Loose Leafing: The Broken Ankle (Good?) Life

Good morning!  It's the glorious Sunday of a holiday weekend.  Honestly, I'm surprised that I even remembered that because I pretty much do the same things every day now regardless of weekdays, weekends, and holidays because ankle - still broken.  Or at least, still healing.  Even though I'm the sort of person specially adapted to stationary activities, being a reader and a blogger and TV fan to boot, I have to say this whole broken ankle recovery thing is still almost more mentally and emotionally taxing than it is physically painful.  Friday marked three weeks since the injury and my two week "surgiversary," and also two weeks since I've stepped foot out of my apartment.  It's definitely a struggle both to do anything for myself and to have to depend on others to do the many things I find myself unable to do, so there's really no winning.  It's a little too easy to get down and depressed when everything you used to do easily seems about impossible, but you know what?  At the same time I've found so. very. many. things (and people!!) to appreciate both big and small while I've been home bound, and that should make for some much better reading (and thinking!).  So, how about some broken ankle good stuff?

Netflix - Netflix is my home slice.  It has so much good stuff to watch.  Seriously.  I'm loving revisiting old episodes of Frasier, which has brought me a lot of laughs when I've needed them.  I also discovered the Chopped collection which is much more fun to watch when you don't have to wait through those "cliffhanger" commercial breaks.  Whose dish is going to be chopped? 

The Lion Sleeps Tonight radio  - Some time ago I made a Pandora station based on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and it is so great.  You can not be sad while listening to the upbeat hits of the 50s and 60s.  Trust me, you really just can't. 

Books - Obviously, right?  I just finished Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell, which I seem to have liked better than a lot of people.  Also, I'm working my way through the Monument 14 series by Emmy Laybourne, at the recommendation of my mom.  It's perfect fast reading YA post-apocalyptic goodness.  I'll have the second book finished today for sure.

Rejuvenating the blog  - I have been meaning to do this for sooooo long now.  It's been good to have the time to sit down and write some reviews again and, even more, to take the time to visit and comment on other blogs which I haven't really done well even when I was doing a better job of keeping the blog afloat. 

Friends and Family - I hope it's obvious at this point that these blessings are graduating from the small to the large.  If it weren't for my family and friends I would have gone insane probably about 2 weeks, 6 days, and 23 hours ago.  I have been incredibly blessed to have numerous family members and friends from church and prayer group stopping by, bringing food, encouraging me and distracting me.  My co-workers and my boss have been incredibly supportive (not to mention the generous PTO structure of my organization that is allowing me to get paid for the time I'm forced to take off).  Even my friends and family who live at a distance have been calling and texting and sending me care packages that lift my spirits.  My figurative cup has been running over with company and home cooked food and puzzle books and coloring books and cookies and candy and everything.  On one hand, I can't remember the last time I felt so helpless.  On the other hand, I can't remember the last time I felt so well loved.

My Mom and Dad - A step above the rest of the family.  ;-)  My mom and dad have done everything for me while I've been going through this.  They practically carried me to the car to go to the ER the night I broke myself.  My mom has selflessly dropped her life to be here helping me do things that used to be easy and are now impossible for me to do alone, dealing with my upkeep and occasional miserable moods, and running endless errands on my behalf.  My dad delivered me a Smart TV at the beginning of the broken ankle odyssey and has been holding down the fort at home to free mom up for me.  Hopefully I'll be getting better at this broken ankling soon, so I can give my mom some time back, but she's totally been my lifeline these three weeks.

So there you have it, my bright sided acknowledgements of everything that's been good about breaking my ankle.  What's good in your life this week?

Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

Jacob McNeely was born to a life of crime.  His father is the meth kingpin of Cashiers, North Carolina, and half the county is in a league with him.  The other half knows to steer clear.  We meet Jacob on the night he would have graduated from high school if he hadn't dropped out and given in to the notion that he had no choice but to inherit the family business.  As the book unfolds, we meet the girl Jacob is head over heels for that he didn't break up with so much as set free.  We discover his mother, holed up in a shack, who is desperately addicted to the family merchandise.  Then, there are the folks that dare to double cross the McNeely family and have to pay the price.

