#15
Title: The Shack
Author: William P. Young
Genre: Fiction
Challenges: 100+, Audiobook, Read and Review, Support Your Local Library, New Author, Support Your Local Library, Pages Read
Rating: B+
CDs/No. of Hours: 7/8.5
Published: 2008
Dates read: 2/16/09 - 2/26/09
Read by: Roger Mueller

From the back cover - “Mack Philips’ young daughter Missy was abducted during a family vacation. Though her body was never found, the place where the murder took place was discovered in an abandoned shack. Mack receives a letter that appears to be from God, asking for him to meet him at the shack for a weekend-long encounter.”

The sub-title, Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity, is appropriate. Mack, in his quest to come to terms with his daughter’s disappearance goes to the shack and encounters Papa, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Sonya. This story is both a mystery and a philosophical discussion about life, death, truth, and relationships.

#14
Title: Silent Battleground
Author: D. M. Ulmer
Pages: 250
Genre: War
Published: 2008
Challenges: Bang Bang
Rating: B
Dates read: 12/27/08 - 2/25/09

From the back cover - “A Cold War turns hot when most of the U.S. Navy coastal installations and the American surface fleet are all but destroyed by Soviet nuclear attacks. In the gripping naval-action thriller Silent Battleground, wartime operations on board the nuclear submarine USS Denver take an unexpected turn as weapons officer, Lieutenant Brent Maddock, faces numerous challenges to his combat tactics skills from both an elusive enemy and a vindictive, ambitious skipper.

While the complex war unfolds beneath the waves, Herculean efforts ashore restore a Washington west coast submarine facility to keep the war defense effort going as the President of the United States resists powerful political advocates for surrender.

Readers will find a delightful blend of elements comparable to novels On the Beach, Hunt for Red October, Incredible Victory and Thirteen Days.”

Captain Ulmer, a personal friend of my husband, is a 1954 graduate from the US Naval Academy and served a thirty-two year career in submarines and is the author of Count the Ways, Missing Person and The Roche Harbor Caper. He now lives in Redmond, WA with his wife Carol. I love his books and he knows submarines inside out. To help the lay person along, he’s provided a glossary of terms and maps to show the USS Denver Combat Patrol Route and the Operation Macedonia Overlay Map.

#13
Title: How to Be Alone
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Genre: Essays
Challenges: 100+, Audiobook, Read and Review, Support Your Local Library, Seconds, Support Your Local Library, Book Around the States
Rating: B-
CTs/No. of Hours: 6/9
Published: 2002
Dates read: 2/2/09 - 2/18/09
Read by: the author and Brian d’Arcy James

From the back cover - “Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written about novel of 2001. Now in How to be Alone, discover the personal narratives and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

“The Audiobook How to be Alone features Franzen’s reading of a moving narrative of his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease (which won a National Magazine Award and has been reprinted around the world).

“Although his essays range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each essay wrestles with essential themes of Franzen’s writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity, the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America.

Here in 14 essays, are 14 fresh answers to the question of how to be alone in a noisy and distracting mass culture. These essays show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.“

Franzen tells it like it is in each of these situations. The essay I liked least was his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s; one I liked pretty well was a discussion of the inept Chicago postal system a few years ago. That was pretty funny and pathetic. While Franzen does well with his craft, I’m not much of a fan.

#12
Title: The Fall of Troy
Author: Peter Ackroyd
Genre: Literature
Challenges: 100+, Audiobook, Read and Review, Support Your Local Library, London Olympics 2012, Seconds, support Your Local Library, Around the World in 80 Books
Rating: B
CTs/No. of Hours: 6/6 hours/50 min.
Published: 2007
Dates read: 2/6/09 - 2/15/09
Read by: Michael Maloney

From the back cover - “Sophia Chysanthis is only 16 when the German archaeologist Herr Obermann comes wooing: he wants a Greek bride who knows her Homer. Sophia passes his test, and soon she is helping to excavate the amphorae and bronze vessels at the battle site of Troy without damaging them. Obermann is very good at the art of archaeology -- perhaps too good at it. The atmosphere at Troy is tense and mysterious. Sophia finds herself increasingly baffled by the past … not only the remote past that Obermann is so keen to share with her in the form of his beloved epics of the Trojan wars, but also his own, recent past -- a past that he has chosen to hide from her. But she, too, is very good at the art of archaeology…”

This story takes you to ancient Troy in modern-day Turkey. Sophia takes the adventure in stride through each of the unexplained phenomena that occurs -- her swoon that lasts all night, the illness and death of a fellow archaeologist, the fate of another friend who runs a race with Sophia’s old, fat husband. Earthquakes, storms and fire illuminate the tale and bring it to an amazing end in the shadow of Mt. Ida.

