What Lori Has Been Reading This Week

With school being out of session this summer, my reading has been on fire.  I've read a ton of great books in the past few months and I'm disappointed that the break is coming to an end.  But I'm hopeful that my reading will continue.

This week I started The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan.  I'm really enjoying it so far.  My favorite characters are Delphine, the French woman whose relationship is in a shambles, and Kate, the one who refuses to marry her longtime partner.  Those two characters are, thus far, the most interesting and complex.  This one has been on my radar since before it came out in 2013, so I'm very glad to finally be getting to it.

Since it's almost time for back to school, I've been thinking about clothes a lot.  I've been consulting a couple of my favorite clothing books so I can make sure I've got what I truly need.  A while back, I decided to pare down my wardrobe and also primarily focus on wearing black, white, and gray.  I can get dressed so much more quickly because I don't have to think when I get dressed.  I recently decided to add navy blue to the mix as neutrals.  In my opinion, How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are, by Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, and Sophie Mas, and Lessons from Madame Chic, by Jennifer L. Scott, are two of the best (though they both cover WAY more than just what to buy).  They both cause me to focus on what I want and need to round out my closet, which makes shopping infinitely easier.  I still look at all the wares because something else might catch my eye, but I'm not in a frenzied state, buying a ton of items I really can't afford.

I've also been in an organizing mood lately.  I haven't actually done a whole lot of organizing, but I've been thinking about it.  This means that I'll probably be pulling out one of my favorite lifestyle guides, Maria Menounos's The EveryGirl's Guide to Life.  This one covers a lot of areas to be organized, like your home and your office.  I usually wind up consulting it before the start of every school year, when I'm still hopeful that my life won't be a hot mess.  I keep meaning to read The Art of Getting Things Done, but I just freeze every time I start.  Maybe I need to find a digest version.

I have a few things incoming that I'm looking forward to--Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Siracusa by Delia Ephron.  Homegoing is one that I've been hearing a lot about recently.  I've heard that the novel brings you from Africa through the antebellum South and into the Harlem Renaissance, which I think is really interesting.  I love lengthy sagas.  Americanah is one that I've bought before, but I can't remember whether I donated it or if it's still at my parents' house.  So I went ahead and ordered a new copy.  If my old copy shows up, I'll pass it along to a friend.  And Siracusa is the Book of the Month that I selected.  I know nothing about it other than what is written on the Book of the Month Club website.  I loved Nora Ephron, but have never read anything by her sister, Delia, so I want to give it a try.  I've heard that it has some mixed reviews, so we'll see.  I'm hoping to finish The Engagements by the time it arrives.

What have you been reading lately?

Lori Reviews The Thorn Birds

Title: The Thorn Birds

Author:  Colleen McCullough

Published:  Avon, 1977

Where I Got It:  My mom gave me this book.

Summary from Goodreads:  Powered by the dreams and struggles of three generations, THE THORN BIRDS is the epic saga of a family rooted in the Australian sheep country. At the story's heart is the love of Meggie Cleary, who can never possess the man she desperately adores, and Ralph de Bricassart, who rises from parish priest to the inner circles of the Vatican...but whose passion for Meggie will follow him all the days of his life.

Why I Read It:  My mom and grandma loved this book when it came out.  A few years ago (4? 5?), my mom, who is totally not a reader, gave me a copy.  I picked it up a few times and set it aside.  One time I even read about 2/3 of it before stopping.  I just couldn't finish.  This year I signed up to participate in Roof Beam Reader's TBR Pile Challenge and wanted to finally finish--mostly because this book obviously meant enough to my mom for her to buy me a copy.

My thoughts:  I decided to tackle this book first for the TBR Pile Challenge because of my mom.  I wasn't getting any pressure from her, but I felt like I needed to finally read the novel.  I read the entire thing in six days.  It's not a particularly short book.  I just couldn't put it down.  Maybe it was a right book, right time kind of thing.  Who knows?

