After her husband Richard leaves her, Edie continues to eat, while her family members do their best to deal with the effects of illness and the separation on their own lives. Edie is clearly smart and capable, but she is also angry. She is, you might say, fed up. Richard is by turns helpless, guilty, hapless, and righteous in his decision to leave a woman who clearly was gone long before he physically left her. For Robin, Benny, and Rachelle, Richard is clearly the bad guy for leaving his sick wife. But for the reader, Attenberg quite smartly never makes it easy to lay blame either on Edie or Richard. Neither one of them is particularly likable, but it’s easy to empathize with both their positions, and they both deserve a second chance.

Reading The Middlesteins is a bit like watching an indie comedy-drama about family. It has a daughter with a borderline alcohol problem who teaches private school and has a difficult time with relationships; it has the tightly wound sister-in-law obsessed with raw vegetables and stalking her mother-in-law; it has the hapless Chinese cook who is helplessly in love with Edie and cooks wonderful large meals especially for her. You may not have seen these exact characters on the screen, but you know what I mean—and you can see the story very clearly in this way in your mind as you read. Well, you can if you happen to like indie comedy-dramas, which I do.

The Middlesteins is relatable and easy to read, and I gave it 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. (Note: This post was written before the announcement that Amazon bought Goodreads. I haven’t abandoned them yet; I’m planning t osee how things evolve over the coming months.) Attenberg writes her characters well—they are wholly flawed and human, likable sometimes and annoying the next. She’s both funny and empathetic. This is a story that could have easily turned the corner into being either absurd or macabre, but it never goes outside the bounds of exactly what it is: the story of an unremarkable family dealing with a problem that’s probably not altogether uncommon—but it’s also a problem that’s strangely difficult to discuss. Lots of novels exist about families dealing with relatives who are drug addicts or alcoholics or who have depression, and in a way, dealing with a family member who is obese seems no different, at least on the surface. The problem is, how do you tell someone to stop eating, when we must eat to survive? That conundrum is exacerbated by the fact that until we have medical evidence to the contrary, we cannot say that someone who chooses to keep eating in the face of death is not of sound mind. We want to believe, as Edie’s daughter-in-law Rachelle does, that eating healthy and exercising and love and support from family can be enough to help someone facing a weight problem. But what if the person does not want to be helped?

This novel seems more personal than political. Attenberg does not make Edie either an object of self-righteous “fat pride” or an object of scorn. And in fact that’s probably the best thing about the book—she doesn’t make Edie an object at all, or a stereotype. She’s just a flawed human, making her way in the world the best way she can.

In Benediction, Haruf returns to the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. Some time has passed since the stories contained in Plainsong and Evensong. We meet a new cast of characters, including Dad Lewis, who is at the end of his life (not a spoiler—the reader knows this from the very first page of the book). Daughter Lorraine has returned home to help her mother Mary care for Dad Lewis. Next door, neighbor Berta May’s eight-year-old granddaughter Alice has come to live with her grandmother after her mother’s death from breast cancer. This group is joined by Willa and Alene Johnson, a mother and daughter who are longtime residents of Holt, and the Reverend Lyle and his wife and son, who are new to Holt and its Community Church.

Bit by bit, Haruf tells their stories, parceling them out slowly. Lorraine, who is in her 50s, has a boyfriend her parents don’t approve of. Alene was a schoolteacher in another town for many years, even after she caused a scandal by falling in love with the wrong man. Willa never really got over her husband’s death. Reverend Lyle’s son John Wesley learns a hard lesson about what he believes is his first love. Reverend Lyle, chased out of Denver because he voiced support for gay rights, continues to confront how to align his personal beliefs about what it means to speak the gospel when the gospel is not what the congregation really wants to hear. And Dad Lewis confronts all the ghosts of his past, including his son Frank, whose whereabouts are unknown after he left home decades before because he had a lifestyle his father could not tolerate.

