From April into May 2022

 Monthly Recap Time! and plans for current merry month of May:

• 10 books; 42 for the year
• 2881 pages, ~21.8 hours | 11478 total pages, 114.3 hours for the year so far
  • By Type:
    Hardcover – 2
    Tradeback 2
    eBooks 4
    Audiobooks 2

My favorite was … The City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, followed very VERY closely by The Slow March of Light by Heather B Morris. Chouette was the most artsy (and musical) and creative and just wild! If you like unsettling books, I recommend.

“My tiny important job of the day is to crimp pie crusts.”

-Chouette

Locations and travels:

• A few of these were based in the US or England and then traveled around the world
• Slow March was set in cold war Berlin
• The Last Thing He Told Me started and ended in Sausalito CA with much of the action in Austin TX
• City of Girls was NYC
• Chouette was CA but also forest fantasyland somewhat.

She was a bright, energetic, pie-faced fourteen-year-old, who always dressed in the most outlandish costumes.

-City of Girls

For challenges, I added one more category for the What’s in a Name 2022 “Speed” with the SLOW in the title, The Slow March of Light by Heather B. Moore – and still hope to add a single post review of this soon. It was a scary book with a hopeful “Wow, good humans DO exist” ending that really touched me.

I’m excited to have completed the personal to me challenge of reading Truth & Beauty with The Autobiography of a Face. Interesting story of friendship, of writing, of memoir and who owns the telling.

As a refrain offered in Chouette, “It’s time to tell.” Ellman’s essays would certainly agree with that.

Pie was mentioned in five of this month’s reads: Things Are Against Us had many pie mentions! Which is not at all surprising if you had read Ellman’s prior book Ducks, Newburyport about a pie baker. And of course, the only reason I have a kids book read was because PIE is in the title. Chouette, City of Girls, and The Last Thing He Told Me round out the pie offerings.

I made a bunch of pie in April – for Easter. Go search #CaresPieShow hashtag in IG or Litsy to see a picture. (or my post prior)

Now it is May and I’m doing a buddy read with Laila of Big Reading Life of The View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor. It is going to be GOOD, I just know. Looking forward to it! This was also a SPIN book for Litsy in May – yay me for having more reasons to read it (besides it being a classic for my Club 50.)

What was YOUR favorite book of April?

May 3 is Raspberry Tart Day, May 8 is Coconut Cream Pie Day, May 13 is Apple Pie Day, and May 20 is Quiche Lorraine Day – which is in a pie crust, so I call it pie.

“Just go sit inside and get yourself a piece of pie, okay?”

“I literally couldn’t want a piece of pie less,” she says.

LOL! -The last thing he told me

“… make mock apple pie out of green pumpkins”

Things are against us (many many pies in this!)

Copyright © 2007-2022. Care’s Books and Pie also known as and originally created as Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care. It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

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Yoga Pant Nation

Thoughts by Laurie Gelman, Henry Holt & Co. 2021, 256 pages

Challenge: Local bookclub pick for October

Genre/Theme: Mom Lit

Type/Source: Hardcover / Library

What It’s About: Jennifer, our main character, wears many hats and has a snarky attitude that makes it all come together. She is class mom to the fifth grade class with her youngest, baby sitter 3 days a week to her oldest daughter’s 2 year old, is trying to keep up with her parents, gets recruited to be the chair of the school fund-raising committee with a goal of $10,000, and is in training to be a spin class instructor at the local gym. She gets lots of curve balls thrown at her like one does as a premier family juggler of the sandwich generation. AND it’s set in a suburb of Kansas City.

Thoughts: It was fun. A VERY fast read. I don’t subscribe to her yoga pant love and I was thrown off by the many ‘ya’ drops in the dialogue, but minor quibbles. I would have gone with the yea or yeah spelling, myself.

And it has pie. She made six pumpkin pies for the Thanksgiving bake sale. I wouldn’t have made six and I don’t have an 1/8th nor 1/16th! going on that she does. Just another proof that the more you have to do, the more you get done.

Rating: Three or four slices of pie. Pumpkin and key lime.

“He just stuck his face in a key lime pie, and we called it a night.”

 

Copyright © 2007-2022. Care’s Books and Pie also known as and originally created as Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care. It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Poetry 2020 Edition 4

Poetry Goal 2020:  to read a poem* every day.

 

Collection #7  by Billy Collins, Random House Trade Paperbacks 2002, 173 pages

Budapest

My pen moves along the page
like a snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tomorrow,
dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,
nose pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window and image Budapest
or some other city where I have never been.

 

SO GOOD. I had misgivings and incorrect assumptions about Billy Collins “the famous poet”; he is too famous. But I had not experienced his work, his poems, with just me sitting with each one. I love his stuff! Mostly, I love the devotion he shows to the time it takes, allows. The time a poem bakes, crafts, comes into being, as if he and he alone, is the messenger, or person only to deliver the package. He sits and waits and plays and writes and then a poem emerges. He makes it seem effortless and yet like he doesn’t really have any choice in the matter. I am grateful that he allows the poems to come to him and then shares them. I very much love his poems about poems.

(Believe it or not, there is a 1-star review on goodreads; very entertaining.)

Rating: FIVE SLICES

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Collection #8 by Lisa J. Starr, Beautifully Produced by the Poet 2008, 116 pages

Other People’s Poems

Perhaps I should leave other people’s poems to other people,
but I am afraid that left unsaid, they grow, they thicken,’
never mind how they accumulate.
The poems of others—this one’s my brother’s.

.
.
.

Your poem, then, my brother—the weariness of knowing
that what’s done is done, except that then it’s yours forever.
It takes twenty years sometimes to discover it’s not that your secret
is so dark; it’s that it’s always with you.

 

I am contacting the poet to see what is the best way to purchase a copy of this. (I don’t want to use the big A place… I suppose I should check if the indie bookstore on Block Island has a copy.) I thought this poems impactful, poignant, and relatable to the point that I want to have them to share. Poems about the joys of childhood, and how childhood pain is long-lasting; poems about taking care of parents and old dogs, poems of recognition.

Rating:  Five Slices of Pie. Quiche Lorraine and Pumpkin Pie

 

 

*Or more. I’m not tracking, I’m just reading. I’m not limiting this experience to one poem a day – that is only the minimum.

Copyright © 2007-2020. Care’s Books and Pie aka Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Standard Deviation

Happy Day!  Happy 4th of July! Happy Birthday USA!! 

Thoughts  by Katherine Heiny, Vintage 2017, 322 pages

Challenge: Personal, just a whim

Genre: non-plot driven family focused comedy?

Type/Source: Tradeback/can’t recall

 Why I read this now: not sure about this, either

MOTIVATION for READING: Somewhere I read a positive rec on this and it landed in my lap. Jumped into my book-buying basket somehow. I don’t remember! I could possibly have been swayed by the mathematical-ish title.

WHAT’s it ABOUT:  I have another video to share. Crazy, right? I do these with zero planning and then they make it into a post here while I probably should be doing other things. Like vacuuming.

WHAT’s GOOD: It *is* funny, but not wildly funny. (Why do we always have to qualify what is funny? such a personal odd thing: humor…) It has funny moments and witty insights and nutty characters.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Oh just watch this. See how I try to bury these so you have to read to the end of the post before you realize I have a video? Is this passive aggressive? I’m asking too many self-consciousy questions.

RATING: I give this 4 slices of pie – I enjoyed it. I’ve been reading too many heavy books. This fit me right when I needed it.

Well, wasn’t she the sneaky one with that cottage pie!”

 

Copyright © 2007-2018. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.