Books for Ilana and I!

The fix is in!  The other day, I took pictures of Third Place Books' Bargain Table and Staff Picks.  Today Ilana and I had Book Club for the "Undoing Project" which we both enjoyed and considered remarkable.  Though we couldn't figure out the title and what's with all of the basketball stuff at the beginning.  Story of two brilliant Israeli psychologists who worked closely together for many years.  Amos and Danny.  Their work launched the field of Behavioral Economics and Danny won the Nobel.  Amos couldn't because they only give Nobel prizes to the living and he had passed away.

But it was our last book.  Ilana had some ideas based on my pictures.  So we went back and forth.  We agree nothing 'brutal,' 'heartbreaking,' 'tragic,' 'violent,' 'dark.'  You get the idea.  But we're willing to take a chance.  Here are the books.  Two from staff picks, the rest from the Bargain Table.  I went down to fetch them.  I asked Dennis to come help me, he was too busy, he had a meeting in less than an hour.  So I went myself down to Third Place Books.  I had my list and a young man to help me.  Here's the list, I want two of each.  So we got to work.  We found all of them within 10 minutes.  He brought them to the cashier, arranged for the shipping.  I bet I wasn't in that store more than 20 minutes.  And so cheap to ship, $3.50 for first book, $1 apiece after that.  A deal!  Cost me all of $11.50 to ship all those books.

I got home way before his meeting even started.

Sandy and Ilana buy books!

Ilana and I have 'book club' where we both read a book and then talk about them.  She also does this with Dennis, Matt (her husband) and some of her friends.  We've had different criteria to choose books, the local book stores Staff Picks has been great.  One thing we started last year was to go down to our local bookseller, Third Place Books, and choose several books so we're all set for awhile.  One of our favorite spots is the Bargain Table.  Sometime you can find some Staff Picks on the Bargain Table.  What a great excuse to buy books at the local book store!  Here was our haul the other day.  Ilana is carrying all of our books, her copy and mine.  Most are from the Bargain Table.  Dennis and Ilana went down today and did the same thing.

Retail therapy

Ilana does separate book clubs with people closest to her.  She and her club (in this case, me) read a book and then we talk about it.  She has book club with me, Dennis, Matt (her husband), Ariel (her college roommate)

We both felt we needed to do something together and the schedule was quite overwhelming.  So we decided to go down to our wonderful book shop (Third Place Books) and pick out a book club selection.  We ended up picking out 4!  Some were in the Bargain Books section.

We have a 20% coupon.  They let us split the cost.

There's actually a fourth one about jobs that we have on order.  The whole thing cost us $26 each.  Quite the deal.

That is Teddy underneath the table.

I really have mountains of food but cannot resist the Christmas Eve panic buying.  We need milk.

All the Light We Cannot See

This book was on the bestseller lists.  Won the Pulitzer, short-listed for National Book Award.  On ever list of top books.  So I put my name on the public library reserve list.  About a jillion before me.  But, sooner than I expected, I had it.  Wow, thick long book, 530 pages.  I better get on it as I would not be able to renew it.  Sometimes it takes me a long time to read those long books.

I read this one in less than 48 hours.

It was a compelling easy read.  I enjoyed it a lot.  Yes, lyricism but, as the author points out, short chapters carry a long along.

One of those real page turners, haven't read one like that in a long time!

Photoessay #1094 - After the Fire

After the Fire - J. A. Jance

I love my Guided Autobiography class. Every week the instructor suggests memoirs for us to read. And class members also make their recommendations. I will definitely recommend this book this week. I listened to it and I found it compelling and lyrical yet personal and grounded.

You might recognize the author as a popular Seattle based mystery writer. In fact, I have an audiotape of one of her books racking up overdue fines right upstairs. Plus she will be making an appearance at Third Place Books not a mile away from my home on July 27.

This memoir is really an annotated collection of poetry that she secretly wrote in the late 1970s through 1984 chronicling her life during her 18 year marriage to a heavy drinking self-destructing alcoholic. Feminism also plays a part as she endorses these new ideas not realizing that she's living her own life as a sacrificing submissive wife. Bitterness at being excluded from the creative writing program at the University of Arizona because of her gender and her husband's decree that the only writer in their house would be HIM fueled her dedication to write, though she didn't start until she left her husband and moved with her two young children to Seattle selling life insurance for a living.

The pieces ring true to those coping with family members experiencing addiction. At the time, she thought she was writing 'art' but years later, she recognizes she really was journaling her own story. She eloquently sets the stage for each poem and then reads it. But her poetry and images are so integrated into her own self that often I didn't know if I was listening to the poem or its commentary. You experience with her the recognition that she could not save him, she nearly destroyed herself with her enabling behavior. She illustrates the last straw when attending her child's t-ball game, he had drunk so much by 5pm that he had to crawl back to the car on his hands and knees. He died 18 months after she divorced him of acute alcoholism. In some ways, she still felt tenderly towards him but she recognized that if she had not been able to save him after 18 years of marriage, it was never possible. She subsequently met her second husband at a grief group and, as far as I know, is still happily married.

An eloquent memoir that clearly captures the time and the destruction of addiction.