To be honest, Benediction is weighted with sadness. It’s stark and pure like a clear cold sky that stings your eyes with tears. I can see where some people might only see a town that’s restrictive and restricted, a small-minded bunch of people whose sadness and loss do not count for much in a world filled with technology and war and terror and poverty, who might even deserve what they get for being so willingly closed off from everything by choosing to live out there on the eastern prairie of Colorado. These are fly-over people. But even fly-over people have their moments of doubt, of existential angst, of navel-gazing and terrifying realizations about their place in the world, and that’s what Haruf illustrates so well.

Near the very end of his life, Dad Lewis is visited by Frank–or rather, a vision he believes is Frank. This Frank is angry and accusatory, and they have the following exchange about why Dad Lewis left his own family in Kansas when he was young:

It was because he wanted to beat me again, Dad said. I wasn’t going to have it. I was fifteen and I run away. I never went home after that.

History repeats, Frank said.

What?

I’m saying I know that story. A version of it, anyway.

Maybe so, said Dad. He looked at Frank for a while. Goddamn it, I didn’t even know how to cut my meat or eat my potatoes right, I chased my peas around the plate with a knife. I come out of that kind of life, out of their house, knowing nothing but hard work and sweat and paying heed and dodging cow shit and taking orders. I cut my meat about like it was a piece of stove wood.

None of that matters, Frank said.

No. That don’t matter, Dad said. but it matters what it stands for. He talks about luck. Your mom was my luck. I was lucky in your mom.

I know, Dad.

Your mom helped me change.

Well, I don’t like to tell you, but you’re not all that sophisticated yet, Dad. If that’s what you’re talking about.

What?

Never mind. that doesn’t matter either.

Wait now. I know what you’re talking about. I know what you mean. But you don’t know where I come from. I wanted more. I wanted out of that. I wanted to work inside someplace. Talk to people. Live in a town. Make a place for myself on Main Street. Own a store, sell things to people, provide what they needed. I worked hard, like I told him. It wasn’t just luck. Your mom was my luck. I know that but I worked hard too.

This conversation for me was the heart of the whole book. Hollywood tells us that the big dream for the boy in the small town is to go to the big city, make it big as a king of industry or somehow otherwise find fame and riches. The city is truly an urban center, and the boy either guiltily forsakes his rural life or eventually decides to return to his small town as a benevolent hero. For many people, success is not life in the big city, but life in a bigger town–or any town at all. To work indoors, in a hardware store or a grocery. (If you’re a Haruf fan or want a better understanding of how and where these people live, I suggest you watch “The Farmer’s Wife,” a wonderful PBS FRONTLINE special series about a family struggling with modern farm life on the Nebraska plains. It was the first time I heard someone who came from a town of 400 people as a “city girl.”)

The excerpt is about Dad Lewis’s particular story, and it shows how far he believes he has come from where he started, about how he achieved his dream, but the book as a whole deals with much the same theme even with the other characters. Right now, the United States is divided in so many ways: along religious and political lines, rural and urban, education and technology. It is easy to forget how big dreams can be, how what are a few small steps to one person are a huge leap for someone else. The particulars of so many lives are lost because the Dad Lewises of the world have no control over the narrative.

I’ve left out so much—Reverend Lyle’s struggles with his faith, with his desire to say what needs to be heard rather than what people want to hear, even his own wife and son. The satisfaction that the child Alice brings to Alene and Lorraine in different ways by allowing them to do small, care-taking things for her. Haruf writes clean, simple prose, lines as clean as a clear sky against the flat horizon. His characters are complex in their simplicity. Even though Benediction is considered to be the third of a trilogy of sorts, you don’t need to read the other two to understand and enjoy this. But I highly recommend you read all three.

In Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Life After Life, Ursula Todd lives her life again and again. This isn’t Groundhog Day, though; some of these lives have only the slightest differences, while others diverge wildly. Her family—father Hugh; mother Sylvie; siblings Maurice, Pamela, Teddy, and Jimmy; Aunt Izzie; as well as the cook Mrs. Glover and maid Bridget—gives Ursula’s story continuity, grounds her in a reality more specific than time and place. Her deaths are never the same: She dies of blood loss, in a bombing, from carbon monoxide poisoning. She is murdered. She dies as a child; she dies of old age. She describes the experience as darkness falling, or as though she is being enveloped in the velvet wings of a large bat.

Ursula is unaware of what’s happening to her, yet she has a certain sense—déja vu, if you want to call it that, but really it’s more like a form of anxiety. Each time she lives through certain events, she feels compelled (sometimes) to either prevent something from happening or to make something happen, but she’s never sure why. It’s a strange sort of mix of logic and emotion that causes her to choose this and not that, to walk down one street instead of another, to quite literally take another path.

Much of the book is set in London or Germany during the years just before World War II and during the Blitz. We follow Ursula through all sorts of possible circumstances. Atkinson really creates a sort of plurality of experience through Ursula. We see all the ways a person might live during wartime, all the situations that might sweep her up or put her down, and we know that this particular reality represents so many lives.

Atkinson never burdens the reader with the mechanics of what’s happening to Ursula. She presents no discussions about it nor any reasons for it. When Ursula is ten, her mother Sylvie sends her to see a therapist. This seems rather progressive for someone like Sylvie, who cares much about propriety and convention, especially given that psychotherapy was not exactly common for children in 1920 (although it was not unheard of, either). Dr. Kellet is the only one with whom Ursula discusses these feelings—they are not experiences she knows are really happening—and he presents to her the idea of the ouroboros, the symbol of a serpent consuming its own tail that represents eternity and the continuity of life.

Atkinson brings her trademark wit to the story as well, which is a good thing because without it Life After Life would be a rather dark book. Ursula is able to live life over and over again, although she cannot control it. She corrects past mistakes without knowledge. And in the end, she always dies. The primary message here, although told in an interesting way, is that life always gets us in the end—or death, depending on how you want to look at it.

It took me some time to get into Life After Life, I’ll admit. At first I was a little bit lost with all the going back and forth, and I missed some of the subtle differences. This is probably the first time I can fault the Kindle; if I’d had a traditional book, I could have easily flipped back and forth, but going back and forth on the Kindle is no easy business.

Highly recommended.

Disclosure: I received an advanced reader’s copy of Life After Life in Kindle format from Net Galley. Life After Life will be published in the U.S. on April 2, 2013.

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. This is such a sad and wonderful book. Mistry is a wonderful storyteller. A Fine Balance follows the lives of four characters: Dina Dalal, Ishvar Darji, Omprakash (Om) Darji, and Maneck Kohlah. The main part of the story takes place in Mumbai, India during The Emergency, a period from June 1975 to March 1977 when Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi suspended civil liberties and elections and established rule by decree.

Ishvar and Om are untouchables who travel from their village to Mumbai to find tailoring work. After struggling to find a job, they are hired by Dina, a widow with poor vision who has taken in piecework in order to remain independent. Dina, who is from a wealthy family, has also sublet her bedroom to a college student, Maneck, who is the only son of a former classmate. Maneck’s father is a merchant in the mountains of northern India. Their backgrounds could not be more diverse, but after much struggle and misunderstanding, they become a sort of family.

