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The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides

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Three students graduate Brown University and find themselves confronted with post-graduate life in the 1980s. Unbeknown to them, the author has trapped the three are trapped in a traditional marriage plot. Madeline, with no plans of her own, follows her manic depressive boyfriend Leonard to his research fellowship in Cape Cod. Mitchell, who is convinced Madeline is his future wife, travels to Europe and India to make sense of his budding spirituality. 

The only thing I hated reading more than this book was positive reviews for it. (Sorry, Laura!)

I found this book to be impossible, for its insistence that it was a traditional marriage plot told in present time. You can't adore the marriage plot unless you are endeared to the characters wrested in it and the point in time in which is being told. I've read Pride and Prejudice a dozen times and watched and rewatched so many tellings of it. The characters, and their situations in society, are compelling. They move you because they are simply not you. Their confinements of the time are understandable, they make you swoon for a time when there were rules and codes of conduct and letters written and courtship. But they do not belong to you and you would not enjoy them if they happened to you. It's the code we who read them agree upon. 

These three? Sigh. They disappoint you. Madeline's quite frankly the Most Annoying Girl of All Time -- seriously, in the EIGHTIES you just follow your man to school with no pretense of building a life or career for yourself and when that doesn't work out you (spoiler, spoiler, spoiler). Sigh. Women for generations prior to you worked harder for you to achieve much more than that and Eugenides you know better. 

Her suitors -- Mitchell, with his Franny-esque tics, and Bankhead, with his mania -- were no better. 

Read mostly in the waiting room, which made the reading just that much more painful. I can't remember the last time I was so glad to have finished a book. 
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One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding | Rebecca Mead

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A staff reporter for The New Yorker examines the economics and business behind the modern wedding.

Weddings are expensive, but why? This is a question that my fiancée and I have asked each other time and time again throughout the process. All we want to do is get married, we'll say, in between my sniffles as the pressure of trying to find something in our means reduces me to tears. 

(To be fair, our planning just one component in a Perfect Storm of Crazy that is happening right now, and the tears are really a release from all the pressure and uncertainty and fears that stem from Trying To Handle All The Things At Once. And also maybe a little because that caterer screwed us big time.)

But the expense of weddings, that is what Mead is out to examine. I read this book with a sinking pit in my stomach the whole time. I hate being marketed to, but I did do and will continue to do a lot of what Mead discussed. I don't buy in the Disney myth and dont't drop cash like some of these gals, but damn it, I will register for kitchen goods. Mead's tone is never judgemental, but the judgement is there in between the lines none the less. This is where your dress comes from. This is what those editors of those magazines think of you, how they talk about you behind your back. 

I thought the book's copyright date was fairly current, but as I went through it, I found some components to be outdated. Yes, David's Bridal and Sandals and Martha Stewart, all the ilk are still popular. But there was very little examination of how the budget bride is now being marketed to via the Internet - being told to DIY and purchase on Craigslist and eBay and Etsy - through blogs and boards and tweets. And the fight for same-sex marriage is rendered a few (powerful) paragraphs at the end of the book, when the content therein and it's relationship to other themes deserved a better look. 

So why do we buy dresses made in another country, with hand-sewn beads by laborers who cannot afford the goods they make? And why do we buy those magazines, hire those videographers, agree that photographers an investment worth making? Why are we busting our humps to make one perfect day?

Mead says it's the marketing, the assessment that brides are the best consumers and without the free will to remove themselves from the clutches of devious businesses. Based on her own wedding, discussed in the epilogue, it seems like the only true way to not conform to the notion that you are a unique, individual couple who deserves a unique, individual experience myth is to stop playing the game. 

But in my heart of hearts I don't believe this. We are planning our wedding in the wake of Something Possibly Very Bad happening to a member of my family. When that happens, everything you think you know sort of gets shook around. It is a strange time to try and plan something so extravagant, you feel a little crazy for considering this. 

But I will be forever glad that my mother was beside me when I had my "Oh, Mommy" moment. I know she needed that as much as I did. Some girls really want that and can't have it.  And I will hire a (reasonably priced) videographer and a photographer to capture this day, because I will want to remember it and share it and revisit it. Why? 

Because we are so lucky. We are so fortunate to have found each other and have this right to wed. Because we are so lucky our family and friends are with us to. I want to stand in the library before the people I love most and make a promise to the person I chose to share my life with. And I want us to eat a (reasonably priced) meal and have a drink and dance to hours of Pitbull songs. 

