Jenyfer Matthews

A friend of mine who teaches English as a second language has been recommending a book to me, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, for years. I trust her judgment and her taste so why have I resisted her suggestion? I guess it’s just perversity. I’ve been disappointed many times by books and movies with mass popular approval so I tend to resist or at least approach such things with extreme skepticism.

I still might not have ever read the books if my father hadn’t had a stack of them which had belonged to my grandmother. I had already run through my own stack of summer reading so I gave them a try.

As my friend so wisely predicted, I loved them. I’ve read seven of the series in just over a week.

Imagine a book that is a cross between the commonsense of Agatha Christie’s character Miss Marple and the cozy, slice of life portraits of English village life written by British author Angela Thirkell – only set in Botswana. Beautifully written, the books are much more about the “traditionally built” character of Mma Ramotswe and life in Botswana than they are about any serious mystery plot and I gobbled them down in short order.

(Apparently they appeal to lots of people the same way because when I looked on Amazon for the link to the books I see there is also a TV series and a movie tie-in book. Glad I didn’t know that before!)

Now my only problem is that I am out of fresh books to read and I still have a few weeks left of summer vacation…

My reading habits have changed somewhat in the decade or so.

It used to be that when I read a good book, I would gobble it up as fast as I could just to find out what happened. When I reached “the end”, I would almost immediately turn back to page one and start reading all over again, more slowly. Secure in knowing the storyline, I could savor all the details the second time through. I read almost every book I liked twice, back to back. (Hmmm…Sounds a little compulsive when I describe it now)

I still read books that I like twice, only now I’m usually content to put it aside for a while and revisit it at a later date. Sometimes a much later date. What’s changed? Sometimes it has to do with how many other books I have on my nightstand waiting to be read, but more often it’s just me. There are fewer books that I enjoy enough to get swept away in on even the first read that want to read them again at all – now or later.

Would it surprise anyone to know that I used to make myself finish books that I wasn’t enjoying, simply because I’d started them? I don’t do that anymore. The only reason I can think of to finish a book you don’t like is if the book is for a class or a job – there are too many other books out there to waste time on something you don’t like.

Some of the difference in my reading habits I put down to doing my own writing. Like anything else, the more you know about how to do something, the better someone else has to do it to impress you – or so it is with me anyway. I can’t look at a quilt and not see the pattern and the workmanship that has gone into it. I can’t read a book and not see the story structure, plot, and word art. People I know who don’t write seem to enjoy a much wider range of books than I do – even the same books sometimes. I can only assume it is because they aren’t being constantly distracted by the mechanics of the writing. It’s hard to sit back and enjoy a story when you are editing in your head.

(I recently pointed out a writing quirk of an author my sister and I both enjoy, much more hit or miss on my part. Since I’ve done that my sister can’t not see the quirk and it’s making her crazy now too!)

I’ve read two books recently that I plan on reading again in the future. The first is a historical fiction book I bought called Lily of the Nile by Stephanie Dray. It’s a fictionalized account of Cleopatra’s daughter Selene after they were taken to Rome as political prisoners after Cleopatra committed suicide. I bought it because it appealed to me as a sort of sequel to The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel which I read on my trip to Thailand last year (was that only last year???) The author admits that the actual historical record for her account is pretty thin and hugely Roman biased, but it was a fascinating story all the same and I’d like to believe that her account could have happened. (Mostly I’d like to have seen Octavian get dragged through the streets of Rome in defeat and humiliated but that’s another story all together). I’ll also be looking out for the sequel to this one.

The second book I just finished this weekend drifted into my life during a book swap. I picked it up because I liked the title: Between, Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson. I read it in big chunks and when I reached the end, I had that old impulse to just turn back to page one and start over again. I have a stack of other books to read just now so I’ll probably just let the afterglow of this one simmer in the back of my mind for a while instead, but it sure is nice to know there are still books out there that grab me that way, even if they are harder to find now.

I have been lucky to read more than my share of good books recently, most of which have been recommended or passed along by friends so I thought I’d share the titles in case anyone was looking for something to read.

Little Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews Light, frothy, silly and lots of fun – like mango sorbet on a hot day.

Hissy Fit by Mary Kay Andrews
Another fun novel by the same author – HGTV meets Antiques Road Show with a dash of Southern manners, humidity, and mystery.

Bed of Roses (The Bride Quartet, Book 2) by Nora Roberts
I knew I would like this book going into it – I’m not sure there have been any Nora Roberts books that I’ve read that I didn’t enjoy. This is the second book in the quartet and though she always writes a book so it can stand alone she also manages to make you want to know more! I’ll be looking for the other three in this series.