The Emergency and its direct effects on each of the characters frames much of what happens in the story, but the book never falls into the realm of political discussion. It also does not use The Emergency as a device for telling the story; instead, it’s an organic part of the plot. Even though Mistry is most certainly helping readers to understand the struggles that Indians of all backgrounds faced from post-independence in 1947 through The Emergency and to show India’s struggles as a country (religious intolerance, caste systems, poverty, and so forth), the characters’ personal stories remain the author’s primary concern. I bring this up because the style is so very different than what happens in a book like Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, where the author has very deliberately taken something real in the form of Judaism and Kabbalah and used them as devices to tell a story in a very particular way. I essentially read these back-to-back, so it really got me thinking about what I enjoy in storytelling, and I realized that ultimately I prefer not to have the author on the page with me. When I read The Autograph Man, I was constantly aware that I was reading a very deliberately constructed narrative, which actually distanced me from the main character, Alex, and made me twice removed from the characters in Alex’s life. I think a constructed narrative can work in the first person, because the construction can belong to/be organic to the character, but in the third person, it can be difficult to tell whose story I’m reading: the author’s or the character’s.

All that is just to say, Mistry never gets in between the reader and the story, which might be easy for an author to do, especially when his audience might be one that is not familiar with Indian politics and history. He could have–how shall I say this?–pulled a Tolstoy and given the reader a lot of information about the history of what actually happened, but instead, he just lets the characters lead their lives, and that is more powerful than anything. So if you haven’t read this book, you really, really should.

Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury. Obviously, this is a book about writing. Confession: I’ve never read a thing by Ray Bradbury, not even Fahrenheit 451, which is really the only book of his I knew at the outset. I didn’t realize he’d written Something Wicked This Way Comes, not to mention countless other novels, stories, and plays. So why pick it up? Well, it’s a book I see recommended over and over again for fiction writers. While I can’t say I learned anything hugely profound, what I liked about this book was Bradbury’s complete joy and excitement about writing. Most books about writing focus on the suffering, the difficulty of getting something on the page. Bradbury doesn’t deny the difficulty–or rather, I should say, he’s not unrealistic. Sometimes–much of the time–your writing will be bad. But only by working and writing badly will you ever write well. This isn’t so different from advice by Stephen King or Anne Lamott, but it’s certainly delivered more effusively. It reminded me of a quote from an interview with George Saunders that I read recently: “Fun is an aspect of fiction that often gets undersold…Fun is hard to talk about. It doesn’t ‘teach’ well. … All those literary things we learn about? Theme and character and all that? My experience is you can’t get there without fun.”

This book is quick to read and definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in any kind of  writing, I think. But even if you’re “just” a reader, Bradbury talks about reading–and watching television and movies–and holding on to what you love.

Divergent, by Veronica Roth. I might be the last person in the book blogging world to have read this book, but I’m glad I did. If you haven’t read it yet and you enjoyed The Hunger Games trilogy, definitely pick this one up. I admit I didn’t like it quite as much as The Hunger Games–the love story is more central here, and Beatrice/Tris, the heroine, not quite as strong as Katniss–but it still has an interesting premise. Society has been divided into five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite. At the age of 16, children are tested to determine their aptitude for their particular group, and they can choose to join any faction–but choosing a new faction results in leaving behind one’s family forever. Candidates go through initiation, and those who are unsuccessful (or somehow otherwise break the rules of their faction) become one of the Factionless, who live outside the bounds of the city (dystopian, future Chicago) and do menial jobs to support themselves. Some people have no test results–they are Divergent, and they are also considered dangerous.

Unbeknownst to Beatrice/Tris, some of the factions are preparing a war to wipe out the other factions. This book ends with Tris’s discovery and the initial battle. It was a gripping, quick read, and I look forward to reading the next in the series, Insurgent.

American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell. The short story collection American Salvage was a National Book Award finalist in 2009, and it’s so apparent why–these stories are terrific. Campbell is a natural storyteller in the vein of Flannery O’Connor. Given her material, I could see that some people might also want to compare her to Raymond Carver–certainly no insult.

These stories are about hard-working, small town people in upper Michigan. Most of them are poor, several are plagued by meth addictions that affect so many people in small towns. A family returns to their summer home to find it has been invaded by meth addicts. An overseer at a former construction yard realizes he is unable to arrest the natural course of things in life and marriage. A young girl who hasn’t spoken in over a year finds a way to let her shotgun speak for her. A man pines for an old girlfriend he saved from an abusive father, only to find that she considers him just another in a long line of abusers. A woman with a higher degree in agriculture tries to make a go of it as a farmer’s wife.