The more Jacob learns about his father and his merciless ways, the more Jacob knows he's not cut out to follow in his father's footsteps.  When he gets another chance to win the girl he loves, Jacob finally sees a way out of the life that is expected of him.  Unfortunately, walking away might be harder than even he could ever imagine.

Where All Light Tends to Go should have been a huge hit with me.  I'm fresh from a binge watching of Justified, so backwoods Appalachian criminals are right up my alley.  Instead, I found myself disappointed with the book.  Joy is a capable writer, but Where All Light Tends to Go seems just a bit disingenuous.  Except for a few token country boyisms, if you will, Jacob's narration is almost too well spoken and even a little wooden.  When Jacob does stumble into some local vernacular, it smacks of Joy trying too hard to get his character to be a little more down home.  It would actually seem more genuine if Jacob referred to pants as pants every once in a great while instead of as britches, and not every police officer has to be referred to as a "bull." 

Jacob faces some considerable struggle in the pages of this book, but for me, Joy missed the mark when it came to garnering my sympathies.  Instead, I felt as if I was still watching this narrator from a distance instead of being truly involved in his story, despite the first person narration.  All in all, Where All the Light Tends to Go is a competent debut that didn't quite find its voice.

(Received my copy for free from the publisher via giveaway in Shelf Awareness)

Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions ed. by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

July was the month of weird reads.  Honestly, I was moving and terribly busy and stressed both at home and at work and the usual things that have no problem holding my attention were well beyond my mental capacity for most of July.  Happily, a couple of books rose to the challenge of keeping my over-stressed mind from melting all over the floor while still serving as a good distraction from the madness.  One was Enthralled, a book of YA paranormal short stories that I picked up at my first BEA (which was ever so long ago now).  It's sat patiently on my shelves waiting for one of those moments when I decide I'm into short stories again.  Short stories, especially of the YA variety, were just the ticket for this crazy summer.

Enthralled features a wide variety of paranormal situations from a bunch of pretty big name YA authors.  Obviously, some stories were more to my taste and others less, but overall I found Enthralled to be an enjoyable collection.  Some of the authors' pieces were supplemental to their other published works and offered up a good enticement to dig into the authors' novels.  Melissa Marr's piece about the fairy Winter Queen taking a vacation with her (now mortal) beloved promises to lure me back to finish her Wicked Lovely series, for one.  Jeri Smith-Ready's selection drew on her characters from the Shade series and convinced me that I should give that series another shot since the short story, "Bridge," was among my favorites.  Another of my favorites was Carrie Ryan's "Scenic Route" which is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as her Forest of Hands and Teeth series, a world that I'm now ready to dig into sooner rather than later. 

Other stories stood alone, and I was sad to see them end and disappointed to find there wasn't more fiction out there with the same worlds and subjects that I could dash out and buy.  Ally Condie's selection, "Leaving" was one.  In just a few short pages she managed to create a captivating dystopian world and a couple of characters that made me hunger for more of their story.  "The Third Kind" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes was another great story about a pair of sisters unwittingly being swept into an otherworldly war that I'm certain would make a compelling novel.

A few of the stories left me cold, particularly the ones that were looking on the "lighter" side of paranormal but came off more ridiculous than funny. However, by and large, Enthralled was an excellent collection of diversions that proved to be the perfect opportunity for me to dip back into the waters of paranormal YA that I'd been missing without realizing it.

(Thanks to the publisher for giving away copies at that long ago BEA.)

Loose Leafing: Bouts of Books and Broken Ankles

Have you heard the one where I spent all of early summer getting ready to move to a new apartment and finally actually moving out of my parents' house?  Then the one where I spent most of mid-summer working like a dog at my job while the lab I work for got moved into its new quarters?  Then maybe the one where mid-August rolled around and I was thinking maybe I can breathe again, read more books, take up blogging again, go on vacation and enjoy myself a little before my favorite season slips away in the blink of an eye?  This weekend I thought there was totally a light at the end of my tunnel.  There was.  Unfortunately, it was a train.

On the very first night of the glorious long weekend I was about the take, I was rescuing a baby from a kidnapper ... I mean, I was rescuing a kitten from a tree... Okay, fine, I was badly underestimating how many stairs I had left to descend to arrive at the bottom of my new apartment's staircase while taking out the trash when I took a tumble and broke my stupid left ankle.  So, here I am with 6 or more wretched weeks stretching out before me of wearing a splint and hobbling around on crutches and generally being a massive invalid, and that's probably the best case scenario.  I feel stupid and in pain and kind of hopeless about the whole thing, and the stairs are no longer just a danger to the clumsy but practically an insurmountable obstacle between me and the wide world.