The Search by Nora Roberts
I really loved this book, particularly the details on dog training and search and rescue training. I did find the ending slightly anti-climatic given all the build-up but overall, it was still very enjoyable.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen
I really like reading memoirs, and particularly like memoirs that include glimpses of new cultures. This book was both interesting and funny. Who knew that Mennonites could be so quirky?

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A friend of mine read this book and insisted that I read it. I admit to being a little reluctant to read it because it seemed like it might be a bit heavy and somewhat of a downer. Once I finally did get started, the story was so compelling that I read it in a matter of days. The author has a definite political agenda in her presentation, but whether or not you agree with that it is simply a remarkable story of the author’s journey from a childhood in a tribal society in Africa, escaping an arranged marriage, and becoming a citizen and legislator in Holland. Wow.

I’m in the middle of another good book I’ll tell you about when I finish it. Getting books from friends can be great – I read things I’d probably never have run across otherwise.

Just a reminder that the sitewide Smashwords.com book sale is still going on and all of my books are 25% off – just use the code SSW25 at checkout. Offer good thru July 31, 2011!

I arrived in Minnesota last week just in time to participate in a local arts festival last weekend. In other circumstances I might have brought along some quilts to sell, but since all my quilts are stuck in Egypt at present, I sold books instead.

It was my first time to stand next to a table displaying all my books and it was both a thrilling and uncomfortable experience. Thrilling because I think my books are beautiful and I’m proud of them and seeing them all on display together at long last was wonderful, and uncomfortable because I’m not used to putting myself out there next to them in the flesh, particularly among people I know in real life. It’s not a nice feeling when someone glances at your books and keeps walking, or picks one up and reads the blurb and then moves on.

Fortunately, I kept my expectations pretty low so any time I sold a copy it was a thrill. It was an even bigger thrill when a woman made a beeline for my table and told me she’d seen my book Separation Anxiety reviewed in the local paper and she’d come out to the festival to look for me.

Of course, I went looking for a newspaper as soon as I could. I will link to the online article as soon as it’s available, but in the meantime you can click the image below and read the review below.

I don’t know if it was the review or the display or a combination of both, but I did pretty well at the sale. I sold out of Separation Anxiety and I’m still coasting on the high of the good review.

My children were selling bottle cap magnets and pet rocks and they made a bundle. They nearly sold out of magnets the first day. When you can sell lake rocks in rock country then you know you’re either a born salesman or very, very cute.

I won’t be able to sign them for you, but all of my books are available on a summer sale at Smashwords.com. Available in multiple digital formats just use the code SSW25 at checkout for 26% off during the site-wide promotion! (Offer good thru July 31, 2011)

It has been a while since I’ve talked about what I’ve been reading – time to catch up!

It wasn’t always easy to find recent releases when I was in Cairo. Mostly I relied on the used book store, friends, or found books – several of my neighbors used to just leave piles of books in the stairwell when they were finished with them. It may sound a bit odd but I’ve read some wonderful books I might otherwise have passed over simply because I picked them up on the stairs on my way home!

I like history but it never really occurs to me to read a non-fiction book on a history topic. Give me a historical novel however and I gobble it up. Obviously, the accuracy of the historical research in a novel is going to vary by author but since I’m reading a novel instead of an encyclopedia, I can live with an impressionistic presentation wrapped inside a story. If the story or characters are intriguing enough and I feel like I want to know more, I might even do some research of my own.

A friend gave me a copy of Gone With the Wind a couple of summers ago and once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. It started off a bit slow, but in hindsight I realize that was only because Margaret Mitchell was painting a picture of what the South was like before the changes the civil war brought with it. Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t a very nice or sympathetic character but she was compelling and you have to give her credit for being a survivor. I think what I liked best about the story was that it wasn’t about the various battles that took place, but instead focused on what it was like back home, just trying to get by.

This fall I found the Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus in the stairwell. Another really long book – the paperback edition I adopted was nearly 1000 pages long. I admit hesitated to start it – reading a book like that is a commitment, especially since I generally limit my reading time to just before bed. It sat on my nightstand for a while before I took the plunge – and then was immediately sucked in. The story is told from the perspective of an old woman living in a nursing home in first person and from the very beginning I loved Lucy’s down-home voice. She was telling her own story, but in the process also had to tell the story of her husband, his mother, their family maid (and former slave), and various other people around their small town. Lucy was 15 when she married her husband, a Civil War veteran, who was already in his 50s and the time period the story covers is post civil war until about the 1950s. (At least I think that is right – I gave the book to a friend who expressed interest just after I finished it!) It is a fascinating presentation of post-war society and race relations. Is it entirely accurate? Probably not, but it seemed reasonable and plausible to me. Every fact is tainted by someone’s perception and interpretation in the process of relaying it after all (with the possible exception of math!)

