22. The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes

What a welcome respite from the heaviness I’ve seemed to be reading lately. This is a not-quite-chic-lit book, and the characters, what characters they are! This is my first experience with Marian Keyes, and I have to read more. This particular novel takes place in Ireland and London (as I suppose most of her work does), and I loved reading all the English and Irish slang. She created some wonderful characters, male and female, all ages. My favorite character in this book was the 2-year old Ema, who reminds me so much of my own 3-year old, always coming through with something hilarious to bring joy back into joyless situations. Here’s an example: (To set the scene, Ema’s mother Lily is speaking - she is in the throes of writing a charming new book about the joys of life, and she tries it out on her own mother and Ema.)

That first night I read what I had written to Mum and Ema.
“Darling, it’s adorable,” Mum said.
“Dirty,” Ema agreed. “Filthy.”

Another passage:

Daily, I continued to write, the words pouring from me, and every night, when we put Ema to bed, I read that day’s work and Mum raved about it. Ema, too, offered comments. (“Jiggy.” “Seedy.” “Farty.”)

Funny stuff! I also loved the Russian neighbor Irina who works at the make-up counter. I felt like I could go on reading about these characters for much longer than the 500+ pages Keyes delivered.

I’m not offering much in the way of plot lines here, but the book really gets into the publishing industry, which I found fascinating. It illustrates the relationships between authors (hopeful and already signed), their agents, the publishers, and the readers who love or hate them.

Will definitely pick up more Keyes to read. Next up is Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic. I didn’t see the movie (with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman), so I’m going in fresh. My only other experience with Hoffman is Here on Earth, which was written in the very strangest present tense, and was dark and a little creepy, but I enjoyed it.

Friday Weekly Weigh-in

Lost this week: 4.8 pounds.
Total lost this goal period: 4.8 pounds
To goal: 25.2 pounds

Finally! The scale grudgingly gives a little. As close as I can approximate, I've lost about 18.5 inches total. It's so grand. But still such a long road ahead.

21. The Pact by Jodi Picoult

I finished this book, The Pact by Jodi Picoult, a couple of weeks ago, actually, but forgot to post anything about it. Maybe I'm trying to forget it entirely. It wasn't a bad story; in fact, it was a rather compelling story. But from the first chapter to the very last word of the book, it was the heaviest, most sad story I've read in a long time, maybe ever.

The story revolves around two families, who are best friends, whose lives are so intertwined, they are like one big family. The women are best friends, the children are practically siblings. Then the two oldest children get older and fall in love - just the way their parents wanted it.

A phone call is received in the middle of the night, and both sets of parents find out that their children were found together, shot, in an apparent double-suicide attempt - she dies, he lives. It takes a while for the police to wade through the evidence - was it a botched double-suicide, or did he kill her?

There is no way to find happiness in the story. I wonder if Picoult wrote it this way on purpose? If you've read this one, I'm very curious to hear your views.

Next up, some chic lit from Marian Keyes. A much-needed break.

Friday Crappy Weigh-in

Friday weigh-in: +.8 pounds. ACK! Total lost: 0. To goal: 30 pounds.

I think I'm starting to figure this thing out. On the weeks where I squeeze in some sort of exercise (even if it's mowing the lawn or just walking around the mall) I lose more. Go figure, exercise = losing more weight.

BOO.

20. Little Children by Tom Perrotta

I finished book number 20 last night (a third of the way to my goal of 60 books this year!). This was my first experience with Tom Perrotta, but I have heard of him before. He wrote the book Election, which was turned into the movie starring Reese Witherspoon (I haven't seen it). The reviews for this book said it was very funny.

The story centers around two stay-at-home parents: Sarah, mother to 3-year old Lucy, and Todd, father to 3-year old Aaron. Sarah is young, very educated, but bored (and feels wasted) staying at home with Lucy. She is a strong feminist and never saw herself in the wife/mother role. Todd is a law school graduate who can't seem to pass the bar, and instead stays home with Aaron while his gorgeous wife makes documentary films. These are only the two most central characters; there are at least three other very strong characters that make their mark on the story (including a fresh-out-of-jail pedophile whose very presence sends the neighborhood into uproar). Sarah and Todd end up in an affair, both trying to recapture their youth before having children, looking for something they aren't finding in their "stay-at-home" lives. They, more so than Aaron and Lucy, are the little children referenced in the title.

