Friday Fancies

First off, thank you to everyone who entered or commented on my giveaway for Me Before You. In the interest of being both random and festive in picking the winner, I put slips of paper with each name into a stocking, closed my eyes, and picked:

Congratulations, Some Day is Right Now!

Email me your address at: miss(dot)bibliophile(dot)blog(at)gmail(dot)com and I'll get your copy out to you shortly.

In other news:

Tiny Christmas books that contain intricate works of art.

An Etsy artist who puts a unique spin on the ubiquitous antlers-as-wall-art.

Hot rollers de-mystified.

And this may be old news to anyone in the UK, but did you know you can go ice skating at the Tower of London? The especially caught my eye since the Tower is the setting of the book I'm currently reading (more on that on the other side of Christmas).

Last but not least, I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday. I really appreciate everyone who takes time to stop by this little blog of mine and hope that however you spend the holiday, it's your own perfect combination of family, friends, good food, festive music, and maybe a book or two!

Old School Cookies

I had a holiday "aha" moment last week when I saw this post and realized that vintage Christmas cookie books from the 1970s-1980s may be a more widespread phenomenon than I thought, going  beyond my own family's bookshelf. All of my favorite Christmas cookie recipes come from one beat up, mid-eighties era cookbook, the likes of which I would never give a second look to if I saw it in a bookstore today.

It's falling apart, filled with stains, and its production value is a far cry from some of the eye candy cookbooks that I've come to love, but its recipes yield the best cookies. So far this week I've make big batches of two varieties: Chocolate Cherry Chips and Cream Cheese Gems. This year I've been really diligent about scooping out tiny balls of dough to achieve paper thin cookies that have a slightly chewy quality that I love and practically melt in your mouth. They've given rise to a slight family debate, as my mom now says she prefers the thicker, chunkier cookies she used to make when she baked these recipes. I get the last word, though, by resorting to the argument, "well, if you want thicker cookies, you can bake a batch yourself". (All in good fun, of course.) Where do you stand on the thin vs. thick cookie debate?

(P.S. - Tomorrow I'll choose and announce the winner of my very first giveaway. There's still a little time to enter, if you'd like.)

A Streak

I'm fresh off of finishing two books in a row that both failed to live up to my expectations for them.

 First was In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, the nonfiction account of the American ambassador to Germany in 1933, during Hitler's rise to power. Like in his earlier acclaimed book The Devil in the White City, Larson focuses this story around two principle figures, Ambassador Willam Dodd, a Chicago academic who was something like Roosevelt's fifth choice for the post, and his twenty-something daughter Martha, who accompanies her father to Germany on the heels of her divorce. Once they are settled in Berlin, the Dodd family becomes reluctant witnesses to the increasing power of the Nazis. As the book chronicles Dodd's official duties and Martha's active social life, it emphasizes the complicated grey area that marked much of the American perception of Hitler in those early days. Although the Dodd family is disturbed by various acts of violence against foreigners and mistreatment of German Jews, they still count certain Nazi party members as friends and allies, and tend to believe Hitler's assurances to the outside world. Their hopeful, or some might say gullible, attitudes erode as the book progresses and the writing on the wall becomes more legible.

Although this is certainly a worthy and interesting story, it just didn't hold me in its grip in the same way that The Devil in the White City did, perhaps because the ultimate outcome of the story is already common historical knowledge. The individual episodes portrayed in the book are heavily focused around diplomatic meetings, events, and government correspondence, which naturally make the story lean a little more toward the dry end of the spectrum. There were a couple of interesting details that stood out to me, like appearances by famous writers like Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe in Martha's circle of friends and the way that Roosevelt comes off as much more of a waffling politico than he's typically portrayed as being. In spite of these highlights, I found that I had to push myself to make it through to the end of this book.

The second disappointment was The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty, which was widely raved about when it came out this past summer. It's a fictional telling of movie star Louise Brooks's first trip to New York City. At he behest of her parents, Louise, who is headstrong and dangerously wise beyond her years, travels in the company of a chaperone, Cora Carlisle, a Kansas wife and mother of grown children who as a secret reason of her own for wanting to visit New York.

The first chapter or so started out really strong, making me think I was in for a treat. The story is really more Cora's than Louise's, and the way Cora is characterized at the beginning made her seem like a complex and likable character. There's one fantastic passage early on where Cora listens to a neighbor extol the "good works" the Ku Klux Klan is doing. Cora, while internally revolted, knows that she must be careful not to be too vocal in expressing her dissent. Instead, she targets her neighbor's weakness--a desire for wealth and prestige. Trading on the fact that she is the wealthier of the two, Cora implies that she is staying away from Klan activities because they are "common" and instantly see her neighbor's opinion change. It was such an interesting passage in that it showed Cora as someone who was capable of using cunning tactics in pursuit of good. I had hoped to see more of this complexity as the story progressed, but unfortunately, it didn't make as strong an appearance as it did in that first scene. Instead, the emphasis turned to Cora's "prudish" morals in the face of Louise's outrageous behavior,  Which were played up to the point of irritation. I found myself siding with Louise as they butted heads and came to view her as the more interesting character. I would have preferred to have seen more time devoted to getting inside Louise's head instead of just relegating her to a rebellious thorn in Cora's side.