My sister gave me a copy of The Help by Kathryn Stockett for Christmas. When I say that I didn’t have much access to new books in Cairo, maybe you’ll believe me when I admit I had never even heard of this tremendously successful bestseller. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading it and that was probably for the best because I am often disappointed by books / movies which get too much hype. I started this book blind and I loved it. Set during the beginning of the Civil Rights Era in Jackson, Mississippi and told from the perspective of three different women, one white college educated young woman and two African American maids, it was a not only compelling enough that I carried the hardback edition back and forth to the children’s tennis lessons but it was also a wonderful follow-up to the Last Living Confederate Widow Tells All, picking up in time where that book left off. I loved hearing the stories from each of the three different main characters and also that it focused on such a small but personal aspect of race relations at the time: the black maids and the white women they worked for.

These books were written by different authors, many years apart, but they go together well. If you have some time and are looking for some thought provoking reading, I recommend all three of these novels either individually or read in sequence. Depending on how quickly you read, if you start now you might just have your summer reading list all taken care of!

I bought a copy of The Queen’s Fool: A Novel (Boleyn) while I was on summer vacation and packed it to read on the plane ride back to Egypt. As it turned out, I didn’t finish it until after I’d returned home which is why it’s taken me so long to get back with my thoughts on it.

(I love my blog – it’s kind of like my own little reading group where I get to pick all the books!)

What can I say except that I loved The Queen’s Fool: A Novel (Boleyn) How could I resist a book with this for the blurb:

It is winter, 1553. Pursued by the Inquisition, Hannah Green, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, is forced to flee Spain with her father. But Hannah is no ordinary refugee. Her gift of “Sight,” the ability to foresee the future, is priceless in the troubled times of the Tudor court. Hannah is adopted by the glamorous Robert Dudley, the charismatic son of King Edward’s protector, who brings her to the court as a “holy fool” for Queen Mary and, ultimately, Queen Elizabeth. Hired as a fool but working as a spy; promised in wedlock but in love with her master; endangered by the laws against heresy, treason, and witchcraft, Hannah must choose between the safe life of a commoner and the dangerous intrigues of the royal family that are inextricably bound up in her own yearnings and desires.

I only knew the bare historical facts of this time period (and what I had gleaned from watching Black Adder II) so I felt as clueless as poor Hannah while reading this story. She’s just a girl when she enters the court and has to wade through the treacherous political waters. She is not only too naive to play the games, but also constantly afraid of being exposed for her religion – which is often held over her as a threat to make her do as she is asked. There were times I wanted to slap her for her naivete, but it was also a coming of age story for Hannah so it’s no wonder that she often acted with girlish impulse and that it took her a long time to realize where her best interests lay.

What I found especially marvelous was the author’s ability to make you sympathize with ALL of the characters, even Queen Mary. Known as “Bloody” Mary for bringing the Inquisition to England and her execution of countless citizens in the name of her religion, the author was still able to paint her as a woman in pain herself. It would have been easy to make her the big villain – there was plenty of material for that – but instead she was presented as merely a flawed human in the clutch of a religious frenzy and heartbroken over her husband’s philandering.

What can I say other than I loved it. If you like historical fiction, read the book.

If you read a book that you don’t intend to keep, what do you do with it? Me, I bring them to the local used book store. My neighbors leave them in the stairwells. I can’t tell you the number of books that have come to me that way. Some of them are simply good enough to pass the time, some are wretched, but now and again I find something wonderful like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Paperback). I picked up a couple more abandoned books recently, one of which was Addition.

Grace Vanderburg likes to count: steps to the shop, poppy seeds, bristles in her toothbrush. There are some actions she cannot perform without knowing what time it is. Numbers structure her life. She can no longer work but she still has her routines to get her through the day. Things were going just fine until she meets Seamus O’Reilly, who throws everything off. He likes Grace and things are really well until he tries to help her stop counting.

Grace enters therapy and she does stop wanting to count – but she also stops wanting to do much of anything else either. In her attempt to be “normal”, Grace ends up losing what makes her unique and special in the first place. At what point does a quirk become a problem that needs to be “fixed”? What’s so great about being “normal” anyway, if you are just like everyone else?

