So my last entry was May 3rd. It is now May 21st. One part of this challenge that I forgot to mention in my first entry is that I would like to get all of these books through the library. Unfortunately we did not have this book at my branch so I had to wait three weeks to get it! So, a 78 page book that I read in a day took three weeks to write about! Instead I read the last two book in the Dexter series and they were awesome!!
So, About Alice is a nonfiction book written by Calvin Trillin after his wife's death. Calvin Trillin is a writer for The New Yorker as well as a novelist. I wish I would have known who he was and had read at least one of his books before I read this. At first I felt really disconnected from this book. It just kind of started right in on her life and I felt like I needed more background before just jumping right in. As I continued to read though I really felt the love of a man for his wife, the mother of his children and his best friend. The pride he had in her talent, her work ethic, her beauty inside and out and her ability to mother his two daughters was amazing. One of my favorite things about their relationship and their parenting views was this: "We agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they're not, the rest is commentary." This was a major theme in her life and their relationship.
Alice was an amazing person. She had lung cancer in the seventies and had treatment that resulted in remission but ended up causing heart failure in the 2000's. She never smoked a day in her life, in fact was very outspoken about her dislike for cigarettes. Instead of having a bad outlook on this she felt that she was lucky after cancer to have twenty five more years with her family. One of my favorite quotes in the book is this: "My doctor said that getting sick like that - getting a lung tumor when you haven't smoked and when you are way too young to get one - is like having a flower pot drop on your head while you are walking down the street," she wrote. "It really isn't your fault, there isn't much you can do about it except try to get the flower pot off your head and go on walking." This to me summed up her outlook on life.
By the end of the book I started to see why this is on the list. Even a short book about an amazing life and an amazing relationship can inspire us all to be just a little better, try just a little bit harder. At her memorial her daughter Sarah said: "Mom, I know you're listening somewhere, waiting patiently to hear me say these words: You were the coolest girl I ever knew."
So, on to the next book on the list. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I read this novel in junior high and know I liked it, but I don't remember much! So I already have this book in hand because it was on our shelf. Woo hoo! On the first page of the inside cover: "NOTICE. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G., Chief of Ordinance." Gotta love Mr. Twain!
Now if I can keep my mind on Huck Finn and try to ignore the pile of books on my shelf that I want to read......Kinsey and Me is calling my name.......
So this is the first post of my very first blog. I was at work today processing magazines and I came across this list in a Real Simple magazine. The title was: 50 books that will change your life. It made me pause and read the list to see how many of these books I had actually read seeing as I work in a library. Really, sad to say, not many! In fact, I hadn't even heard of all of the authors. I started to think about how a book can change your life. I love to read. I read all the time, anytime I get a chance really. I am a busy mom with two jobs, two cats and a dog. I don't have a lot of free time but I really would like to change my life with a book! So, I starting thinking that maybe I should read all of these books. Even the few I have read should maybe be reread and rethought. So where do I start? The list is in alphabetical and that appeals to my sense of order so I'll start with the As and work my way down. The first book on the list. Number one is About Alice by Calvin Trillin. I haven't heard of this book or this author. We didn't have a copy at my branch so I had to put the book on hold and have it sent out to me. I hope to get it by next week. This is a summary from Good Reads:
In
Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the
wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three
meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every
performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take
the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this
loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of
Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching
at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a
stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a
friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life
you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are
to take pleasure in.”
Though it deals with devastating loss,
About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a
Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young
woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”
But
he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes
his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he
published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I
wrote everything for Alice.”
In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.
Hardcover, 96 pages
Published
December 26th 2006
So this book is non-fiction. Not usually a non-fiction reader but it sounds kind of interesting?? So, officially #1 About Alice by Calvin Trillin....as soon as my hold comes in!
