Top Ten Tuesday: Books About Friendship

I actually had a lot of fun assembling my list for this week's Top Ten Tuesday because the topic is "Books About Friendship."  While I was perusing potential candidates for this list, I found a lot of great books that are so very different from each other, but all of which hinge on one type of friendship or another.  It's amazing to think about all the sorts of friendships that exist, and I think my list this week has a pretty interesting cross-section of them, and I'd be lying if I said that I designed it that way. 

1. Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett - Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, and I always surprise myself when I think about her work and come up with this memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy as one of my very favorites.  I think this book appeals to me so much because Patchett is the steady, dependable friend in the relationship, and that's me in most of my relationships.  It's obvious she loved her friend, but she doesn't skirt around the more difficult aspects of their time together.

2. Brewster by Mark Slouka - Possibly the most powerful portrait of a friendship I've ever read.  It's a great coming of age story, too.  The two main characters in Brewster step up to be each other's family when real family fails them.  It's a powerful picture of what it is to read between the lines to figure out what a friend really needs and stopping at nothing to protect them.

3. Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden - This is one of those day in the life sort of books, and Madden's narrator spends a midsummer day staying at a friend's house in her friend's absence and ruminating about the impacts her two best friends have had on her life and each other's.  And it's a much, much more interesting read than I just made it sound like...

4. Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going - Troy, the fat kid in question, is contemplating suicide when he makes friends with a budding rock star who's got some problems of his own.   Curt's a little bit larger than life, and drumming for Curt's band gives Troy a reason to be, but, turns out, Troy's not the only one who needs a little help.  Fat Kid Rules the World is a great story about two unlikely friends who turn out to be made for each other.

5. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger - Told completely in letters, Last Days of Summer is a mostly hilarious and briefly heartbreaking story of a mouthy kid who starts writing letters to the hot-headed up-and-coming star of the New York Giants.  What starts as mail harassment soon turns into a memorable friendship.  I love this book.  Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again. 

6. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty - The main character in this one is missing her flaky friend who fled normal life to join the circus.  This is the sort of friendship where you understand why your friend is doing the crazy things they're doing, but you're also kind of bummed that they're always leaving you in the lurch.

7. Gossip by Beth Gutcheon - This book hinges on a narrator whose two best friends became each other's sworn enemies over some long past trivial slight.  The ripples of their mutual loathing are far-reaching, and it's an interesting look into the delicate balancing act that ensues when the people you love best in the world don't even like each other.

8. The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton - Then there are the "group of friends" books. I kind of expected this story about a group of women who bond when they form a writing group during the 1960s to be kind of fluffy.  Instead, it's a an intriguing story about women "coming of age" all over again, in a decade when the world is opening up for them in ways never before experienced.

9. Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister - Another great book with a group of friends.  One friend is facing a fight with cancer and inspires her group of friends to dare each other to do one fearless thing that will open up their lives to new possibilities.  What's great is following each friend through her assigned task, which may at first seem pretty innocuous, but turns out revealing each character's struggles and also the depth of their relationships with each other.

10. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson - Bridge to Terabithia is practically a classic.  You pretty much haven't lived until you've explored Jess and Leslie's imaginary kingdom and cried bucketloads of tears over a kid losing a best friend.

Turns out I really love lots of books that explore friendships.  What's your favorite?

Bout of Books Update #1

It feel like I've been reading for a long time, so it must be time to finally post a Bout of Books update.  Honestly, I'm pretty happy with my progress.  I'm sure my reading totals will pale in comparison to most people's, but in comparison to my average week, this week has been a big win so far.

Books Read:

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink (finished off the last 45 pages)
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis (56 pages of graphic novel, which really is  good for a readathon morale boost)
Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern (342 pages)

Reading Now:

Out of the Blue by S.L. Rottman (70 pages down)

All told (in case you didn't just whip out your calculator), that's about 513 pages, which isn't too shabby considering I work full time and haven't been able to get much reading time in there, spent most of Tuesday night celebrating my grandmother's birthday, and, also, I am that person who needs close to eight hours of sleep at night in order to successfully mingle with the rest of the human race.