Not to belabor my negative reaction here, but I really felt like this was a book where the more I read it, the more I disliked it. I'll admit that a lot of that may have had to do with the particular mood I was in at the time. As increasingly dramatic revolutions were made, I found myself craving more quiet, slice-of-life kind of story. I will give The Chaperone points for the ease of Moriarty's prose. It made for a quick read, which was a bit of salvation when I got to the later chapters of a book that went on for long beyond the point at which the story could have ended.

I can't wholeheartedly recommend either of these (unless you're an avid history buff--then In the Garden of Beasts might be worth a try). A book that I can recommend, however, is the one you can win in my giveaway. You still have until Thursday to enter!

Have you had any big reading disappointments lately?

Friday Fancies

This is the third Christmas that I've lived in my apartment and I've finally reached the point where I've perfectly honed my holiday decorations: wreath on the mirror, lights around the windows, tabletop tree in place. But my favorite decoration is actually the lit garland I put on my mantle (or faux mantle, I should say, since it's a ledge against a brick wall with no fireplace in sight). Each year I love finding new little treasures, usually silver and sparkly, to tuck into it. One of my new additions this year is a miniature domed cake stand that I filled with mirrored ornaments.

Now for some links from the week. Surprisingly, most are non-holiday related:

Houses of Fiction is an art project that showcases dual versions of famous literary rooms. One is a literal representation of the room as described in the story, the other is a more metaphorical interpretation of the madness experienced by the fictional character who inhabits the room.

A thought provoking post about commenting on blogs.

Fun photos using record covers.

Would you wear the entire text of a classic novel?

And to end on a somewhat seasonal note, who doesn't love a good holiday book gift guide? This one is for you if cookbooks and coffee table books are your thing.

Me Before You (and a Giveaway!)

I recently accepted an offer from Penguin to receive a review copy of Me Before You, the new novel by Jojo Moyes. Apparently quite successful in the U.K., it's being released here in the U.S. at the end of the month. Billed as an unexpected love story between an ordinary girl and her wealthy, moody, wheelchair-bound boss, it sounded like a novel that would have a Beauty and the Beast dynamic, or maybe even some hints of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Since that would be right up my alley, I jumped at the chance to preview the book.

After reaching the final pages, possibly with slightly puffy eyes, I can safely say that Me Before You was not at all the novel that I was expecting. It's a true tearjerker without being a "downer", which, to my mind, most often connotes characters who are bleak, depressing, or unlikeable. That's not at all the case in Me Before You, with its vividly drawn, immensely sympathetic characters who just happen to face a tragic fate. This is the kind of book that offers a good cry, yet also delves into some serious and potentially controversial issues.

As the novel opens, twenty-something Louisa "Lou" Clark is jobless and living a very small, very ordinary life in the town where she grew up and still lives with her family. As a last resort to find work, she takes a job as a paid companion/ caregiver to Will Traynor, a thirty-something quadriplegic. Will had lived a very flashy, high-powered life until a sudden traffic accident left him in a wheelchair, practically homebound, and very bitter. Although initially resistant to and critical of Lou, Will slowly thaws to her personality. And while she cheers him up and takes him out of his own head, he in turn broadens her horizons, introducing Lou to new books and music and encouraging her to think about her future more that she's wont to do. Just as their friendship starts to take off, and just as we get hints of deeper romantic feelings between them, Lou discovers that Will has plans to end his own life, and has even gotten his parents to agree to take him to an assisted suicide center in Switzerland at the end of a six month waiting period. Lou's mission then becomes to do everything she can to show Will that he can still experience a life worth living. As the novel starts to approach its conclusion, we're left in suspense, wondering, along with Lou herself, if her efforts will be enough to change Will's mind.

The only qualm that I can point to in the entire novel is a small piece of Lou's characterization. Her narrow horizons at the beginning of the novel manifest themselves through a limited knowledge of many cultural and life experiences, which makes sense, but also through a limited knowledge of how to use a computer. During a scene in which Lou visits the local library to research and plan an outing for Will, she actually seems to be using a computer for the very first time. For a novel set in the mid-2000's, I just didn't think this was plausible, no matter how small of a place one comes from. That's really just a small, nit-picky complaint, though, in the face of what's an overall emotional, engrossing novel.

(Just for fun, I'm already casting the film adaptation in my head. The role of Lou is still up for grabs, but I have Johnny Lee Miller in mind for Will and, in an unexpectedly dramatic turn, Jemaine Clement as Will's New Zealand born healthcare aide.)

And last, but not least, since the nice people at Penguin also sent me a second galley copy of Me Before You, I've decided to spread a little holiday cheer and try my first ever blog giveaway! If you'd like to win a copy for yourself (and if you're a U.S. resident), just leave a comment below by 11:59pm EST on Thursday, December 20th. I'll randomly choose and announce a winner next Friday, December 21st.