Books

36. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
37. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
38. Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
A big run of Barbara Kingsolver books! I love her writing, and I love all these books. They were re-reads for me. The Poisonwood Bible is my favorite. It is just an amazing book. It is one of those books for which a simple description of what it is about, doesn't really capture what it is 'about', you know? Prodigal Summer is the same way and is my second favorite of Kingsolver's books. Pigs in Heaven is the final book in a a series, and I love the whole series and the characters, but they seem lighter to me in a way, and don't knock me on my ass like the first two books.

Anyway, Barbara Kingsolver is great and you should read all her books all the time.

39. Local Girls by Alice Hoffman
So I'm basically re-reading books I love, and then going through our pile of books to give away and reading some of those. This one is to give away and still is, because I didn't really like it. This is kind of a collection of short stories, all dealing with a girl growing up on Long Island. Her parents get divorced, her mom gets sick, her brother becomes a drug addict. At first I thought it would be ok, but I found the reading of a bunch of disconnected stories that moved chronologically through one character's life kind of disconcerting. The stories were not really connected, in that each could stand alone, but they also changed person which was hard for me to adjust to. Anyway, this was an ok book, but not my favorite.

40. Notes From a Big Country by Bill Bryson
This is a book it may be hard for Americans to get, as it did not pop up from my Librarything search in US Amazon/libraries. I think R bought it in Heathrow years ago. Anyway, it is a collection of columns Bryson wrote for an English paper. He lived in England for twenty years, basically his whole adult life, and then moved back to the US with his family. In these columns he writes humorously about American life, and how it has changed since he was growing up in Des Moines. Parts of it are really amusing but parts of it were kind of stupid, and it is a little dated in some ways with discussions of technology, but it was overall a pretty amusing book. Bryson has much better books, though, so I would stick to those.