“In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.” This is how Jodi Picoult starts Nineteen Minutes, by listing all of [...]
Archive > August 2009
One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Candace Bushnell’s newest book, One Fifth Avenue. Everyone knows her best for the Sex and the City series and while I never read it or watched it on television, I enjoyed the recent movie more then I would care to admit. With that in mind I tried to [...]
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Inheritance of Loss was a Booker Prize winner in 2006 so it had been on my list for awhile to read. Once I started it, I read it quickly, and emerged at the end feeling mostly saddened by the hopelessness that infused some of the story lines. This book takes place in the mid [...]
The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson
The Devil In the White City chronicles one of the first serial killers, H.H. Holmes, in Chicago during the World’s Fair in 1893. This book is full of information. It provides a lot of context for the financial and social norms during this time in Chicago and how Chicago came to have the “White City”, [...]
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
This memoir by Jeannette Walls leads the reader through her dysfunctional family as a child to an adult, with the mixed feelings that go along with that journey. Again, the first sentence of this book caught my attention and kept me reading. “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the [...]
The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman
This was a book that took me a little bit by surprise. It mixes the believable and unbelievable together in a way that really worked for me. The Ice Queen is about a woman who has a pattern of making wishes that come true. The first sentence of the book drew me in reading, “Be [...]
Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
I was looking through my bookshelves and thought about how many of the books I read are about women. One that stood out to me was Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen. It was part of Oprah’s Book Club in1998. It is the story of a woman named Fran Benedetto who married her husband Bobby [...]
Under The Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
I had previously enjoyed Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, so when I saw Under the Banner of Heaven at the used book store I couldn’t help myself. This is the story of the murders of Brenda Lafferty and her baby, Erica that took place on July 24, 1984. The perpetrators of this murder were [...]
Baby Proof by Emily Giffin
This story brings together many of the different issues faced when trying to decide whether or not to start a family. Claudia Parr is the main character and she has known her whole life that she does not want to be a mother…and she had pretty much given up on finding a man who did [...]
A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
John Irving was one of my favorite authors several years ago. My favorite of his books is A Prayer for Owen Meany. John Wheelwright is the narrator of his childhood in New Hampshire. He is writing as an adult living in Canada and the chapters related to his childhood are interspersed with thoughts from the [...]
