The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan – for the read-along.
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling – for the HP re-read.
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
Finished:Armada by Ernest Cline, Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee, and Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, all of which I’ll be reviewing sometime this week.
Total # of books for the year: 63. Since I finished Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy on Thursday, I’ve been striking out when it comes to audiobooks. Either the story doesn’t appeal to me, or the narration is horrible. I renewed A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole so I can give it a try, but for today I’m going to take a break and listen to music or maybe a couple of podcasts I’ve gotten behind on.
Top Commenters: My Top Commenter for this week was Shaina @Shaina Reads.
There was so much that the Boyfriend and I saw and did in New Orleans that I couldn’t condense it down to one post. So, I’m breaking up our four-day trip into two parts. Part 1 concerns our first night and day there, leaving our second day and last morning for Part 2.
Friday night:
Sign on the edge of Faubourg Marigny
We arrived at our hotel just off the French Quarter in the Faubourg Marigny in the early evening. At least, it was early for New Orleans. We were staying in a historic hotel, meaning everything was original, or replica antebellum-style furnishings and the interior hadn’t been renovated to fit modern tastes (with the exception of electricity and other important technology of course). The staircase railing was so old, it was held by strategically placed metal bracings to keep it up and safely useable.
A word of caution: If you’re planning on staying in a historic hotel, be prepared for some slightly less modern levels of cleanliness. The women who came in to clean the room mopped the carpet and picked up debris with an ancient roller-style vacuum. Walking around barefoot left my soles black with dirt. Needless to say, I started wearing my sandals around the room so I wouldn’t have to worry about tracking dirt into the sheets.
One of the buildings of the hotel, and a view of our private balcony.
The first thing we did after getting the car into the hotel’s tiny, cramped parking area ($30 a night to park, and that’s considered cheap) and getting our stuff up to our room, was to head to Café du Monde for some dinner sugary goodness. On the way, we came across a parasol shop, so of course I had to buy my inner goth a fancy black parasol.
By the time we got back from eating beignets, the long drive, and then the walk to the cafe and back caught up with us, and we crashed for the night. Or at least I did. The Boyfriend wasn’t so lucky.
View from the side of our balcony.
Another word of caution: The hotel happened to be across from a Blues bar, which didn’t shut down until around 3 or 4 am. I love Blues music, but the house band seemed only to know how to play a couple songs well, and the later it got, the worse they played. If you require quiet to sleep, don’t think that earplugs will do the trick, and don’t get a room facing the street.
Saturday:
We both got Rose Benedict.
Few places are open for business prior to 11 am, but the hotel desk clerk gave us a couple suggestions for a great breakfast. One was the Cafe Rose Nicaud, and the other was Cafe Envie. We chose to try out Cafe Rose Nicaud first.
After breakfast, we headed back to our room to rest a bit before we needed to head into the French Quarter to meet up for a cemetery tour. We left early since we weren’t sure where the place was, and then we waited and people watched. There were tourists everywhere, a jazz band playing in the street, street performers scattered around the corners, and homeless people with handmade signs asking for help. Forget about having a conversation while in the heart of the French Quarter. However, I did get several compliments about my parasol.
The sign on the building where Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s now a t-shirt shop.
Our tour guide was a few minutes late, and our meet up point was in one of the busiest parts of the French Quarter. The information about the tour failed to mention it was actually two hours long, and the hour it was supposed to be was only for once we arrived at St. Louis Cemetery.
Allison “Tootie” Montana Mardi Gras Indian statue on the edge of Congo Square.
Because of this lack of information, we had only brought a couple bottles of water with us. I don’t know what kind of arrangement the tour company has with the people selling water along the way to the cemetery, but we felt we were deliberately not told how long the tour would really be. Though we learned a lot about the French Quarter, we were so hot, tired, and irritable we only took a couple of photos.
We chose not to take photos in the cemetery because that whole portion of the tour felt disrespectful. Our tour guide seemed to be more interested in telling us about the superstitions concerning Marie Laveau and made a spectacle out of the whole experience. Also, I felt deeply sad for all the people buried there who hadn’t been able to afford to pay the Catholic Church for perpetual care or no longer had any family to care for their tombs. Many of them were crumbling into a pile of rubble, the name markers completely gone or damaged to the point that I couldn’t read the names or the dates. Many more had been vandalized. All I could think was how little respect for the dead do people have to let any of this happen?
