Life: It Goes On - June 19

Happy Father's Day to all of the father's out there and those who have played the role of a father in a child's life! We'll celebrate shortly with a late brunch with my parents; my sister, brother-in-law and niece; and my nephew who happens to be in town for the College World Series.
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Remember last week when I told you it was a hot? Yeah, it's still that. So hot (and now humid) that I can't even stand to do dinners on the patio and you know how much I love those! I'm a little testy about missing the longest days of the year inside.

This Week I'm:

Listening To: I'm loving listening to Cassandra Campbell narrate The Woman Upstairs and I've been catching up on some podcasts, too, including Slate's Audio Book Club's discussion of Curtis Sittenfield's Eligible.

Watching: Baseball and Miss H and I finally finished season three of Orange Is The New Black. She's been watching season four of Parks and Rec so I've caught up in a few episodes of that as well.

Reading: The Marriage of Opposites for book club this week. Really enjoying that so far.

BG cutting steak for today - the
mooch wasn't allowed on the
stool next to him but that didn't
stop the mooching

Making: More granola, mini bagel sandwiches for Mini-me and Miss S to take on the road, and breakfast tortillas for today's brunch.

Planning: Nothing. My plans of late seem to get waylaid so I'm just going to play it by ear this week.


Thinking About: Milwaukee. Mini-me, Miss S and one of their friends who drives trucks took a UHaul there yesterday. She starts her residency there next week. Mini-me will join her there in a couple of months when his job here wraps up but they took everything up now and he will live on the bare minimum of furniture and clothes until then. I wish I were a fly on the wall. Oh, who are we kidding - I wish I were there with them!

Enjoying: I met a long lost friend for lunch the other day. We were inseparable middle through high school but haven't seen each other in more than thirty years. Lunch lasted four hours and we were so busy talking that I forgot to take a picture!

Also, the College World Series. We'll be cheering for the TCU Horned Toads since we have dear friends who are alumni. Miss H, the baseball fiend, had to have a shirt to celebrate.

Feeling: I didn't cry when we left the moving crew by some miracle. But that's not to say I'm not feeling pretty sad to know I'm not going to see Miss S again for months.

Looking forward to: Book club this week. We didn't meet last week and I'm missing those ladies!

Question of the week: What are you reading this week? I'm having the urge to make my own readathon this week. So many books I want to read and so little time!

A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi

A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi
Published June 2016 by Lake Union Publishing
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
In trendy Silicon Valley, Priya has everything she needs—a loving husband, a career, and a home—but the one thing she wants most is the child she’s unable to have. In a Southern Indian village, Asha doesn’t have much—raising two children in a tiny hut, she and her husband can barely keep a tin roof over their heads—but she wants a better education for her gifted son. Pressured by her family, Asha reluctantly checks into the Happy Mothers House: a baby farm where she can rent her only asset—her womb—to a childless couple overseas. To the dismay of friends and family, Priya places her faith in a woman she’s never met to make her dreams of motherhood come true.

Together, the two women discover the best and the worst that India’s rising surrogacy industry has to offer, bridging continents and cultures to bring a new life into the world—and renewed hope to each other.


My Thoughts:

• This one is right in my wheelhouse - set mostly in India, filled with moral and ethical dilemmas and family dynamics.
• I had no idea this kind of thing happens but further research confirms that Malladi based the book on reality. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised - where there's a chance for the wealthy to exploit the poor, particularly if they can convince themselves that they are doing good, they're likely to do it. It was interesting to think about the different ways surrogacy is viewed.
• Malladi explores infertility, marriage, poverty, class structure, parent/child relationships, parental expectations, cultural differences, and, of course, surrogacy.
• She does a particularly good job of developing Asha as a character - her conflicted feelings about acting as a surrogate, her growth in her marriage, her attachment to her children, her relationship with Priya.
• Along the way there are a lot of characters to keep track of as Malladi tries to show readers different familial relationships, takes on motherhood, views of surrogacy, and Priya's and Asha's feelings about the baby Asha is carrying. Not all of them felt necessary to the story and slowed the story line down. I would have liked to see some of the relationships become more developed.
• I think some more judicious editing would have helped tighten up the book - it often felt repetitious and as though it were circling back around on itself. 
• The end of the book felt rushed to me and I felt like some of the areas where Malladi had been building tension went unresolved in the end. It was almost as if there were a set number of pages the book was meant to be and after the slow buildup there were a limited number of pages to wrap up as much as possible. 
• That being said, I do understand why some of the things weren't resolved. One of the points Malladi makes is that there is only so much money and it's simply not possible to help everyone in the best way possible. Which means that the home, which most decidedly does not live up to its billing, will remain shabby and the doctor running it will continue to do it as a way to profit from the needs of both the surrogates and the babies' parents. 
• Despite what I felt were its flaws, I did enjoy a lot about A House for Happy Mothers and think it would make an excellent book club choice. There is a lot to discuss here with the many themes and relationships. 

