry fields. The clean June light went softly gray and a breeze came up in the southwest. It was possible, then, to feel the cool pause before the first drops fell. The air turned thick; sudden gusts caught the cedars at the edge of the fields and flailed their tops and branches... The pickers craned their necks to watch the clouds and held their palms out to check for rain. At first just a few drops raised tiny wisps of dust around them and then, as if a hole had been punched in the sky, and island summer rain poured hard against their faces...

...Kabuo's memory of the sea from his prison cell...

From his bunk in the Island County Jail he felt the sea again and the swells under his boat as it rode over the foam; with his eyes shut he smelled cold salt and the odor of salmon in the hold, heard the net winch working and the deep note of the engine. Rafts of seabirds rose off the water, making way in the first misty light with the Islander bound for home on a cool morning, half a dozen kings in her hold, and the whine of the wind in her rigging.

and the essence of a snow day:

Yet on the other hand the snowstorm might mean a respite, a happy wintertime vacation. Schools would shut down, roads would close, no one would go off to their jobs. Families would eat large breakfasts late, then dress for snow and go out in the knowledge that they'd return to warm, snug houses. Smoke would curl from chimneys; at dusk lights would come on. Lopsided snowmen would stand sentinel in yards. There would be enough to eat, no reason for worry.

Sleep Toward Heaven by Amanda Eyre Ward

Amanda Eyre Ward is a great author that I discovered this year upon reading How To Be Lost, which I enjoyed. Sleep Toward Heaven is arguably even better.

Ward's debut novel explores the lives of three struggling Texas women while at the same time probing the death penalty issue in a way that is neither overbearing nor preachy. Karen Lowens, after suffering a very unfortunate childhood, comes to know the only love in her life with Ellen, her junkie girlfriend. Karen's love and desperation for Ellen's love in return drive her to unspeakable acts that finally land Karen on death row as penalty for several counts of murder. Franny Wren, a workaholic doctor recently burned by getting too close to a dying patient, returns to Texas upon the death of her beloved uncle, a part-time prison doctor. In doing so, she flees a life and a fiance in New York City that no longer satisfy her to temporarily replace her uncle as doctor in the prison. Celia Mills, young librarian and widow of Karen's final victim, struggles through life without her husband Henry. She attempts to fill the void by writing a letter to Karen on death row in an attempt to make her husband's killer understand just what has been taken from her and then having an affair with a boy-author she meets when she goes to mail the letter.

Added to the main characters are the women Karen lives with on death row. These women, while we never quite understand what drove them to their crimes, are convincing characters each dealing with their incarceration and impending deaths in their own way. Somehow Ward manages to make these characters and their interactions in their small prison both appalling and strikingly ordinary.

Ward's characters are damaged and real. Karen, Franny, and Celia's stories suspensefully intertwine as Karen's August execution date approaches. Ward graces Sleep Toward Heaven with a deeply satisfying ending successfully doing justice to the rest of the story and the characters that readers will come to care about.

Having read two books by Ward, it's obvious to me that Ward's greatest strength, which is very well demonstrated in Sleep Toward Heaven, is her great sense of timing. While developing her characters' current situations, she gives us a steady trickle of their histories that we find ourselves longing for as we become acquainted with them in the present. Her ability to perfectly time the "doses" of this information combined with her skill in knowing when to cut away from one character's story to another's make this novel quite literally unputdownable.

It's a slippery slope...

All right, so it seems that, until recently, I had been the last internet loving book junkie to not catalog my books online in some way that doesn't include BookCrossing. All of the evil bloggers (and I mean evil in the nicest kind of way) with their shiny, pretty Library Thing widgets showing random samples of their libraries have been wearing me down and wearing me down...and down. Slowly I approached the Library Thing, wandering by the site every other day or so thinking, "I could just give it a try. See if it's so great. I certainly won't ever need to pay for it. No, no I don't need it at all. The Bookcrossing and the books and the blogs, not to mention a vast amount of free (but often subpar) periodicals that have begun to flood our mailbox as a result of a strange Delta Skymile rip-off (or is it?) is plenty to do. I don't need anything else to keep me busy. Really, I'll pass."

But the pretty, shiny widgets...they're everywhere. And the people with their early reviewer books from there that look all shiny and pretty and scrumptious, they're everywhere, too, it seems. So every few days I found myself wandering casually by the site thinking "Oh that looks like fun, I could... - No, I don't need it!" Until, as is the case with anything having to do with books, my resolve began to weaken until in a series of supremely weak-willed moment I found myself signing up...and adding my books...and making my profile all pretty and informative...and, finally, this morning, paying my $25 lifetime fee to be able to catalog all the books I feel to be necessary. And now I need it. And I love it. And it's a good deal of fun.