More importantly, I'm pretty happy with how well I've been doing at keeping to my modest time management goals.  I started early (the Bout of Books is not just one week, it's a way of life, amIright?), abandoned stupid computer games/social networks I don't even like, sacrificed the overage of naps in favor of reading on the front porch, and have generally made reading more of habit instead of squeezing in a few pages before bed.  And, that, my friends, is just what I was going for.  Here's hoping I can keep it up, but even if I can't, I still count this week a success already.

What have you been reading this week?

Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

They call us guards, warders, invigilators, room keepers, gallery assistants.  We are watchmen, sentinels, but we don't polish guns, shoes or egos.  We are custodians of a national treasure, a treasure beyond value stored behind eight Corinthian columns of a neoclassical facade, the dreams of the ancients stuccoed to our building.  And our title should honor that.

Asunder is a short book, but it demands a lot of its reader.  Its main character, Marie, is a guard at the National Gallery in London where she has worked for nine years becoming intimately acquainted with the museum's many works of art and sinking into a life of days marked by routine and lack of ambition.    There is little plot to speak of, just Marie's slow dawning realization that she's allowed her life to become like one of the paintings she guards: ripe for contemplation but requiring her to maintain a safe distance.  Marie's life within Aridjis' pages is austere, marked by long days at the museum, evenings crafting delicate dioramas from egg shells, and a bizarre friendship with fellow museum-guard and poet, Daniel, a relationship that demands the following of a certain set of rules to "thrive,"  and a relationship that each fails to push beyond the realm of awkward friendship despite numerous opportunities.

I struggled with very mixed feelings about Asunder.  On one hand, Aridjis's writing is compelling.  She can turn a phrase, and the way she describes the strung together episodes of Marie's life draws out the mundane life she leads as well as a few surreal, bizarre occurrences that finally set up Marie's life for a change.   On the other hand, Asunder is a very short book that took me so long to read because I ended up pausing numerous times to stare into the middle distance trying to piece together what seemed to be a collection of unrelated events into some sort of cohesively themed whole.  I always felt like I was on the verge of understanding the larger scheme of what Aridjis was trying to say but never quite getting there.  In the end, without a little more help understanding the nature of Marie's transformation, Asunder failed to make the jump from a compelling piece of artful writing to an engaging story, and I was left with the distinct impression that I was missing something, rather than the closure I was looking for in Asunder.

(Review copy provided by publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Almost Put Down but Didn't

It's been forever since I've done one of these great Top Ten Tuesdays hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.  Okay, it's been forever since I've done any serious blogging at all, but this week's topic captured my interest.  It's all about those books you almost put down but didn't.  Obviously, there are books that you didn't give up on that turned into major reading winners.  On the other hand, there are the books that you definitely wish you would have gone with your gut and given up on.  I've divided my list between the two.

Books I'm Glad I Didn't Put Down

1. The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson - I'm totally into the whole family saga thing, so this one reeled me right in.  Then I realized it was a bunch of interconnected short stories, which is often a dealbreaker for me since I don't find that short stories really connect into much of anything for me.  This one was different, and really worked for me - an excellent picture of a family weathering the changes of the late 20th century with an ending that's like one of those songs that starts in a minor key and then suddenly transforms to a major one in the final note.  Hopefully you're musically "educated" enough to know what I mean by that...but even if you aren't you know it when you hear it.  And read it.

2. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh - Between the rough subject matter and the written Scottish accent/dialect, Trainspotting is nothing if not challenging.  I had to read it out loud until I got the hang of it (thank goodness no one was around), but once I got it down, I could hear it in my head and surprised myself by really liking this one.

3. Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman by Minka Pradelski - The narrator of this one, and the premise of a stranger coming to the weird narrator's door to tell her stories all about her Jewish town in the run-up to World War II, is all a bit too much on the weird side, but then Mrs. Kugelman started bringing her town to life in a way that seemed to mix the mundane with legend and myth, and I was sold.  Sure, it was weird and outside the box, but it also happened to be really good.

4. We Sinners by Hanna Pylvainen - Here are those interconnected short stories again, which is apparently something I expect to hate, but don't always.  The stories from the perspectives of the many members of a large fundamentalist Christian family combine to create a picture of all the pleasure and pain of living life or leaving life steeped in religion.  I didn't realize until I wrote the review how much I admired the well-balanced, loving perspective Pylvainen brought to her story.