Campbell shares a sensibility with another one of my favorite authors, Kent Haruf. Her characters’ stories are tough, but they are also beautiful. Campbell allows her characters their dignity even in the worst circumstances, and her writing is seamless.

This collection got me thinking about how many people there are out there who don’t enjoy reading short stories. This is a collection I’d want to get in their hands to make them see what stories can be at their best. O’Connor and Munro and Carver are wonderful, but their reputations precede them and put a sort of pressure on the reader to enjoy them in a certain way. In reading this collection, readers place themselves in the hands of an able storyteller who also has the luck of being someone who has not yet become a name, someone to be imitated (although she most surely will be, because how could any writer help but want to write so well as Campbell does?). Highly recommended. I cannot wait to read her latest work, the novel Once Upon a River.

The problem is this: the book is pretty good. It’s Zadie Smith, for starters, so at least one knows going in that the writing will be better than fine. The Autograph Man is the story of Alex-Li Tandem, a half-Jewish, half-Chinese English boy (okay, he’s in his late twenties, but trust me, he’s a boy) who lives in a suburb of London called Mountjoy. Long story short: when the book opens, Alex’s father is taking Alex and his friends Adam and Rubinfine to see a wrestling match. At the match the boys meet Joseph, who’s been dragged there by his own father. Joseph is a collector of sorts, dealing in autographs. A tragic accident happens that afternoon. Fast forward 15 years later, and Alex is an autograph man, which is exactly what it sounds like: a person (a man, right) who deals in items autographed by famous people. For Alex, the most desirable autograph is that of Kitty Alexander, a Hollywood movie star from the 1930s and 1940s whom Alex admires. Alex messes things up a lot. He frustrates his friends. He takes a trip to New York City and seeks out the elusive Kitty Alexander.

I’m making it sound more boring than it really is. I enjoyed it, mostly. I just can’t decide how I want to write about it. I’m pretty sure I missed a lot. For example, Book One of The Autograph Man is The Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem. I could talk about how if you have knowledge of Kabbalah, it will probably help you with the book’s structure, and you’ll probably get a subtext (no pun intended) that I didn’t. But you can also probably read it (as I did) without looking up anything and still enjoy it. (Okay, I actually did look it up, but not until I’d already finished Book One, so it doesn’t count.)

I guess I should be embarrassed that I didn’t try to figure out what Smith was doing with the book, but in all honesty, I just didn’t want to. I wasn’t up for the challenge. Or rather, for a pretty simple coming-of-age story, the challenge seemed unnecessary. If one strips away all the clever artifice and references, the story is  simple: a boy who still grieves for his father, who has never been sure how to grow up. The boy has friends who care and want to help. The boy must go on a journey to see what is really important in life.

A better title for this book might be, “Writer Amuses Herself with Own Talent.” I know, ouch. And I like Zadie Smith–or at least I think I like her. The only other thing I’ve ever read by her was On Beauty (which is based on E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, a book with which I was already familiar), and I enjoyed it a great deal. She is very critically acclaimed and all that, and I’ve accepted it all on the basis of that one book. And she seems to be…everywhere.

Sometimes it’s a pleasure to read a book where one can tell the author is having a lot of fun or has really hit a stride. And then there are other times when a book can seem just a little too clever, as though the author found (or created) a place to use all those clever lines and observations she’s been collecting in a notebook over the years.  This book definitely falls into the latter category.  I sort of felt like Smith was doing jazz hands on every page, and it got old about halfway through.

