Candy's Raves (and Rants)

Oh wow.

I went into this book half-dreading it. I mean, can he even come close to The Kite Runner? That was such a great book, one of my favorites.

Well, Mr. Hosseini, it is your fault that it’s almost 9am here and I’m tired. Why? I was up until 5am turning pages, I could NOT pry this book out of my hands. Once I hit around page 120, I was a goner. I HAD to finish it.

I won’t say it’s as good as Kite Runner – that would be a mistake. They are two different books, set in the same place/time (approximately anyway). The stories are different though. Several times, I cried so hard I couldn’t read from all the blurring tears. This is a touching book, of two women whose lives converge, it’s sad, but oh so beautifully told. The authors writing carries you away to this faraway place, making you be there, in the moment, with the people, in that climate, dealing with that oppression.

I am again struck by how different our lives were in the US during this time period (just 6-7 years ago) than it was in other countries. I cannot imagine living like some of them did.

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From the Publisher
After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

This was a great sequel to A Girl Named Zippy. It’s interesting that in this book, as she grows up a bit, she figures things out about her family that she didn’t know as a smaller child. But this book… this book is for her mother. For the woman that got up off of the couch and made a life for herself. I’ll admit in the first book I had some not so nice thoughts about Zippy’s mom… but she redeemed herself, pulled herself out of her depression and got on with her life. Kudos to mom for being so involved with the book and getting her life back on track. A beautifully told story – I hope there’s another in the works – Zippy as a teenager – oh my!

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From the Publisher
The # 1 New York Times bestseller A Girl Named Zippy was a rare and welcome treat: a memoir of a happy childhood. Spunky, strong-willed, and too smart for her own good, Zippy Jarvis brought readers delight and joy. In She Got Up Off the Couch, Haven Kimmel invites us to rejoin the quirky and hilarious Jarvis family saga. Zippy is growing up and struggling with both her hair and her distaste for shoes. But this memoir strikes a deeper and more emotional chord, as now Kimmel shines the spotlight on her remarkable mother, Delonda. Courageous and steadfast, Delonda finally realized that she could change her life, and she got up off the funky couch in the den, bought a beat-up flower power VW bug (and then learned to drive it), and went back to school, which gave her the chance to gain both financial independence and, at long last, self-respect.

A true pleasure for old fans and new ones alike, She Got Up Off the Couch is a gorgeous encapsulation of an innocent time when a child didn’t understand that her mother was depressed or felt stifled, but just noted on her way out the door that Delonda was a fixture in the living room. Kimmel captures the seminal moments of her mother’s burgeoning empowerment with the full strength of her distinctive, deft storytelling, and with the overflowing sense of humor that made A Girl Named Zippy a favorite of readers everywhere.

This was a quick easy read. HILARIOUS and makes me glad my mother doesn’t call me like this. My favorite one was telling her to wear a helmet on the off chance she got hit by falling debris. Huh?

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From the Publisher

Does your mother call you in a panic whenever there’s a storm warning for your area? Does she act as though it’s her duty to alert you to every health story on the news? Have you ever been briefly out of touch with your mother only to find out she’s phoned everyone short of the National Guard to track you down—or, just maybe, are you that mother?

Take comfort in knowing you’re not alone, as Amy Borkowsky shares more than a decade’s worth of maddening phone messages from her hilariously overprotective mom. Based on the hit CD of the same name, Amy’s Answering Machine features actual messages in which Amy’s mom warns her not to wear a red bathrobe because a friend’s grandson “said that red is a gang color”…advises her not to get a cat because “what if you finally found a nice guy and he was allergic?”…cautions her not to wear crepe-soled shoes because “they were just saying on the news that if you’re ever in a plane crash, crepe is no good if you have to go down the slide.”

Amy also reveals the stories behind the messages and shares calls not available on the CD, each one brimming with the worry and annoying comments only a loving mother could dish out.

The same warnings and suggestions that had Amy cringing are sure to have you doubled over with laughter.

This audio book made me cry a few times. Okay, I admit it, I’m a bleeding heart liberal. There. Happy? But this book is the reason that the death penalty should be overturned. Sorry. My opinion. I get to make them So yeah, it really ticked me off, in a sense. This man lost TWELVE years of his life – for something he didn’t do – for something he never should have been convicted of in the first place. I’m not saying he was a saint, but not a murderer.

