BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP

  
  What if you woke up every morning and didn't remember who you were or anything about your life?  I know, I know, the theme has been explored before; haven't you seen Fifty First Dates?  This book by S.J. Watson, however, puts a different twist on the old amnesia theme.
     What if you woke up every morning and didn't remember who you were or anything about your life, and some days you woke up thinking you were a teenager; other days waking up thinking you were in your twenties and single.  But you have to deal with the strange man lying beside you.  And you have to believe whatever he tells you about who you are and why you can't remember. What if he's lying?  How do you know?
     That is the position Christine finds herself in every day.  Then, on the advise of a counselor her husband doesn't know about, she begins to journal. The counselor calls each day to tell her where the journal is and she reads about her life again.   Instead of questions being answered, she only discovers more questions.  Can she believe the man who claims he is her husband?
     This book makes you think about the precarious position such a person is in.  How would you know the truth?  The author builds the story and the suspense lasts up until the last chapter.  I truly enjoyed reading it and look forward to more books by this debut author.

    

Only a Bookaholic

Happy Day!   I had thirty extra minutes today and ran by McKay's Used Books.  I found four books that have been on my wish list for months!  If I could only read non-stop I might make a dent in the to be read list!  Here are the great books found on this unexpected trip to the store. I'll let you know if they are any good!

Have You Read . . .?

I love to read.  When asked "What are your Hobbies?"  I only have one - reading. I have cross stitched in the past.  I do like to shop but only when I have money, and is that really a hobby anyway?  I love the idea of gardening, cooking, bird watching, sewing, etc., etc., etc. I've heard a lot of people say they don't have time to read, they wish they had more time to read, they used to read, and so on.  You know what I've learned?  You make time for what you enjoy.  Even when I had five small kids at home, I found time to read.  Maybe the house wasn't spotless, supper wasn't gourmet, I didn't grow our own food, but I somehow found time to read. Anyway, I have been thinking about books I've read. You know one of the best parts about reading books is sharing those books with others.  With all that said, here are some of my favorite books. (I'll tell you a secret:  I've read most of these books at least twice.)
If you've read any of them, tell me what you thought.  

My First Best Friend

See those kids in the picture?  They were best friends!  That is me and my brother Keith.  Born just 20 months apart, I believe we were inseparable until he went to Kindergarten, which was a sad, sad day in my life.

This is what I remember.  We played a game we called "Cat and Dog"  that involved running around the house on all fours (crawling) because the "dog", i.e. Keith, was chasing the "cat", Lisa.  The cat could climb on chairs and the couch, but the dog could only jump and bark.  Hours and hours of fun!  Another fun game was called "Cops and Robbers" which was played on tricycles. I ALWAYS had to be the bad guy and Keith always got to be the cop.  We would ride round and round on the road in front of our house playing this game. 

When Keith went to Kindergarten at our church I remember feeling lost.  What was I supposed to do without him?  I remember watching soap operas some, and sitting around lots.  I guess I got used to him being gone eventually and the next year I went to Kindergarten! 

As we got older our world enlarged to include the neighborhood kids.  I know there were probably girls my age in our neighborhood but I ran with the guys.  Keith's friends were my friends and the two best were Mike and Tony Brown.  They lived just down the street and we had the best fun playing with them.  They had a dog named Candy, (an Airedale) that I remember thinking was not a very pretty dog.  I haven't changed my opinion much - I still don't think they are pretty dogs with their rectangle snouts!  Anyway, I remember playing with those guys every summer.  If they minded a girl being part of the group I don't remember it.

After we moved to Ooltewah Keith and I were pretty much the only kids we had to play with because we no longer lived in a neighborhood.  I remember us waiting at the end of the driveway for the school bus just talking about stuff.  What stuff?  I have no idea.  Stuff that was important to us.  Living in the country was a new experience for us and I remember exploring the creek and the field behind our house with Keith.  We had lots of adventures out there!  After we started our new school we each made friends in our own grade but I still considered Keith my best friend.  In the summers we would play board games.  I remember having a Monopoly game that went on for most of one summer!  We just left the game set up in Keith's room and played some every day.  We also played ping pong and pool in the basement.  He was a mean ping pong player and showed absolutely no mercy.  He would serve the ball in such a way that there was no returning it.
I preferred vollying the ball back and forth some - but not Keith - he was out for the win!. 

We also played basketball on the driveway.  HORSE and PIG were the staples. I never got very good and probably didn't really enjoy basketball (considering I don't now) but if that is what Keith wanted to do, I joined in.  He would stay outside shooting baskets long after we had gone inside in the evenings.  We swam daily in the pool playing Marco Polo and having jumping and splashing contests.  We just had fun being kids.

When Mom and Dad started having Betty  Brown and her husband (what was his name?) come on Saturday nights to play Rook I remember watching the adults play (and learning how to play the game), reading my book, and playing in the basement with Keith and  the Brown's son Steve. Baby sister Jenni and Greg Brown were the same age and spent the evenings playing somewhere.  Meanwhile, once again it was me and the guys.  You know, I was not a tomboy but my best memories as a kid are when I ran around and played with Keith and his friends.

Well, there you have it.  My first best friend was my brother, Keith.  I love remembering those days and just wanted to write my memories down somewhere and this is where I decided to put them.  Hope you enjoyed reading this little vignette  about my childhood.








