Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Sorry I haven't been around much this month, but it's been a roller coaster of one that hasn't left me much time to so much as turn on my computer, much less blog constructively, but I'll save that tale for another day.  Until then, witness my big Christmas gift...finally asked for and received for better or worse.  I've held out for a long time, but here it is at last...the dread Kindle (a Paperwhite - purely for reading, no additional distractions for the short attention-spanned).  Bad picture quality brought to you by iPhone and my glare-y kitchen table. 

Aw, but it is kind of cute, now, isn't it?  And it might have proved itself by making it exceedingly easy for me to purchase and re-read a good chunk of The Hobbit immediately in the wake of seeing the movie yesterday.  I could get used to this, I think.  My TBR "pile"?  Maybe not so much. 

Anyhow, just thought I'd stop in between holiday meals and gatherings to wish you all a very Merry and assure you all that I have survived most of December despite reports to the contrary.

So, what did Santa leave under your tree?

Driving the Saudis by Jayne Amelia Larson

Jayne Amelia Larson's memoir starts out the way anybody's story of trying to pursue their dream might start.  Girl moves to LA to try to make it in the film industry.  Girl gathers mountains of debt while failing to gather mountains of job offers.  Girl takes utter crap job to pay the bills.  It's a common story, but the utter crap job that Larson takes is a boon to her readers because she's not waiting tables or cleaning toilets, rather she's chauffeuring a pack of rich Saudi royals.

As it turns out, a truly awful job for Larson makes for an engaging memoir that proves to be both entertaining and enlightening.  Life among the Middle East's most filthy rich is bizarre to say the least.  The Princess heading up the party spends most of her days shopping in high end stores with family, friends, and servants and demands that the chauffeur for each participant follow along as the party walks between stores.  A tea set gets its own expensive hotel room.  Women who, at home, are expected to be covered from head to toe to go out in public, who may not even be looked upon by a man not related to them, suddenly throw off their restrictions, not to mention most of their clothes once they hit American soil.  Larson is responsible for catering to her employers' every demand, no matter how ludicrous, and standing at the end of a long road, is that beacon of freedom - the unfathomably large tip the Saudis are rumored to pay for a job well done - a tip Larson is counting on and slaving toward in hopes of keeping her creditors at bay.

Driving the Saudis is a fascinating book, really.  On one hand it is a memoir of a woman pushed to the brink by an unbelievably demanding job, but also a woman who found unexpected friends in the servants to the royal family.  On the other hand, the book proves to be an enlightening look at a culture that can rarely be seen from the inside. Larson's book is compact and well-paced, moving from one anecdote of her time with the Saudis to another fluidly in such a way that never loses the reader's interest.  Larson's tales of the Saudis are wild, mind-boggling, and occasionally funny, but Larson never seems to lose sight of the fact that these are people she is writing about and shines a light on the paradoxical lives of the Saudi women who have more money at their disposal than most of us can even imagine in a lifetime but whose lives are fiercely constrained by a society ruled by strict Muslim law. 

I fully expected Driving the Saudis to be an entertaining read, but I was surprised again and again by Larson's unique insights into the lives of both the rich Saudi royals and their servants, who are little more than girls working to send money home to their families.  Driving the Saudis is an amusing romp among the rich, but it's also a fascinating snapshot of a culture that could hardly be more foreign to us. 

(Thanks to Free Press for sending me a copy in exchange for my honest review.)

A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck

I think somebody might have recommended this book to me at one point.  If not, then I read it entirely based upon a misconception.  I read and loved A Day No Pigs Would Die when I was in junior high, and I fully thought up until moments of writing this post that Richard Peck was the author of both that and this.  As it turns out, Robert Newton Peck was the author of A Day No Pigs Would Die (now I remember!), and this Richard character is a totally different guy.

Good news, my failure to differentiate between authors came out all right in the end as I'm sure I'll remember A Long Way from Chicago equally as fondly.

Joey and Mary Alice Dowdel are growing up in Chicage during the 1930s, the age of gangsters, bank robbers, and the Great Depression.  One would think they would see all there was to see in Chicago, but as it turns out, their more interesting life experiences come from the week they spend with their grandmother in a small town south of Chicago each summer.  According to a much older Joey looking back on those life-altering August weeks, Grandmas was as large as life, if not larger.

Now I'm older than Grandma was then, quite a bit older.  But as the time gets past me, I seem to remember more and more about those hot summer days and nights, and the last house in town, where Grandma lived.  And Grandma.  Are all my memories true?  Every word, and growing truer with the years.

A Long Way from Chicago consists of a short story for each year that Joey and Mary Alice visit Grandma.  Each year, the kids grow up a little more and grow to understand Grandma a little better.  Each year, Grandma's antics make for the kind of family stories that become almost mythical in the telling and re-telling.  With a strong sense of justice, a veiled capacity for kindness, and a clever way of putting people in their place when they need it and helping people out when they can't help themselves, Grandma proves herself to be nothing if not a person of action.  As Joey and Mary Alice grow older they go from not quite knowing what to expect from their stern, practical grandma to always expecting that she'll be up to something.

A Long Way from Chicago is an immensely enjoyable little book about a grandma that's tough as nails on the outside but, on the inside, is the sort of decent and resourceful ally you'd want in your corner.  It's obvious that beneath her rough exterior she loves both her grandchildren fiercely.  Whether you're young or old you'll get a kick out of Grandma's way of handling her town's busybodies, but if you're looking closely, you'll also find a story subtly woven with a grandmother's love, never more profoundly shown than in the last chapter, which brought me to tears. 