I really enjoyed this book on a number of levels, but mostly for the challenges it presented to what is normal and what is not? Where would our world be today if history’s geniuses had been put into therapy and prescribed anti-depressants for their obsessions?

Thank you, neighbor, for leaving this book on the stairs. It will probably sit on my shelf for a while.

We have a busy schedule at my house – two children doing two sporting activities each equals no time. We deliberately kept Fridays free so we could…do what we like. Often that means renting a movie and ordering in Chinese food. Last week I let the children choose the movie and they came home with Coraline (Single-Disc Edition w/ 3D).

I watched it and in the end was left with WTF feeling. With it’s stop-motion animation and blue haired heroine, it looked like a kid movie, and yet it was not. It was much more of a gothic / horror movie masquerading as a child’s movie. In short, Coraline has moved into a large old house and is bored. She goes exploring and is lured into a parallel world which looks like her own world, only better. Her mother is nicer and is a better cook, her father is witty and fun, and her toys are real. What’s the catch? If she chooses to stay, her Other Mother wants to sew buttons into her eyes and then maybe later on…eat her.

I had to look it up after we watched it because I couldn’t imagine what the audience was for such a movie – it was fairly scary for a young audience, and yet it because it was animated it didn’t seem to be targeted at adults either. What I found was that it was based on a YA novella and had won many awards. Really? The movie was visually interesting from a cinegraphic perspective, but I didn’t even find the plot that original. I will say I didn’t read the book, but based on the movie the story took many common elements from fairy tales and updated them. They even used button-eyed dolls. Dolls are an evil cliche. (I. Hate. Dolls.)

What can I say about this one except that watching it isn’t a total waste of time, but it isn’t the kind of movie I would want to watch more than once.

I’m going on a walking tour of dowtown Cairo this weekend – fingers crossed I’ll have some fun photos to share next week.

As you read this, I should be somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way back to Egypt. I don’t think I’ll truly be able to relax until I have all six of my stuffed suitcases checked and I’m settled in my seat on our non-stop flight from NY to Cairo.

One thing I always enjoy about summer is getting new books. There aren’t very many bookstores in Egypt, and the ones they have are not particularly satisfying, at least for the authors and genres I enjoy the most. Since I wouldn’t necessarily be willing to pay for international shipping even if Egypt had reliable mail service, normally I just send everything to my father’s house for summer pickup. It’s a little bit like Christmas as I open all the boxes and see all the pretty new books, some of which I had forgotten ordering.

I ordered The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne on the basis of a great review on Smart Bitches. It was every bit as good as the Smart Bitches’ review suggested it would be. There were very few times when the heroine did what I expected her to do and she surprised me in the most delightful ways. There aren’t so many books that can do that. I had also ordered My Lord and Spymaster (The Spymaster Series) at the same time, which I read immediately after finishing The Spymaster’s Lady. It was also very well written, however it suffered a bit by comparison because the characters and the story were very similarly done and I kept getting them mixed up in my head. They were meant to be in a similar vein because there were a couple of overlapping characters, but I’m sure that the author didn’t intend for them to be totally indistinguishable. I’m going to keep it anyway because I have the feeling I’ll enjoy it at another time, read fresh and on its own terms.

A friend of mine sent me a box of goodies in which she included the book Flirting with Forty by Jane Porter. She had enjoyed it and thought I would as well. I don’t want to give too much away, but, in a nutshell, it’s about a fairly newly divorced woman who is trying to figure out what her role is in life now that’s she’s a single mom, staring her fortieth birthday in the face. A friend suggests they take a girl’s weekend to Hawaii for her birthday – and then her friend backs out. Let’s just say she has a better time than she expected to. The ending was a tad unrealistic, but what’s so great about constant reality anyway?

Having enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl (Movie Tie-In) so much, I bought The Queen’s Fool: A Novel (Boleyn) by Philippa Gregory for the plane right home. It’s a nice, fat historical and at 500 pages it ought to be long enough to entertain me for the entire flight, in case my e-reader and my netbook both lose their charges. Heaven forbid I should have any big delays – I think I’ve already had my share of those!

With luck, I’ll be back live by Wednesday as usual, jet lag permitting, though it may take me longer to get back to you with my thoughts on The Queen’s Fool.

The last time I worked at the library I picked up a couple of books on their discard shelves (these are books that may be actually from the library collection or could be donations that have not been adopted into the collection, lucky me) One of the books I picked up was Spook by Mary Roach.

