Life: It Goes On - October 22

Will you look at that? I started this post Sunday morning and completely forgot to finish it! Well, here's what was going on then:

We're finally finishing up the great move home today. We're headed off shortly to get her furniture and what's left of her things. Her "new" room here is ready but it will probably be another week before we have her really settled. So much of her stuff is still living in my office!

Very bummed not to have been able to participate in the Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon this weekend. It really always is one of my favorite things about blogging - planning a pile of books to choose from, choosing special snacks for the day, and all of the blogger interaction that's a part of the event. But yesterday was also the annual Omaha Lit Fest (more on that later) and I knew I could not be sleeping through today to make up for staying awake all night. Already planning to clear the calendar for the spring event!

This Week I'm:

Listening To: Catching up with the NPR Books podcast, listening to an episode of RadioLab about American football, and this week I will listen to the Slate podcast discussion of All The Light We Cannot See as prep for this week's Omaha Bookworms discussion.

Watching: The Theory of Everything and Draft Day late into the night last night, thanks to free HBO. We liked both of them quite a lot and could definitely see why Eddie Redmayne won the Academy Award for his performance of Stephen Hawking.

Reading: I raced through Homer Hickam's Carrying Albert Home for an upcoming TLC Books book tour this week. Sneak peek - loved it! [Not much of a sneak peek when the review already posted, huh?] I will finish All The Light We Cannot See in the next couple of days for book club and then I'll get back to The Secret Chord.

Making: Snickerdoodle cookies, pasta salad, pork tenderloin, fried apples, and oven-dried tomatoes. The Big Guy has actually done most of the cooking lately; he gets home first and must be hungry when he hits the door.

Planning: A birthday weekend trip to one of my happy places - Les Bourgeois winery in Rochefort and Columbia, Missouri. We'll do a little shopping, have some Shakespeare's pizza, talk a lot, laugh even more and drink our fair share of wine.

Grateful: To be done with the actual moving. For now. You know, I'm sure that we'll be moving at least one of these kids again in the next six months. I can't wait. Can you sense the sarcasm?

Enjoying: Books! I've been reading so many good books lately.

Feeling: Tired. It's been busy around here lately with all of the packing and moving and other life things going on.

Looking forward to: Book club. Which as this posts actually happened two days ago. But still, on Sunday, I was really looking forward to talking  about All The Light You Cannot See with my ladies!

Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam

Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam
Published October 2015 by William Morrow
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
Elsie Lavender and Homer Hickam Sr.—the future parents of Homer Hickam Jr.—were high school classmates in the West Virginia coalfields, graduating just as the Great Depression began. When Homer asked for her hand, Elsie instead headed to Orlando where she sparked with a dancing actor named Buddy Ebsen (yes, that Buddy Ebsen). But when Buddy headed for New York, Elsie’s dreams of a life with him were crushed and eventually she found herself back in the coalfields, married to Homer.

Unfulfilled as a miner’s wife, Elsie was reminded of her carefree days in Florida every day because of Buddy’s unusual wedding gift: an alligator named Albert who lived in the only bathroom in their little house. Eventually Homer gave Elsie an ultimatum: “Me or the alligator!” After giving it some thought, Elsie concluded there was only one thing to do—carry Albert home.

My Thoughts:
If you've ever read Daniel Wallace's Big Fish or seen the movie it inspired, you have some idea what you can expect with Carrying Albert Home. Quirky, a bit fantastical, and loaded with larger than life characters, Carrying Albert Home is the absolutely charming "somewhat true story of a man, his wife, and her alligator." It's also the story of how a woman learned to love her husband and make peace with the life she'd chosen. It is sweet and sad and, did I mention, charming.

When Homer Hickam Sr. agrees to travel to Florida to carry Albert home, he imagined a two-week trip from West Virginia - straight there, straight home. He was, after all, a miner with a home and the only job he could imagine ever having. Elsie, on the other hand, sees this as her chance to get out of West Virginia for good, with or without Homer. She has never gotten over Buddy and spending the rest of her life in a coal town is not in her plans. Along the way they pick up a rooster who befriends Albert, get caught up with union strikers, become movie actors, become a nurse and a baseball player, fly an airplane, get caught in a hurricane, and meet John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. At least, those are the stories his parents told Homer over the years. Homer never knew whether or not they were true, but those stories taught him more about his parents and their relationship than all the years of watching them together ever had.

Thanks so much to the ladies of TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other opinions about Carrying Albert Home, check out the full tour at TLC Book Tours.

