Life: It Goes On - August 3

Happy Sunday! I'm dragging today and not getting much done. May have something to do with having had more to drink the past couple of nights than I've had to drink in the past couple of months! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Marie Benedict's Carnegie's Maid, which I will probably finish today. Not sure what's up next since I have nothing on hold that's even close to being ready. 

Watched: I watched the first episode of Washington Black and My Oxford Year. 

Read: I finished My Friends by Fredrik Backman and started Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Paul Harding's Enon. 

Made: A lot of salads including caprese, cinnamon rolls, some dips, and we grilled burgers and hot dogs. 

Enjoyed: My niece's two little guys - they are busy but well behaved and the oldest became buddies with the Big Guy who got talked into playing jai alai and football quite a bit. We all had so much fun that not a single one of us took a single picture. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: This week will see me spending an hour or so a day talking care of Mini-him's and Miss C's cats while they are in Alaska, which will mean less will get done around here. I am hoping to get back to some genealogy research this week. 

Thinking About: What I'm going to do with all of the tomatoes we have coming ripe. We'll eat as many as we can but I'll end up with well more than we can eat fresh. 

Feeling: A little disappointed - we were meant to be having the Shep siblings and their spouses for dinner on Saturday as well, but the family patriarch wasn't feeling well so that had to get postponed. 

Looking forward to: I've been so focused on what needed to be done to get ready for this weekend that I haven't even looked to see what's coming up this week. 

Question of the week: It's been a gorgeous weekend here (except for some grey skies), with highs in the mid-70's. We've spent hours and hours that past two evenings on the patio and it's been so much fun and so relaxing. My brother and sister-in-law arrived Friday evening and were here about 24 hours, my brother-in-law has been here since late Friday, and my niece and her family arrived mid-day yesterday and spent the night. So much talking and laughter! 

Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

400 pages

Published June 2012 by Little, Brown and Company

Publisher's Summary: 

A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. What begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver, Penny Alistair, dead, and her twin brother in a coma. The other passengers, Penny's boyfriend, Jake, and her friend Demeter, are physically unhurt—but the emotional damage is overwhelming. Questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.

As summer unfolds, startling truths are revealed about the survivors and their parents, the secrets kept, promises broken, and hearts betrayed.

My Thoughts: 

I read my first Elin Hilderbrand book last fall, The Five-Star Weekend. You may recall I wasn't a fan and wasn't sure I'd read more of her work. But as I mentioned then, I own at least one of her books on my Nook and when I saw the cover of this one, I thought it might be perfect for the summer. It looks bright and light, does it not? 

I'd say it's a spoiler alert to tell you that this book is not, in fact, bright and light. But you'll know that if you've read the summary; clearly I had, once again, not read the summary before I launched into the book. 

Imagine that you're Penny's mother, who considered Penny her best friend. She is devastated, but needs to focus on her son, Hobby, who is shattered in the accident in ways that will change his life. Imagine, too, that there are a lot of questions as to why your daughter seems to have intentionally driven her boyfriend's vehicle over a cliff and what got said to her to upset her so much just before she got behind the wheel. Add to that the fact that Penny's boyfriend's father is also the man Penny's mom has been having a years long affair with - a man whose wife is deep in mourning still four years after the death of the baby she'd wanted for years before he was finally born. And Demeter, whose purse was found in the wreckage of the vehicle with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, who knows what made Penny so upset, who has no friends other than the three that were in the vehicle with her? She's about to spiral out of control without her parents having the slightest clue. 

Yeah, there's a lot going on here. Especially when you add in the fact that Nantucket is a relatively small town, where everyone knows everyone. It seems to make the healing more difficult instead of easier. 

Is it a perfect read? No. There were parts I thought dragged, maybe too much going on. But I was able to empathize with all of the characters and thought the relationships played out well. Even as dark as most of it is, I'm not giving anything away when I saw that things work out as well as they can. And, surprisingly for me, that's exactly what I wanted. 

Life: It Goes On - July 27

Happy Sunday! I really, really need to talk my boss into letting me work four-day weeks so the weekends aren't so short. Sunday always just feels like the day where you race around doing all of the things you didn't get done on Saturday and getting ready for the coming week. 