I like the book because it ends well. I'll leave it at that to keep the storyline under wraps. I hated that it took an affair for certain lessons to be learned, but in the end, it works. Very good.

Next up, another Jodi Picoult novel, The Pact.

Weekly Weigh-in and Book 19

Friday weigh-in (2 weeks, actually): Down .8 pounds. To goal: 29.2 pounds.

Not great, but I did manage to negate the 4-pound midweek gain!

Also, I finished Book 19: The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd last night. I thought it was a little creepy, frankly. It's the story of a woman who, in an apparent mid-life crisis, leaves her husband and college-aged daughter to care for her crazy mother, and falls in love with a monk. Their love, of course, doesn't work out, and she returns home to her family. This wasn't my favorite (obviously, as I'm giving away the spoilers). Her other book was so much better. On the whole, I give it a blah.

18. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

This is a very hard memoir. It's hard to read because it is infuriating. It's the story of Jeannette Walls, now a journalist in New York, as she grew up in the most dysfunctional family. She and her siblings were basically left to fend for themselves while their parents chose to live without jobs, a home, food, basically transients transversing the country. It's such an intriguing read, to see what she came through and how she ended up. There were times I had to put it down and just be mad for a while, but I really found it - well, enjoyable isn't the right word, but maybe fascinating, and I felt so much sympathy for her and her siblings. Very good read.

17. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

The premise of this book is very interesting. It's a story about a perfect family of four, two parents and two children. The youngest child is discovered to have leukemia at age 2. She needs a bone marrow donor, and no one in the family is a perfect match. So the parents have a third child - a "designer" baby girl, the embryo specially chosen to be a perfect genetic match for their older daughter. At first the baby donates her cord blood to her older sister, which sends the older sister into a remission. Then as the years go by, the leukemia comes back, and the younger sister again donates - blood, bone marrow, until she feels like she can't give anymore. The book chronicles her difficult decision to stop donating to her sister, and her legal journey to become medically emancipated. I thought it was a super read.

Friday Weigh-In - GOAL!

2.6 pounds lost this week. Finally reached the goal! Actually a little bit over the goal, and that combined with a few pounds lost prior to setting the goal adds up to a loss of 25 pounds even.

I now weigh the same as when I got married - no more baby pounds! But I have to say, that weight is redistributed in a not-so-nice way. This doesn't really bother me; post-baby body will never be pre-baby body again, unless I fall into some vortex where I can afford plastic surgery. It feels good to see that weight on the scale though, that's for sure.

New goal: Lose 30 pounds. This will put me at my high school weight.

Friday Weigh-in (2 Weeks)

Down 3.6 pounds for the past 2 weeks.

Lost to date: 18.4 pounds.

To reach goal: 1.6 pounds.

16. Memoirs of a Geisha

Finally - FINALLY - finished Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. It took me about 115 pages to begin to enjoy the story. And then, when I got to the end, the first line of the Acknowledgements from the author reads, "Although the character of Sayuri and her story are completely invented..." I read the book actually thinking it was a memoir, silly me. So it was a little startling to find out that it was complete fiction (read: James Frey). The story was okay. Not sure I could recommend it, unless you are a real history buff - there's more history than story, I thought. One thing I must appreciate is how much research and work the author must have done to put this novel together. That much is undeniable.

Weekly Weigh-In

Didn't weigh in last week, was on the road to Arkansas. So today's weigh-in: 0 pounds lost. To goal: 5.2 pounds. I'm not disappointed, though - after these past two weeks, including two birthdays (two, count them, TWO cupcakes at Taya's bash), I fully expected to step on the scale and have gained 5 pounds. No gaining, I can take that.

I'm currently reading Memoirs of a Geisha. I've been reading this book for about a month now, and it's not drawing me in. I started it because I've heard people rave about it, but I can't seem to get invested in the story. I'm plugging away at it, though, thinking that at some point it will get really good. It's seriously hindering my book reading goal. I have to move faster than this if I'm going to reach my goal. Dang you, Memoirs, DANG YOU.

