Week 20: The Man Who Invented Christmas

This week's book:

The Man Who Invented Christmas

By Les Standiford

Ok so this is so this week's blog is ridiculously late. The list of reasons why it's late is so long. It was Christmas, the hubby and kid were “home,” we were in the car almost every day for the last week for a long flipping time (including a twelve hour trip that should have taken eight hours at the most) but most importantly, I wanted to see my family and not read. 

I got a late start on reading this week's book. It's about Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol and how he came to write it. I totally thought it was going to be historical fiction, but it was not. The book is more like a doctoral dissertation, which perhaps it was. But let's be honest, I'm not devoting anymore time to this book. 

Christmas has never been my favorite holiday, (my birthday, Halloween and the fourth of July in that order). If you have met me or anyone in my family you know we do holidays big. We decorate everything. Our trees are covered in ornaments. Before my sister and I married our own husbands, we would spend the full two weeks of winter vacation in Iowa to see both sides of the family. We shop months in advance to make sure everyone has the perfect gifts. We’re the flipping Who's from Whoville. Have I driven the point home yet that Christmas is amazing? 

Anyway the Christmas Carol isn't my favorite Christmas story. It wasn't until I married my amazing husband and my mother-in-law's love of this story really came to my attention again. Of course I had heard it and had seen all the versions but I never seemed to go out of my way to see the newest version that comes out what seems like every year around the holidays. If I'm going to be honest, when I was little I was scared of the story. I remember going to Scrooged when I was little and being freaked out (funny enough that is my hubby's favorite Christmas movie). I was always a Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer kind of girl, which now is seen as a sexist, homophobic, racist little film, so yeah there's that.

This week's book was made into a film which I'm assuming is a much better depiction of Dickens creating this timeless classic, the guy from the live action Beauty and the Beast (Dan Stevens….yummy) and Capt Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) star in it too! There are times when a book is better than the movie and there are time the opposite is true. One good thing about this book is that it comes with the original Christmas Carol so it's like getting two books for the price of one. 

Week 19: I Don't Know How She Does It

This week's book:
I Don't Know How She Does It
By Allison Pearson

This past weekend, one of my best friends since the age of twelve came to visit. Being wives and mothers in different cities and growing up having to do all of that has forced us not to be able to get together as often as we both would like, but so it goes.
My Bestie surprised me a few months ago by telling me she was going to a mom. I was over the moon and have already created a Pinterest board for the ridiculous baby shower I will throw soon for the little guy or girl.

When we had lunch together this past weekend, she confessed her first bit of mom shaming or at least questioning a choice she had made. I had to tell her that this was only the first of a lifetime of questioning the choices she will make as a mom. But it got me thinking, I'm sure I'm not the only mother who questions everything I do with my children. Or could I be?

Between losing my own mother when our first born was only four months old, living in a town where, after eight years, we still don't know many people, or being a first time mom, I'm lost a lot of the time. Even when our little guy started kindergarten, which should have been a happy time, his teacher made the whole family feel like failures. I will admit, that has put me into a real tailspin. I don't know any mothers that half-butt their job. We are all trying our best and I know that we are feeling like we are failing sometimes.

I have been lucky and have been able to stay home with both of our kids. Some people have to work out of the home and have their children in daycare or have a nanny. Some women want to work and can't imagine being a stay at home mom. They say they’d be bored they were home all day with their little ones. And there are moms that have dreamt of staying home with their kids. But it seems like no matter what path that we take, there is always some sort of shame or guilt or what have you. This week's book is all about this topic; moms who want it all and are being pulled in too many different directions.

I will be honest it took me awhile to get through this book. I vaguely remember watching the movie adaptation a million years ago. (cable, maybe?) The novel is based in London and sometimes I didn't know some of the things she was talking about. The book was also quite repetitive. She never asked for help or accepted it if someone offered. She would redo everything her husband had just done and was constantly jumping on the company jet and leaving her children with their nanny. While I do know women like this do exist I had a hard time with not even liking the main character of the book. I read this book because it fulfilled one of the last remaining books on my book challenge and a book I like earlier this year referenced it. The ending of the book doesn't seem realistic with how the rest of the book is put together.
Sometimes as a mom or woman, there are sacrifices we make; there are choices that have to me made. I had our son before I started nursing school because I wanted to be a mom so much. When I was eyeball deep in clinicals and tests and literally five hundred pages a week to read and part of the campus was in a completely different time zone, I was becoming a person I didn't know or like. I was failing on all fronts. I wasn't being a good student because I wanted to tuck my little one in at night and I wasn't being good mom because when I was able to make it home I was never fully there, I could never turn my brain off. The tipping point was when I failed one of my courses and we found out by total surprise we were expecting our second kiddo. I snapped and decided I would give up becoming a nurse. My children were only going to be little once and I didn't want to miss any more. I didn't want to being crying all the time, and I didn't want to feel like a total failure.

I don't recommend the book. If you are a struggling working mom you don't have time to read it anyway. We all know we are stressed, there is no need to read about it.

Week 18: Karen Memory

This week's book:

Karen Memory

By Elizabeth Bear

This week's was a book to cross off my book challenge. It was a steampunk novel. I will be honest, I didn't really know much about this genre before I started the book. This suggestion came from my sweet brother in law, who happens to be a nerdy boy like my husband, but was strangely at the hottest frat when I was in college. I even met him at a frat party years before my big sister ended up marrying him. My brother in law got this book from Gen Con and the book was even autographed by the author.

It took me two weeks to finish this book. I don't really think it's the book’s fault that it took me as long as it did due to the fact I had a lot of Christmas shopping I had to do, and I kid you not, every quilting/sewing project I have been putting off and still haven't caught up on. Whatever the case, it took me way longer than it should have to finish this book.

The story is about a teenage girl who becomes a lady of the night to save up some money to get a stable full of horses. Along the way she falls for a beautiful, but broken, girl from India. The main character and her band of merry girls have to fight an evil man who uses a machine that brainwashes people so he can take over all the whorehouses in town. I am sure I am doing a very poor job of explaining the plot, but whatever.

If you are into steampunk or Westerns, because there is a touch of that as well, I would recommend the book. It wasn't my cup of tea, but I am glad I tried it. The book challenge is fun because it gets me to read books I would normally not read. 

Week 17: The Martian

This week's book:
The The Martin
By Andy Weir

My amazing husband has been reading The Martian to me for a while as a fun way to connect before bed. It should come to no surprise that I have always loved to be read to. I was spoiled by my parents and grandparents and really anyone I could convince to read to me when I was a child. So my sweet Hubby decided that instead of watching mindless TV before bed every night, we would read some. Now, let's be honest, we still watch TV as a couple, Stranger Things and Game of Thrones isn't just going to watch itself! But I digress...

I read The Martian a couple years ago while I was pregnant with our little girl. I had a stretch of reading some of my favorite books ever and this was one of those books. While I was reading this during my horrible morning sickness, I kept telling my main squeeze that he would like this book. I would stop him from what he was doing so I could read him certain passages. I just loved the book.

I read the book before I saw the movie and I loved the movie just as much. It's one of the truest adaptations I have ever seen. They got the film just right. Matt Damon did an awesome job playing the main character who is stranded on Mars for a long time. The character has to have such a range of emotions and he just nailed it.

One thing I had kind of forgotten was that I had skipped over some of the technical parts when I had originally read it. The film also kind of skips some of the techy stuff too. Being married to a tech nerd myself, he read everything and I may or may not have zoned out a little.

If you haven't already read this book, I can't recommend it enough. I rarely ever reread books, but when my sweet asked if I wanted to read it again, I had no problem diving right back into the story.