 

Winter Garden

    Family, love, and secrets are the major themes in this novel.  Two sisters strive for years to earn their seemingly cold mother's love.  The older claims to not care even while she spends her entire life trying to 'be good enough' to win her mother's approval and love.  The younger sister becomes an adventurer and searches for meaning through her job as a photographer, continually drawn to women and their suffering throughout the world.
     A fairy tale is at the center of the story.  On his deathbed the beloved father and husband, the glue that has held the family together, extracts a promise from his wife that she will tell her daughters the story in it's entirety, something she has never done.  The girls' grew up hearing the romantic story of the peasant girl and the prince but never realized that there was more to the story than 'happily ever after'.
     I enjoyed this book.  It made me think about how important it is for us to know the history of our family.  Not just the genealogy.  I think that even if we cannot understand the circumstances our parents and grandparents came from, even if their stories are beyond our ability to empathize with because it might be so far removed from what we know, it is still important because these stories help us understand ourselves.  Each of us is a product of our history.  What happened to the women and men in our family of the past affects us and our children and even our children's children.  How many of us have found out a tidbit of history and suddenly had an 'a-ha' moment of understanding of an event or events from out childhood or even a glimpse of ourselves?  How many of us decide to change family patterns without ever understanding why these patterns exist?  I believe hearing the stories of our past is the first step to understanding.
     So much of our history is lost because either the younger generation never cared enough to ask or to listen to the stories or comments that are made by previous generations.  Or the stories are never told because they are too painful or we don't think our children care or could understand our story.  Then one day everyone who knows those pieces of your family story are gone, and the history is gone with them.

Laura and Me (part 2)

     My love affair with Laura continued and I wanted to find out everything I could about her.  One year my mom (I think) gave me a biography about her by William Anderson.  He had researched the Wilder and Ingalls families and included parts of Laura's life that was not in the series.  Pa and Ma working in a hotel after they left Plum Creek.  Their returning to Plum Creek before heading west to Silver Lake.  Laura's little brother who died.  William Anderson did a great job and I read the biography several times.  I really wanted to find out more about Laura and Almanzo's daughter, Rose, so I started looking for information about them.  I found a biography, Laura and Rose, in the Hamilton County Public Library.  The book was sad and interesting at the same time.  You remember Eliza Jane Wilder from Little Town on the Prairie?  I think Rose was cut out of the same cloth as her Aunt Eliza.  She was intellectually gifted but never had a great relationship with her mother.  Rose became a successful author and, according to this book, was jealous that her mother's books became more popular than any she herself had written.  The author also stated that Rose heavily edited the Little House books, and, if your read The First Four Years, which wasn't published until after Laura's death, and was left unedited to honor her, you have to realize that someone edited the other books.  The final book does not read as smoothly as the others.  Of course, Laura did not publish this book because it was so sad.  It was probably very difficult to write about that time in her life.  I was left saddened at the end of Laura and Rose because my image of Laura was changed.

Rose as a young girl

Rose as a young woman

     After the television show became so popular a new generation of  'Little House'  lovers wanted to know more about the real Laura.  I like to believe these people decided to read the books because of the show and that is what made them curious.  However, suddenly there was a plethora of new Little House stuff on the market.  The Little House Cookbook, The Little House Songbook, On the Way Home, and a new series based on Rose's life (which was horrible, by the way).  It seemed that the estate of Roger Lea MacBride decided to make all the money possible off of Laura.  It continues today.  Now there is a series based on Caroline Ingalls (Ma) childhood. 

      Two books by Stephen Hines which are biographical in nature helped me in my search for Laura.  Little House in the Ozarks is a collection of writing by Laura.  It turns out that the Little House books were not Laura's first foray into writing.  For many years she wrote a column for the Missouri Ruralist newspaper.  The other book, "I Remember Laura" is a collection of memories by family, friends, and neighbors of Laura and Almanzo.  Both of these books depict a Laura much like the one we meet in the Little House books.  Petite, shy, and humble, as well as very pretty would describe Laura.  I was happy to read these books to dispel the image I had from reading Laura and Rose.
     To sum up, Laura Ingalls Wilder will always fascinate me.  I believe she was a special person who, like the rest of us, had problems.  I believe she developed a deep faith that saw her through some difficult years.  I also think she and Almanzo loved each other deeply and were "partners in every sense of the word."

 

Iron House - Why You Need to Read It

     Okay, I promised a more complete review of this book in my previous "teaser."  Two brothers are abandoned and end up in a poorly run orphanage named Iron House where the biggest, meanest kids run everything.  The adult supervision is minimal.  One brother is strong and confident, the other weak and sickly.  Michael spends the first ten years of his life trying to protect his brother Julian from abuse.  Then Julian kills the biggest bully while protecting himself and Michael takes the blame and runs away.
     Julian is adopted and raised by a wealthy senator while Michael lives on the streets of New York City until a mob boss 'rescues' him and raises him as his son.  The two have no contact until Michael falls in love and decides to leave the 'business'.  His fellow criminals threaten everyone and everything he loves to prevent him from leaving.  When he checks on his brother he finds that old classmates of theirs from the orphanage have been discovered dead on the Senators property and Julian is the chief suspect.
     Julian's mother will do anything to protect him.  The story of family, tragedy, and love is gripping at every turn.  My sister has made me promise to tell her when I find a book I don't 'figure out' ahead of time.  Well, this is the first in a long time!  I had close guesses, but the climax surprised even me!  Needless to say, I loved this book.  It is even better than John Hart's previous book, The Last Child.