R.I.P. Challenge 2019: Mr. Mercedes and The Halloween Tree

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (2014)

Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes. Having only read King’s On Writing and part of The Dark Tower series, I was anxious that this might be too much for me to handle. And it came right up to the very edge of my comfort zone in terms of darkness. The villain here is 100% depravity. Even though King relays the circumstances of his childhood (rough) and his mother being a total psycho, it wasn’t enough to make me feel any sympathy towards him. But what kept me turning pages was the superb pacing and the protagonist, retired police detective Bill Hodges. He’s not adjusting well at all to retirement. He’s depressed and isolated , possibly suicidal. But when the perpetrator of the grisly case that went unsolved before his retirement taunts him in a letter, he finds new purpose in life, teaming with new friends to hunt him down before he strikes again. I liked Hodges – he reminded me a bit of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, maybe a little less hot-shot-y. There are two more in the series and I’ll try the second one. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury (1972)

They banged doors, they shouted Trick or Treat and their brown paper bags began to fill with incredible sweets. They galloped with their teeth glued shut with pink gum. They ran with red wax lips bedazzling their faces. But all the people who met them at doors looked like candy factory duplicates of their own mothers and fathers. It was like never leaving home. Too much kindness flashed from every window and every portal. What they wanted was to hear dragons belch in basements and banged castle doors.

And so, still looking for Pipkin, they reached the edge of town and the place where civilization fell away in darkness.

The Ravine.

I don’t remember where I heard about this one but it’s the perfect read for October! It’s a book for kids but it’s just as enjoyable for adults – lyrical and imaginative. A group of boys excited for Halloween set out for adventure only to find that one of their group, Joe Pipkin, is sick. He tells them to go on ahead and he’ll catch up, only to find that Death has “borrowed” him and his holding him for ransom. The creepy Mr. Moundshroud, resident of the haunted house in The Ravine, cajoles the boys into looking for Pipkin and “solving” Halloween simultaneously. It’s a race through time and space, discovering the origins of Halloween through the ages. I thoroughly enjoyed it. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Have you read these? Are you reading anything creepy for Halloween?

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WWW Wednesday on Thursday

WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @ Taking On a World of Words. Take a look at her page and tell us what you’re currently reading. I’ve been out of town and then playing catch up on work, so I couldn’t even manage a WWW on Wednesday! Hoping to catch up on reading all your posts this weekend too.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently: 

I’m about 40 % into the audio book version of The Feather Thief and it’s fascinating. I heard about this book from Rebecca from Bookish Beck. I prefer nonfiction when I listen to audio books, do you?

Recently Finished:

I took the Anne Tyler on the plane (my tradition/superstition,) but managed only to read about 25 pages the whole trip. If I’m going on a sightseeing kind of trip, I just don’t find time to read and I’m wiped out at night. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my favorite of hers. The Halloween Tree was the perfect read for this time of year! I’ll post about it and Mr. Mercedes in a different post since they’re my picks for the R.I.P. Challenge. El Deafo was great – a graphic memoir for kids (and grown-ups) about a little girl who was left hearing impaired after a brief illness when she was four. This was the 1970’s and hearing aid technology was more primitive, so she had to wear a piece of machinery with earphones and cords at school. Cece Bell draws all the characters as bunnies and explores how her hearing loss impacted her friendships and school work. I can see kids really liking this book and being able to put themselves in Cece’s shoes.

Up Next (Maybe:)

I’ll definitely get into Quicksand soon since it’s my Classics Club pick for the Spin. I’m very much interested in 24/6 because I think my family needs a day to totally unplug from screens every week. I hope it provides some real life solutions to technology addiction.

I’m not sure what else I’ll get into next. I’m feeling the urge to both be spontaneous in my reading choices and also to read something off of my own bookshelf. I hope your week has been great – happy reading!

Classics Club Spin #21 List

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin! I am so grateful for this prompt because otherwise the classics on my TBR list would get pushed down to the bottom. Having this nudge is a life-saver.

I chose 20 books from my master list and put them in a random number generator. Here’s the result:

1. The Last Gentleman – Walker Percy

2. Beloved – Toni Morrison

3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte

4. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

5. Quicksand -Nella Larsen

6. Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko

7. The Gowk Storm – Nancy Morrison

8. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

9. Wives and Daughters – Elizabeth Gaskell

10. The Blue Castle – L.M. Montgomery

11. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

12. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

13. 1984 – George Orwell

14. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

15. Crossing to Safety – Wallace Stegner

16. Howard’s End – E.M. Forster

17. A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

18. The Sweet Dove Died – Barbara Pym

19. The Warden – Anthony Trollope

20. Native Son – Richard Wright

I’ve got some chunksters in there which makes me a bit nervous, but I’ve got to read them sometime. We’ll find out Monday which number is picked and I’ll post then. I’ll have to read and review my classic by October 31.