5. In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike - I read this book for a book group meeting, and I'll admit it was occasionally kind of a slog, not to mention that the first segment is about a minister losing his faith, which is kind of too depressing, even for me.  The book has 4 huge chapters that take on one character's life journey each, and I struggled to understand it at times.  But it was great for discussion, and I found that having discussed it and thought it over that the story and ideas Updike brought together in this book really stuck with me.

Books I Finished and Sorta Wished I'd Put Down

6. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen - In hindsight, with all the scandal and everything, I wish I had put it down.  Mortensen's was an interesting story so drawn out and dryly told that I could have put it down a dozen times. 

7. Crossing the Heart of Africa by Julian Smith - This book has a cool premise bringing together the stories of Ewart Grogan who made the first crossing of the African continent in the late 19th century, braving innumerable hazards to earn the uncle's blessing that would allow him to win the hand of his true love alongside Smith's own story of traversing the continent before marrying his wife-to-be.  Grogan's story is pretty cool.  Smith's side of the story is more about escaping marriage than embracing it, and his weird commitment-phobia and over-sharing about his own relationship look that much shallower when set against Grogan's impressive feat.

8. Enjoy Every Sandwich by Lee Lipsenthal - Interesting memoir about a doctor facing death with dignity takes a bizarre turn for the metaphysical and self-helpy. 

9. From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry -  Bizarre satire features an impossibly naive high fashion designer turned accessory to terrorism.  And, yes, it was as weird as it sounds.  And also unexpectedly...boring?

10. The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison - I pressed on with this one because it got an Orange Prize list nod, but I wish I hadn't.  The novel is about the dissolution of a marriage during World War II while the couple hosts numerous evacuee children on their country estate.  Therefore, impressionable young Anna is on hand to witness marital drama far beyond her years.  Kind of creepy, really.

What books did you almost put down but turned out to be good?  Or do you usually wish you would have gone with your first instinct when you finish a book you thought you should've put down?

Bout of Books 10

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 12th and runs through Sunday, May 18th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 10 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team.

Bout of Books is one of these book blogosphere events that I always see happening, and think "I should do that next time," and then subsequently miss the next event.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  This time, with the next week not looking as terribly busy as most weeks tend to be, and next weekend still being fairly open to book-reading activities, I'm not going to miss it.

I didn't sign up as a reader for this spring's Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon, but I, without a doubt, sorely need to get more reading done.  I've arrived at one of those moments, while I'm trudging toward the finish line of Five Days at Memorial, where I feel like there are just too many good books - in my house, in the world, coming out this summer, this fall, next year - and how will I ever read them?  Rather than causing me to focus and, you know, read more books, this kind of just makes me flutter around in a low-grade state of overwhelmed panic.

Enter Bout of Books, from what I gather, a more relaxed week-long Readathon that will (ideally) help me to put more priority on reading in the day to day when I am most prone to distraction.  The reality of the thing is, even if I read more than usual, I'm probably not going to put away more than one or two books this week, because I am, indeed, the world's slowest reader, but I will be satisfied with moving in the right direction in terms of getting a little more reading into every day.   As such, I don't have a specific number of books or pages I'm planning to read - these types of goals always lead me into disappointment.  Rather, I have a collection of reading time management goals that I hope will serve me this week and into the indeterminate future beyond this lovely event.

• I will turn the time that I usually spend distracted by the more pointless diversions of all my electronic gadgetry and the wonders of the internet into reading time.  Here's a fond "See ya later!" to Facebook (which I don't even like but *still* sucks up my time), Words With Friends, and the Microsoft Solitaire collection.
• I will curtail unnecessary naps in favor of reading.  I am a great lover of naps both needed and not.  A good nap is a great thing when taken sparingly.  The napping has been less sparing lately.  And yes, I realize how pathetic this sounds.  I'm admitting I have a problem, people.  I'm told that's the first step. 
• I will redirect the freakish amount of energy I put into acquiring books into reading them.
• If I'm stuck in a waiting room, it will be with the written word, not my iPhone.
• I will take back some of my lunch time at work for reading.  Sorry, fitness and working when I don't really need to be - this is not your week!
• I will start early.  Like today.  Sure, that's kind of cheating, but I'm a slow reader, I need every advantage I can get.  Plus, what's better than an excuse to read more for one week than an excuse to read more for one week plus one weekend?  ;-)

Will you be participating in the Bout of Books?  And, even if you aren't, do you have any tried and true suggestions for cramming more reading into the nooks and crannies of your week that I should know about?