I resisted writing about this book, but I knew I really needed to because it was technically the only thing fitting the bill for Long Awaited Reads Month. If you have it in your stacks, read it. You won’t be wasting your time. If you consider yourself a Smith fan and this is the only one you haven’t read, definitely pick it up. For me, the jury is out. If The Autograph Man were the first Smith I’d read, I’m not sure I would want to read anything else by her, in all honesty. Still, I’m glad I read it, but I have a feeling that the next book I read by her will be the one to tip me toward reading more or away from her altogether.

I was right: reading 11/22/63 was fun. This novel would be terrific for a long plane ride, for the beach, or for general entertainment.  Jake Epperson is a 35-year-old high-school English teacher in a small Maine town. Jake is approached by an acquaintance, Al Templeton, who is dying of lung cancer. Al has a secret, a “rabbit hole” he discovered in the storeroom of a diner he bought long ago. The rabbit hole takes a person back to the same date and place every time: September 9, 1958. After several journeys to the past, Al discovers a few things about time travel. One, of course, is that he can stay as long as he likes and enter events directly to affect the future. The second is that every trip he takes back in time resets events. In other words, anything he did on his previous trip is undone by the next trip.

As with most time travel stories, many complications exist, but the gist of the novel is this: Al wants Jake to travel back through the rabbit hole and stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On many of his trips to the past, Al has collected information about Lee Harvey Oswald that will help Jake change events. After taking several short “test” trips to the past to test the theory (a subplot that involves undoing a crime involving the family of someone Jake knows in the present), Jake agrees to go back in time to stop Oswald.

In the past, Jake Epperson becomes George Amberson. Because the rabbit hole always takes the person back to September 9, 1958, Jake/George must find a way to spend the intervening years before he can travel to Dallas and track Oswald. Those intervening years are what make up most of the book. After undoing some past events in Maine and spending some time in Florida, he eventually takes a job as a high-school English teacher in the small town of Jodie, Texas. He becomes involved with a woman named Sadie Dunhill, makes real friends, tracks Oswald when he can. It’s all too long to explain here. And in the end, he tries to do what he promised, all at some great cost, which he must then decide if he wants to undo by going back through the rabbit hole one last time.

Like I said, it’s all too long to explain here, which is to say: it’s too long. The relationship between George and Sadie takes up too much of the book, and in the long run Sadie herself is not all that interesting. Her story/subplot is rather melodramatic, but luckily King shifts back frequently to Jake/George’s task at hand, which is to stop Oswald, so it’s easy to read through the Sadie parts quickly (if you wish).

The only other thing that bothered me about the book was a bit of hokey heavy-handedness, and the repetition of certain phrases and ideas. “Life can turn on a dime”–that’s an old saw that gets lots of play. The other one is “Dancing is life.” If the narrative is doing its job, the author doesn’t need to spell out the message. And in this case, the story alone works well; the reader doesn’t need to be told or reminded. As for time travel, King handles it nicely, although again he gets a little heavy-handed with “harmonies” toward the end of the book, having Jake/George point things out instead of letting the reader uncover things. It wasn’t as mind-bending as I thought it would be, but I also liked the fact that the actual logistics never got in the way of the story. If you just go with it, it works well.

All in all, I enjoyed 11/22/63, and for it being such a long book, it was a quick read. I liked it a lot, but I didn’t love it. The story overall was engrossing, and if I were rating it on Goodreads or Library Thing, I’d give it a solid 3 stars.

I’ll start with 11/22/63: I’m about halfway through this big hunk of a book, which is 850 pages long.  (I’m reading it on my Kindle, so there’s no danger of sustaining injury should I fall asleep while reading in bed.) The last King novel I read was Misery, back in 1988! That summer I also read Skeleton Crew, and several years before either of those I read The Shining, which is still one of the scariest books, I think. I read it in one sitting and thought nothing of it until I awoke that night and could not get the sound of the empty elevator going up and down, up and down in The Overlook, carrying ghost revelers to their rooms.

