If you could only see the happy dance I’m doing right now! I am WAY too excited over my brand new library card!
This all started many years ago, when I registered to vote in East Baton Rouge Parish. My voting spot is just down the road from my apartment, at a library. The only thing is, the voting area wasn’t around any books — or other evidence that it was in fact, a library.
A few people in my office later started telling me about the wonders of the library; the digital collection, DVDs, and of course, endless piles of books! I officially put it on my to-do list to get a library card.
Although it took me awhile to get around to it, I picked a rainy day after work when my muscles were too sore to get to the gym. I had my ID in tow, along with a list of books I was looking for.
It took all of two minutes to obtain said library card, and I was free to roam the stacks. There were so many books on my list that I saw on the shelves, but checkout time is three weeks, so I didn’t want to go overboard.
I ended up with two books that I’m really excited to read:
The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer: “The latest from Wolitzer (The Ten Year Nap) is a plodding story with a killer hook: will the women of Stellar Plains, N.J., ever have sex again? After new high school drama teacher Fran Heller begins rehearsals for Lysistrata (in which the women of Greece refuse to have sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War), every girl and woman in the community is overcome by a “spell” that causes them to lose all desire for sex. No one is immune, not Dory Lang and her husband, Robby, the most popular English teachers at Eleanor Roosevelt High School; not Leanne Bannerjee, the beautiful school psychologist; or the overweight college counselor Bev Cutler, shackled to a callous hedge-fund manager husband.
The Langs’ teenaged daughter, Willa, who eventually lands the lead in the play, is also afflicted, wreaking havoc on her relationship with Fran’s son, Eli. Despite the great premise and Wolitzer’s confident prose, the story never really picks up any momentum, and the questions posed—about parenthood, sacrifice, expectations, and the viability of long-term relationships in the age of Twitter—are intriguing but lack wallop.”
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan: “For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. Their beachfront property, won on a barroom bet after the war, sits on three acres of sand and pine nestled between stretches of rocky coast, with one tree bearing the initials “A.H.” At the cottage, built by Kelleher hands, cocktail hour follows morning mass, nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and decades-old grudges simmer beneath the surface.
As three generations of Kelleher women descend on the property one summer, each brings her own hopes and fears. Maggie is thirty-two and pregnant, waiting for the perfect moment to tell her imperfect boyfriend the news; Ann Marie, a Kelleher by marriage, is channeling her domestic frustration into a dollhouse obsession and an ill-advised crush; Kathleen, the black sheep, never wanted to set foot in the cottage again; and Alice, the matriarch at the center of it all, would trade every floorboard for a chance to undo the events of one night, long ago.
By turns wickedly funny and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back, every summer, to Maine and to each other”
As usual, I’ll keep you posted on how they are. As far as other summer reads, I’ve also loaded up my iPad with Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska by John Green, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. What are you reading this summer?
The Bitter Lemon 