And it's not because I was sold that dream. It's because we all deserve one day where everything is great, where you have all the people you love most together to celebrate something joyful. That is worth the cost to me.
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I'm Not the New Me | Wendy McClure

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First wave blogger Wendy McClure discusses her weight loss journey (and the larger heavy issues that arose along the way).

I really enjoyed McClure's voice in The Wilder Life and was excited to see my library system has this memoir. It was just serendipity that led me to start reading it the same week I started Weight Watchers. The reasons that led us to start the program were very different, but I really appreciated her views and the discussions of the environment she grew up in.

I liked reading about her participation in the first wave of blogs, where having a website was somewhere in the same grey field as playing online text based games. As if I didn't enjoy her enough already!

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The Fault in Our Stars

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Hazel didn't think she'd find anything at Cancer Care Support Group. Not a rationale for why she is still alive after having received a terminal diagnosis, not the normal teenage life her parents want her to have. And certainly not Augustus Waters. 

I love this book. I didn't want to, at first, once I realized it was about cancer and Augustus wasn't going to ever smoke that cigarette dangling from his lip. But this is John Green. You suspend your disbelief, imagine teens really are that articulate and let yourself fall for it. 

I love the recurrences of water and stars throughout the story, the importance of champagne, the discussions of why we bother to love at all if all if each of us will one day cease personhood. I love Augustus and pages 153 and 208 most of all. 

My favorite quotes:

I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. 

We made the story funny. You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice. 

That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it -- or my observation of it -- is temporary?

Finished while having my third nosebleed this week (damn you, dry heat!) - man, is it hard to cry when your nose is bleeding. 
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I Married You for Happiness | Lily Tuck

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After her husband passes away suddenly, Nina spends the night recounting their marriage.

Fiancée, I promise you that, if I should ever find you unconscious in bed I will - unlike Nina - call the paramedics instead of a doctor neighbor. Really? That mere fact alone put me in a sour mood for the rest of this thin novel. The story and characters were really bougy. I hate tales of martial infidelity like this, with French dialogue and exotic locations and people who use the word sensual to describe artwork.

But I did enjoy the postcard style of storytelling, wherein the reader must keep track of the timeline the way people actually do, in circles and snippets connected in seemingly unconnected ways instead of linear storytelling. We saw Tinker, Tailor, Soilder, Spy over the weekend and the way that this sort of narrative is used was just divine in both tales.

Read in large chunks late at night under blankets and while stuck at train signal stops.

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And So It Goes | Charles J. Shields

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The first comprehensive biography of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut is one of those authors who I hold in such high esteem that I was terrified of what I might learn in this book. Seuss and Schultz were ruined for me in their biographies, but Shields does a fine job of telling the facts without vilifying or drawing too much attention to martial indiscretions. I like the flow, and interspersing of book summary and typical biography fare for the reader to see the large disconnect between what Vonnegut wrote and what he lived.

That disconnect was the biggest surprise to me, as I consider God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to be the very marrow of my bones. Similarly, I fell into a research wormhole upon learning Vonnegut's brother died on a Newark-Bayonne railway that I never knew existed. Also, I never made the connection between Kurt's Jill and the Jill who shot A Very Young Dancer, a book that has haunted my entire librarian career.

Although I have less of a personal connection, I'd really like to read Shield's biography of Harper Lee now that I've finished this one. I lugged it around for weeks, forever letting my new iPad eclipse it. Vonnegut would have been horrified, but so it goes.  

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The Knot Ultimate Wedding Book| Carley Roney

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A collectional of wedding inspiration and advice from the editors of The Knot.

This book came accidentally via ILL when I requested The Knot's Book of Lists. Our wedding planning is well under way and luckily our venue won't need much decoration for, as luck would have it, it's a library! The rest writes itself.

But the logistics are proving to be far harder to wrangle than we imagined and alas this book didn't provide what we needed. Some of the advice, such as information on invitations, was helpful but really it was mostly eye candy that was old hat from their website, Pinterest and the legions of wedding blogs I read on a daily basis.

I would suggest it for those working with a blank canvas or looking to replicate another wedding aesthetic.

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Tadpole's Promise | Jeanne Willis

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A tadpole and a caterpillar meet and fall in loved. But will their star-crossed romance continue to blossom once biological changes take their course?

