The First Gift of Christmas by Richard Paul Evans

This is a little book I picked up off a discount table once upon ten years ago... and I read it every year! I love it! (It's RPE, what's not to love??)

This little book can be read in 30 minutes or less, as it's more like a poem.  Each section is so beautifully worded, will touch your soul and leave you thinking.  It talks of the different parts of Christmas, such as the Advent, Christmas Eve, Christmas morning and Christmas night. 

I don't want to tell too much because, really, words cannot describe the wonderful feeling one gets from reading it, so I'm hoping you'll add a little more "spirit" to your Christmas and find a copy for yourself.  In fact, I just looked at Amazon.com and you can purchase this glorious book for !!a penny!! used, with only $3.99 shipping! I'd do it, folks, it's totally worth it. 

If you only wish to check it out through your local library, I highly recommend it.  :)

Christmas Jars, by Jason F. Wright

If you haven't read this book, you should.  It's a quick read and oh-so-good.  I cried a little - well, maybe more than a little, and even thought of starting my own Christmas jar.

***WARNING:  SPOILER***

This book starts out with a single woman having her annual dinner at a local fast food joint when she notices a baby in the bench behind her, alone.  There's a note that says something to the effect of whoever holds my baby next, she's now in your care.  This woman takes the child into her life, names her Hope, adopts her legally, and raises her.  When Hope is five, her mother reveals why the bench is so special and that her real mother loved her so much and wanted a better life for her.  She supports her in her ambition to become a news reporter and they are so happy together. One year, the mother reveals to her daughter that she has cancer.  She doesn't live long after that, and dies on Christmas Eve.  One year later, the daughter's out at the chicken place where her mother found her, the same place they eat every year at that time and comes home to her apartment to find out it's been robbed.  During the investigation, she finds a jar left inside her door, but doesn't know who it's from.  It's full of money.  As an aspiring reporter for small columns in the local newspaper, she decides to investigate further, as she's found she's not been the only recipient of such a miraculous jar and she thinks this would make a great story, the one that will get her on the front page.  She finds several families who refuse to give much information, wishing to leave the giver as an anonymous angel of sorts, until she finds the family that started it all.  She tells a little lie to get into their lives and have her questions answered, and ends up falling in love with the family, and them with her.  She finds out that they originally started the Christmas jar as a way for them to save money for Christmas presents every year.  One year, though, while at the bank to cash in their coins, their daughter notices a woman crying on the curb outside and offers to give her their Christmas jar.  The parents tearfully allow it, which is what the woman needed, as her abusive husband took all her money and left her pregnant with nothing.  After that, they just kept giving Christmas jars every year and more and more people started to partake in the tradition.  Hope thinks she's on to something big when a spotlight is run on her in the paper.  She fears her secret of who she really is is out and the family will be angry as they think she's a college student writing a paper about their small family business, so she goes months without talking to them.  One day, she finds herself in someone else's office looking for a package of jelly when the phone rings.  It's a man who wants to run an obituary.  She finds out it's the patriarch of this beloved family that has died and is heart-broken.  Not knowing how to get back in touch with them to offer her condolences, she runs a front page article on this great man and a small piece of the legacy he and his family left behind with their very own Christmas jars.  She then goes to the funeral, and then back to the family's house to see if she has been forgiven.  They embrace her without any hesitation and confess that they hid the article from the father so he never even knew who she really was.  Relieved a little, she leaves to have her annual dinner at the chicken place.  After her departure, the family receives many visitors who saw the article and were touched by a Christmas jar of their very own, bringing a jar to the family who started it all.  After all the visitors are gone, their front porch is covered in jars filled with money.  Then, one final visitor knocks on the door.  It's a woman with a very special story.  After all is told, the family realizes she was the first woman they ever gave a Christmas jar to, the woman at the bank.  She tells a story of leaving her precious baby on a bench in a chicken restaurant.  Realizing who she is, they drive her to the chicken place to create a joyous and happy reunion with Hope, her daughter. 