What would be your pick from my list?

Five Sentence Reviews : Two Classics and a New Best Seller

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G.Wells

This is short – my edition was 131 pages including an Introduction and a Forward by Margaret Atwood. It was descriptive, atmospheric, and unsettling, and the beginning is mysterious enough to hook the reader. I can see it’s rightful place as a science fiction classic and also how it’s exploration of science and ethics would make for great classroom discussion. But I can’t summon much enthusiasm for it. It’s pretty bleak and parts of it are very disturbing. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #3)

Another short book- my paperback was 207 pages- but this one felt MUCH longer. Intriguing premise: a young attractive blond woman is found strangled in a country estate library and of course there are many suspects. Miss Marple didn’t make much of an impression on me here and she disappears for much of the book. The end provides a great twist but it took forever to get there. I love Christie’s other great detective, Hercule Poirot – am I just being too hard on Miss Marple? ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

This was delightful; it reminded me of Elinor Lipman. A baseball player struggling with the “yips” and a youngish widow who isn’t exactly grieving meet when one rents an apartment in the other’s overly big house. Sparks smolder slowly and eventually burst into flames. I appreciated the modesty with which the romantic scenes were written ( I don’t really want a play by play.) This was a cute, smartly written novel about the value of good therapy, true friendship, and two people on the journey to wholeness ( but not co-dependent!) ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

A request for you Christie fans out there: What is your favorite Miss Marple book?

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal

When Edith was feeling low like this, baking a pie had never failed to make her happy. Like how some people talk about yoga or mountain climbing or music, it was how she lost herself and touched something else. It was her church away from church. It wouldn’t solve any problems, but it might make her and a few people forget them for a while, and that was something.

She stocked up on ingredients at Cub Foods. She took out the last of the canned rhubarb from Lucy, and used the fancy lard from Block’s Provisions, that expensive and tiny store on Hennepin. She felt the dry flour between her fingers, and thought about being a great-grandmother. She thought about it like how a tree in winter thinks about its leaves. She rolled this thought over the dough, and pressed it into its edges. The sun fell outside, and she didn’t reach for the lights. The pie baked in the dark, and she sat in her quiet kitchen and waited. She was good at that. She was seventy-seven years old, and she had all the time in the world.

I’ve found my leading contender so far for favorite book of the year. I know there’s a lot of year left, so I’m leaving the door open for something else to come in and touch me more than J. Ryan Stradal’s second novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota. But it had better be darn good, because I’d give this book more stars if Goodreads would let me.

Lager Queen is about sisters and pie, and yes, beer. It alternates points of view between three characters: sisters Edith and Helen, and Edith’s granddaughter, Diana. Helen is an unlikely sort of young woman in the 1960s, who figures out that she wants to make beer, and she knows she’d be good at it. Her older sister Edith is the settled one, the dependable one, the one who Helen says “putting cake frosting on a bran muffin” is her idea of fun. When their father gives all the money from the sale of the family farm to Helen to help start her beer making venture, Edith and her sister stop talking, and the silence only gets louder and louder over fifty years. Year later, Edith’s granddaughter, Diana, who Edith has to help finish raising after a terrible accident, exhibits both Helen’s fiery spirit and her grandmother’s practicality. But after getting caught making some very questionable choices, she is given a new opportunity to find something she’s good at, and it’s closer to her great-aunt’s path than she could ever guess.

This book just hummed with authentic characters and believable dialogue, two of my criteria for good fiction. J.Ryan Stradal has a gift for creating characters the reader cares about, people who aren’t perfect but are fully dimensional and whose actions are credible. And just like his first book, Kitchen of the Great Midwest (which I loved,) featured some killer foodie scenes, this one is filled with interesting and zingy writing about beer. I’m not a beer drinker but I almost wish I was reading these sentences.

The four examples of IPAs were meant to break Diana’s brain open about the possibilities of what an IPA can do, but these beers were too far beyond her comprehension.

Her first, second, and third impression of each IPA steamrolled her ignorant palate; drinking them was like losing a boxing match to become a better boxer. It’s unfair, she thought, that whatever the hell she’d made would be called beer, on a planet where these beers existed. They her feel terminally bewildered.

Other sentences I loved:

“Her grief was a forest with no trails, and she couldn’t guess how long her heart would walk through it, as her body walked other places.”

“It was like a man to scratch his name on the banister of history, but Helen had come to believe that it was better to be the stairs.”