Homer Hickam (also known as Homer H. Hickam Jr.) is the bestselling and award-winning author of many books, including the #1New York Times memoir Rocket Boys, which was adapted into the popular film October Sky. A writer since grade school, he is also a Vietnam veteran, a former coal miner, a scuba instructor, an avid amateur paleontologist, and a retired engineer. He lives in Alabama and the Virgin Islands. Find out more about Homer at his website, and connect with him on Facebook and Twitter.

I highly recommend the movie October Sky, if you haven't seen it. I'm certainly hoping  Hickam has more personal history he'll share with readers soon!

Pin It and Do It

Y'all know how much I love when Trish (Love, Laughter, and A Touch of Insanity) hosts the Pin It and Do It challenge! She hasn't done it for quite a while (it being a lot of work for a working mom with two littles) so I was excited to see that she had decided to bring it back again this fall and it prompted me to open up my boards to see what I could get to this fall.

Books To Read: I will have knocked off several books from my Books To Read board before the end of this month, including Jojo Moyes' After You, Geraldine Brooks' The Secret Chord, Stewart O'Nan's Last Night At The Lobster,  and Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last. It would probably be unfair to say that the challenge prompted me to read any of these since I was already planning on reading them this fall. Still...they were all pinned!

Fall/Holidays: A simple thing - I just filled a vase with a candle and yellow popping corn and tied my candle with some raffia. I actually had this pinned in several variations. I guess I must have liked the idea!

Drinks: It being fall, it was time to buy some apple cider. Since I already have caramel vodka, we made some hot cider with caramel vodka one night. I also used the caramel vodka in lieu of caramel sauce to make to make both salted caramel hot cocoa the night I watched the lunar eclipse and caramel apple sangria, both of which I had also pinned.

Food/Appetizers/Desserts:

• Texas Roadhouse Butter was a bust but one we will try again with some changes. The recipe called for sticks of butter but if you've had Texas Roadhouse butter, you know that it is fluffy. So when we retry it, I'll be using whipped butter as my base as well as reducing the honey by about a third. Hot caprese dip was a total fail. The cheese did not melt at all the way the recipe said it would. Maybe a different brand of fresh mozzarella would have worked better but I'd rather just turn it into salad which I know we all love.

• Crockpot lasagna soup would probably have been just fine if I had read the recipe through before I started or if I had even been thinking. The recipe calls for all of the ingredients to be cooked for 4-5 hours on high and then adding the noodles. Yeah, I just threw it all in at once, including the noodles. To say they were mush would be an understatement.  It's definitely a recipe I will do again. 

• Texas Trash dip, on the other hand, was a huge success. It did make a full 9" x 13" pan so I'd probably cut the recipe in half if I make it again and have a lot of other things with it. The plus side of the huge batch was that we nibbled it all through Sunday football games and I even took some for lunch on Monday. Good thing we liked it! 

• Caramel Apple Cake was another recipe that I will tweak but will make again. It called for a can of caramel frosting but that seemed to be too sugary. I'd either top it with caramel ice cream topping or make my own caramel frosting the next time. 

• Refrigerator Sweet Pickles was another hit. It turned out exactly the way the recipe said it would and everyone in my family liked them. I could chop them up to make pickle relish, we put them on sandwiches and ate them all by themselves.  I would like to figure out a way to reduce the number of seeds in them (grow seedless cucumbers, maybe?), otherwise, this is one we'll definitely do again next summer. Best part of the recipe is that you can keep adding new cucumber slices to the brine as you use pickles up so you can constantly have a full batch.

All in all, a successful Pin It and Do It challenge, I'd say! Thanks, Trish, for pushing us, again, to not just think about what we'd like to do but to actually do it.

Lit: Uniquely Portable Magic

After I finished "reading" Room the other day, I wasn't in the mood to start a new audio book so I decided to try to catch up on some podcasts.

I don't get to listen to nearly as much NPR as I used to so I download the podcast for NPR Books to catch up on all of their bookish news. Which probably isn't news any more by the time I listen to it but it's still interesting. Periodically I do have to go through and delete some of them or the sheer number of podcasts I have to listen to overwhelms me but I make sure to keep those that are about books I've read, books I'm interested in reading, or award discussions. Many of them are no more than 4-10 mins which means I can knock off quite a few in one day, especially an errand day, like yesterday, which means a lot of time in the car. It also means I have to spend a lot of time moving from one episode to another which might be a little dangerous for the drivers around me. Sorry, guys!