After the tour, we stumbled our heat exhausted, sunburnt, and dehydrated selves to Acme Oyster House, but they had a ridiculously long line. I absolutely needed to sit down and drink lots of water, and I didn’t want to wait any longer to do so, so we went next door to the Bourbon House, which also had oysters. I personally think oysters, mussels, and clams are disgusting and akin to eating loogies, but the Boyfriend wanted to have oysters at least once while we were in New Orleans. There was plenty of other food on the menu, and I just wanted a place to sit more than anything else. I’m glad we chose to park our butts there because the French bread was fantastic, the shrimp po’boy was delicious, and the crème brûlée was marvelous. Had it not been a nicer establishment, I would have licked the shallow bowl the crème brûlée came in.
(picture an empty bowl where a serving of crème brûlée used to be)
We made it back to the hotel around 6 pm, but we were so tired we were in bed by 8 pm, figuring we could head back out if we woke a few hours later. We didn’t, and you’ll find out what happened when we finally did get out of bed in Part 2.
Welcome to the 2nd weekly recap of The Joy Luck Club read-along! Below is the schedule. Each Saturday I’ll post a recap (with clearly marked spoilers for those who get a little behind). The final review of the book will be on Saturday, October 24th.
Oct. 4th – 10th: Chapters “Four Directions”, “Without the Wood”, and “Best Quality”
Oct. 11th – 17th: Chapters “Magpies” and “Waiting Between the Trees”
Oct. 18th – 23rd: Chapters “Double Face” and “A Pair of Tickets”
This week, we read two more character, rather than action, driven chapters, “The Red Candle” and “The Moon Lady” of part one. I’m still certain there isn’t going to be anything that isn’t essential, and in these chapters the author gave us more background and context. I marked quite a few pages that I felt really drove home the pain and suffering these women have endured. I asked myself again how does anyone survive what they have? How did any girl during this time grow up without being irrevocably damaged emotionally?
[Spoilers] Chinese society doesn’t seem to be friendly or supportive of women. I already knew that from an academic standpoint. I also understand that it’s a collectivist culture with an emphasis on selflessness and honor, and I don’t think those are bad qualities in themselves. However, reading the way it plays out through myths, folk tales, and even their religious beliefs is a bit unsettling. When I read the story of the Moon Lady, I couldn’t help but think of the story of Adam and Eve. The Moon Lady eats a peach her husband stashed away in a box, and for that she’s punished for all eternity by being trapped on the moon. The last line she says is, “For woman is yin…the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.” With a belief like that, it’s no wonder girls are brow beat into subservience and their value broken down to how well they restrain themselves from acting on their desires. I saw this same sort of reasoning in the previous chapter as Lindo Jong did everything she could to live up to her family’s wishes. At one point she says, “After a while, I hurt so much I didn’t feel any difference.” She then goes on to say that she was happiest when everyone else was happy. Another example is Ying-Ying St. Clair explaining that Amah gave up her child when her husband passed away so that she could be Ying-Ying’s nursemaid. I’m assuming that this was Amah’s best option, and that breaks my heart. [End Spoilers]
What do you think of the story so far? Comment away! Just be sure to mark clearly any spoilers 🙂
If you’d like to join in, the sign up is open until midnight!
The above ISBN is to the hardcover edition, but I listened to the audiobook I purchased.
Uprooted is the type of updated old world fairy tale that I love. If you stripped the story down to it’s bare bones, it could easily be the kind of story found in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. However, Naomi Novik adds the deep friendship of Agnieszka and Kasia and a touch of “Beauty and the Beast” style romance in such a way you would think she is herself a witch, and you’ve become spellbound. I’m not talking about the Disney version of a fairy tale, though. This is definitely an adult book.
Besides the friendship, I think what I love the most about this story is the Wood being the enemy. Perhaps because my all-time favorite book, The Hobbit, also includes a sinister forest, and there’s just something about the woods in general that is both inviting and slightly menacing at the same time. There is no “slightly” where the Wood is concerned, but it does lure people into its shade when it’s not grabbing and taking them, never to return.
