These is My Words

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"These is My Words" is a historical novel of a girl growing into woman, as a settler in the Arizona Territories. I loved imagining life in my Arizona way back then. And definitely loved the love story of the book. The book is not all roses, however, showing many or the real and heart-breaking struggles of the people of those days.

Some of my favorite quotes:

Sarah referring to her mother said, "She says a move is a time for lightening your load and starting things new." (3) That one just stood out to help motivate me to declutter for our upcoming move!

"Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing I think." (248) Sounded good to me, though most of the ladies at book club added, "or having children!"

"Children are a burden to a mother, but not the way a heavy box is to a mule. Our children weigh hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank, and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it." (303) This quote just went along nicely with a train of thought I've been having lately about children being both a blessing and a burden. I was so sad for Sarah, when she talked of her baby girl just crying nonstop, for years.

"It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There's no starting over nor undoing the steps I've taken." (309) Sometimes it's hard to look back and wonder what might have turned out differently with different choices, though that type of thinking leads right into the last quote I marked.

"Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says." (327) And that is a good enough lesson for all of us.

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My Side of the Mountain

My Side of the Mountain/On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just finished reading aloud with Owen. I remember reading it in 5th or 6th grade by myself and loving it. This is a great story about self-reliance, and learning to live off the land. As a child I was fascinated and dreamed of going away to live in my own secret place, eating plants and making my own nature home. I definitely enjoyed reading this book again with Owen, and he enjoyed it as well.

At one point while reading we were looking on the store shelves for a car-washing chamois (shammy) called for in Owen's Wizard Craft book for making a coin pouch. (He's simultaneously been reading Harry Potter.) The chamois at the store was much larger than we needed and therefore more expensive, and so I went to explain to Owen what we might try instead. I said, "What the instructions want is some fabric that looks like leather, so do you know what we could do instead?"

"Kill a deer?!" He said.

So I about died. "Yes, kill a deer." How can I argue with that? If what he learned from this story is that when he needs some leather he can go kill a deer then I am a happy person. Good bye "Made in China", Hello self-reliance!

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Atlas Shrugged

How to even begin a review of a book that is over 1100 pages long?!

This book book follows a young female railroad tycoon, Dagny, as she operates the nation's largest railroad.  She and some of the other main characters who work in industry are seen as greedy and selfish when what they are really trying to do is follow their passions, see their job done "right", and in many cases work in  innovative new ways to improve their industry and the world around them

The story shows her struggles trying to succeed in a country where the social/political atmosphere seeks to shame and work against her and others like her simply because of their success.  The politicians and public think the industrialists should show more concern for "the people", stressing things like equal share and equal opportunity, even though the services they provide are, themselves, providing for the good of the people.

As politicians, and less-motivated industrialists, pass regulations to "even the playing field" a little, for fairness, and "most importantly" to help the good of "the people"--discouraged businesspeople begin simply vanishing--closing up shop and leaving without a trace.

Dagny begins to feel that there is an actual destroyer working against her efforts to succeed--someone coming along collecting the last of the competent and intelligent people left in the country, leaving her with a greater and greater burden to carry on her own to keep the ever-more fragile country running, and eventually posing her with the question of whether or not she is fighting on the right side of the conflict.

This book was fascinating.  It showed how quickly our country can be changed for the worse, by constantly operating in the present and in reactionary attitudes, and most-importantly by punishing those who can help things change for the better.  It was actually a book that I felt pretty "somber" while reading.  There is just so much that goes on that was so frustrating, and discouraging (particularly the things that rang true to the state of our nation right now).

This book had a sub-theme of sexuality that ran through it (written in the 50's, it was pretty mild there were, I think, two paragraphs where I skipped to the end).  But the theme of sexuality was important in the way it was a metaphor for the contradictions existing in the general values and morality of the society as a whole.  This was demonstrated  through their different relationships which served to give a concrete example of the product of their values. This string of quotes between two characters helps describe this view of sexuality. 

"We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies. . . You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one's body, but the expression of one's mind's deepest values. . . I love you, my dearest, with the deepest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind.(pp 859-860)"

This discussion was of a "good" relationship, but these same ideas were shown through a few "bad" relationships as well--that the physical was a manifestation of the person's truest inner values. 

I'm coming to believe that I really appreciate a cognitive discussion on healthy sexuality simply to counteract all the immorality that we are exposed to so frequently.  So I really appreciated the quote of sexuality being "the deepest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind".  I really believe that to be true, and what a different view than the worldly idea of sexuality being involuntary physical lusts!

In the end I'll put this book on my "to read again" at some point list.  I enjoyed it and would love to pull out some more quotes from it--the philosophy is fascinating--but that task just seemed a little too daunting the first read through.  

Understood Betsy

Understood Betsy is a children's novel written in 1916, but I had never heard about it before.  I learned about it in home education circles, and read it aloud with Owen. I'd say that it's of equal or higher caliber than the beloved Little House in the Big Woods. 

In the story, young orphan Elizabeth Ann lives with her aunt and her aunts mother.  Her aunt takes care of her every need and shelters her from anything unpleasant, and prides herself in truly "understanding" the needs of Elizabeth Ann in a way she was never understood as a child.  When her aunts mother gets ill and needs to move somewhere where she can get well again, her aunt sends her to go live with the Putney cousins, whom Elizabeth Ann had always overheard are undesirable people--who don't understand children at all and make them to do horrible things called chores.

With the Putneys, Elizabeth Anne, becomes known as Betsy, and is exposed to a manner of living she's never seen before.  However, as "terrifying" responsibilities (like walking herself to school) are placed on her shoulders, she comes to realize that she is equal to the task, and capable of far more than she ever knew. 

