Books

Schuler, Lou, and Cassandra E. Forsythe. The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift like a Man, Look like a Goddess. New York: Avery, 2007. Print.

Got this from the library after seeing it mentioned somewhere (wish I could remember where – perhaps the Fit Fatties forum?).  I was prepared to ignore the diet sections but was afraid I’d be triggered by them, but fortunately they started off with things like “you probably aren’t eating enough”, “eat more protein” (but not that carbs are bad), and “eat five or six meals a day”.  That eased my mind.  The exercises seem basic but not easy; this is *real* weight lifting!  There’s a good variety and the workouts start fairly simple with only five exercises.  I have been sick for weeks with a string of colds, but I’ve done two partial workouts and enjoyed them.  I look forward to doing it more regularly.

Recommended by someone on the new message board I’m on, plus two friends were reading it for their book club.  Some of the reviews made me think I wouldn’t like it, but perhaps because they set my expectations low, I found I did like it.

It’s told as a series of emails from one man to another, after he finds his old friend has included him and elements of his life in a book he wrote.

Picked it up, read a chapter, almost returned it.  Picked it up again in the car another day and finished it within the hour.  Entertaining, very similar to the first two books; amazingly so, considering they are different authors.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as the first of her books I read, but perhaps I was only reading that one because I had to for book club.

About half-way through I got more interested and finished it quickly.

Book 2 of the 39 Clues series. Amazingly (I might even say annoyingly) like the first one, considering they have two different authors. I wouldn’t bother with the series except I like the fact that each book is written by a different author, and lots of them are authors I like.

Book #1 of the series “The 39 Clues”.

Fast-paced, enjoyable.  The old and rich Grace Cahill dies and leaves an improbable will letting her relatives join a mystery clue-chase.  Her young favourites, Amy and Dan, join the chase and are competing against other relatives who are willing to set fires and detonate bombs to get ahead.  Nobody dies, but the violence is more than I would like.

There’s plenty of history, for example, about Benjamin Franklin, which as far as I know is accurate.  It makes sense and is needed in the narrative, in a way that will make kids remember it, I believe.

Rick Riordan wrote the “Percy Jackson” series, which my son enjoyed.  I like the fact that the books in this series will be written by different authors that I like; that will be enough to keep me reading through them.

I resisted reading this for a long time.  I said that it didn’t sound interesting, or relevant to me, or some such thing.  When I finally picked it up (from our local Little Free Library) and opened it, I recognized a sense of dread.  Turns out I’d been afraid to read it.

I needn’t have been.  It’s wrenching and awful, yes, but somehow funny and passionate at the same time.  Walls never asks for sympathy; she just tells it like it was.  It’s a fascinating portrayal of family life completely unlike what I experienced growing up.  She’s a wonderful storyteller, and I finished the book in a day or two.

A book like this shows me how everyone I meet has their own unimaginable story, and reminds me that we all have u“>nmet needs, some recent, some a lifetime old.

After finding and reading one Agatha Christie on Gutenberg.org, I put this on hold at the library, since it seemed to be Christie’s most famous work.  I enjoyed it, reading it in one sitting.  I didn’t manage to guess “whodunnit”, but I didn’t expect to, not being an expert in the genre.

Recommended.

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to.  As an experienced knitter on my way to become a Master Hand Knitter, I don’t ignore beginner’s books, but I don’t generally find anything new in them.  This one impressed me by not leaving out all the ‘extra’ stuff that a lot of books think beginners don’t need.  By focusing only on the knit stitch (not even purling!), she can include all kinds of little touches and details that make a knitted garment outstanding.  I mean things like how to start and end a row, or exactly how to make a buttonhole that will work well for a certain garment.

I actually found it because I was looking on Ravelry.com for a certain type of jacket I wanted to knit.  I found something pretty close, which turned out to be the Einstein Coat in this book.  I’m about a quarter of the way through an enjoyable garter stitch project, which I never thought I would do!  The plain, flat fabric of garter stitch turns out to be the best way to show off the crazy colours of variegated wool I bought at fire-sale prices from KnitPicks.

I recently bought myself a Kobo Vox, and I’ve read several books on it without having figured out how to track them.  I’m not even sure when I’m reading a “book”, to tell the truth, which makes things confusing.

For example; this turned out to be something that I’d read before, because it’s one of the four in Alcott’s “Behind a Mask”.  However, I read it again and enjoyed it.

At under 20,000 words I’m not sure if it’s long enough to be called a novella, but it was longer than a short story, I’d say.