Spook is non-fiction, but the premise sounded interesting: a skeptic uses science to prove or disprove an afterlife. In the course of the book the author visits India to talk to researchers into reincarnation, she examines the historical and modern day attempts to weigh the soul at the moment of death, she talks about mediums and ectoplasm, delves into a legal case involving a ghost and a will, and finally lets one scientist blast her with electromagnetic waves. Her conclusion? Inconclusive.

I loved this book not only because the topic was interesting, but because of the approach. Roach admits she approached the topic with skepticism but she also presented the information with a tremendous amount of humor. I intended to read this book when I was waiting around during tennis lessons but ended up wanting to read it at bedtime as well because I was enjoying it so much. In the end, I had to restrict my reading time to daylight hours however because I was laughing too hard to be able to relax enough to sleep. I haven’t laughed that hard at a book in ages. I giggled my way through tennis lessons instead.

The book may not have been adopted into the library’s collection, but it has certainly earned a spot on my own shelves.

My husband received The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini as a gift from his cousin several years ago. He never read it and had put it in a pile to bring to the used book store a couple of times, but I always stopped him saying that I would like to read it…someday.

Someday came last weekend when we went to the beach for the weekend. Not your classic beach read, I know, but then I’ve always been a bit contrary.

For instance, though it sounded interesting, I didn’t read The Kite Runner for ages precisely because so many people loved it so much. I am always skeptical about movies / books that get such rave reviews because even though something might be every bit as good as people say, once my expectations are raised, I’m inevitably disappointed. Too much hype isn’t always a good thing.

I’m glad to that I finally picked up The Kite Runner though. The first several pages of my paperback edition are filled with glowing reviews more thoughtfully written than anything I have the mental energy to come up with. Instead I’ll write a few of my gut reactions.

I was pleasantly surprised by the writing style; I’d been expecting a more challenging, obscure literary style and instead found very straight-forward and entertaining storytelling. I also found it engaging on a cultural level – though I’ve never visited Afghanistan, much of what was described in the book was similar to the culture of the Middle East, where I have lived for a decade. I don’t want to give anything away in case there is actually someone out there who hasn’t read the book yet, but it’s a wonderful human story about weakness, mistakes, regret, and redemption.

I read the book in two days and even convinced my husband that he ought to finally read it.

No reading in my immediate future – today I’m hosting an early birthday party for my daughter and having twelve 9-10 year old girls over to spend the afternoon dancing in my living room. It’s going to be a long afternoon!

I know I complained an awful lot about my weekend away. In fact, though it was a long ride, the trip would have been nice if I could have contented myself with either the mountain climb (sans migraine) OR the beach. The main source of my dissatisfaction is that I wanted to do both and only really had time for one. Oh well.

There was a bright spot though – I had a lot of time to read while sitting on the bus. I brought along my e-reader so I could finish up a book I was in the middle of, and also so I could read in bed without disturbing my son. But I also brought along a paperback: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

(Just an aside: if she had written that book with today’s attitude toward flashy pen names, do you think she’d have stuck with Betty Smith? Or gone for something like Beatrice Smythe-Whitmore?)

I got this book out of a pile of freebies a neighbor in my old building left in the stairwell – it was a familiar title and the blurb looked interesting. It’s been sitting on my nightstand for ages though. I normally only have time to read at night, and by then I only have so much mental energy left for reading books that require a bit more attention. So I’ve looked at this one every time I’m between books and have then chosen another one.

I decided that with so much time to read on the bus, it was the perfect time to turn my attention to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Though it starts out slowly enough, it didn’t take long to hook me. A good character will always suck me in, and this book is nothing if not full of good, rich characters.

It’s the story of Francie and her family, and her life growing up in terrible poverty in Brooklyn before World War I. Her father was charming and a talented singer but an alcoholic, her mother worked as a maid to hold their family together. Francie and her brother Neely started working when they were little children, collecting scraps and selling it for pennies to contribute to the family’s income. Often they subsist on coffee and the variety of meals their mother created from stale bread and little else. Ultimately, it’s the story of survival and persistence and growing up and bettering yourself, in spite of the many obstacles put before you.

There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . .survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

This quote from the book is a metaphor for Francie – and for all the poor people in the city.

Apparently, the book is nearly autobiographical as Betty Smith grew up in the area of Brooklyn she wrote about and many of the characters are based on people she knew growing up. Perhaps that’s why it felt so alive – a best seller in its time and written in clear, no-nonsense prose, it reads as well today as it did when it was published in 1943. Almost makes me long for another long bus trip so I can take in another classic.

Or maybe I’ll just skip the bus and make time to read in the daytime instead!