I highly recommend getting the audiobook and bumping up the speed a bit (the narrator, Julia Emelin, talks too slowly IMO), unless you already know how to pronounce Slavic names or don’t care. I think the audiobook helped bring me further into the world of the story, but there were several people complaining about the narrator’s heavy accent on the Sword and Laser discussion forums on Goodreads. Regardless of the edition, if you love fairy tales, you’ll love Uprooted.
This check-in is for September 7th – 13th. This week was a recovery week from my trip to New Orleans. I did a lot more walking and driving than I’m used to, and it all took a toll on my knees and back. I was even too exhausted to make myself get up to do yoga.
10-Week Mindful Diet Plan for Healthy Eating? Nope. Instead, I finished up the various snacks that I bought during the trip, including a bottle of Swamp Pop pralines and cream soda. Now that all the yummy stuff has been devoured, the Boyfriend and I are both trying to eat a lot healthier.
If you’d like to add me as a friend on FitBit, you can find me HERE.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan – for the read-along.
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
The Portable Dorothy Parker
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling – for the HP re-read.
Armada by Ernest Cline
Finished:Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which I’ll be reviewing sometime this week, and Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti, which I won’t be reviewing. Though it was a fairly decent book on modern Feminism, much of its information is outdated.
If you’ve been reading my posts for the past couple of weeks, you already know that the Boyfriend and I took a long-weekend trip to New Orleans to celebrate our second anniversary. Both of us are huge fans of vampire stories, especially Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. While vampires weren’t the sole reason we chose to go to New Orleans, If you know anything about Louis and Lestat, you know they spent a lot of their time together in the city. The Boyfriend attempted to find a decent vampire tour, but the few offered seemed hoaky and cheap. So, we created our own, or rather, I searched through my copy of the Vampire Companion for all the places in New Orleans mentioned in the books.
I was not prepared for how large the French Quarter is, and the map in the Vampire Companion is deceptive. I’ll be writing more about that in my next post about New Orleans, but to put it simply, we never made it out of the French Quarter to see the Garden District or City Park. However, on our drive back home we stopped off at the Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, LA.
Now, this is not the actual plantation that Louis and Lestat live at in The Interview with the Vampire. Pointe du Lac is entirely fictional and based on the West Indies style Pitot House. However, Oak Alley was used, both inside and out, in the film adaptation for several scenes. It’s also one of the biggest and most popular antebellum plantations still in existence. The photo above is of the various souvenirs and such I got from the gift shop or as part of the tour, and the one below was taken from the front balcony of the house during the tour.
Side Note: Have you ever wished all the people would just go away so you could get the perfect shot? That’s why we didn’t drive out to the levee to take photos of the front.
While we were in the French Quarter, we spent a lot of time in and around Jackson Square, which is in front of St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest church in the United States. Unfortunately, we never made it inside the Cathedral due to their Labor Day weekend hours not being listed on the website. It was closed to the public when we had planned on visiting during our last day in New Orleans. We also visited St. Louis Cemetery, which is just outside the French Quarter. Due to a high rate of vandalism and grave robbery, no one is allowed into the cemetery without a tour guide and only during the day. We took one of the cemetery tours, but for reasons I’ll get into in a later post, we didn’t take any photos. For now I’ll just say that it was the most depressing part of our whole trip.
The last place we visited in the French Quarter is another building that Anne Rice used as a model for one of the many fictional places in her books. The Gallier House wasn’t built until the 19th century; however, Anne Rice’s description of the townhouse Louis, Lestat, and Claudia live in for 65 years on the 2nd floor is based on this historic building. The townhouse is returned to again and again throughout the Vampire Chronicles, and though it is open to the public, we didn’t know that or about the website when we were planning our trip. Side Note: for a city that relies so heavily on tourism, it’s difficult to find information about anything not having to do with hauntings or partying.
The Café du Monde also comes up on multiple occasions throughout the Vampire Chronicles, but I’m saving that for my future posts about the French Quarter.
Welcome to the 1st weekly recap of The Joy Luck Club read-along! We officially started Monday, September 7th and the last day will be Friday, the 23rd of October. Below is the schedule. Each Saturday I’ll post a recap (with clearly marked spoilers for those who get a little behind). The final review of the book will be on Saturday, October 24th.
