"A Rainy Day at the Beach is Better Than a Sunny Day at the Office".

On Saturday, I'm off on vacation this week to celebrate my dear sister Quinn's 30th birthday! A week of sun and fun and food and drinks with Quinn and our dear friend Corrie sounds like a little slice of heaven, and I couldn't be more pumped.

So a beach vacation means lots of books right? Right. Here's the lowdown...

- Divergent  by Veronica Roth (been saving it since March to read on this trip!)
-The Long Walk by Stephen King (Killing kids before the Hunger Games made it cool)
-The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (It's a classic I've never read, and you know how much I love those silly Russians and their shenanigans).

And at least 4 books to be read on my Kindle. It's my first vacation with said Kindle, so we will see how it goes.

It seems like a lot but when you factor in waiting time in the airport and time on the plane...honestly I might grab another one on the way out the door, just because I hate being without. Since I don't have to pack a hairdryer (unfortunately a travel must for me) that means I have room for one more book, I think.

I'm not going to promise any real reviews on these but when I do a vacation wrap up post I'll make sure to include a few thoughts on the books.

There will be some blog shenanigans during the week, but I'm not going to divulge any details so it's a surprise!

If you're looking for me, maybe try here first?

Wisconsin in 5 Books

Shannon over at River City Reading did a great post recently, summing up her adopted city of Richmond Virginia in 5 books. I know that it set mine and many other people's brain wheels turning. How would you describe your city? Your state? I thought long and hard about summing up Milwaukee, but I thought that expanding it out to the whole state would be more fun (and frankly be easier for me).

Wisconsin winters are no joke. Almost all the crazy things you have heard are true. Can your tongue really get frozen to a flag pole? Hell yeah it can. I've seen that with my own two eyes. Can you throw a pot of boiling water in the air and it freezes on the way down? Yup. (But be careful you don't burn yourself doing it). -30 degree temperatures with a whipping wind that makes you wonder why you live in a place where it hurts to breathe? Yeah, that was me basically all December and January. Long cold days and nights can drive you to the brink. Relationships can suffer, moods darken, the whole works. These feelings made me think of  A Reliable Wife. Intrigue, snow, and secrets!

Drunk driving is a serious problem in all of Wisconsin. Everyone knows someone who has either a) been arrested for drunk driving or b) had a run in (God willing not seriously) with one. It is a plague on this state, made worse by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle refusing to make punishments harsher for repeat offenders so there's people driving around (usually on suspended licenses) with 4 OWIs under their belt.It's a freaking embarrassment. So the book I chose has nothing to do with Wisconsin but all about someone who has to slowly put their life back together after a horrifying drunk driving accident. It also happens to be one of my favorites. It's Gargoyle. Don't drink and drive. It's the law.

So a couple of different states can lay claim to Neil Gaiman's awesome American Gods but I think Wisconsin has a strong claim because of all the action that happens at The House on the Rock, especially the scenes at the carousel and the ice cream shop. I've never been to House on the Rock, but my friend Anna has and she said that it's basically a hoarders dream. (She's not joking, he has rooms stuffed with things all around a theme, it's crazy.) Here's a few of her pictures she let me use. Boob out angels, "the mouth to hell" and a prosthetic leg gun. So obviously this place is like a fever dream on E.

The books of Laura Ingalls and her family's adventures were staples in a lot of childhood reading. The first book Little House in the Big Woods is set in Wisconsin and helps to illustrate people who made this state what it is! People who came from all over the world and settled and worked themselves to the bones on farms and in the mines, on our lakes, and helped shape the future of our state. Also this book is where I learned to be scared of panthers, because the noise they make sounds like a woman screaming. That is the fuel for nightmares for me. If I was ever in the woods by myself at night and heard that I don't know if I would be able to run because I would be pooping my pants. Ahhhh!

And finally we end with another childhood staple (of mine at least, and Courtney from Courtney Reads a Lot), Underwear. I included this because the headquarters of Jockey is in Wisconsin...and because I ran out of ideas.

So Wisconsin is not without it's problems, but sometimes it's pretty lovely and fun:

Big picture: Racing sausages at the Brewers game; top right: downtown Milwaukee; middle: Black River Falls at sunset; Bottom corner: Lovely deck on Green Lake; middle bottom: food on a spigot at Oktoberfest; lastly: me and the husband enjoying adult beverages at a Kenosha Kingfish game. Yes, there's a reason these are all summer and fall pictures.

Author Interview with Catherine Aerie, author of "The Dance of the Spirits" (HF Virtual Book Tour) and giveaway!

Today I've got an author interview for you with Catherine Aerie who wrote a book called "The Dance of the Spirits".  Immediately below is all of the info about her book, and then below that is our Q&A. She gave very thoughtful and thorough answers and I hope you enjoy it!

Amazon blurb: Award Winning Novel "...fleeting but intense...An often engaging tale of a flickering moment of love during a forgotten war." --Kirkus Reviews Spring 1951: it is the fiery zenith of the Korean War, a war that the youthful US Army lieutenant Wesley Palm and his men thought that they had won… until the Chinese swept across the Yalu River. Traveling with the million-man army bent on driving back the march of “American imperialism” is Jasmine Young, a Chinese surgeon who has volunteered herself into the war for unspoken, grave reasons. Through a chronicle of merciless battles, freezing winters, and the brutality and hypocrisy of human nature, the two will find themselves weaving through the twists and turns of fate and destiny. Though their love is forbidden, their passion and pursuit of liberty cannot be quenched.

