Skip it if you wanna.
1. Growing up Stubborn at Gold Creek by Melody Erickson - Memoir about growing up in Alaska in the sixties. Good.
2. Where am I Now? by Mara Wilson - Essays from a former child actress - Meh - did not finish.
3. Perfect Peace by Daniel Black - Novel - Interesting premise - Boy child raised as a girl by delusional mother - but not very well written - I gave up about thirty pages in.
4. Trials of the Earth by Mary Mann Hamilton - Innumerable memoirs have been written about settling the American West, but this memoir was about settling the South in the 1800s. Very interesting, if hard to read at times for the heartaches that beset Ms. Hamilton and also the vernacular language, which included ample descriptive use of the word "nigger", but I understand that that is the word that was used back then. Still a good read.
5. The Whole Town's Talking by Fannie Flagg - Novel about the inhabitants of a small Missouri town, from the 1800s up through present day. I normally love Ms. Flagg's novels, but this one had so much ground to cover that it was more a series of short vignettes than a comprehensive novel. Each time I'd get interested in a character, the story would switch to someone else, and in the end I didn't finish it. I still like Ms. Flagg's books as a whole; I just didn't care for this one.
6. Little Heathens by Mildred Kalish - Memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm in the 1930s - This book is really interesting, because it goes into great detail about how people actually lived back then. Very good.
7. Dairy Queen Days by Robert Inman - Novel about a teenage boy in Alabama in the seventies. Booooring. It was well-written I guess, but there was not a single character I cared about. I got about two-thirds through, decided life is too short, and quit.
8. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katerina Bivald. Novel. Nope, too cutesy.
9. Moonlight at Midday by Sally Carrighar. Nonfiction about Alaska. Nope, too dry.
10. The Immigrants by Howard Fast - I read another Howard Fast book (Max) and really enjoyed it, but The Immigrants was basically Max all over again, just with different character names and a different setting. Did not finish.
11. I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows - Novel about a family in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Interesting.
So! That's what I've been reading lately. How about you?
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2 comments:
Well, now, if you had gotten farther into the Mara Wilson book, she might have revealed the fact that I knew the director of her Miracle on Whatever Street (34th?) when he was a teeny kid (Les Mayfield). He directed other stuff too.........Encino Man, etc. His mom's (Dorothy Ruth Gage) family lived two doors from me when I was nine in Stillwater, OK. They were lifelong friends. His grandpa, John Gage, owned THE western store (boots, jeans, etc.) downtown to accommodate the cowboy population at Oklahoma State University. I had a job there briefly at age 15 to refold and restack Levi's because Les' teenage aunts were too spoiled to do it.
You can still call me by my first name, even though I am making it clear that I KNOW people.............
haha whoa Ginny, I didn't know you were SOMEBODY. :)
And if I directed Encino Man, I think I'd keep it off my resume ...
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