Thursday Thoughts

Lots to think about today.  Let's see..........

1. My weather app says there's a 50% chance of rain today, with thunderstorms late tonight.  Today's high is predicted to be 101°F.
2. We are under two "Severe Weather Alerts":  Heat Advisory and Air Quality Alert.
3. Hot enough for ya?  High heat and rain tomorrow, too.
4. Oh, no!  Tomorrow, I'm supposed to go with Risé (my retired librarian friend who is the source of my Risé Recommends posts) to take boxes and boxes of books to trade for some new-to-us books for our Crown Center library.  Yikes!  Rain is not good for cardboard boxes or books!  Now what?
5. As I'm typing this, I'm also glancing out my window and seeing blue skies with fluffy white clouds.  Okay, some clouds are kind of smudgy gray, since we are also under that Air Quality Alert all day.
6. I need something positive to focus on.  How about this quote?  It's from page 33 of the book on JOY and ENTHUSIASM:  "Think and practice joy every day. ... Get enthusiasm, think enthusiasm, live enthusiastically!"
7. 
   So I should think positive thoughts, like something about my brand new apartment.  I can say positive things about my walk-in shower.  In my old apartment, my shower was over my tub, which required a nonslip bathmat with suction cups that could grip the slippery enamel.  Yay, fall risk lessened!
8. Let's end with a book Risé Recommends:

 

The Innocents ~ by Francesca Segal, 2012, fiction (London), 289 pages

Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London.  He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry.  To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community — a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates.  Marrying Rachel will cement Adam's role in a warm, inclusive family he loves.

But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel's younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he'd care to admit.  Ellie — beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent — offers a liberation that he hadn't known existed:  a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London.  Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.  What might he be missing by staying close to home?

Risé Recommends ~ another couple of books

The Scent of Rain and Lightning ~ by Nancy Pickard, 2010, murder mystery (Kansas), 337 pages

One beautiful summer afternoon, Jody Linder receives shocking news:  The man convicted of murdering her father is being released from prison and returning to the small town of Rose, Kansas.  It has been 23 years since that stormy night when her father was shot and killed and her mother disappeared, presumed dead.  Neither the protective embrace of Jody’s three uncles nor the safe haven of her grandparents' ranch could erase the pain caused by Billy Crosby on that catastrophic night.

Now Billy Crosby is free, thanks to the efforts of his son, Collin, a lawyer who has spent most of his life trying to prove his father’s innocence.  Despite their long history of carefully avoiding each other in such an insular community, Jody and Collin find that they share an exclusive sense of loss.  As Jody revisits old wounds, startling truths emerge about her family’s tragic past.  But even through struggle and hardship, she still dares to hope for a better future — and maybe even love.

Never Come Back ~ by David Bell, 2013, psychological mystery, 448 pages

Leslie Hampton always cared for her troubled son Ronnie’s special needs and assumed that her daughter Elizabeth would take him in when the time came.  When Leslie dies unexpectedly, Elizabeth is consumed by grief.  Then police discover that Leslie was strangled, and they immediately suspect that one of Ronnie’s outbursts took a tragic turn. Elizabeth can’t believe that her brother is capable of murder, but who else could have had a motive to kill their quiet, retired mother?

More questions arise when a stranger is named in Leslie’s will:  a woman also named Elizabeth.  As the family’s secrets begin to unravel, a man from Leslie’s past who claims to have all the answers shows up, but those answers may put Elizabeth and those she loves most in mortal danger.

Risé Recommends

It's been awhile since I shared books that my friend Risé recommends, so here are two more from her list.  I have not read either of them, so I'll see if my library has copies.

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz

hosts The Sunday Salon.

Another book that Risé recommends

The Little Paris Bookshop ~ by Nina George, 2015, fiction (France), 416 pages

Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart.  But can he fix his own?  Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary.  From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life.  Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls.

The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared.  She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.  Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself.  

This is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.

See these other books that my retired-librarian friend Risé has recommended (click on the titles):

• Everything I Never Told You ~ by Celeste Ng, 2014, fiction, 305 pages, 8/10
• The 13th Gift: A True Story of a Christmas Miracle ~ by Joanne Huist Smith, 2014, memoir, 224 pages
• Lost Laysen ~ by Margaret Mitchell, 1996, novella, 128 pages
• The Fifth Child ~ by Doris Lessing, 1988, fiction, 144 pages
• Plum Wine ~ by Angela Davis-Gardner, 2006, fiction, 352 pages

Risé Recommends

It's Saturday.  Let's look at another book recommended by my friend Risé, a retired librarian.  I've read this one, so the rating is mine.    I wrote about it HERE.