Yesterday, I listened to Paula McLain talk about Circling The Sun, Ruth Reichl talk about writing about cooking, Andy Weir give his thoughts on the movie adaptation of The Martian (he loved it), and Marlon James talk about winning the Man Booker Award as well as Maureen Corrigan's review of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies (she had mixed feelings).

I'm in the midst of listening to a Terri Gross interview of Mary Karr. Karr has written a new book about writing memoirs (she has written three and teaches a course about writing memoir). Karr has me both fired up to try my hand at it. I think of my life as quite ordinary most of the time but  everyone has their own trials and adventures and my life is no exception.

With National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) coming up, I've been thinking a lot about writing lately. Every November I think I'll give NaNoWriMo a shot and then every November I remember that there is already so much going on during the month. I have no idea where I would find that kind of time. With two kids back home there is more cooking to be done, more laundry to be done, more interruptions in my day. And there are books to read and the holidays to get ready for. Still...I have always wanted to be a writer and there are all of these ideas percolating in my head. Maybe everyone on my shopping list will just get a first draft of my first novel for Christmas. Hmmm. This could work!

If you're a podcast listener, what's your favorite bookish podcast that I should add to my playlist?

The Determined Heart by Antoinette May

The Determined Heart by Antoniette May
Published September 2015 by Lake Union Publishing
Source: my ebook copy courtesy of the publisher through Netgalley

Publisher's Summary:
The daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley had an unconventional childhood populated with the most talented and eccentric personalities of the time. After losing her mother at an early age, she finds herself in constant conflict with a resentful stepmother and a jealous stepsister. When she meets the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she falls deeply in love, and they elope with disastrous consequences. Soon she finds herself destitute and embroiled in a torturous love triangle as Percy takes Mary’s stepsister as a lover. Over the next several years, Mary struggles to write while she and Percy face ostracism, constant debt, and the heartbreaking deaths of three children. Ultimately, she achieves great acclaim for Frankenstein, but at what cost?


My Thoughts:
Mary Shelley lost her mother only days after she was born. It was not the recollection of her mother that shaped Mary's life but rather the shadow of who her mother had been that influenced Mary's life in ways both good and bad. It drew some people to Mary and her family and caused others to shun them. William Godwin's radical writings had much the same effect on the family. Her parentage resulted in an extremely bright young woman, with radical ideas and a strong will.

Percy Shelley was four years older than Mary and married when they first met but two years later, when she was just sixteen, they became lovers and eloped to France and then Switzerland to be together. Young Mary, one would think, imagined that their life would be a dream but from the beginning things went awry. Percy consented to allow Mary's stepsister, Claire, to accompany them; they ran out of money long before they reached Switzerland and were forced to walk much of the way; and, eventually, the trio was forced to return to England where they were ostracized by their families. Those first few months symbolized Percy's and Mary's lives together. They often lived with high hopes and, once Percy's grandfather died and he came into his inheritance, money was much less an issue. But Mary, who professed to believe in "free love," only ever truly loved Percy and his constant affairs with other women wore heavy on her heart. Her battles with depression after the lose of four of their five children were unbearable for Percy and tended to drive him away. They lost both Mary's sister and Percy's wife to suicide and were never able to mend things with Percy's father. On the other hand, they lived life largely on their own terms, surrounded by the top literary figures of their time, including Lord Byron.

Mary Shelley is most famous for working arduously to bring acclaim to Percy's poetry after he died and for her novel Frankenstein; or a Modern Prometheus but she was actually a prolific author in her own right and had much more success during her life that did her husband. It's true that Frankenstein was the result of a prompt by Lord Byron on a rainy evening when their group was shut inside but the story was one that came about as the result of a number of previous inspirations, as imagined by Ms. May at any rate. It was Mary's first novel and brought her fame, after it eventually came out that she as the author (the book was originally published as having an anonymous writer as it was felt that the public would not accept a scientifically based book written by a woman).

There were times when the book felt repetitive and others when it felt like May had included to much detail. Perhaps a tighter editing of the book would have worked better for me. Still, I enjoyed learning so much about the writers of the time, not just the Shelleys and my heart broke for the little woman whose own darkness was reflected in her most famous work.

As with all novels based on fact, as soon as I finished this book, I started researching Mary Shelley to see how much of the novel was based on fact and was surprisingly pleased to find that May had done an excellent job of sticking to the facts as they were known.