1. As Cool as I Am by Pete Fromm - Novel about a girl struggling with adolescence and her mother's struggle with aging. Meh. Didn't finish.
2. Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig - Novel about a boy and an old man on a Greyhound bus trip in the 1950s. Good.
3. Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good by Kathleen Flinn - Described on the flyleaf as "a family history with recipes", this memoir of growing up in the fifties was very good.
4. Arctic Homestead by Norma Cobb and Charles W. Sasser - Memoir about a woman who homesteaded in Alaska with her husband and five young children in the seventies. I love, love, LOVE reading about people roughing it in Alaska, maybe because it is the last thing in the world I would ever want to do myself, and unlike a lot of people who embark on such an endeavor after years of planning, Ms. Cobb and her family, broke and underemployed in their lives before Alaska, basically half-assed the project and learned as they went. Very interesting.
5. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. An absorbing look at several families trying to get by on very little. Very interesting. America's a great place to live, unless you're really poor, and then it sucks worse than a lot of other countries with better social safety nets.
6. All We Had by Annie Weatherwax - Novel about a teen who gets moved around a lot by her shiftless mom. Okay, but not memorable.
7. The Final Frontiersman by James Campbell - Nonfiction account of Heimo Korth, who is raising a family in a mostly uninhabited area of Alaska. He was featured on the show "The Last Alaskans". As mentioned above, I LOVE books about people living in Alaska, and this one was very good.
8. Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses by Paula McLain - Memoir from a woman who grew up in the foster system with her sisters. Good.
So! That's what I've been reading lately. How about you?
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2 comments:
I'm still reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. It's hard going, especially when you know how it ends.
Waiting in the wings is Nicholas Nickleby, a YA novel about the Lenni Lenape tribe, and a book about Native Americans by Nathaniel Philbrick. And when I was a the dollar store the other day, I scooped up a bunch of books include Blue Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews. Looking forward to a lighthearted read.
I've got a PILE of books next to my chair in the living room that I haven't read yet. I'll pick one up, leaf through it, think, "nah, not right now", pick up another one, leaf through it ...
I keep telling myself that I should just plow through the damn pile, one book at a time, and be DONE with it, but I hate the idea of reading as punishment. ha.
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