Library Musings

I signed up to be an Early Reviewer at LibraryThing and will receive a free book for the first time this month (actually in 8 weeks or so, maybe less).

The pre-pub book I’ll be reviewing is When the Time Comes: Families with Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions. Based on the title, I think it is a very timely book since so many of us are currently in the position of wanting to help our elderly parents while helping them retain their pride and independence.

My short review will be on LibraryThing. I’ll post a longer review here, and link to it from LT. I hope you’ll come back to read it.

You can help me review the book if you’ll answer these questions:

1. If you’re caring for elderly parents is it your mother, your father or both?
2. Do they live independently in their own home; with you; or in a home for the elderly?
3. What struggles are you facing, and what solutions have worked for you?
4. Have you thought ahead to the time when you will be elderly and need to have care? What do you see happening to you at that time?

I ran across an excellent post on Sue Waters’ edublog today. Between the five tips she offers and the info available in the comments to the post, the post is really a good place to “enhance your bloggin’ skills”.

What Sue had to say makes me realize that it’s time for me to get back to reading other blogs as well as posting to my own here. I do get a lot of blogging ideas from the books I read and from the daily challenges and triumphs in my own library, but I need a little enrichment.

Anyway, getting back to what I was originally going to post about today. I just finished reading Replay by Ken Grimwood. If you’ve ever entertained the classic fantasy of going back in time to do your life over again knowing what you do now, this will be an excellent choice to read. I loved the overall arc of the storyline, and certain characters became very near and dear to me.

I had a few criticisms but they’re very minor: The epilogue is written as if the author had no idea of what the book he just wrote was really about. And there were some scenes of sex and drugs that bothered me, although I can see where they were necessary to the storyline.

Overall though, this is a wonderful book. One of the very best I’ve read in a while. It’s available at Amazon, of course. Amazon lists some other books by Grimwood, but evidently they do not measure up to Replay.

So…can you tell me:

1. Have you read Replay, and what did you like and/or dislike about it?

2. Did you visit Sue Waters’ blog? Any comments you want to post here about that? Did you comment there?

3. What are your three favorite library blogs? I’d like to know that the ones I start reading are some of the best!

Thanks for reading–this is day 5 of my post-something-everyday challenge.

Absolutely True Diary is a book about challenges, changes, and choices. The central character is Arnold “Junior” Spirit, a Spokane Indian who chooses to change schools from the Indian school on the reservation to the white school in the nearby town. This one change sets in motion a cascade of events that challenge Arnold to move from a comfortable (if awkward) conventional way of thinking to a level of postconventional thinking that is almost painful to read about. This book will best be recommended to a more mature YA who has developed the ability to think in the abstract. The plot of the novel is realistic in one sense, but absurd in another–Arnold’s inner nature seems to develop in a natural way, but the brief time-frame of the plot is not a realistic time span for the changes and growth that occur. Because of this conflict, some of Arnold’s achievements seem unreal, or at the very least, miraculous. The physical changes that adolescent boys must cope with are addressed but in an awkward fashion (which may well seem very appropriate to a teenage boy). The strongest feature of the book is its realistic portrayal of emotions–how they are expressed both appropriately and inappropriately when tragedy occurs and at other times of high emotion. There are some plot points that are dropped into Absolutely True Diary and then forgotten, particularly in the second third of the book. These are distracting enough that they could keep a reader from finishing the book. This is unfortunate since the book concludes on a note that is both realistic and hopeful, and that reflects how Arnold’s perception of the people nearest to him has changed–and how much those same people actually have (or have not) changed. Ellen Forney’s rendering of Arnold’s cartoons in this book is magnificent and adds greatly to the quality of the book. In summary, I think that boys will find this book most appealing, and that the ideal target reader would be a boy who reads on an advanced level but feels like an outsider at school.

I’m having a great time reading and reviewing books for my YALSA class with Teri Lesesne. I’m focusing on books for guys since I’ve found they’re my toughest customers.

The most recent book I’ve read is Firestorm by David Klass. (It’s the first book in The Caretake Trilogy.)

I loved this book. Stayed up all evening to read it from front to back, in fact. The action never stops, and that is why I think this one will be especially appealing to guys. Although the book has a message about ecological concerns, that message never gets in the way of the full-speed throttle of the storyline. Main character, Jack, moves quickly from a typical high school life with football success and a girlfriend into a new and baffling world where he never knows who he can trust or who will betray him. A mangy mutt with telepathic powers and an overblown sense of self-esteem leads him to a locked barn where he is beaten severely and repeatedly by a masked Ninja warrior. But, through his severe trials, Jack becomes the man he needs to be to accomplish his first mission: find Firestorm and set events in motion that will save the world from the destructive path set by ignorant and uncaring humans.

Guys will love the idea of being tested and hammered out into a stronger, faster, better warrior. The small doses of literary quotes and vocabulary building words won’t hurt them a bit either–the action fits the words so that they are melded seamless into the narrative of the book.

My only “complaint” about this book is that the ending is not quite the “firestorm” that I expected, although it is certainly spectacular. I’ll be very interested to see how the storyline continues in the remaining volumes of the trilogy.

I’d give this one five stars for your guys. You can sell it as a fantasy novel or as a novel that takes “boot camp” to the extreme.