I still haven't even touched the desk I bought at that auction - it's living in my dining room, just off the front hall where it's a visible reminder that I need do something with it. I keep thinking "next weekend." It wasn't this weekend. Maybe I am getting old - I definitely don't get as much done in a weekend as I used to be able to get done!  The Big Guy, on the other hand, has knocked out getting the kitchen painted, which is making me so happy. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished B.A Shapiro's The Art Forger and just started Marie Benedict's Carnegie's Maid. Not too far into it yet, but I'm afraid I'm going to struggle with it. Fingers crossed because I really don't want to go to the effort of trying to find another book that I'm interested in that's available right now. 

Watched: We went to see Superman last night. Not the kind of movie that I usually pay to see in the theater, but it's summer so why not see a summer blockbuster. Still not sure if I liked it or not - maybe too much comedy in it and I'm not sure about the dog (that felt a little Disney-esque to me). 

Read: I'm about two-thirds of the way through Fredrik Backman's latest, My Friends. While I love his writing, this one took me a little while to get into the story. I am feeling like it runs on, but I am becoming quite attached to the characters. 

Made: It's summer and it's the week of Mini-him's bday so the food this week reflected that: caprese pasta, BLTs, Asian chicken salad (which is not a salad, but a pasta dish that Mini-him always wants for his bday) and red velvet cake. 

Enjoyed: Dinner Thursday night with Miss C's parents, the movie followed by dessert and drinks last night with friends, and birthday dinner today with Mini-him and Miss C. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I have a renewed interest in genealogy so I've pulled out all of my old paper files and I'm working on getting those organized so I can get everything uploaded and start researching again (let's be honest, I'm alway already researching because that's really the fun part!). 

The zinnias are bring in the 
monarchs! 

Thinking About: We're required to take five days of our PTO in one block and I need to figure out when I'm going to do that and what I'm going to do in that week. A vacation would be nice, but I think our kitchen was our vacation this year! I may end up painting cabinets during that week. Or trying to knock out a big organizing project around here - like the garage or photos or the basement. I'd say that would make me as happy as sitting on a beach, but nothing makes me happier than sitting on a beach. 

Feeling: Tired. My anti-depressant seems to be helping in the way it should be helping, but it makes me so tired that I tend to nap as much as possible. Not sure that's tenable long term. 

Looking forward to: Visits from family this week. 

Question of the week: If you had to take a week off of work but weren't going anywhere, what would you do? 

Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallander Series #1) by Henning Mankell

Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallander Series #1) by Henning Mankell

Read by Dick Hill

8 hours, 59 minutes

Published March 1997 by The New Press

Publisher's Summary: 

It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. 

Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.

My Thoughts: I've been hearing about the Kurt Wallander series for years (heck, I've even seen some the  PBS adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh). When I was looking for an audiobook that was available immediately, I wasn't so sure that this was going to work for me, though. I didn't know how graphic it might be, how tense it might make me. Lately I've been drawn more and more to softer fare in books. 

This one surprised me. I didn't find it overly graphic; which isn't to say that there's not some very brutal violence, but Mankell doesn't dwell on it or make it the focus of the book. Instead, Mankell spends a great deal of time focusing on developing his characters and the relationships between them so that while the tension is enough to pull the reader through the book, it is never overwhelming. 

Wallander is a complicated man. His mother died when he was young, his father (an artist who has painted essentially the same painting 7,000 times and makes a living doing that) is beginning to suffer from dementia and never lets Kurt forget how disappointed he is that Kurt chose to become a policeman, his wife has left him, he and his daughter are estranged and Kurt is not entirely sure why, he drinks too much, he eats too much junk food, and he has no moral qualms with having an affair with a married woman. He loves opera, has very few friends, is devoted to solving crimes, and, in this book at least, has a real problem with immigrants (which makes it a timely read but didn't help me to like him). 

Wallander screws up, puts himself in peril repeatedly, and doesn't solve the crime nearly as quickly as they do on television. Months pass between the night of the murder and Wallander and his team solving the case, but I appreciated that things didn't just fall into their laps - it felt much more realistic that way and allowed time to develop the relationships between Wallander and the other characters. 

Will I read more Kurt Wallander? Definitely. Although I wasn't ready to listen to the next book right on the heels of this one, it won't be long because I don't want to lose my familiarity with these characters.