Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner

You know, it's helpful when you're about to leave on vacation if the internet actually works, so you can, you know, line up a post or two for the time you're going to be gone. I meant to have this for you last week before I dashed off for a long weekend in Niagara Falls, but you know what they say about the best of intentions. I'm happy to report that the internet appears to be working again (yayyy!), and I have an excellent book to review for you - Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner.

P.S. Thanks for all the happy blogiversary wishes. Again, if my internet hadn't been sucking for the last week or so I would have been way more interactive with all you awesome people. I'll announce winners for the giveaway tomorrow!


Wes is seventeen, but he feels much, much older the night that he takes the long walk home from an Upper East Side apartment to his house in Greenwich Village. For an average seventeen year old guy, the night he loses his virginity would be a momentous occasion. Wes, however, is anything but average as we come to find out during the course of the next day of his life as he reflects on losing his virginity to the "wrong" girl, nurses his terminally ill mother, tries to make a deadline for a revised paper about War and Peace, and attempts to cook a bizarre meal that will bring his whole fragile family to the table. In the course of one ordinary yet extraordinary day, Wes grows up and learns some important lessons all while readers are treated to a unique and extremely vividly drawn family and a main character whose unexpectedly deep thoughts about life and love appeal to our own experience.

Through much of the reading, Everything Happens Today inspires mixed feelings. On one hand, Browner's choice to write his novel without chapter breaks has the tendency to make Wes's narrative monotonous, and gives the impression that Wes's sometimes incessant navel-gazing will proceed in circles without breaks or ends indefinitely not unlike Borges' Library of Bable, an illustration Wes is particularly drawn to. On the other hand, getting inside Wes's thought-pattern and learning the reasoning that drives him is what ends up making Everything Happens Today stand out. Wes is a more or less typical teenager who spends a little too much time with his iPhone, wonders if he is good enough for the girl he loves (or if what he feels for her is even truly love), and gets frustrated with his family, but Wes is also a bookish, thoughtful sort of guy who loves his family sacrificially, wants to be a truly good person, and struggles with the decisions he's making as he works his way into an unstoppable adulthood where his dearest wish is that he not become his father. In short, Wes is a lovable narrator both despite and because of his perpetual over-thinking, and he will make readers root for him that he might come to an understanding and an acceptance of his life such as it is.

Even though Wes is the heart and soul of the book, Browner creates a cast of secondary characters - Wes's parents, his sister, his best friend, the girls he might or might not be in love with - that leap off the page. His beloved little sister comes off just as quirky and innocent as intended. His father shuffles through a life populated with broken dreams and unmet potential that Wes himself loathes. His ill mother is a fragile shell of herself whose former life is barely visible beneath her current circumstances. His friend is the perfect well-intentioned meddler. The girls he falls for are as much fully fleshed out characters in their own right as they are lessons in what love really looks like for the hapless Wes.

It would be lying to say that Wes's deep thoughts combined with their lack of chapter breaks don't make Everything Happens Today a little difficult to tackle. That said, what I've come to appreciate about the Europa Editions books that I've read thus far, is that they make me think and work at them a little before yielding what is nearly always a rewarding, if somewhat atypical, reading experience. I'm fully convinced that readers will fall in love with loyal, well-intentioned Wes, just as I did, and be caught up in and ultimately charmed by this unusual tale of coming of age today.


(Thanks to Julia at Europa for my review copy!)

Top Ten Tuesday: Again for the First Time

Greetings all and welcome to another Tuesday with a great top ten topic from The Broke and the Bookish. A couple weeks ago we did "Books We'd Love to Reread," this week, a similar but really totally different topic - books we'd love to read again for the first time. I find that the books I want to reread are books I want to wrap up in and get comfortable, but the books that I'd most like to read again for the first time are ones that really made me feel something really strongly that I'm convinced probably can't be re-created quite the same way on a second reading.

1. After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell - I loved this book so much the first time I read it. I finished it on Christmas Eve a few years ago, and it made me ugly cry like no other book I've ever read. (I should mention that I do like that quality in a book.) It's so tragic...and hopeful, and the way the story's told just makes it punch you in the gut.

2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - Especially The Return of the King. I can't even talk about it without getting all spoilery, buth ah, so good. I wanna feel that way again.

3. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff - This seems to be one of those books that you either love or hate. There are cousins in love (which is shockingly not gross), no quotation marks, and an inexplicable occupation by some enemy. The narrator, Daisy, is so real and so cynical and sarcastic from the start, and she undergoes this huge transformation in this really unusual situation, and it's all incredibly profound and emotionally wrenching. And wonderful. Yeah.

4. City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell - This is a novel I read last year about Christian missionaries in China. I wish more people would read this (especially Christians), because it's so good, and the way it shows its characters (based on the author's grandparents) having their beliefs put to the test again and again and passing with flying colors is so refreshing and tearjerking.

5. The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen - This is the first book I ever read about the Holocaust. It's basically a time-travelly book-long reason to remember some of the darkest days in history. It sparked a fascination in me for all books Holocaust just because of how real it made it all for me.

6. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy - And this is probably the best Holocaust novel I've read since. Somehow Murphy turns Hansel and Gretel into not just a believable Holocaust story, but a really, really powerful one. It does one of the things I love in a Holocaust novel and really shows you how ordinary people became heroes in the face of overwhelming opposition.

7. The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips - I loved the family in this book. I'd love to meet them all over again!

8. Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going - I swallowed this book in one gulp. It's all about a fat kid who thinks he's totally worthless and a kinda homeless guitar prodigy with a band that needs a drummer. I'd love to read this again and slower and just enjoy that moment when these two characters realize how badly they need each other. It's perfect.

9. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger - This is one of those books that I feel like could never be as good as the first time. Once you know what happens at the end (even though you suspect it as the book progresses anyway), there's no going back, it just can't be as good as it was the first time. It's about an annoying but lovable kid who irritates a major league baseball player into becoming his friend. Told mostly in letters it is hilarious, heartwarming, and heartbreaking. Just talking about it makes me want to read it again.

10. The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen - I read this book at just the right time. So much of Macy's story hit home for me that I found myself in tears again and again because I liked her so much and because I really felt like I could relate.


What books would you like read again for the first time?


P.S. On a side note - it's my blogiversary, and I'm giving away a few books. Check it out?

Four!

It's hard to believe this day has come. It's even harder to believe I remembered that it came and am writing a post about it seeing as I usually am off looking at shiny things or other such distractions for the attention span impaired while my blogiversary skates by with little fanfair. I'm not forgetting this year, though. That's right - this week Leafing Through Life is four. Four years old. It was four years ago today that I wrote my first book review for my own little corner of the interwebs. Little did I know the journey that I was beginning and that I'd still be at it four year later.

You see, I, as a person, am not blessed with a great deal of stick-to-it-iveness when it comes to things that life doesn't require me to do. With a flightiness I've more than likely inherited from my mother, I have the tendency to bounce from obsession to obsession. I'm all in for a little while, but once the thrill is gone, I'm on to the new thing. Not so with book blogging. I've finally found a hobby that stuck to me. It's had its highs and lows, and I've neglected it for other pursuits along the way, but I've never abandoned it completely, and with good reason - it is, by far, the most rewarding hobby I've ever put my hand to.

As I start my fourth year of blogging, I just want to thank all of you have taken the time to read some of my ramblings here, to befriend me, to encourage me whenever things haven't been going well, to send me a book, to make me feel like what I do actually matters and generally make this whole blogging thing the most worthwile of pursuits. Thanks, also, for making the book blogosphere the great place to be that it is, so that even when I think I might ponder giving it up, the connections, the recommendations, the friends keep me coming back.

To show my gratitude (and also because I just haven't done it in a while), I've got a few books to give away, because hey, what's a good celebration without presents?

I've got two gently used ARCs of a couple of my favorite reads from this year that I'd love to share with some other readers...

Sparrow Road by Shelia O'Connor (Read my review)
Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister (Read my review)

and also a pair of (never used) duplicate ARCs...

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

The giveaway is open internationally. You can enter for all 4, but you can only win one. Just leave me a comment letting me know which ones you're entering for as well as some way to get in contact with you should you win. I'll take entries through midnight (EST) on Monday October 17th and will announce winner shortly thereafter.

Kid Konnection: Butterfly Tree

Kid Konnection is a Booking Mama's weekend feature dedicated to all things children's books.



Butterfly Tree by Sandra Markle, Illustrated by Leslie Wu
Peachtree Publishers
Ages 4-8

When you're making a memory, you want it to last as long as possible.

One September day, while Jilly is on the shores of Lake Erie throwing a stick for her dog, Fudge, she notices an orange cloud coming closer to the beach. At first, she worries that it's smoke from a fire or volcanic fallout or even an alien spacecraft. When she tells her mom about it, though, the two hurry off into the woods in search of the mysterious orange cloud. Just when Jilly is ready to turn back, the two discover an ordinary tree covered in orange leaves, but when Fudge races through chasing a squirrel, the tree suddenly bursts into a magical flurry of monarch butterflies.

Markle's verse vividly renders a memory of the migrating butterflies drawn from her own childhood. Her detailed descriptions capture the atmosphere of the woods and the magic of discovering something for the first time. Wu's illustrations are perfectly suited to the story. Her beautiful impressionistic paintings reveal the perfect cast of the light and the motion of a hundred fluttering butterflies but with soft edges that gives the sense of a rare, beautiful moment being viewed throught the lens of memory.

Young readers will be taken in by the bright colors and the suspense in the search. Older readers might well be reminded of the wonder and the opportunities for discovery that nature offered us when we were children and still today if we slow down long enough to see.

Beautiful book!

(Thanks to Peachtree Publishers for sending me a copy!)

Ready to Read?

Arguably my favorite book blogging event is coming up in a few short weeks. Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon takes place on October 22nd this year, and as of yet, I haven't stupidly made plans that totally (or even mostly) prohibit me from spending a gloriously guiltless day of reading and blogging for as much of 24 hours as I can handle. The first Readathon took place in October 2007 when my was just a baby and was how I really started to meet some of the bloggers that I still love! Therefore, of course, I have a total soft spot for it.

I am busy at work assembling a pile of easy and absorbing reads to fill my Readathon day. I think I'm going to be aiming mostly at YA this time, because it's easy and also because I'm totally craving a bunch of YA since it seems to be very much lacking from my reading this year for no apparent good reason.

I hope you're planning on Readathon-ing this year, whether you're a veteran or a newbie. It's fun for all, and you only have to read as long as it's fun, and, believe me, it's fun for quite a while. You can enjoy the encouragement of cheerleaders as you creep into your 23rd straight hour of reading, or cheer on your fellow readers before you chuckle softly to yourself at the insane souls who are really going to stay up all night reading as you tuck yourself into your warm, welcoming bed (at a decent hour - LOL!) to sleep until it's time to catch up with everybody early the next morning when people are still reading.

That's my pitch - it's great fun and I hope to see you on Readathon day, so head on over and sign up to read or, if you'd rather, to cheer on the readers (which, is at least as fun as being a reader, if not occasionally more fun!).

So, will I be seeing you on Readathon day? =D