#11
Title: When Wendy Grew Up, an Afterthought
Author: James M. Barrie
Pages: 32
Genre: Children
Published: 1908
Challenges: 100+, Book-a-Week, Read & Review, Support Your Local Library, Seconds, A-Z
Rating: B+
Dates read: 2/11/09 - 2/12/09

After I listened to Peter Pan last year and learned there was a sequel to the story I just had to have it. I found this shorty at the library. Basically, it’s a mini-bio about James M. Barrie followed by a short play that was tacked onto Peter Pan on February 22, 1908. It was only done once but was a huge success. As with the end of Peter Pan, I wept I suppose for my lost childhood and for the promise of generations to come who I hope will continue to read and love the boy fairy who captured the hearts of young girls and promised unending adventures for little boys.

Sidney Blow provides the foreword in which he refers to another book called Fifty Years of Peter Pan by Roger Lancelyn Green. Would love to get my hands on this, too, and get more of the life of this endearing author.

#10
Title: Directions to Servants
Author: Jonathan Swift
Pages: 78
Genre: Classic
Published: 1745
Challenges: 100+, Book-a-Week, Read & Review, Support Your Local Library, Seconds
Rating: B
Dates read: 2/9/09 - 2/1109

“When you have done a fault, be always pert and insolent, and behave yourself as if you were the injured person; this will immediately put your master or lady off their mettle.”

Such are the instructions to a host of servants in the 17th and 18th century British Isles of Jonathan Swift in this tongue-in-cheek Hesperus Press selection of little known stories by classical authors. In the foreward, Colm Toibin states “Swift was hilariously funny. He combined a great schoolboy feeling for jokes about toilets and matter of hygiene with the joy of slapstick and with the pleasure … of taking the joke too far …”

From the butler to the housekeeper, the cook to the footman, each sentence is a delight and a testimony from a man who spent years of service himself, “(I)n the household … where … his duties included reading aloud to his patron and keeping the household accounts.”

I loved this tiny volume and laughed because it reminded me of Bertie and Wooster in the Wodehouse books of Mr. Jeeves. And I love the idea that this publishing house has a list of books in the back (of which I made a copy) of lesser known works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe and other famous and infamous authors of the ages. Each book is about 100 pages and has a foreward by other well-known authors such as Doris Lessing, John Updike and Peter Ackroyd.

#9
Title: Saudade/Sorrow
Author: Claribel Alegria
Pages: 103
Genre: Poetry
Published: 1999
Challenges: 100+, Book-a-Week, A-Z, Read & Review, Support Your Local Library, Seconds, London Olympics 2012
Rating: A
Dates read: 2/3/09 - 2/8/09
Translated by: Carolyn Forche’

From the back cover, “In Sorrow, Claribel Alegria plumbs the depths of grief and wrests hope from pain and memory in lyrics written as love letters to her deceased husband. The poems not only summon their shared past in vivid detail, but also ponder the meaning of death and separation, and the yearning for eventual reunion. As Carolyn Forche’ says in the preface, ‘In these poems, she resists her longing to join her beloved while somehow also preserving this longing. She resists the eternal transcendent, praising the most fleeting and fugitive of human moments…. (Sorrow is) a record of the passage of the human soul through searing grief and separation.’”

I loved these poems written on one side in Spanish and the other in English. She calls on Prometheus, Orpheus, Icarus, Hermes and Artemis, and her own name, Alegria, which means happiness. The poems are short yet full of meaning and soothe the itch that sorrow brings in the grieving process. I’m seriously considering buying this book to give to friends as they experience the grief that death and separation bring.

#I
Title: Genesis
Authors: from the Bible
Genre: Religion
Challenges: 100+, Read & Review, Operation Actually Read the Bible
Rating: B+
Dates read: 1/1/09 - 1/21/09

I’m not sure how to treat the books of the Bible in this unusual perpetual challenge. What I can say is that this is the first book of the Old Testament and that I’m reading from The Daily Bible in chronological order 365 daily readings, New International Version (with devotional insights to guide you through God’s word). F. LaGard Smith provides the commentary that so seamlessly pulls the story together from book to book, chapter to chapter.

Genesis describes creation and runs to ca. 1400 B. C. It encompasses the beginning of the world, that God created the heavens and the earth, the sun, moon, waters, sky. He created man and woman and set them in the Garden of Eden. As Smith puts it, “both Adam and Eve share in the uniqueness of having received a divine inbreathing of God’s Spirit which sets them apart from all other living creatures.” This is a Christian Bible and foreshadows the coming of Christ from the beginning when Adam and Eve sin and fall short of perfection. We learn about their descendants to Noah, mankind’s degeneration into wickedness, the Flood, the call of Abram who will be called Abraham, the father of many including Isaac and Ishmael, Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau, Jacob’s 12 sons until the death of Joseph, Jacob’s youngest son.