This latest King book is not about horror. It’s about time travel. The main character has been asked to travel back through time and stop the Kennedy assassination. I’ll save the details for another post, but so far the story is carrying me along. I’m always wary of time-travel stories because there are so many obvious problems with it. To his credit, King handles some of these issues (such as how the “present” person’s appearance in the past changes events, etc.) well without actually trying to give a heavy explanation. He sort of lets it be a mess, which I like, because the main character, a high-school English teacher, doesn’t know how it all works either. He figures things out as he goes; some things he gets and others he realizes he might not ever understand.

King doesn’t write the most graceful prose, but he writes clearly. The main thing is that I keep hearing his voice narrating the story. This is probably because my copy of On Writing is an audio book (it is the only audio book I’ve ever listened to, actually, and the only one I own, as I tend to feel about audio books the way some people feel about e-readers) and is narrated by King. So poor Jake Epping/George Amberson might be a high-school English teacher from Wisconsin who’s in his mid-thirties, but in my head he’s a 65-year-old novelist from Maine. Oh well. He tells a pretty good story.

The book I decided to read for Long-Awaited Reads Month is Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man. I ordered it on clearance from Barnes and Noble back in 2007, if memory serves, but I never read it. I ordered it because I had enjoyed On Beauty, which I had read the previous year. All her recent success with NW made me decide to pick it up now.I’m only a few pages in, but so far it’s pretty good. I’m happy to be giving it a chance after six years!

Certainly for the next three months as I participate in the TBR Double Dog Dare, I need no temptation. That “challenge” does allow taking out books that were on hold before January 1. The problem is that if a book from my hold list comes up, being the slow reader that I am, I’m more likely to set aside something I am already reading so I can read the library book (especially if it’s a “new” book with a two-week checkout period and no re-check available). And it also means that when I’ve finished the library book, I am more likely to ignore the book I was reading before and pick up something else. I’m moody that way.

This year, I would like to be a bit more disciplined about reading from my own books, so I’ve decided that for at least the first half of the year, I will stay away from the library. I think many of you can sympathize: when I’m reading reviews, if something sounds intriguing, it’s just a bit too easy to open up the library site and see if they have the book, and if they have it, to put it on hold. By letting my card expire, I cannot add anything to my hold list should I get a whim. (The Atlanta/Fulton County library system does not allow users to acquire or renew library cards online. For once I am actually thankful for backasswards thinking, because I can’t decide to renew from the cozy comfort of home.)

Going forward, if I really want to read a book that isn’t in my library, I’ll have to buy it (after the TBR Double Dare is over, of course). Not for one second shall I pretend that I don’t buy books and not read them. However, holidays aside, I generally can talk myself out of spending money, even for books. I cannot talk myself out of books that are FREE! And that’s how I end up with a bunch of DNFs and a pile of my own neglected books.

I hear all the time about people giving up buying books or quitting the book swapping sites (I had to do that, too, years ago), but no so much the library. Have you ever been tempted to turn in your library card?

Diva used to lie across both our laps for equal-opportunity petting. At the very least, if she was mostly in one of our laps, she’d put a paw on the other person.

On Friday we (I) started the search. We (I) wanted a Snowshoe, which is a breed that mixes Siamese and American Tabby, and which is the breed Diva was. We (I) also wanted a girl. I was poking around on the Internet and looking at pet rescues when I found THE ONE. She was a seven-month-old Snowshoe who had been abandoned in a dumpster. I showed her picture to Bob, and we both agreed she was too cute to pass up, so I made the call. It was too late in the afternoon for us to go and see her Friday, so we made plans to meet her and pick her up on Saturday. I won’t kid you–I let my imagination run wild. I thought about where to put her dishes, where she would sleep, what it would be like to have her in our laps, all those things. On Saturday morning Bob woke up with a terrible cold, but he pushed through it and we rushed around the house taking down Christmas decorations and getting things ready. I spoke with the adoption counselor and told her our plans–we would go buy supplies (carrier, litter box, litter, toys) and come to the adoption center early in the afternoon.