Sep. 7th – 12th: Chapters “The Joy Luck Club” and “Scar”
Sep. 13th – 19th: Chapters “The Red Candle” and “The Moon Lady”
Sep. 20th – 26th” Chapters “Rules of the Game”, “The Voice from the Wall”, and “Half and Half”
Oct. 4th – 10th: Chapters “Four Directions”, “Without the Wood”, and “Best Quality”
Oct. 11th – 17th: Chapters “Magpies” and “Waiting Between the Trees”
Oct. 18th – 23rd: Chapters “Double Face” and “A Pair of Tickets”
Before we get into this week’s chapters, here’s a bit of trivia: the book is arranged similarly to a game of Mahjong. It has four parts that are each divided into four chapters. Also, there are four families in the book. Each chapter per part is from the perspective of either a mother or daughter from each family as if they’re taking their turn during a game of Mahjong.
Not a whole lot happened, action wise, in the first two chapters, “The Joy Luck Club” and “Scar” of part one. However, what did occur was essential to the story and emotionally devastating. I have a feeling there isn’t going to be anything that isn’t essential, but in these chapters the author gave us some background and context, and WOW! I had to put the book down after fourteen pages, so I could process everything I was feeling. How does anyone survive what Suyuan goes through in China? How does anyone grow up to be a well-adjusted adult after a childhood like An-mei’s?
[Spoilers] None of my prior knowledge of China’s history prepared me for how Amy Tan depicts what the Japanese did when they invaded. How can anyone not be affected by Suyuan’s response to her daughter’s question about the two babies after Suyuan says she lost everything during her escape? “Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.” I was cooking pasta while I was reading, and that line made me sit down on the kitchen floor. I don’t know how I feel about Jing-mei finding out after her mother’s death that those babies survived. Is it somehow worse that they grew up without their mother and possibly raised in the same way An-mei was with the belief that her mother didn’t love her enough to stay? One aspect of the mothers that I’m having difficulty with is the use of language to manipulate their daughters’ actions rather than to communicate their emotions or wishes for their daughters’ happiness. Is it any wonder that Jing-mei constantly felt at odds with Suyuan? Living with women whose words must be re-interpreted to get to the heart of what is really being said must be exhausting, especially when you add on the frequent switching from one language to another. [End Spoilers]
What do you think about the story so far? Comment away! Just be sure to mark clearly any spoilers 🙂
If you’d like to join in, sign up through the linky below with your blog, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. The sign up will close at the end of the 2nd week, Saturday, September 19th.
This month, those of us participating in the #ShelfLove No Book Buying Challenge are discussing the pros and cons of owning a significant number of books. For myself, I’ve only seen having a large personal library as positive, with one exception: moving. I’ve been packing and unpacking my belongings throughout my entire life, and I don’t even know the number of times I’ve moved. I’m uncomfortably familiar with the general workings of Uhaul rentals and storage units across the country and during one move I managed to double the weight of my poor Nissan. I’ve also hurt my back a countless number of times from overfilling boxes with my book collection.
You would think I would have learned by now and tossed the majority of my Smaug worthy hoard. Think again. Despite my efforts to pare down the number of books I own, my library has only expanded in size. Thanks to ebooks, and the No Book Buying Challenge, that’s no longer happening exponentially, but it’s still happening. I have bought with gift cards or received as gifts, more physical books than I’ve read this year. The books I have at my apartment are double stacked on the shelves, I have several more boxes in storage, and the Boyfriend and I are planning to move next year.
The boxes of books are the ones I hope always to own. The ones at home are mostly books I’ve never read; which has led me to think that perhaps there is another con to book hoarding. I’m not getting any younger and tomorrow is never a guarantee. Either I need to make peace with the idea of never reading many of those books, or I need to make a decision. Do I cull my collection (again) or develop the discipline to choose a book I own instead of a library book or one borrowed from the Boyfriend’s shelves? I think I’ll just throw my hands up in the air in frustration when I move again, just like I’ve done every move before *sigh*
8 Literary Places In Paris Every Book-Lover Must Visit – I recently got back from a long weekend in New Orleans, and the next trip I want to take is to Paris. That likely won’t happen for a few years, but all of these places (and more) will be on my itinerary.