#8
Title: Littlejim’s Gift
Author: Gloria Houston
Genre: Children’s
Challenges: 100+, Seconds, Book-a-Week, A-Z, Read & Review, Support Your Local Library
Rating: B+
Dates read: 2/2/09 - 2/3/09

From the inside flap, “’Christmas is just another day, like all the others. And that’s that,’ Littlejim’s father tells him.

“Littlejim knows times are hard, now that the country was at war with the Kaiser and all. But deep down he can’t help wishing that his family could go to the church Christmas tree celebration like the other families, just this once. He so wants his family to share the feeling of Christmas.

Littlejim saves his pennies for a toolbox, helps Mama with the chores, and runs errands with his sister Nell, all the time wishing, wishing. Finally, he sees that the best part of Christmas is the giving part. Now if only his papa could see that too.

Based on her own family stories and Appalachian holiday traditions, Gloria Houston’s story of a Christmas long ago is as satisfying as a warm gathering of the whole family. And Thomas Allen’s gentle paintings bring this heartwarming story its own special color and light.”

This is a sweet book and I can’t add another thing to make you want to share this with a child at Christmastime.

#7
Title: The Longest Trip Home
Author: John Grogan
Genre: Biography
Challenges: 100+, A-Z, Audiobook, Read and Review, Support Your Local Library, Book Around the States, Seconds
Rating: A+
CTs/No. of Hours: 9/11
Published: 2008
Dates read: 1/26/09 - 2/4/09
Read by: John Grogan

From the back cover - “Best-selling author John Grogan explores his childhood, including his relationship with a fiery blond named Jenny and getting in serious trouble. He also explains how he came to terms with who he is as an individual.”

I loved this prequel to Marley and Me. It mostly takes place in Detroit Michigan where John, the youngest of four kids grew up, Catholic of strict, yet loving parents. John was always in trouble with one thing and another throughout his growing up years. Nerdy and overweight, he and his buddies did drugs, harassed the old man of the neighborhood and lied to his parents. In an attempt to turn him around, his folks enrolled him in a parochial high school. After one year, he was back with his friends in public school. One teacher got him interested in writing and he excelled in journalism and went on to college, graduating with honors. He married Jenny and began a family. All the while mom and dad stood by him in the decisions he made although these were not their choices. Then his father and mother both became ill. Thus was the turning point in John’s life as to what the values really meant that they had taught him. I loved his straightforwardness, not pulling any punches in telling the truth about himself. This is one fine author and I look forward to breaking my rule about only two books by one author and reading many more by him. Thanks John!

#A
Title: The Tempest
Author: William Shakespeare
Genre: Play
Challenges: New Author, Read and Review, Shakespeare
Rating: A
Published: 1611
Dates read: 1/1/09 - 1/30/09
No. of Acts: V
Type of Play: Comedy

Illustrated with original designs by: T. M. Matterson

This is basically my first attempt at Shakespeare though I read Romeo and Juliet a few years ago but will not count it for purposes of this challenge. I’ve had trouble in the past answering the Jeopardy questions regarding Shakespeare so this was my motivating force to cut through the restraint. So here I am. Just last week one of the questions had to do with Patrick Stewart playing Prospero in which Shakespearean play and I was able to answer the question. I have googled the play and did get some background on it which I felt helped put the work in perspective. That particular bit of information had to do with Prospero having been shipwrecked himself some years earlier with his daughter Miranda.

In the play, Prospero directs Ariel and other spirits who attend him to perform acts to cause the ship to wreck and subsequently stir up the newly shipwrecked party, dispersing them to all parts of the island. Each party thinks the others are dead. Through a series of events, we see Alonso, King of Naples; his brother, Sebastian; Antonio, Prospero’s brother; Ferdinand, the King’s son; Gonzalo, an honest old Counsellor of Naples and a couple of Lord friends aboard the doomed ship. Another scene finds us on the island in the presence of Prospero and his daughter, Miranda discussing their present condition with Prospero directing the invisible Ariel to confound the King and other characters. In the meantime, Ferdinand meets Miranda and they fall in love.

It wasn’t always perceived as a comedy but after reconsideration, the play has fallen under that category. And, in deed, it is with mirth that I began to appreciate this work as I carefully read and made notes as to what was going on. I had my dictionary at hand because there are so many archaic words I didn’t understand.

The play itself resides within a volume entitled The Completed Works of William Shakespeare, comprising his play and poems also The History of His Life, His Will and an Introduction to Each Play with a contribution on the Shakespeare and Bacon Controversy by the Late Sir Henry Irving to which are added An Index to the Characters and an Authentic Glossary. Publishers are Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York and London, 1927 under the Literary Digest designation. So, I’m also reading it in conjunction with the plays, the other discussion as mentioned above.