I added a new page to the blog – the list of books I read in 2017 – here it is!
Books I Read in 2017
As I look at this list of books from 2017, it is notable that most of them are for book club! We made an intention in 2016 to meet monthly NO MATTER WHAT and so we have been more organized and planful. I have also read a few books for a work book club, listened to a few audiobooks, and picked up a few kindle books for quick reads.
Thanks to the publisher of this little book, I have either an ebook or an ARC paperback to GIVEAWAY to one randomly selected person! All you have to do is read my review posted HERE and comment on that post through the comment form. Please tell me at least ONE THING that would be on YOUR wishlist, if you were to win, say, $25,000,000.
A winner will be selected on Tuesday, April 1 (no foolin’!) and will be notified by email. Must be from USA or Canada to win. Please state your preference of ebook or paperback, and provide your phone number, if you are from Canada.
Questions can be answered here or there in the comments! Thanks for playing!
See below for the form to fill out to win an ARC paperback or ebook of this book!
In the midst of coursework, I took the time to read this book for a blog tour. I loved the premise (who doesn’t dream of winning the lottery?) and it is a mere 176 pages, so it was a quick read. I read it with a highlighter in my hand (a little bit of the student coming through?) because some of the sentences and passages called out to be reread and read aloud. Wow. I loved the language.
Jocelyne is a 47 year old woman who married a man named Jocelyn (“One chance in millions. And it happened to me.”) Jo and Jo have two children, they both work hard and have what they need but little more. They were in that place in their marriage where they were happy, content. Their children were raised, they were comfortable being together, and their dreams were small. He worked for Haagen Daz and she owned her own fabric store (haberdashery) and started a blog. He dreamed of a big screen TV and a fancy car. She dreams of being happy and having her father with a failing memory well-cared for.
She wins a large sum of money (18,000,000 Euros) and doesn’t tell anyone. She hides the money in a shoe and then creates lists – lists of things she needs, lists of things she want – and she worries about how the money will change her life. And change her life, it does.
“Being rich means seeing all that’s ugly and having the arrogance to think you can change things. All you have to do is pay for it.”
I really enjoyed this book. I loved the care that the translator took with the language – I loved the writing, period! The chapters were short, but for example, one chapter was infused with “I dreamed…” sentences. Another is full of “I am happy with Jo” sentences. I love that. I love that the things on our “need” lists are called our “daily little dreams” that keep us going. There was so much of the language of the book that really was beautiful. It was spare but meaningful. But the book does have a surprising twist which packs a powerful punch, so it is not without plot.
There is much I could highlight about this book in this blog, as is shown by the highlights in my book! Whoever borrows the book from me will have to contend with the orange highlights throughout. But as the book uses few words to make its point, so will I.
This book would lend itself to great discussion and would be a great book club book. Who doesn’t like to dream of winning the lottery? Who also doesn’t want to dream about how money would change their life? And it sounds like it’s going to be made into a movie! French or American, I’ll see it!
Good stuff. And this good stuff can be yours! I’m hosting a GIVEAWAY! Tomorrow I’ll give the details on how you could win an ebook or Advanced Readers Copy paperback of this book of your very own (you won’t have to see my highlights!). Stay tuned!
Thanks Emma for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour! More info can be found by clicking here:
Fill out this form to be entered in random drawing for a book of your own!
SYNOPSIS
A cathartic, charmingly tender, assuredly irresistible novel, MY WISH LIST (Penguin; ISBN: 9780143124658; On-sale: March 25, 2014: $15.00) imagines one answer to the question: If you won the lottery, would you trade your life for the life of your dreams? With sales of more than half a million copies in France alone, rights sold in twenty-five countries, and a major motion picture in development, this slim yet spirited tale has sewn up the interest of the literary world.
Jocelyne Guerbette is a forty-seven year old who runs a modest fabric shop in a nondescript provincial French town. Her husband—instead of dreaming of her—wants nothing more in life than a flat-screen TV and the complete James Bond DVD box set. And to Jocelyne’s two grown-up children, who live far from home, she’s become nothing but an obligatory phone call. Perpetually wondering what has happened to all the dreams she had when she was younger, Jocelyne finally comes to terms with the series of ordinary defeats and small lies that seem to make up her life.
But then Jocelyne wins the lottery: $25,500,000! And suddenly she finds the world at her fingertips. But before cashing the check, before telling a soul, she starts making a list of all the things she could do with the money. While evaluating the small pleasures in life—her friendship with the twins who manage the hairdresser next door, her holidays away, her sewing blog that’s gaining popularity—she begins to think that the everyday ordinary may not be so bad. Does she really want her life to change?
MY WISH LIST is an essential reminder of the often-overlooked joys of everyday life and a celebration of the daily rituals, serendipities, and small acts of love that make life quietly wonderful [provided by the publisher]
“A runaway bestseller that looks set to follow the success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.” — Elle (France)
“Delacourt has hit the jackpot… [He has a] knack for finding exactly the right words and for evoking feeling” — Le Nouvel Observateur
“Delacourt has a keen eye for everyday life and for the extraordinary challenges that ordinary people face” — Le Parisien
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grégoire Delacourt was born in Valenciennes, France, in 1960. His first novel, L’Écrivain de la Famille, was published in 2011 and won five literary prizes. MY WISH LISThas been a runaway number-one bestseller in France; publication rights have been sold in more than twenty-five countries. Delacourt lives in Paris, where he runs an advertising agency with his wife.
