Catching Up

So, although I didn't finish Irish Crystal on Christmas Eve, I have now finished it. As usual, it was a very enjoyable book - I have the next book in the series (Irish Linen) currently checked out from the library and would have suggested my Mom read it a couple days ago when she was looking for something to read, except for the fact that there are so many books that come before it.

After reading that I quickly read a Young Adult book I'd also gotten from the library - Gayle Forman's If I Stay. This story was pretty well written - at least most of the characters felt like real people. The story was quite sad, and for about the last half of the book I was in tears, but still, that in no way makes it a bad book/story. It's been awhile - over a week now- since I read this so I don't remember all of my thoughts. Mia has a very difficult decision to make and she works her way through it quite well, all things considered.

Having finished that, I realized that I only had two weeks to read the books for both of my book clubs - so I slightly panicked and rushed to read those next.

The St. Francis book club meets first (a week from today) so I read Crow Lake by Mary Lawson first. I quite enjoyed this book as well, even if it was also quite sad. Living in a snowy, wintry climate, there was much that connected to my own experience - although I didn't actually grow up in a farming community or with a one-room school. I really like the reading shelf added to the spinning wheel from the beginning of the book. This was an exploration of how tragedy (in various forms) can affect the relationships within one family and the surrounding community as well.

I finished that book faster than anticipated, but was okay with that as it meant I could move on to the Lemmings book club book. This is our next book and a movie meeting, so we are reading Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey and watching O Brother Where Art Thou. I'd already read a translation of it, but I'm not sure which one I read. I also somewhat remember it taking awhile to reading, although I did much prefer it to The Iliad. This led me to worry a bit that I wouldn't be able to finish it in time - however, again I was wrong. Having started it a day or two earlier, I spent much of New Year's day plowing through it (with a bit of a nap in the middle). By staying up until 12:30 I was able to finish it - which meant I could leave it at the house I was going to be at the week of the book club - I'm all for hauling fewer things back and forth if possible. I did enjoy the story as much as I remembered enjoying it before. I was confused a bit at first because some of the story wasn't told in the order I remembered it being told, but I'm sure that's from my memory's delay, as well as a blend with the Wishbone episode version of it. Having finished the story so quickly, so to speak, I did also read the Introduction (by Seamus Heaney (I think)) as well as Robert Fitzgerald's ending commentary - I've momentarily forgotten what he called it. I loved all of Seamus Heaney's poetic comparisons (even if they don't surprise me too much as he and Homer are/were poets), but my absolute favorite was his alteration of a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem. I can't recall off hand if Heaney was refering to Homer or The Odyssey, but he said he/it "is (was?) charged with the grandeur of Greek."

Having finished that I moved on to The Haunting of America: From the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini by William J. Birnes and Joel Martin. So far I'm enjoying this book, although it's not always what I was expecting, and much of it is actually things I'd already read about, at least a bit, in some of the Time Life (R) Mysteries of the World books. That mostly just makes it more fun as I can connect more things together, although I might find parts of the book a bit more fascinating if I hadn't heard much about them. There aren't as many ghost stories per se as I expected - more it's a biography of some famous "spirit rappers" or "spiritualists" or mediums and such. There's more about seances than about hauntings. However, I was amused that both hauntings that formed the basis/background for Barbara Michaels' book Other Worlds were included at least briefly in this one.