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.

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.

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

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.

It's Time to Vote!

Here are the choices for book club in March. Voting Closes on January 19th.

A Town Like Alice: ...tells the story of Jean Paget; as a prisoner of war in Malaya during World War II and then her return to Malaya after the war where she discovers something that leads her on the search for romance and to a small outback community in Australia where she sets out to turn it into 'a town like Alice'.

Angela's Ashes: Recounting scenes from his childhood in New York City and Limerick, Ireland, McCourt paints a brutal yet poignant picture of his early days when there was rarely enough food on the table, and boots and coats were a luxury. The author remembers his wayward yet adoring father who was forever drinking what little money the family had. He recounts the painful loss of his siblings to avoidable sickness and hunger, a proud mother reduced to begging for charity, and the stench of the sewage-strewn streets that ran outside the front door. As McCourt approaches adolescence, he discovers the shame of poverty and the beauty of Shakespeare, the mystery of sex and the unforgiving power of the Irish Catholic Church.

The Scarlett Letter: The novel is set in a village in Puritan New England. The main character is Hester Prynne, a young woman who has borne an illegitimate child. Hester believes herself a widow, but her husband, Roger Chillingworth, returns to New England very much alive and conceals his identity. He finds his wife forced to wear the scarlet letter A on her dress as punishment for her adultery. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's former lover. When he learns that the father of Hester's child is Arthur Dimmesdale, a saintly young minister who is the leader of those exhorting her to name the child's father, Chillingworth proceeds to torment the guilt-stricken young man.

The Ladies Auxiliary: When free-spirited Batsheva moves into the close-knit Orthodox community of Memphis, Tennessee, the already precarious relationship between the Ladies Auxiliary and their teenage daughters is shaken to the core. In this extraordinary novel, Tova Mirvis takes us into the fascinating and insular world of the Memphis Orthodox Jews, one ripe with tradition and contradiction. Warm and wise, enchanting and funny, The Ladies Auxiliary brilliantly illuminates the timeless struggle between mothers and daughters, family and self, religious freedom and personal revelation, honoring the past and facing the future.

Readers Choice March!

In March we're going to try our first ever Readers Choice! We'd like you to submit book ideas, then we'll choose four and have everyone vote for the one they want to read using our handy poll here on the right side of the page! Since we're trying this for the first time, lets have you submit a classic novel you would be interested in reading. We'll define "classic" as a book that most people have heard of and some might have read in school/college. Leave your suggestions under comments! Thanks!

Upcoming Book Club Books

January's book is Goose Girl by Shannon Hale hosted by Nicole Baldwin (It has a five star rating on amazon!)

"She can whisper to horses and communicate with birds, but the crown princess Ani has a difficult time finding her place in the royal family and measuring up to her imperial mother. When she is shipped off to a neighboring kingdom as a bride, her scheming entourage mounts a bloody mutiny to replace her with a jealous lady-in-waiting, Selia, and to allow an inner circle of guards more power in the new land. Barely escaping with her life, Ani disguises herself as a goose girl and wanders on the royal estate. Does she have the pluck to reclaim her rightful place? Get ready for a fine adventure tale full of danger, suspense, surprising twists, and a satisfying conclusion. The engaging plot can certainly carry the tale, but Hale's likable, introspective heroine makes this also a book about courage and justice in the face of overwhelming odds. The richly rendered, medieval folkloric setting adds to the charm." -Anne O'Malley

Salt Lake County Library System

Lehi Library

February's book will be The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer hosted by Micki Lambert

"January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever." -amazon.com product description


Salt Lake County Library System

Lehi Library

If anyone has access to either of these books and wouldn't mind lending them out, please leave a comment