The book starts out on Meggie's fourth birthday.  She is the youngest of several children and the only girl.  Her family is fairly poor, so they tend to get practical gifts, like clothes and shoes.  Except this time Meggie's mom bought her a beautiful doll that Meggie had seen on her only trip into town.  Meggie absolutely treasured that doll.  The opening chapters do a wonderful job of setting up the family dynamic--the mother works all the time on the home, the father is lord and master, the eldest brother has a great anger in him.  It's a dynamic that is explored throughout the book.  We all have our reasons for doing what we do and acting the way we act--they're just not always apparent to the outside world until much later.  That's the case here.

The big plot is Meggie falling in love with a priest.  That's what this book is known for, right?  I loved the dynamic between the priest and Meggie!  He was about eighteen years older than her and first met her when she was a child.  So, in some ways he always thought of her in that light.  But she grew up and became a lovely woman and he was attracted to her.  He struggled with how to honor his vows and also honor with woman he loved. (I was raised Protestant, and converted to Catholicism, so I am used to pastors being able to marry; however, my eventual children will be raised Catholic and I am kind of curious to see how they react to this story...)  However, it's not the love that is the main point.  It's the pain caused by the love, by the things we want most in life, that is the point.

When she novel shifted focus to Justine and Dane, I very nearly lost interest.  Justine is really abrasive and I didn't like her.  A couple of things seemed to come out of left field.  But they eventually make sense.  Honestly, one of those things almost made me yell out when I was reading the novel at work (I work in a library frequented by graduate students, so we keep things very quiet...).  Then the last passage beautifully ties it all together and is the reason I give the book four stars:

Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.

Life is pain, but we endure.

It wasn't the best written novel in the world.  And that's fine.  I wasn't expecting it to be.  But the story!  Oh, the story definitely sweeps you along and sometimes you just can't breathe.

In which Bridget discusses the appeal of short stories versus novels

I am very much a novels person. I love grabbing a chunky volume off the shelf and curling up with it, and I've found that my favorite novels tend to be at least 500 pages long. I'm also very much a details person in that I find that I need to know everything, and that's what long novels usually give me: painstaking detail.

This is also why I am generally not a big fan of short stories.

But--I've been reading a lot of Stephen King's short stories recently. Maybe it's just that it's him, but I've been enjoying them quite a bit. One of the advantages is that if I'm not necessarily very into a story, I don't feel bad skipping over it. It's also an advantage that I can tell myself it'll only be a few more pages and then it'll be over--it's not like trying to plod through a novel that I'm not enjoying.

They're also just cool little pieces of the author's mind. It's so interesting to me to think that an author could be struck by an idea and create an entire story in pretty much one sitting.

I feel like I've always resisted short stories unless I had no choice--by which I mean, if I wanted to read something by Edgar Allen Poe, it would probably have to be a short story. The desire to read short stories just never really translated to authors that had written things other than short stories. My fiancé wanted me to read a collection of James Thurber's short stories once, and after not really getting into the first few, the book sat guiltily on my nighttable until he asked if I was ever actually going to finish. I said I might, but short stories just really weren't my thing. It was difficult for me to enjoy them because right as I was getting drawn in, the story would be over.

I think now, though, after reading a few of Stephen King's short story collections in a row (Everything's Eventual, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and now I'm working on Nightmares and Dreamscapes for a second time), I'm starting to appreciate the format a little bit more. It's kind of cool to have neat, easily digestible, read-in-one-sitting stories that I don't necessarily need to get invested in (even though I do).

That actually leads me to a good metaphor: short stories, to me, always felt like the one-night-stand of the book world. No commitment, minimal time spent, just wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am and we're done. I've always been a deep, committed relationship kind of person when it comes to my books. But now I think I'm ready to play the field a bit more with some more short stories.

So, that being said, a question those of you who are connoisseurs of short stories: where do I start? Or, I guess, where do I continue? What are some of your favorite short stories? Did you have to learn to like short stories like I did, or have you always liked them? Which do you like better, short stories or novels? Let us know in the comments!