Tonight Sarah and I mall walked and did a little planning of “what’s next.” She’s reading “True Grit” and then going to see the movie. She’s enjoying the book, so that will be on my TBR list. She’s also working on “The Magicians.” Then we’re going to read “The One,” and “Plain Truth.” I’m gonna jump into “The Summer We Read Gatsby” and am listening to “Every Last One.” Then I’ll read “Plain Truth.” Oh, it’s so fun to plan and dream about all the books we will read!
This morning I finished “The Position” by Meg Wolitzer. It was ok. Don’t know what else to say about it. It’s about a couple who write a sex book in the 70s and how it affects their four children. Then (as 10-17 year olds) and now (as adults). It also is about the relationship of the couple and how it changed. I’m not gonna recommend it to anyone, but I have a copy if anyone is interested! 🙂
Book club tonight was great, as always. But I hate when weeks pass between finishing a book and book club! And I didn’t get around to skimming or looking for discussion questions. I get fuzzy on the details! Merrit? Who is that? Phillip? Are you sure? No, it’s Patrick – nubby sweater guy! Ah… thank goodness we all know each other well enough that we can laugh at ourselves and not worry about impressing each other. And of course, the food was yummy. Nancy hosted and thought since Helen frequented a taco place we’d have tacos. Good call. Lovely margarita the perfect thing after a busy whirlwind day.
Thursday night will be Walkie Talkie night… I think we’re talking about Sarah’s Key? The Virgin of Small Plains? Maybe The Magicians? I’m on disc 10 out of 14… will not quite finish by Thursday I think. MUST GET ANOTHER AUDIO BOOK RESERVED! Don’t want to listen to something stupid out of desperation.
I thought of a bunch more books to add to Sarah’s list. But I didn’t write them down so now I’ll have to go back to find them. I joined a Goodreads group and I’m getting idea after idea! Yikes! So …
Here is a list that Sarah compiled for possible book club books. She owns most of them or wants to read them. Our plan for the next few weeks is:
1) Walk and discuss “Sarah’s Key” and “The Magicians” (by Lev Grossman)
2) “The Virgin of Small Plains” by Nancy Pickard and that book that Jess loaned Sarah and I reserved at the library OR Meg Wolitzer’s book OR “The House on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”
And then we’ll figure out the order of the below…
“The Art of Racing in the Rain”
“The Glad of Small Things” (A.Roy)
“The Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (D. Eggers) “The Magicians” (Lev Grossman)
“Half Broke Horses” (J. Walls)
“A Reliable Wife” (R. Goolrick)
“Lark and Termite” (Jayne Ann Phillips)
“The Poisonwood Bible” (Barbara Kingsolver)
“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” (D. Wroblewski)
“The Unbearable Lightness of Scones” (Alexander McCall Smith)
“Plain Truth” (Jodi Picoult)
“The Hummingbird’s Daughter” (Lus Alberto Urrea)
“White Tiger” (A. Adiga) “The Virgin of Small Plains” (N. Pickard)
“The Little Giants of Aberdeen County”
“The Women” (T.C. Boyle)
“The Inheritance of Loss” (Kiran Desai)
“Brooklyn” (C. Toibin)
“Prayers for Sale” (Sandra Dallas)
“Home Safe” (Elizabeth Berg)
“Back when We Were Grown Ups” (Anne Tyler)
“The Book Thief” (Zubak)
“House Rules” (Jodi Picoult)
“A Softer Place to Land”
“The Wives of Henry Oades”
“Hunger Games” (Series)
“Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”
“The Red Leather Diary”
“The Latehomecomer”
” The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”
Others on my TBR list include:
“What is the What” (Eggers)
“The Center of Everything” (Moriarty)
the one about “Major Pettrigrew”
the one about “Ceecee Honeycut”
and I’ll edit and add more later… It’s late!
Off to read!
All right, book readers! Are we falling apart? 🙂 We’ll have to get a time on our schedule to get together and get a few books lined up to read. I had planned to read all the Harry Potter books again, but since I don’t have #1 (I thought I did, but it’s #2!) I doubt that will happen within the next six weeks. We’ll see. Right now I’m enjoying “Going in Circles” about a woman who joins a roller derby league, and then I’m going to read “Blessings” by Anna Quindlan for my book club at work. I have one copy left from the Book Club in a Bag, so we could read that and discuss that as well! Just let me know…
Sarah was talking about getting a Nook or Kindle… did that happen?
According to the Office for Intellectual Freedom, at least 46 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the target of ban attempts.
The titles not in bold may have been banned or challenged, but we have not received any reports on them. If you have information about the banning or challenging of these titles, please contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom.
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell 10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell 18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne 23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving 38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster 40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce 45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum 48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin 51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster 53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger 55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison 57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf 64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles 68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs 74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett 80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James 88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald 97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
I have two new books on my bedside table: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Best Friends Forever”! I’m ready to dive into a story! The last THREE books I’ve read were memoirs! Crazy… Ann Bancroft, Jeannette Walls, and the Girls from Ames. Good times, but I’m ready.
I did find myself in tears while reading The Girls over the weekend. Loss always gets me.
But now I’d better head off to read. I have book club Thursday night and I”M NOT DONE YET! Close. And the Walkie Talkies didn’t meet tonight or last Monday so I’m really lax!
Walkie Talkie Book Club 