What's wrong with me? Why is it that I can hold myself back from pretty much anything else...food, clothes, music, movies...but I have no control over myself when it comes to books and book-related gizmos?

Hello, my name is Megan, and I really am obsessed with books.

Thursday Thirteen #3 - 13 of This Year's Great Reads

I was just going to post my top 13 favorite reads from this year, but those would have included ones that I'd already talked up in my first T13 (Small Island, Black & White, Water for Elephants, and Truth and Beauty). In light of this, I've decided to include 9 of my absolute favorites for the year and 4 runners up, so those 4 can get their moment in the sun, too. The rest aren't really in any order, but the last four are the runners up.

Thirteen of My Favorite Reads From This Year 1. The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers - I could kick myself for not having reviewed this one right after I finished it. It was a slow read, not because it was boring, but because I wanted to absorb the prose and contemplate the themes in this story of a therapist who discovers a breakthrough of his own after hearing the heart-rending story of one of his patients. 2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling - Because who can say enough about Harry Potter? Actually, I've never been the person that runs right out and buys the new Harry Potter, but I'd certainly grown to love this series and since I was working at a bookstore when it came out decided I'd better get right to it so nobody would spoil its end. Glad I did. Loved it. 3. The Reluctant God by Pamela Service - I read this book when I was in middle school and then came upon another copy through BookCrossing and decided I had to read it again. I'm quite certain I loved it just as much the second time. An ancient Egyptian travels through time to the present where he and his discoverer, an archaeologist's daughter, must seek out something that has been stolen from them. History! Action! Time travel! Awesome! 4. Away by Jane Urquhart - I love to read about the Irish experience in history. I also don't like to be depressed all the time. Luckily, here's a book that allows one to read about the Irish immigrating to Canada without being depressing the entire time. It's a mystical story of a woman who falls in love with a drowned man whose legacy follows her ancestors down through history even after they leave Ireland for Canada. The mystical part of the story, a few slightly kooky characters, and Urquhart's beautiful writing made this a fantastic read. 5. There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene - An incredible story of a woman who opened her heart and her door to Ethiopia's orphans. A book that manages to touch your heart and also be a powerful expose of the AIDS problem in Africa. 6. The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - A coming of age story that understands that growing up entails feeling "infinite" but also feeling like crap. Loved the honesty. 7. Shout Down the Moon by Lisa Tucker - Single mother and singer, Patty Taylor, tours with a jazz band that is hostile to her presence while facing trouble from her recently-paroled and very explosive ex-husband. I loved the look into touring with a small-time band, the emotionally charged encounters with her ex-husband, and most of all, watching her learn to stand up for herself and what she wants in her life instead of letting all the forces in her life bowl her over. 8. Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger - One of the first I reviewed here. I loved that she came at this love story from the straight guy's point of view. You don't see that much. You see it done well even less. 9. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson - Guterson's descriptions of even the most ordinary things make it feel like you are there seeing, smelling, feeling it. Guterson delves into love, prejudice, the effects of war on its veterans, and even gets a little bit of legal thriller in there, too. Wow. 10. The Rest of Her Life by Laura Moriarty - The narrator of this story is so unlikeable that it is difficult to continue reading about her or it might have made the top thirteen. This story is an all too realistic look at a family in crisis, what they learn about each other as a result, and also what they learn about themselves. 11. The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day - I think I may have mentioned my "thing" for circus stories. This is a novel in short stories about a circus wintering in a small town in Indiana which takes place while the circus is still touring in season and also well after the show has been disbanded. The themes of the stories are woven together perfectly, and Day creates a few characters and scenes that are simply unforgettable. 12. No Great Mischief by Alistair McLeod - McLeod made a slightly bumpy transition from short stories to a full-length novel, but this "blood is thicker than water" tale of Scots in Canada certainly proves its theme that "all of us are better when we're loved." 13. The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings - Matt King, husband and father, seeks out his wife's lover after she falls into an irreversible coma. In the process, he tries to repair his damaged relationship with his daughters, sell off his land-holdings, and come to terms with his own feelings about his wife's imminent death. This novel also suffers from characters that aren't immediately likeable, but I grew to accept them and root for them to work through their problems. All in all, it's a great debut novel from Hemmings.