It's a sweet story that is very inspiring and touching to the very end.  I'm glad I cheated a little and took the time to read it this Christmas season.  :)

Cheating

So.... I've decided to take a break from the book I've been reading... and start another book... hee hee! I hate doing that because my OCD (self-diagnosed) flares a little in that something I started wasn't finished.  It's almost as if I'm betraying the book... lol

Anyway, the book I've been philandering with is Christmas Jars by Jason F. Wright.  Not only is it a short book, but the one I ended up with from the library has large print, so I should be done in no time.  (My other book will hardly notice my absense!)

So far, it's very good... slightly tear-jerking, very simple, yet, very entertaining.  :) I'll keep you posted.  ;)

I'm also doing a reading group with some church ladies about a book called The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom - another survivor story of the Holocaust - so, I may have to have a double affair.... ;)  Oooh! Feel free to read it with us! Our deadline is January ummmm.... something.... I think the second or third Tuesday in January.  Probably the third... I guess I should find out for sure.

Gotta love the Holiday Season

Between my son's baptism, making his gift, my parents visiting, making gifts for the girls I babysit for, babysitting, coupon searching, not to mention mothering a teething baby, laundry, dishes................... there just isn't time for reading.  I've been reading here and there, when I can, and I even finally made it past the half-way point in my book... *sigh* 

I am still reading it, and I will finish it... I have to! I have a stack of books that just keeps getting bigger and bigger that will be due back to the library eventually...


Have you been reading anything good lately?? :)

Not a lot of reading time

I try to read a little everyday, but there are so many things on my to-do lists that it seems it's on the back burner more often than not.  The book I'm reading right now is really fascinating, though.  I highly recommend it so far.  It's called The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan.  It's about survivors of the Dust Bowl, something I didn't know much about due to my lack of interest in history classes growing up.  Maybe next week after, say, Tuesday or something, I'll be able to read more.  We'll see.  :)  Hope you're all having a great holiday season so far! :)

Somebody's Baby by Charlotte Vale Allen

My review of this book is pretty straightforward:  It's about a 31 year old woman who's mother just suffered a heart attack, and on her death bed tells her daughter that she kidnapped her in a supermarket when she was a baby.  Then she dies, telling of a letter that confesses everything and starts this woman on a search for her real mother/family.  She finds her, it'a joyous reunion and all is well.  She tries to find out who her "mother" really was, finding dead end after dead end and numerous identity changes, all leading nowhere.  It turns out she had stolen something like 20+ identities since she was a teenager and planned the whole kidnapping for whatever reason and the book just leaves you hanging as to who this woman really was.  The author could've at least said she was abused as a child and stole all the money that made her so wealthy and wanted a new life but was physically unable to have children due to the horrid abuse she endured as a child and was also unable to get close to any man, also due to her childhood abuse... anything but nothing would've been good.  Fiction should end well, not happily, necessarily, but at least have closure, you know? That's my opinion, anyway.  It was a decent book, and kept me turning pages till the very end... which is probably why I kept reading it even though there were more than two bad words, but only increased my disappointment more at the end when I couldn't even solve the mystery.  Oh, well.  Chalk one up to... well, whatever.  ;)

Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

It took me EIGHT DAYS to read this book, Storm Front by Jim Butcher, and that, for me, is a very LONG time. 

So, if there were just a handful of words I would use to describe this book, they would be cocky, unrealistic, dark, lame, and sex.  There were two F-words, too.  They were towards the very, very end (like within a few pages of the ending) or I would've stopped.  Still, there was a lot of swearing, and like I said before, some obsession with sex.  Yuck.  Plus, the whole magic/wizard thing is just plain bizarre to me.  On the whole, I didn't like it and won't be reading this author in the future.  I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone as a worth-while read and hope those who were reading right along with me won't hold it against me.  ;)

I suppose I can try to say a few good things about this book:  yyyyeaaaah, nope.  Not really.  The plot was so simple-minded and just not twisty and turny enough for me (I'm used to Mary Higgins Clark... now that broad can write one heckuva mystery AND keep it clean, all at the same time). His attempt at being funny was so obviously that:  an attempt.  I have to give him this, though, it sounds as though he's done his research on the "Nevernever" and magic and all that cra- um...stuff.  I don't know anything about it, but I would have to guess he's not making this stuff up.  Or maybe he is, who knows.  (Who cares...) Sorry, that was low. 