This story contains quite a lot of the explanations of interesting daily tasks that are so fascinating to us these days, like in the Little House books, but there is so much more depth to this story.  I was amazed by the moral lessons that were woven throughout, and I struggled wile reading aloud to choke back tears through a few parts.  I had never heard of this book before, but I'm glad I found such a true classic while my boys are still young so I'll have the chance to share it with all of them. 

Made from Scratch

    I recently re-picked this book up from my library (I picked it up once before but had to return it before I finished).  The book Made from Scratch by Jenna Wogenrich is subtitled "Discovering the pleasures of a handmade life."  This isn't an intense DIY kind of book--if that isn't really your thing.  This book is more of a memoir of a young woman who decides to rent a farm to live on when she moves to Idaho for her IT job rather than renting an apartment. This book chronicles her experiences and the pleasures she finds in doing so.
  
    The book is not chronological but based on subject.  On chapter will be about keeping chickens, one will be on beekeeping, one on gardening, one on mountain music.  Each chapter begins with the author talking about her personal introduction to that aspect of homemade living, and her experiences with it.  She had some great successes and epic failures and shares them all alike.  She makes some good friends as well, learning how much handmade living involves community.  The second half of each chapter is a toe-dip of beginner's information to get started in that venture yourself.  As a long-time homemaker and city homesteader most of the "instructional information" was below my own level of expertise.  This was fine because I could easily skip to the beginning of the next chapter and bypass the how-to section. 

    The one chapter that totally captured my attention (I even read the how-to part of the chapter) was her chapter on work-dogs.  At the beginning of the chapter she writes about taking her two sled dogs out on fresh snow, sledding--in the Yukon definition of the word- on her property.  I read with fascination the process of training dogs to carry packs and pull sleds.  And I have to say, that for the first time (to Jeremy's great joy) I could actually see us getting a dog once we had some property.  One of my big arguments has always been that they don't provide me anything--like wool or eggs.  But I would love having an animal that could help out with work like that.  You know. . . if we lived somewhere that had work to do.

This book was really fun to read since each chapter was on a different subject.  That made it easy to pick up and put down as well.  I would also say that because of the chapter layout (where the first half is her personal story and the second half is the how-to) that is is even good for people that aren't interested in the how to, but are interested in reading a clever retelling of the ups and downs of learning to live made from scratch. 

Domestic Mysteries

I've discovered a new genre of fiction, and I'm dubbing it, "Domestic Mysteries."  They are murder mysteries where the main character is of the highly domestic type.  I love them and that makes me such a nerd!

The first one I found just by chance on the shelf when looking for another book.  The main character has a home business selling homemade soaps. (Apparently this is the second in the series, and the first one was more about soap and called Lye in Wait).  In Heaven Preserve Us the mystery revolved around home canning.  Though it did talk about some of the characters' other domestic forays as well.  The main character is volunteering at a local helpline, and after getting a strange call from a suicidal man (that her boss calls a hoax, and hangs up on) she starts getting stalked around town, and her boss ends up dead.  I read this one earlier in the summer, and don't remember the story in as much detail, but I definitely remember it getting intense, and wondering how she'd ever make it out alive!

I picked up A Deadly Grind, from  my library's "New" shelf last week.  In this book the main character is collecting vintage Pyrex, and kitchen tools and adapting vintage recipes to write her own cookbook.  She picks up this vintage Hoosier cabinet at an antiques auction, and realizes she may have brought home more than she was bargaining for.  This book seemed to be kind of predictable at first, until I realized that all my predictions were wrong!  So I really enjoyed having that surprise. 

I haven't read mysteries for a while, so it was really fun to read a few, and yes, I thought it was really fun to read books about people with my same quirky hobbies!  And a great bonus is that both these books have recipes in the end. 

Divergent

I love a good futuristic dystopian novel.  They are a little bit in the pop culture right now, but it's always been my thing.  Fahrenheit 451 and the short stories of Isaac Asimov for example.  What I love about them is the exploration of society.  The question of what would life be like if these people were in power, or this mindset reigned supreme, or suddenly this aspect of culture or technology were to change. . .

In the book Divergent by Veronica Roth, the society has restructured after a great war into factions of people based on what they considered to be at fault for war and contention.  Thus their faction works to eliminate that weakness from among their ranks, developing instead the positive opposite character strength that they believe will help rebuild a better society.  These traits are selflessness, honesty, bravery, knowledge, and kindness.

Children are brought up in the faction of their parents, but when they turn 16 they take part in aptitude testing and then a choosing ceremony in which they can choose to remain in the faction of their parents or based on their aptitude results and preferences can choose to leave their faction and go through initiation to join another faction. 

The main character, Beatrice, grew up in the faction of Abnegation with her mother, her brother and her father, who--as a man valuing selflessness-- is a member of the government leadership.  Beatrice has never felt as effortlessly-selfless as her mother appears to be, yet her aptitude test results surprise her, and ultimately, so does her faction choice. 

As Beatrice learns more about herself, she also learns more about her society around her.  The factions are not all working together toward a common good, as she once believed, and she has a secret role to play in the unfolding events.  As she hones her strengths she comes to realize, with the help of a friend, that what she believed were her weaknesses may not make her so weak after all. 


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That was my Reading Rainbow style book review in which I end by telling you to go pick up this book in your local library today!  Of course it may be a little difficult right now because the second book Insurgent just came out two weeks ago.  Jeremy and I are reading them together.  There is enough action for him, but not too much of the other kind of "action" that guys don't like reading about.