One of the librarians I work with mentioned this weeks ago, but we didn't have a copy. When our inter library loaned copy arrived, we took a break from making bags for the preschoolers to read it. We kept the twist to ourselves and passed it on to the next unsuspecting person, until the whole office had read it. There was a pretty even split in terms of how it was received and I fell on the side who loved the dark humor. I love picture books that are as much for, if not more for, the adults in an early reader's life.

The Count - our little division's unofficial mascot - had little to contribute to our discussions.


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2011, in books

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top 10

01. a storm of swords - george r. r. martin 
02. bossypants - tina fey
03. the scorpio races - maggie stiefvater
04. you think that's bad - jim shepard 
05. is everyone hanging out without me - mindy kaling
06. daughter of smoke and bone - laini taylor 
07. swamplandia - karen russell
08. anna and the french kiss - stephanie perkins
09. the wilder life - wendy mcclure
10. the apothecary - mallie meloy 

total started: 101
total actually read: 96
# of adult books (including graphic novels): 55
# of ya books (including graphic novels): 35
# of children’s (including picture books): 2
month most books finished: january (12)
month least books finished: may (5)

january
total: 12
highlights: started the year with dash and lily's book of dares. hilarious in hindsight, as this wound up being the first year in a long time that i read more adult than YA titles. had a streak of snow slash reading days.

february 
total: 10
highlights: oh the thrill of getting an e-ARC of the last little blue envelope. a good chain of reads mostly borrowed from the public library across the street frm the upper elementary school i worked at then.

march 
total: 8
highlights: had serious reader's ennui until my hold on swamplandia came in. quit three books in rapid succession before that (sorry, you killed wesley payne, but you were killing me)!

april 
total: 7
highlights: trying to sneak in chapters while reading anna and the french kiss while in california for spring break.

may 
total: 5
highlights: reading please ignore vera dietz while on the dock of a montauk shore house.

june 
total: 9
highlights: reading through a string of BEA finds. also, that day i read the scorpio races while all of my classes watched a movie.

july 
total: 10
highlights: served as a panelist for nerds heart YA. had my heart break on the newark light rail when i read the pivotal moment in why we broke up right as my stop arrived.

august
total: 8
highlights: reading y the last man alongside my boyfriend, until i lapped him, on a rainy sunday. that OMG moment where you realize that all bets are off in the game of thrones. quitting warm bodies after witnessing the wrath of hurricane irene in the catskills.

september
total: 6
highlights:  reading a clash of kings mere moments before being proposed to at governor's island.

october
total: 8
highlights: ripping through lauren oliver's pandomenium in one sick day. the glee i felt when we found the name of the star just sitting on a shelf at my fiancée's library.

november
total: 7
highlights: staying up late to read the storm of swords, not knowing i would reach the red wedding.

december
total: 6
highlights: not making a solid effort to finish the kurt vonnegut bio in 2011 once i bought my iPad!

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Everybody Sees the Ants | A.S. King

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Lucky Linderman doesn't really fit his namesake. He doesn't want to be on Nadar McMillian's radar either, but that's as hopeless as the rest of his situation. He's being raised by a turtle and a squid, parents ill-equipped to handle their own problems, let alone those of their son. He lives in the shadow of his POW grandfather, who his grandmother insisted he rescue before she drew her last breath. If he can't save him, how will he ever save himself? 

A.S. King is quickly becoming one of my favorite voices in YA right now and I love each of her main characters with a ferocity that is hard to put into words. Lucky was hard to warm to at first, but once you do (and you will), your heart just explodes for him on ever page. 

(Particularly page 205, which are so well done I wanted to throw the book on the ground, stand up and applaud.) 

If you work with teens, know a teen, see a teen on the street, please direct them to this immediately. Move it to the front of all the YA sections you pass, in bookstores or train stations or libraries. Maybe take it home and read it first, but definitely make sure that it finds the hands of someone who sees the ants. 

Favorite quotes:

She's like a kindness ninja. Sneaking around in order to help people.

 I get the urge to feel it, too, so when she takes her hand away, I turn her toward me and I feel the edges of New Jersey. I kiss Hoboken and Atlantic City. I kiss Newark and Trenton. I kiss Camden, and then I follow the road west, over the Walt Whitman Bridge into Pennsylvania. And I kiss home.
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