I won’t keep you in suspense. When we got to the adoption center, we learned immediately that the kitty cat we’d come to claim had been adopted an hour earlier. We weren’t sure what to do. We had our hearts set on her, had already planned everything, had already let our hearts fill up at the thought of her, and then BOOM. No cat. The adoption counselor urged us to look at some of the other kitties for adoption. I halfheartedly petted a few of them and we left, our shiny new cat carrier empty in the backseat of the car.

When we pulled into our garage, my tears started. Any semblance of holiday festivity inside the house was gone, and we were walking in empty-handed. I cried because I miss Diva, I cried because we missed out on the kitty who seemed so perfect (and who no doubt was adopted by a bunch of monsters who could never be as good as us! Never!), I cried because we’d be spending one more night in front of the TV with no kitty curled up in our laps.

I know. Boo hoo. First-world problems. Not the end of the world. I could hear every nasty voice in my head, including the snotty co-worker and several “friends” who think it’s funny (and pathetic) that we had a cat and no children. But we very consciously chose not to have kids, and our pet was not a substitute. After my tears had dried, I realized that it didn’t matter. The kitty we wanted got a home (probably even a good one), and there are still a lot of other kitties back at the center, one who might be ours, who need someone to love them. Diva cannot be replaced, and even though I told myself that wasn’t what I was trying to do, it absolutely was. I wanted something close that might bring her back, but nothing will.

Last night I lay awake for a long time thinking about those kitties we left behind. “I’d have taken any of them,” Bob had told me. “I don’t know how you can pick one.” In response to that, I’d said something about personality, about bonding, but as I heard myself talking I realized, I honestly have no idea. We just pick one. Our kitty doesn’t have to be a Snowshoe. Our kitty doesn’t have to be a girl. But it will be ours.

As promised, in New Year, New Books (Part 1), I am sharing the “real” books I bought for Christmas. Even with the funky flash action I think you can kinda see all the titles. I am not ashamed to admit that Downton Abbey is completely responsible for my renewed interest in World War I, so I bought The Guns of August and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara Tuchman, as well as Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. The Guns of August won a Pulitzer, so it must be brilliant. I expect good things.

Sort of by accident I ended up with two Civil War era reads. I have had Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln on my wishlist since President Obama was elected the first time around. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by David Goldfield was a very recent addition to my wishlist after I heard Nancy Pearl talk about it on NPR back in November 2012. (For the record, she also talked about Liz Moore’s Heft, which I also purchased.) Here in the South, the Civil War never dies, and after many states started petitions to secede after President Obama’s recent election (and to be fair, not just states here in the South), I was curious to read about this concept of “nation” at a time when people seem more divided than ever.

I guess you can see that lately I am going through some kind of history craze (oh lord don’t let it leave me now that I spent all my Christmas money). I bought Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created after hearing this interview on NPR’s Fresh Air.  Trust me: he’s so engaging, if you listen to the interview, you’ll want to buy the books, too!

Of course, I had to buy some more fiction (although who knows when I’ll get to it, with all those other huge tomes and the fact that I read about 30 words a day). Because I feel like practically the only person who has not read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I decided it was high time I got around to it. I know I added The Report by Jessica Francis Kane to my wishlist back in 2010 not long after I read Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch because I was interested in reading more novels about World War II. The two Charles Portis novels, Norwood and The Dog of the South I bought because I love True Grit so much, I am determined to read all his books. I bought only one short story collection, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been on my list since it was published in 2009. And then, finally, I bought Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, because I’ll never stop dreaming…although with all this reading to do, who has time to write?

*Just a little note: All these links are from Amazon, but I am in no way affiliated with them and I do not make any money should you choose to purchase one of these books because you know how cool I am and you probably want to read all the same books I read. I feel so much better for having said that.