Everything I Never Told You ~ by Celeste Ng, 2014, fiction, 305 pages, 8/10

"Lydia is dead.  But they don’t know this yet."  So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio.  Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue.  But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.  A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing.  This is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

See these other books that my friend Risé has recommended (click on the titles):

• The 13th Gift: A True Story of a Christmas Miracle ~ by Joanne Huist Smith, 2014, memoir, 224 pages
• Lost Laysen ~ by Margaret Mitchell, 1996, novella, 128 pages
• The Fifth Child ~ by Doris Lessing, 1988, fiction, 144 pages
• Plum Wine ~ by Angela Davis-Gardner, 2006, fiction, 352 pages

Musical Saturday?

Is this treble clef sign vine telling us something?  Maybe it's nature's music.  The one on the right looks like a capital S written in cursive, but someone has reversed a clef sign.

Risé Recommends

The 13th Gift: A True Story of a Christmas Miracle ~ by Joanne Huist Smith, 2014, memoir, 224 pages

After the unexpected death of her husband, Joanne Huist Smith had no idea how she would keep herself together and be strong for her three children — especially with the holiday season approaching.  But 12 days before Christmas, presents begin appearing on her doorstep with notes from their "True Friends."  As the Smiths came together to solve the mystery of who the gifts were from, they began to thaw out from their grief and come together again as a family.  This true story about the power of random acts of kindness will warm the heart.  Here are the author's words at the end of the Foreword:

"Come.  Walk with me.  I will share with you the message that forever changed my family, the healing magic of the 13th Gift."

See also other books that my friend Risé has recommended (click on the titles):

• Lost Laysen ~ by Margaret Mitchell, 1996, novella, 128 pages
• The Fifth Child ~ by Doris Lessing, 1988, fiction, 144 pages
• Plum Wine ~ by Angela Davis-Gardner, 2006, fiction, 352 pages

Beginning ~ with Bill lighting his pipe

Beginning

Bill Duncan settled back in his chair and lit his pipe.  I said nothing but waited for him to speak for I knew that the usually taciturn Irishman was going to tell me something worth hearing.

Lost Laysen ~ by Margaret Mitchell, edited by Debra Freer, 1996, novella (South Pacific), 128 pages

Until recently, the world thought Margaret Mitchell had only one story to tell:  Gone With the Wind.  Now meet a heroine to match Scarlett:  Courtenay Ross, a feisty, independent-minded woman, and the two men — one a cool-headed, well-heeled gentleman, the other a hot-blooded, pugnacious sailor — who adore her.

Equally intriguing is the story behind the story — the real-life romance that inspired Mitchell:  how she gave the original manuscript as a gift to her beau, Henry Love Angel, and how the manuscript, along with Mitchell's intimate letters and treasured photographs, were lovingly safeguarded only to be discovered decades later in a shoebox.

I can add that this is one of the books that Risé recommended to me.  So I got it from the Crown Center Library and am about to read this short book.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts

Book Beginnings on Fridays.

It's Waffle Wednesday again

I plan to be in the Circle@Crown Café this morning

because it's Waffle Wednesday again.  Wanna join me?

Risé Recommends ~ While we're in the Café, wander on over to the Crown Center library to see books that our retired librarian Risé has recommended to me.  I mentioned one recently HERE, and below is another she says is good:

The Fifth Child ~ by Doris Lessing, 1988, fiction, 144 pages

Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story — centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human — probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.  Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England.

While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside — until the birth of their fifth baby.  Goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him.

As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him.  Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world.

A book recommended by Risé

Did you remember to change your clocks?  Or are you already running late?

Risé Recommends ~ I'm beginning a new series of books recommended by my friend Risé, a retired librarian.  This is a book in the Crown Center's library that she recently recommended to me:

Plum Wine ~ by Angela Davis-Gardner, 2006, fiction, 352 pages

Bottles of homemade plum wine link two worlds, two eras, and two lives through the eyes of Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching at a Tokyo university.  When her surrogate mother, Michi, dies, Barbara inherits an extraordinary gift:  a tansu chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine wrapped in sheets of rice paper covered in elegant calligraphy — one bottle for each of the last twenty years of Michi’s life.  Why did Michi leave her memoirs to Barbara, who cannot read Japanese?

Seeking a translator, Barbara turns to an enigmatic pottery artist named Seiji, who will offer her a companionship as tender as it is forbidden.  But as the two lovers unravel the mysteries of Michi’s life, a story that draws them through the aftermath of World War II and the hidden world of the hibakusha — Hiroshima survivors — Barbara begins to suspect that Seiji may be hiding the truth about Michi’s past — and a heartbreaking secret of his own.

I have questions:

• What is a Tansu chest?  Tansu are traditional portable storage chests from Japan.  In Japanese traditional houses, there were no fixed chairs, tables, or pieces of furniture in the living space.  Tansu were intended as mobile cabinetry and used to store objects of daily use, clothes, and personal items.
• What are hibakusha?  Atomic Bomb survivors are referred to in Japanese as hibakusha, which translates literally as "bomb-affected-people."

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz

hosts The Sunday Salon.