All three women go through a lot over the course of the book, which feels like real life too, with loss, disappointments, and victories big and small over the years. By the time the end comes around you can feel all the threads coming together, only you’re not sure if it’s all going to end the way you want it to. I’ll say this: it’s one of the most satisfying endings I’ve read in a long time, and I totally bawled. It’s the kind of book I’m tempted to immediately read again, but I can’t because it’s a library copy and people are waiting on it! And then I had the thought that I need to buy Kitchens of the Great Midwest and read that again. So I guess I’m a J. Ryan Stradal-head now. This is one of those books that I am sure I can’t do justice to in a review, so I’ll just say that I wholeheartedly loved it.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

 

 

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The introduction to Burnout reads: “This is a book for any woman who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything she had to do, and yet still worried she was not doing ‘enough’.” Um, hello! The Nagoski sisters have been reading my mail.

I loved this book. I need to own a copy to be able to flip through and underline and reread. There are so many good points in Burnout that I decided against writing a traditional review and simply share some quotations that meant the most to me instead. Here goes.

• “Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most effective strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”
• “To be ‘well’ is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.” 
• “Meaning is not made by the terrible thing you experienced; it is made by the ways you survive.”
• “At the heart of Human Giver Syndrome lies the deeply buried, unspoken assumption that women should give everything, every moment of their lives, every drop of energy, to the care of others. ‘Self-care’ is, indeed, selfish because it uses personal resources to promote a giver’s well-being, rather than someone else’s. “
• “Feeling helpless and hopeless after watching news about the state of international politics? Don’t distract yourself or numb out; do a thing. Do yard work or gardening, to care for your small patch of the world. Take food to somebody who needs a little boost. Take your dog to the park. Show up at a Black Lives Matter march. You might even call your government representative. That’s great. That’s participation. You’re not helpless. Your goal is not to stabilize the government… your goal is to stabilize you, so that you can maintain a sense of efficacy, so that you can do the important stuff your family and your community needs from you.”
• “Maybe you don’t look like you used to, or like you used to imagine you should; but how you look today is the new hotness. Even better than the old hotness. Wearing your new leggings today? You are the new hotness. Hair longer or short, or a different color or style? New hotness. Saggy belly from that baby you birthed? New hotness. Gained twenty pounds while finishing school? New hotness. Skin gets new wrinkles because you lived another year? New hotness. Scar tissue following knee replacement surgery? New hotness. Amputation following combat injury? New hotness. Mastectomy following breast cancer? New hotness. The point is, you define and redefine your body’s worth, on your own terms. Again and again, you turn towards your body with kindness and compassion.”
• “Instead of just looking at your body to evaluate her well-being, turn to her and ask her how she feels: ‘What’s wrong, honey? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Lonely?’ She can definitely tell you, if you listen. You might have to stop what you’re doing, take a slow breath, focus on the sensation of your weight on the floor or the chair, and actually ask out loud, ‘What do you need?'”
• “Your body is not the enemy. The real enemy is out there – the Bikini Industrial Complex. It is trying sneakily to convince you that you are the problem, that your body is the enemy, that your body is inadequate, which makes you a failure.” 

What my body needs right now is to stop writing this post and get up and stretch – ha ha! Reading this book was like talking to a very wise, compassionate friend. The tone is so intimate and warm, but also pragmatic. Here’s the situation, and here’s what you can do about it. It’s the kind of book that can start to crack deeply ingrained thought patterns and let in some light and freshness to your stale habits. It’s also refreshing that it doesn’t put all the blame for this crap on the individual – it acknowledges the big societal and cultural structures and attitudes that contribute to our stress. I am so grateful I happened upon this book. If you are a woman who feels overwhelmed, run down, worn out, helpless, or like you need a boost of confidence, this is a book for you!

 

 

 

R.I.P. Challenge 2019!

I’m excited about my favorite annual reading challenge, R.I.P. XVI! It’s the only challenge I’m participating in this year and it’s my fourth year doing it. I always stick to the very manageable Peril The Second, in which you just have to read two creepy/thrilling/mysterious/scary/ suspenseful books of your choosing. This laid-back “challenge” is perfect for readers like me who are allergic to sticking to a TBR list. You can also read short stories or watch creepy/thrilling movies or TV shows as well, if that’s your thing. Personally, I find that I’m better reading scary stuff than watching scary stuff.

I’m choosing two deep cuts from my Goodreads TBR: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King, which I added way back in June 2015, and The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury, which I added in September 2016. I really don’t know much about either one but I’m in the mood to read some kinda scary and hopefully page-turning reads as we head into Fall!

 

Have you participated in this challenge before? If not, do you think you’ll give it a go now? What do you consider to be a great read for Fall?