Happily, my family and friends have already begun to pitch in, bringing me food and medicine and otherwise assisting me in my time of infirmity.  So that's what I can see if I try to look on the bright side.  If I keep looking, I realize I have a million books here to read, and blogging is one of the few things I do that doesn't require much walking, so while vacation and, you know, actual happiness might be slightly beyond my reach, finally rejuvenating the blog (albeit a little morosely) and participating in next week's Bout of Books (how perfectly timed!) seem much more attainable.  So, here's my official letter of intent to participate...

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, August 17th and runs through Sunday, August 23rd in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 14 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

So I'll be trying to do a little more reading next week instead of a little more binge watching TV series on Netflix while hosting my own pity party.  Wish me luck!

So, how's everyone's summer been while I've been slaving away at my life?  Have you ever broken a bone and lived to tell the tale?  ;-) 

From the Stacks Reviewlettes

You guessed it, everyone, it's time for more reviewlettes so I can get rid of a few more books before I move!  I've been trying to be better about occasionally forsaking my abundance of review copies to sink my teeth into books that have been looming on my own prodigious stacks for too long.  Often, I let the randomizer pick one for me, just so I don't waste a lot of time on decision-making.  When you have as many books as I do, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the choice of what to read next, so I don't even bother giving myself the choice.

We'll kick off with The Martian by Andy Weir, a recently well-loved book slated to soon be a movie featuring Matt Damon.  What can I say about The Martian that hasn't already been said?  The answer is, not that much.  The story starts off with Mark Watney, the botanist/mechanical engineer in a team of astronauts investigating Mars, being accidentally abandoned there during a windstorm that his team believes took his life.  The rest of the book is the story of how the enterprising and entertaining Watney creatively solves the problem of being stranded on Mars while NASA tries to cook up a way to get him back safely.  The Martian is the true essence of science fiction, in that there is more legitimate sounding science in this story than I can ever recall being exposed to in a book of fiction.  In fact, there was so much science and math that it took me a while to get into the book, and I feared I would be bored enough by it to put the book down.  Happily, the intrepid Watney has a winning sense of humor and the suspense of wondering what he would do next when near-catastrophe after near-catastrophe befell him kept the pages turning.  Occasionally it seems as if Watney becomes a little bit of a "Marky Sue," the perfect astronaut, always knowing what to do next and greeting setbacks with ingenuity and unfounded optimism, however, there's no doubt that he's a lovable character and The Martian a very enjoyable book.  I very much look forward to seeing its movie!

Next up, there's A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton.  A Map of the World is an old Oprah's Book Club book that's been languishing on my shelf for (be still my heart) a decade or more.  I surmise that the randomizer was feeling snarky when it chose this one, since the book is around 400 pages, but if the print in my copy was a rational size, it would probably be more like 600.  In short, it's a real morale buster for the reader who is trying to slough off as many books as possible before moving.  However, and herein lies the "problem." I really liked the book.  The beginning finds hapless housewife Alice Goodwin waking up on her Wisconsin farm for the last normal morning before tragedy strikes.  Within the first few chapters, her neighbor and friend Theresa's daughter has wandered off to the farm's pond and drowns in the few minutes it takes Alice to hunt down a swimsuit and discover that one of her charges is missing.  I thought this incident would be the crux of the book, but as it turns out, the drowning is just the tip of the tragic iceberg that strikes the Goodwin family that year and changes their lives forever.  Admittedly, A Map of the World is a bleak book, however Hamilton is a wizard with words, bringing forth two equally compelling narrators in Alice and her husband Howard, expertly depicting the tumble-down farm and the daily struggle it takes to keep it going.  A Map of the World is a dense and introspective account of a family temporarily torn asunder that explores big themes like guilt and forgiveness while at the same time contemplating human connections that are strikingly universal but too easily threaten to give way under pressure.  A Map of the World takes a little extra time to dig into, but for readers who appreciate a good character study with a plot to back it up, it's definitely worth the effort.

(No disclaimers!  These books are all mine!)