I'm totally book-bashing, and I can't say I'm proud to be doing that, because he's published and I'm not, right? So, who am I to talk? It's just my humble opinion and you can take it or leave it.  ;) On to the next...

Struggling

I've been reading the book, Storm Front, and I just have to say, it's no page-turner.  This guy keeps making sorry attempts at being sarcastically funny... he definitely overdoes it in that area, like he's trying too hard to make his character witty or some sort of smart-you-know-what.  This author is way too obsessed with sex.  He somehow manages to keep it mostly clean, but sure does talk about it a lot.  I'm really not into the whole magic and wizardry thing, so this book is just so rediculously fake to me.  I know it's not supposed to be real, and maybe I'm being too negatively judgemental, but this book just isn't doing it for me.  I'm going to make an attempt to finish reading it, because I'm the one who started this whole thing, but I'm not going to be reading the next one in line.  Thanks for the suggestion, R, but please don't take it personally when I do a little book-bashing with this one.  ;)

Join us!

Only one person had a recommendation for something to read together, so that's what we're doing.  It's called Storm Front by Jim Butcher, a novel from the Dresden Files. 

Sounds interesting! Check it out! If you want to join us, please do!

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The word that comes to my mind when I think of describing this book is "raw".

Joan Didion in no way romanticizes the loss of a loved one and the grieving process that one goes through following their death.  "You sit down to dinner..." is a phrase she often repeats throughout this book.  It's as if she's trying to digest what's happened, still in shock at the suddeness of it all.  She and her husband sat down to dinner one night after visiting their sick daughter in the hospital and her husband had a heart attack, dying instantly.  She recalls the details of what happened that night and the nights that followed throughout the book, and the feelings that accompanied these memories.  Her denial of the reality of it is so heart-breaking, yet so real.  I can relate to how she thinks, reminiscing over the past and things said to each other and how something as simple as a plant can invoke memories that inevitably bring tears.  As a writer, herself, she has ways of describing things and comparing to what others have said that make it seem like you're the one grieving, although, I have to admit I truly felt like I was grieving with her.  "The question of self-pity" is another phrase she often repeats, trying to find her way through this grieving process, trying to become herself without her husband there.  Her grieving is put on hold, so to speak, due to her daughter being in the hospital with pneumonia and septic shock, followed by another hospital stint caused by a hemorrhage in her brain.  But when she's finally able to focus on herself, she finds it hard to go through the motions of everyday life because, as a writer, she's worked at home with her husband, who was also a writer who worked at home.  I found it interesting and almost endearing that she kept things like his shoes, because somewhere in her mind, while she was in the denial stage of grieving, she thought he'd need them when he came home.  It wasn't until she saw the autopsy report several months later that she was finally able to accept that he wasn't coming home.  She goes through in her mind how she could've prevented this, how she could fix it.  She goes through a depression of sorts, when she's crying all the time about little things that remind her of something she said or did with her husband.  She did go through the anger stage, because I remember her being angry that her daughter's doctor wanted to take the trach out.  It was a silly thing, but that's where her anger ended up being directed.  By the end of the year, she was sort of coming into an acceptance phase, attempting to move on and keep living.  One can feel the pain and emotional scarring that was left by this tragic event in this woman's life and I have to say, I feel fortunate to have been one of the readers she has shared her story with.

For a peak inside, click here.  I do recommend reading it, especially if you've lost someone close to you.  I can guess that knowing someone else has gone through this exact same thing would, in some way, be comforting.