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. To find other opinions (and most of them liked the book more than I did), check out the full tour.  

Amulya Malladi is the author of six novels, including The Sound of Language and The Mango Season. Her books have been translated into several languages, including Dutch, German, Spanish, Danish, Romanian, Serbian, and Tamil. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in journalism. When she’s not writing, she works as a marketing executive for a global medical device company. She lives in Copenhagen with her husband and two children.

Lit: Uniquely Portable Magic

The interwebs and I are having some discussions lately about what I do and do not have time for.

I'd all but abandoned my Tumblr account a couple of years ago then recently started using it again. It hasn't taken me long to grasp two things: I don't really have an interest in posting things there and it can be a massive time suck. I'm not opposed to falling into a rabbit hole of interesting things but there is only so much time in a day and so many rabbit holes to fall into. Not sure how much longer I'll keep it on my phone.

To that same end, I've essentially stopped using Goodreads. I started my account there to keep a log of the books I was reading/had read and to find a community of other readers. Then I started this blog as a way to log the books I was reading and I found a community of readers among bloggers, some people started making problems among some of the groups I belonged
to on Goodreads, and Amazon bought Goodreads. I'm fully aware that Amazon doesn't notice me avoiding them but a girl's gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere. So, I've exported all of my shelves to other places, although I've yet to close my account. I do miss parts of it but there's only so much time in a day and...

Litsy. It's like Instagram, Goodreads, and a blog all rolled into one. I'm kind of an addict already, checking in several times a day. **addendum** Funny thing. I wrote this post on 6/11/16. On Book Riot on 6/13/16, I find that they are saying Litsy is Instagram and Goodreads rolled into one. I guess great minds think alike!

Here's one of the reasons I need to cut back on my computer time - so many new books in my house!

The Marriage of Opposites is my book club's selection for June; Finding Fontainebleau is for a review; Fate and Furies, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and The Woman Upstairs (audiobook is in my car) all came from my library's weekly sale and the rest of the books I picked up from Better World Books for $2 each. On my Nook I've recently added Eight Hundred Grapes, Monument Men, Auntie Mame, The Book of Strange New Things, Live Through This, Be Frank With Me, Lit, The Bucolic Plague, and Mr. Splitfoot. Plus there are a couple of new ones on my iPad as well (although The Big Guy has that in his clutches at the moment and I don't have the strength to fight it out of his hands). This is going to make it difficult to #readmyowndamnbooks.

So, balance. Gotta find it. Because it all goes back to my word of the year, "happier."

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Published May 2010 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: purchased audiobook at my local library book sale

Publisher's Summary: In the third volume of the Millennium series, Lisbeth Salander lies in critical condition in a Swedish hospital, a bullet in her head.

 But she's fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she'll stand trial for three murders. With the help of Mikael Blomkvist, she'll need to identify those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she'll seek revenge—against the man who tried to killer her and against the corrupt government institutions that nearly destroyed her life.

My Thoughts:

