Sunday, January 25, 2009

Book Review by Mary Jenkins



Multiple Blessings: Surviving to Thriving with Twins and Sextuplets by Jon and Kate Gosselin

"I blinked hard and then stared at the bright screen positioned slightly to my right. There was no mistaking what I saw, yet I was in a state of denial. My doctor began his fateful count. One...aaah. Two...okay. Three...now I was scared. Four...I started sobbing hysterically. The chill of reality washed over me as I watched my husband, my best friend, cheerleader, and storehouse of strength, slowly drop to his knees at the count of five...but the count continued...I feel so incredibly blessed that God has chosen us for this journey. This life is absolutely not in a million years what Jon and I expected, but it is infinitely more than we ever hoped or dreamed in so many ways. While John and I can't imagine what the days ahead will hold for our family, I am often comforted by a quote by Abraham Lincoln. He said, 'The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.' I say, 'Thank God.'"

If you are a fan of the television show "Jon and Kate Plus 8" you will love this book. You may think you know it all but you have no idea. This is a personal, in depth look into the lives of the Gosselin family from their marriage all the way through to the sextuplet's third birthday. Though both parents help write the book it is written from Kate's point of view. It is quite touching to hear their story, how they did not ask to get pregnant with six babies but were absolutely against selective reduction. They felt that God had sent them these children and they were to care for them, all of them. Through her narrative you can hear the worry, stress, excitement, exhaustion, and love that all came to her as she carried and birthed her twins, and then her sextuplets. She gets quite a bit of flack in the online community for being rude to her husband and overbearing with her children. However I found that in this book she was simply stating that she is a mom, like any other mom. She has good days and bad days and she had to learn, and is still learning how to accept help from others graciously. She quotes the Bible quite a bit and really gives credit for her strength to God, concluding the book with six lessons God has taught her while on this journey. It is a wonderful and uplifting fun book that I would recommend to anyone.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Voting Results are In!

Well, you decided! And in March we'll read The Ladies Auxiliary by Tova Mirvis. I have to give a big thank you to the three people who voted and broke the four way tie! I was really worried for about a week there!



Don't forget book club this week at Nicole Baldwin's house, Thursday at 2pm. Kids and treats to share are welcome! We read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Goose Girl by Grimm Brothers

Our January book, The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale was based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. I thought it might be interesting in our discussion coming up to post a link to the original story! http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-14.html

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Best Book Lists

Here is one from Random House:
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

I am embarrassed to say there were several on this list that I hadn't ever heard of. Atleast on the "Board's List"

Another list I found that I made me feel a little better about my book reading was this:
(found at best100novels.com)

  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  11. Ulysses by James Joyce
  12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  14. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  15. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  16. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  18. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  19. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
  20. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  21. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  22. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
  23. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  24. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  25. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  26. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  27. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  28. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  29. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  30. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  31. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  32. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  33. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  34. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  35. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  36. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  37. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  38. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
  39. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  40. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  41. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  42. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  43. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  44. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  45. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  46. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  47. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  49. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
  50. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
  51. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  52. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  53. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  54. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  55. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  56. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  57. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  58. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  59. The Stand by Stephen King
  60. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
  61. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  62. Dune by Frank Herbert
  63. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  64. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  65. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  66. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  67. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
  68. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  69. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  70. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  71. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  72. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  73. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  74. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  75. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  76. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  77. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
  78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  79. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  80. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  81. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  82. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  83. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  84. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  85. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  86. Persuasion by Jane Austen
  87. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  88. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  89. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  90. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  91. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  92. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  93. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  94. It by Stephen King
  95. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
  96. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
  97. Emma by Jane Austen
  98. Light in August by William Faulkner
  99. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
  100. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Still a lot of books I'd like to get to. I think my count was 34.