2012: More lit please.

Gosh y'all it's been so long since I've reviewed a book I barely remember what I read!  And to state the sad truth, it hasn't been much the second half of 2011.  My work schedule, Junior League schedule, and attending a wedding about every month (including MOH-ing in one! Mazel little sister!) made it a challenge to dive into a good book in the off time, not to mention I spend quite a bit of off time whispering sweet nothings to my mang if you catch my drift.  Gosh what a crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful, beautiful year (Just took it there with some country lyrics.  I really do need to amp up the literature in my life.).

Some very brief highlights and lowlights from my reading adventures since we've last sipped and swirled together:

Bram Stoker's Dracula was a true 2011 highlight.  My classics ladies (Teri, Jackie, Biscuit and I) have had a small haitus only partially due to the birth of little Sofie Kay- the cutest little honorary book club member you could imagine- but we did manage to fit in this gem.  Stoker's narrative story-telling is smooth, though sometimes endless, and he builds suspense, plants fear and tickles curiosity in this gothic, romantic horror story.  It's a festive fall read and one of the few page-turners of its time (the UK in the 1800s was a snooze fest folks).

William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.  See snooze-fest comment above.  Friends, this book confirms that any author who was paid by the word a la Charles Dickens just is not the man for me.  If you had a few inches left in your suitcase to a deserted island for the rest of your life and had to choose between a copy of Vanity Fair and four stale hotdog buns, I'd have to flip for it.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

"The Glass Castle" By Jeannette Walls.  Best read of 2011.  Now usually the New York Times Bestseller List is a cesspool of complete malarkey, but the exceptions can be exceptional.  This dysfunctional 2005 memoir is complete nonfiction, yet so sensational it rocks the conscience.  Jeannette's parents are so negligent, you can barely forgive them, yet their own lessons on forgiveness are so remarkable and child-like that you wonder how these thoughts could reside in the parents who could  provide nothing but a poverty-stricken, unstable and tragic childhood for their kids.

"Erma can't let go of her misery," Mom said.  "It's all she knows."  She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies.  "Everyone has something good about them," she said.  "You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that."

"Oh yeah?" I said.  "How about Hitler?  What was his redeeming quality?"

"Hitler loved dogs," Mom said without hesitation.

And those are a few remarks of 2011, along with a taste of my first 2012 read, "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield:

"People disappear when they die.  Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath.  Their flesh.  Eventually their bones.  All living memory of them ceases.  This is both dreadful and natural.  Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation.  For in the books they write they continue to exist.  We can rediscover them.  Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods.  Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy.  They can comfort you.  They can perplex you.  They can alter you.  All this, even though they are dead.  Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

So see y'all for more reading in 2012.  xx