Glad I read it now that I'm older.  I'm a way bigger softy now than I was when I was this book's target audience.  ;-)

(Look Ma, no disclaimer.  My own hard-earned dollars bought this book!) 

Top Ten Tuesday: Anticipating 2013

 

It's been a few weeks since I've managed to do a Top Ten Tuesday, but this week we're doing one of my favorite things - anticipating all the great books to come next year.  Here are a few books I'd love to get my hands on in 2013.  You can see everybody else's lists at The Broke and the Bookish and get even more excited for the bookish year to come!

 

 

1. The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister (January 24/Putnam) - I can't tell you how excited I was when I saw there would be a sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients.  Erica Bauermeister gets a chance to cement her place in the top 10 favorite authors discovered since starting to book blog.  ;-)

2. And the Mountains Roared by Khaled Hosseini (May/Riverhead, I think) -  Is it weird to be looking forward to the new book from a really well-loved author you have actually never read?  My parents are always on my back to read The Kite Runner, which I haven't, but I'm curious about Hosseini's new one just the same.

3. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (May 7/Hogarth) - This stems more or less from my growing interest in Hogarth as an imprint.  Plus, it just sounds good - "In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed--a failed physician--to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate."

4. A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri (January 31/Riverhead) - They're calling this "a magical novel about a young Iranian woman lifted from grief by her powerful imagination and love of Western culture."  Yes, please.

5. The Mirage by Matt Ruff (February 7/Harper Perennial) - This one in Harper's catalog caught my eye a long time ago.  It's alternate history that imagines the U.S. as a struggling third world nation, and Christian fundamentalists are attacking the United Arab States.  Could be interesting and provocative, no?

6. Sever by Lauren DeStefano (February 12/Simon and Schuster) -  Okay, so maybe I haven't read the middle book of DeStefano's Chemical Garden trilogy yet.  That shouldn't stop me from salivating over this one, should it?

7. Red Horse by Alex Adams (August 20/Atria) - This is a continuation of Adams' post-apocalyptic trilogy that started with White Horse which I read and loved this past spring.  Can't wait to see where it goes!

8. The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh (April 4/Amy Einhorn/Putnam) - I'm absolutely all in for a good story set in Africa, and they're pitching this as the South African Gone with the Wind - "The Fever Tree is a compelling portrait of colonial South Africa, its raw beauty and deprivation alive in equal measure. But above all it is a love story about how—just when we need it most—fear can blind us to the truth."

9. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (April 2/Reagan Arthur) - Neato premise much?  "On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization."

10. Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (April 2/William Morrow Paperbacks) - "The author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be delivers her most ambitious and powerful novel to date: a captivating story of two very different women who build an unexpected friendship: a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and the teenage girl whose own troubled adolescence leads her to seek answers to questions no one has ever thought to ask."

What new books are you looking forward to reading next year?

Loose Leafing: Adventures of the Absentee Blogger

Unintentional disappearance take 10 zillion?

Life has been busy on the ranch these days, and the holidays are only just now truly upon us.  I keep thinking I'll have a few minutes to sit and bang out a few posts to schedule ahead so when I get busy I don't go totally dark, but that sort of advance work and planning is not really working out.  This week I'm live-in dogsitting for a friend of a friend who is out of town, and I'm hoping I'll have a few minutes of peace and quiet so I can review some books and make excuses for why I'm such an inconsistent blogger (in iPhone photos!).

For one, you maybe remember earlier this year when I mentioned the lovely new porch we had put on our house.  It was lovely until it got cold and my mom let her inner animal lover emerge victorious and start feeding the stray cats that have been going it on their own all summer ("It's cold!  They'll starve!  They'll freeze!").  So, first we had these two...

We'll call them Patch and Declan.

Not long after that, we discovered some very little kittens in our garage.  So obviously we had to feed the mama, too, so she could feed the kittens, with the hoped for outcome that we may soon be able to take her and stop the kitten-having madness, if you know what I mean. 

Now, we have these...

And our porch looks like a little Hooverville for cats.  They're all very sweet good natured cats, and we're hoping to have them fixed and find homes for at least some of them so that we can stop being the cat ladies of our town.  Until then, cuddling three fluffy kittens and attempting to flea treat outside cats has proven to be a bit of a distraction.

Soon after we adopted the local cat colony, I was off to visit a friend of mine from college.  We had a great weekend together, one day of which we spent in Philadelphia, where, despite being a Pennsylvanian, I've hardly spent any time that wasn't apart of a school field trip.  We ate yummy food,

discovered the ugly Christmas sweater shop (awesome!),

and yes, it was me that started the dominoes falling.  ;-)

This week, of course, was Thanksgiving.  I hope you and yours had a great one, if you were celebrating.  We definitely did.  We had more family and friends at our house than we've had at the holiday for a long time.  It was crazy but also a ton of fun.  Last year we had about half as many people and it felt all boring and sedate, so it was kind of nice to return to the normal chaos.  Odd how you kind of miss that when it's gone, isn't it?

My dogsitting charges are giving me some peace, so I'd better run and take advantage of the rest of this quality blogging time.  Happy Sunday, all!