Frida's Bed

"You have to do the best you can with the cards you've been dealt, because the point of life is living. It's existing, in spite of everything. Feeling, looking, participating. Being happy. We aren't given a second chance or another life." 

- Frida's Bed

     A month or two back I posted about wanting to read a few books this summer (here), and I finally found Frida's Bed at a library and finished reading it. It's a quick read - only about 160 pages - with no chapters or divided sections. It reads like Frida's journal, and it is so personal that at times you feel like she's letting you in on her darkest secrets and memories. There is something about her story that is so relatable, even though she was a remarkably talented woman who led a tragic life that isn't remotely close to my own. It definitely provides an interesting and unprecedented viewpoint into Frida's painting and personal life; the author switches from third to first person intermittently throughout the book. At times it was so raw - Drakulic portrays her as being so weak yet so strong at the same time. I highly recommend Frida's Bed to anyone who has any interest in Frida's life or work.

Book Review: High On Arrival

***** (5/5 stars)

     I just finished reading High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips. I'm sure a lot of people have already read it but I just now got around to it this week. I didn't know that much about Mackenzie Phillips prior to reading it, but I had seen her on Oprah and on So Weird on the Disney channel when I was younger. I couldn't put the book down - it is crazy that someone who had been through everything she has is still alive. It made me think that I should be thankful for my own life. There was a lot of press about her possibly making up the incest that occurred between her and her father, but after reading her book, I don't doubt her for a minute. Her story is absolutely shocking, and it's incredible that she has been able to turn her life around and have such a positive attitude, especially in terms of her father. She doesn't blame him and isn't even angry for what he did to her. Her relationship with her father is something that no one will ever truly understand besides her, but it was definitely insightful reading her story and looking into a life that was completely outrageous in comparison to my own.

"I am amazed to be alive, and I am wildly in love with this great life"

- Mackenzie Phillips

P.S. I'm off to New York today, so I won't be posting again until Monday. Have a lovely weekend!

Book Review: The History of Love

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."

**** (4/5 stars)

Summary:

"The last words of this haunting novel resonate like a pealing bell. "He fell in love. It was his life." This is the unofficial obituary of octogenarian Leo Gursky, a character whose mordant wit, gallows humor and searching heart create an unforgettable portrait. Born in Poland and a WWII refugee in New York, Leo has become invisible to the world. When he leaves his tiny apartment, he deliberately draws attention to himself to be sure he exists. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love, which, unbeknownst to Leo, was published years ago in Chile under a different man's name. Another family in New York has also been truncated by loss. Teenager Alma Singer, who was named after the heroine of The History of Love, is trying to ease the loneliness of her widowed mother, Charlotte. When a stranger asks Charlotte to translate The History of Love from Spanish for an exorbitant sum, the mysteries deepen. Krauss (Man Walks into a Room) ties these and other plot strands together with surprising twists and turns, chronicling the survival of the human spirit against all odds. Writing with tenderness about eccentric characters, she uses earthy humor to mask pain and to question the universe. Her distinctive voice is both plangent and wry, and her imagination encompasses many worlds."

-- Publisher's Weekly 

      Last night I finished reading The History of Love and I can't wait for someone else to read it so we can talk about it! One of my favorite things in the world is when I'm reading a book and I can't stand to put it down; when it takes absolutely all of my will power to set it down without finishing it is the best. It ended up taking me far too long to finish reading this, but not because it wasn't good, I simply just had the craziest two weeks of moving and finishing class. I decided that I would use the Publisher's Weekly review since I don't feel as though I could write a summary that would do it justice, but I did find out that there is a movie  based on the book due to be released in 2012. I typically love the books so much more than the movies but I always check out the movies just to see the book from a different perspective (it is always so different than my own, I think it's good to see things differently once in a while! But this is a whole different conversation for another time). The one thing that I love about this book is the wit of the characters. Leo Gursky is often so...crotchety that it's hard to assume that he is anything but real. I will leave you to read the book for yourselves, but I have one last thing to mention. Two of my favorite quotes/passages regarding love that I had read before but had no idea what they were from are in this book!

"The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life."

"How do you know?" 

"Think about it. Have you ever been happier than right now, lying in the grass?" 

"I guess not. No." 

"And have you ever been sadder?"
"No [...] "What about you? Are you the happiest and the saddest right now that you've ever been?" 

"Of course I am." 

"Why?" 

"Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you."

Summer Reading

     Every summer I look forward to finally having time to read something other than textbooks...and since it looks like I'll be having one of my more relaxing summer vacations compared to the last few years (which is much needed), hopefullyI'll be able to tackle my list of 51 books I want to read.

Here's the top 5 on my list right now:

This crushing novel by the author of A Mouthful of Air is a shocking portrait of suburban ennui gone horribly awry. Laney Brooks, approaching middle age in Short Hills, N.J., appears to have it all: doting husband, two beautiful children, the big house with a kidney-shaped pool. But beneath the facade of upper-middle-class perfection, Laney's life descends into a chasm of indiscriminate sex and drug and alcohol abuse. Koppelman's prose style is understated and crackling; each sentence is laden with a foreboding sense of menace, whether she's describing a sunny Florida resort or the back alley of a seedy strip mall. Laney's self-debasement can be a bit over-the-top at times, but like a crime scene or a flaming car wreck, it becomes impossible not to stare." 

-- Publisher's Weekly

A few days before Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, she wrote in her diary, “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to return.” Diagnosed with polio at the age of six and plagued by illness and injury throughout her life, Kahlo’s chronic pain was a recurrent theme in her extraordinary art. In Frida’s Bed, Slavenka Drakulic´ explores the inner life of one of the world’s most influential female artists, skillfully weaving Frida’s memories into descriptions of her paintings, producing a meditation on the nature of chronic pain and creativity. With an intriguing subject whose unusual life continues to fascinate, this poignant imagining of Kahlo’s thoughts during her final hours by another daringly original and uncompromising creative talent will attract readers of literary fiction and art lovers alike.

-- Amazon.com

The lives of a London couple about to have their first child unravel in Perkins's haunting third novel. In the wake of surviving a train derailment, pregnant Ann Wells tells her husband, struggling screenwriter Tom Stone, that a man has been following her. With only Ann's vague description, the police can do little and Tom attempts to reassure his wife about her safety. As her due date approaches, Ann turns her attention to scouring the house and molding clay guardian figures, while Tom searches for work. Finally, Tom agrees to approach a popular television writer and fellow train accident survivor, Simon Wright, for work. After the birth of their son, Arlo, Ann's behavior grows more disturbing, and Tom realizes too late the truth behind her fears. Perkins's gamble to reveal Ann's fate in the early pages pays off; the suspense mounts with each added detail, until everything falls into place in an unsettling climax. Throughout, both Tom and the reader struggle to find a moment when everything could have been prevented.

-- Publisher's Weekly

 When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber’s seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels and posh restaurants and trips abroad, expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews at once terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects. 

-- Amazon.com

Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it's at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food? What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that's come to typify our food culture. Many processed foods vie for a spot in our grocery baskets, claiming to lower cholesterol, weight, glucose levels, you name it. Yet Pollan shows that these convenient "healthy" alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats--even fruits--from our daily meals. His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. In a season filled with rallying cries to lose weight and be healthy, Pollan's call to action—"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."--is a program I actually want to follow. 

--Anne Bartholomew, Amazon.com