Really good book… and obviously, evoked some strong emotions in me

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From the Publisher
John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.

In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.

Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.

In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row.

If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.

This one is really really good. But… it felt unfinished. There were some parts, especially in his later life, which I was frankly more interested in, that are just left out. The last 50 pages are so felt rushed. I wanted to know more.

Having said that, the author can most definitely write. The writing was superb, very well done, lyrical almost. Her descriptions of the Bengali traditions and lives in America are so well done, I felt like I was right there with them.

Overall, a good read. I hope the movie is good too

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From the Publisher
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works — and only a handful of collections — to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors the book received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as “a writer of uncommon elegance and poise.” The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

This is not a book I would have EVER read on my own Crystal, a friend of mine, gave it to me. I will say that it took me FOREVER to get through this book. It’s trade size. It’s like 650 pages and it’s small type.

It starts out really funny. You have this bungling guy named Bertram who is… well, he’s an idiot. And his gentleman’s personal gentleman (errr… valet… errr.. whatever) gets him out of all these of these scrapes – and his friend’s scrapes.

The problem is that it gets really repetitive in the middle. It starts to feel like the same book over and over and over.

BUT it gets better at the last 150 pages again. Funny book though! Worth a read. I guess this is a book based on other books by this guy… check it out!

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Annotation
A glorious collection of all the short stories featuring Jeeves, the perfect manservant, and Bernie Wooster, a 1920s bachelor on the run.

This was very well written, a pleasant surprise! I’ll leave it like that

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From the Publisher
Bound by fantasy.
Everyone thinks small town Katie Long is the good girl looking for tender romance. All she needs is to find the right man. Katie couldn’t agree more. She too has always fantasized about the “right man.” But what she’s looking for is one who’ll give her exactly what she wants. And everything she needs.

Bound by desire.
Joe Carson is that man. A security guard at a local casino, he’s the answer to her sensual prayers. But there’s more to Joe than even Katie realizes. And more to their nightgames than just master and slave.

Now Katie wonders just how far she’ll go with a man who’s more than ready to take her…

Lindsay and the gang are back. A nice 6th book for this series. Again, I’m missing that “solving it together” thing they had in the first books. I think this “co-author” thing James Patterson has going on isn’t working. His books have lost something. I’ll continue with this series, of course, and hope for the best… I adore the characters, I just want to see more interaction with the girls.

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From the Publisher
When a horrifying attack leaves one of the four members of the Women’s Murder Club struggling for her life, the others fight to keep a madman behind bars before anyone else is hurt. And Lindsay Boxer and her new partner in the San Francisco police department run flat-out to stop a series of kidnappings that has electrified the city: children are being plucked off the streets together with their nannies– but the kidnappers aren’t demanding ransom. Amid uncertainty and rising panic, Lindsay juggles the possibility of a new love with an unsolvable investigation, and the knowledge that one member of the club could be on the brink of death. And just when everything appears momentarily under control, the case takes a terrifying turn, putting an entire city in lethal danger. Lindsay must make a choice she never dreamed she’d face–with no certainty that either outcome has more than a prayer of success.

Some of the pictures are funny, some are not, but the captions are hilarious. Great book, great laughs.

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From the Publisher
Photo ops, aka photo opportunities, are a staple of political management. Photo oops are photo ops with a twist. In BUSH Oops, 110 hysterically human shots of Dubya have been culled from news bureaus and captioned for even more pointed effect.

In this regime of meticulously staged, compulsively controlled presidential appearances on podium and screen, on aircraft carrier or Mt. Rushmore, it is a relief to be reminded that accidents do happen, sometimes for the sidesplitting benefit of the dutiful audience.

This book cut deep, very few books make me want to cry, throw things and feel disgusted all at once. You can’t help but feel sorry for the author, he lost everything, his family, friends, home… you can’t help but cry at the images of these people being killed, the descriptions of what went on in his area of the country. And you can’t help but be angry at the author when he describes killing someone, almost gleefully – yet… you have to remind yourself that he was 12. He was really given no real choice other than death for himself. This story pulled me in and in the end, I felt sad for him now, he’s still only 25 or so, the horror he must relive… I just cannot imagine.

I hope there is a second memoir. I was disappointed that we didn’t find out how he got out of Guinea to the United States and how he got through the next 6 years of his life.

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From the Publisher
My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.