• Except for Lisbeth's voice (which was kind of a problem given that she's the focus of the books), Simon Vance is amazing as a narrator. Gotta find me some more books he's read.
• Stieg Larsson never met a tiny detail he didn't think he needed to include or a backstory he thought was necessary to the book. I really did not need to know the type of handheld device Salander was using every single time she picked it up nor the background of the man Blomkvist enlists to help him help Lisbeth when she is in the hospital.
• There are a lot of characters in this book - it was sometimes hard to keep track of who people were and how they fit in, especially considering I was listening to the book while I was driving.
• There's a secondary storyline in this book involving Blomkvist's sometime lover and business partner, Erika Berger. I kept waiting for it to somehow tie into the main story line. It didn't. It was, apparently, just another way for Larsson to talk about journalism plus the ways in which men hurt women.
• In theory, you could read this as a stand alone book (Larsson does give some background from the first two books as you go), but I wouldn't recommend it. In fact, this trilogy would have benefitted from Larsson and the publisher just being willing to say "you have to read these in order." There's just too much going on that relies entirely on the previous books to catch up with here.
• It's amazing that a man wrote these books, books that focus so strongly on how badly men treat women, books where the main character is a strong, highly intelligent woman who, despite her physical size, again and again kicks the mens' butts.
• All that being said, I really did enjoy this book. The primary characters, who aren't necessarily flawed so much as just not fitting into the "norm," are honest and vulnerable and smart. The "bad" guys might be a little stereotyped but I was okay with that in the bigger picture since so many of them represented government run amok. There's a lot of action, a lot of "putting the pieces together" mental strategy, and the ending is oh so satisfying. 

Life: It Goes On - June 12

Welcome from the gates of hell. Seriously. It's been in the upper 90's for the past four days and the humidity it creeping up. To paraphrase Miss H, "it's a hot." We're having to water everything every day and yard work has got to be done early. Even so, I managed to give myself a case of heat exhaustion yesterday. I'm terrible about remembering to drink a lot more water on days like this.

It didn't stop me from going to the Summer Arts Festival, one of our fave things to do in Omaha during the summer. Always some impressive artwork and we thoroughly enjoyed the music of Rockin' Dopsie Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters. We didn't bring anything home (except some kettle corn!), but my pocket was filled with business cards and I'll definitely be ordering some gifts.

This Week I'm:

Listening To: I finished The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest Thursday (review this week). I'm  sticking to my assertion that every book in the trilogy could have been 100 pages shorter but I still enjoyed the actually stories. I didn't want to start a new book on Friday so I spent the drive time listening to podcasts including Stuff You Missed In History Class. Music wise, I'm listening to the Hamilton station on Pandora. I have noticed that some of the Pandora stations are really limited in what they have - of course, I want to listen to the music from Hamilton, and it stands to reason that I might also enjoy In The Heights, but the station is pretty much limited to those two musicals and Green Day's American Idiot.

Watching: Not much other than the NCAA baseball Super Regionals. Gotta start choosing my teams to cheer for when they get to Omaha and the College World Series! 

Reading: I finished Emma Cline's The Girls last night. Makes me want to reread Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. Next up, though, is A Home For Happy Mothers for review later this week and then A Marriage of Opposites, this month's book club selection.

The Sci-Fi Summer Readathon wrapped up Tuesday. I only managed to get one "sci-fi" book read the entire week. On the plus side, it was, at least, one of my own damn books.

Making: Lots of granola! Cherry/coconut, golden raisin/pumpkin seed, and peanut/chocolate chip all turned out well. I'm particularly a fan of the peanut/chocolate chip which is like eating all of the cookies at once. What didn't turn out so well was an apple cinnamon batch, which was, honestly, nasty. Still, I'm going to give it another try because, dammit, it should be great, right?

Today we're making the summer's first batch of caprese pasta and a lemonade "salad" my sister makes which is more of a dessert, super light and summery.

Planning: Work continues on turning Mini-him's room into a guest room. Chenille bedspreads, my great-grandmother's dresser and vanity, quilts, and old family photos are moving in to replace the Captain America shield, beer boot, and masculine feel. Eventually it will get painted this summer before we get a second bed in there and there will be a new window treatment; but, for now, I'm happy with the way it's shaping up.

Thinking About: Saying goodbye to Miss S who leaves next weekend to move to Milwaukee. She's gone off for months at a time for school assignments before but we always knew she'd be back. This time we don't know when we'll see her again so it's going to be hard to see her leave. Have I mentioned before how bad I am at goodbyes? There will be tears.

Enjoying: The flowers at the library I go to for the book sale.  They are beautifully kept up and bloom spring through fall. Unfortunately, the library sits on the corner of one of the busiest intersections in Omaha so you can't just sit there and enjoy them.

Feeling: Heartsick about the shooting in Orlando. What is it going to take for this country to do something about the weapons that allow for this kind of thing to happen? How many innocent people have to die?

Looking forward to: A quiet week. I think. Whenever I think that, things start popping up to keep life busy.

Question of the week: What's your best tip for staying cool this summer?