15. Conversations with the Fat Girl

Finished this one, by Liza Palmer. What's with the new trend of chick-lit about overweight "loser" girls finding their dream man and deciding their body is A-OK with them? This kind of reminds me of Jennifer Weiner's work, but I actually preferred it to Weiner.

Friday weigh-in: Down 5.2 pounds. To goal, 5.2. To be fair, I weighed in earlier on Friday, and that tends to make me lighter than normal. I don't anticipate much weight loss for this upcoming week!

Late Friday Weigh-in

Last week's weight loss: -2.4 pounds. To goal: 10.4 pounds

14. My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru

Finished this one on Saturday. Author is Tim Guest, a London-based journalist. It's a memoir of his experience growing up as sannyasin, a group of people who wore only orange and lived in various communes of the infamous Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Very sad to see how it tore apart his family and life, but it's a worthy memoir. I enjoyed it as a true story.

Friday Weigh-In & Books

From Friday, February 24: -1 pound. To goal: 12.8 pounds.

Also, finished:

12. In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner
13. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

I really enjoyed Buck's work. It was originally published about 60 years ago, but it's still a great read. Feels much more contemporary.

Friday Morning Weigh-in

Down 6.2 pounds for the week.

Remaining until goal: 13.8

11. The Red Tent

The Red Tent
By Anita Diamant
Published 1997 Picador

The premise of the book, as I described earlier, is the life and times of Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter, from Genesis. In the Bible, she is a footnote. She never speaks a word. Her rape by a prince of Shechem sets in motion the slaughter of a city by her brothers, Jacob's sons. They avenge her rape by killing every man in the city, and taking the women and children as booty. But what of Dinah? The Bible never mentions her again, in life or in death.

In The Red Tent, Diamant gives Dinah her own story, from birth to death. She adds a three-dimensional quality to her not often found of women in the Bible. She also colors the text with all sorts of customs and traditions of Canaanites, Egyptians, peoples of the time. It’s a learning experience, a mixture of Diamant’s imagination and bits and pieces we get from the Bible. Diamant says, and I love this, "The compressed stories and images in the Bible are rather like photographs. They don’t tell us everything we want or need to know. Midrash* is the story about what happened before and after the photographic flash."

I have to agree that the Bible tends to tell stories that leave me with more questions. This is one of them. The Bible paints a picture of Jacob as being deceived when he marries Leah, and he goes to his father-in-law in anger and demands the hand of Rachel. For a man who appears to be uninterested in Leah, the Bible lists nine children shared between Jacob and Leah. And what must it have been like to have sisters married to the same man? There is definitely a story there, one Diamant says "cried out for an explanation, and I decided to imagine one."

This book is historical fiction, enough taken directly from the scripture to resonate with me, and enough taken from the author’s imagination to fascinate me. The life of Dinah is so sad by Biblical retrospect, made even more wrenching in the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed this look at a female’s view of Biblical times.

Favorite quote: "We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. [...] It's a wonder that any mother ever called a daughter Dinah again."

Rating: Four of four stars

*Midrash is described as an ancient literary form, meaning "search" or "investigation," used by rabbis to tell stories from the Bible in a more complete sense, rather than just the glimpse given from the Scriptures.

Goals for 2006

To enrich the body and the mind.

Body: Lose 20 pounds from Ari's pregnancy (18 months ago, hello)
Mind: Read 60 books (including at least a handful of non-fiction)

I've got a good head-start on the book list (which I'll keep on this page), so the number of books may increase.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Book list completed since January 1, 2006:
1. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (non-fiction)
2. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
3. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
4. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
5. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
6. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
7. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
8. If You Could See Me Now by Cecelia Ahern
9. Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
10. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

Currently reading: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. From this point forward I will attempt to do a short review after each read. The Red Tent is a great story for those of us who grew up on the Bible - it's about the life of Dinah, Jacob's only daughter, Joseph's half-sister. In the Bible her role is peripheral at best, a victim, the catalyst for a massacre. However, this book is written from her point of view, giving her a 3-D quality that I personally had never thought about before. It's fiction, of course, the author's imagined life for Dinah (pronounced Dee-nah, by the way - this was new to me). I am thoroughly enjoying it so far. Seems reviewing books will be difficult for me without giving away spoilers. I'll work on that.