That Just Happened!

Well, folks, here it is.  My wrap up of 2010 challenges and status updates.

I started off the year with the best of intentions, but I just couldn’t keep up with the 2010 Social Justice Challenge. 

I think I got through to March and then I just abandoned it.  I really wasn’t able to give it the time it deserved, but I love the premise for this challenge and I like that there was more to it than reading.  I read about Religious Freedom, Water, and Domestic Violence and Abuse.  Pretty heavy topics, if I do say so myself.

I had much better luck with the 2010 Young Adult Reading Challenge.  I had committed to reading at least 12 YA books and I read more, but I only counted 12.

 I would say the highlight to this was the introduction to the Hunger Games Trilogy.  What a great series! 

The TwentyTen Challenge was pretty cool because it forced me to read a wider range of books.  I think my favourite category was the Bad Blogger, in which I picked up recommendations from Jenners and Alyce.  I managed to complete this challenge with no problems at all.

I also kicked butt at the 2010 Support Your Local Library Challenge.  Especially because for most of this year I didn’t really have a library.  They closed my branch for construction and any book you wanted to borrow you had to put it on hold and they would call you when it was in.  Despite waiting 6 months for some titles I managed to go well over the 50 book pledge, but stopped counting at 53. 

For the last month and leading into 2011 my library is completely closed, so all the books I had on hold were going to be sent to another branch.  However, they have not called me once to tell me a book is in, so I think this year I will have to buy/borrow more books than I wanted to.  Especially since the next closest branch has no parking.  What library has no parking?  Isn’t that why I moved to the suburbs?  To drive my car around and be able to park it in ample lots that used to be green spaces?  Isn’t that my right?!

Anyway…

As always I am still working my way through the Governor General Award Winners for Fiction.  I managed to get quite a few read this year, but here’s the thing.  Some of them are boooring.  Some of them are no longer in print and very hard/impossible to find.  I’m going to keep plugging away at this in the next year.

Santa was really good to me this year and brought me a classic literature library with 52 books!!!!   I cried when I saw them.  I literally cried with happiness.  Some of them I have read and some of them I already have copies of, so I am probably going to be giving away the duplicates that I have.  Look forward to My First Giveaway!  in 2011 (and tell your friends).

I also wanted to briefly comment on the lack of challenges being hosted this year.  Is it me, or is there a little bit of a lull?  Are we all challenged out?  Maybe we just want to read whatever we feel like?  Maybe I’m missing something? 

I want to thank all of you for sticking it out through this year.  I can’t believe that after posting “The Grossest Story I will Ever publish on my Blog“  I didn’t lose a single reader.  That either means that most of the readers are my family, or  that you really like hearing about my vajayjay.  Weirdos. 

I hope that your New Years is filled with luck and cheer and you are able to spend time with loved ones. 

Yeah, That Just Happened!

Jakes, T.D.  The Memory Quilt: A Christmas Story for Our Times.  Atria Books (2009).

A perfect Christmas for Lela Edwards this year would include the presence of her husband, her three daughters, and her favorite granddaughter, Darcie. They would each be happy, healthy, and properly married. But life doesn’t always unfold in a perfect way, even for God-loving, churchgoing people like these. Lela’s husband of fifty years, Walter, has recently passed, and the daughters now live in towns and states far from the Chicago neighborhood where they were raised.

Darcie is traveling to Missouri City, Texas, to be with her mother, not to Chicago to be with her grandmother, whom she expects to come down hard on her for deciding to divorce her husband and the father of her unborn child. Lela is upset and annoyed with Darcie and herself for breaking her own time-honored tradition of making a quilt to celebrate each family wedding. The quilt is still in separate pieces, and apparently so is the marriage of Doug and Darcie.

The Christmas season is about celebrating the birth and meaning of Christ; about the hope and inspiration that the story we revisit each year offers. So, as the days of the season progress, Lela participates in a Bible study group that focuses on the Virgin Mary. This is the cold season in Chicago and rough weather, literally and figuratively, is ahead for Lela, her family, neighbors, and fellow church members, but in the Scriptures are messages and guidance. If they heed the lessons of the Virgin Mary, they will learn from their mistakes and misjudgments of each other and find favor with God.

Amazon.com

The thing I liked about this book is that it reminds me that Jesus is the Reason for the Season.  (I love that saying!)  Often we forget what is truly important at this time of year and we forget to reflect on why we started celebrating Christmas in the first place.  The story itself carries a good lesson and it’s not very preachy.  Through the main character Lela, we are reminded that charity and open-mindedness is something that we could use all year round, but it is especially relevant during the holidays.  The story is punctuated with passages from the Bible about Mary and the birth of Jesus.  I liked how when Lela reflected on those passages she asked questions, she thought about what it would have been like, instead of just passive acceptance.

The story itself was just ho-hum.  I think the messages were more powerful than the characters or the plot lines.   I found it a little difficult to get into the actual story and I felt that the characters had a lot going on in their heads, but what we read was only what was said.  The characters seemed shallow and it was difficult to figure out everyone’s motivation.  It was a good Christmas story in that it related a lot to Christmas, but if you took that away, it didn’t evoke as much feeling as it should have.  I give this one 3 French Hens.

Davies, Robertson.  The Manticore.  Penguin Canada (2005).  (Originally won in 1972).

Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels. Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic, THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where ‘the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished’.

Chapters.Indigo.ca

This was the second book in the trilogy.  I have read the first “Fifth Business” in high school, so I didn’t really remember too much of what happened.  This book follows the character David to Switzerland where he meets with a Jungian psychologist in an attempt to work through the death of his father (which he originally thought was murder and is told in the first book).  “The Manticore” is the sessions between David and his therapist as he explores the role his family played in his life.  It was pretty fascinating from a psychological perspective.  You never really get to see the therapeutic process when someone else goes through it and certainly not so condensed.  It was like he had taken all the high/critical points in therapy and fast-forwarded to the end.  The last part of the book does leave it open for a sequal, but you could read this book on its own.

I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in psychology/psychology practices, self-discovery through therapy, or who has read “Fifth Business”.