Praise for The Dance of the Spirits

“…On the surface, The Dance of the Spirits is a story of love and of war, but on a deeper level, it is a story of the misery that the communist ideology brought to millions of souls in the twentieth century. Whether that philosophy is related to nationalism, internationalism or faith, Catherine Aerie reminds readers that when a system that will entertain no contradiction in thought or deed comes to power, no one is safe — and no one is free. Aerie draws a vivid picture of war and its price, and a tender image of love…” – Readers’ Favorite (5 Stars)

“…a love that is stronger than all the horrors that war can throw at them… compelling…poignant… sensitive and beautiful…” – San Francisco Book Reviews (4.5/ Stars)

“Adversaries in the Korean War find love in Aerie’s debut novel. The story starts in the middle of a firefight… Out of the rubble, two characters emerge: an American officer… and a Chinese military doctor… Their paths cross again and again… In the intimacy of the war, these coincidences don’t feel forced, nor even particularly fated–it’s just the way things went… Readers will likely find Palm a decent, very human person, but Young has more complexity and vibrancy… As the war rages around them, Palm and Young fall in love… but their romance is ill-starred and open to tragedy. Aerie keeps readers on their toes with the twists…fleeting but intense…

An often engaging tale of a flickering moment of love during a forgotten war.” – Kirkus Reviews


Did I mention there's a giveaway? Enter here!

Why do you think the Korean War gets so little attention in the public, whereas there's so much attention given to less recent conflicts?

I believe that it had something to do with the Vietnam War growing up long and tall, swallowing the much shorter Korean War before it into its shadow. The latter could have wound up being what we as Americans now perceive the former to be had it only lasted longer; an exhausting conflict marked by a once clear goal marred by confusing politics, a continuously denied total victory, frustration from being unable to achieve it in the first place, and the simple fact that so many lives and resources were spent in a war of attrition that yielded nothing less than a bitter stalemate (or in the case of Vietnam, an anti-climatic loss) after years of fighting. That being said, the fallout from the U.S’ tiresome decade long venture in Indochina simply outgrew and overshadowed that of Korea, and the resulting aftershock upon popular culture and media perception basically reflected that matter into the public. To quote Max Hastings’ history of The Korean War: “Rather than acknowledging that too little attention has been lavished upon the victims of Korea, it may be more just to suggest that too much has been heaped upon the veterans of Vietnam. (pg. 331)”   

You came up with the idea for this book while researching your family history. Did you find any other material for follow up books during your research?

Yes: along the way while researching for the novel, I came upon the subject of the lives of token Western communities residing in China in the times before the communist takeover.

How did you pick the name Wesley? (I'm always curious when such a rare -and awesome!- name pops up places!)

The name “Wesley” has a special meaning when pronounced into Mandarin Chinese: wei - a guardian, si - a poem, and li - wisdom. I thought it’d fit his character to give him a meaningful name.         

(Wesley note: Well well well. I like that!) 

You have a degree in finance. Is it hard to balance your creative/writing part of your brain with the finance/analytical part of your brain?

It’s actually not difficult at all once you find a way to make the most of the two at the same time; I suppose that the abilities associated with the latter must have done something beneficial while I was organizing the plot structure and progression of the former. It’s nothing of a unique ability and I’m very well sure that everyone can do so too.    

What surprised you most when you were writing this book?

I was genuinely moved by the whole United Nations’ effort to enforce the voluntary repatriation program regarding the (especially communist) prisoners of war during the Korean War; by itself, this was a major and bold change especially when compared to the Allied powers handling of surrendering Axis prisoners at the close of World War II, where thousands of Axis prisoners who originally surrendered to the Western Allies were then deported back to the Soviet Union on the reasoning that they had fought against the latter for the duration of their careers. The personal wills of many of these prisoners to avoid a miserable fate in the gulags were thus ignored in the process, and the last of them were only freed up to the late 1950’s, leaving few survivors to share their stories by then.

In sharp contrast to these events only a single decade later, the West allowed its communist prisoners to choose whether to return home, where they would likely be punished for surrendering in the first place, or immigrate to another foreign country instead; in the end, the vast majority opted for the latter option.  

    

Living Abroad - China

"River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze" by Peter Hessler

So in 1996 our author Peter, and another volunteer names Peter were sent to China for a 2 year stint. They were the only 2 "waiguoren" (foreigners) in Fuling a relatively small town of 100,000 people. They were teaching at a college that would train the students to be teachers, usually in very small rural towns. Peter was sent to teach literature and poetry and he was worried that the students would have a hard time with things like iambic pentameter but they all caught on much faster than he expected.

I thought the most interesting things were the different cultural differences:

Many of the English students went by English names (but they called Adam and Peter by Chinese names, which is kind of funny). There was quite a variety of names, but they didn't always seem to mesh right. There were boys named Mo Money, Anfernee, and Lazy. Also many boys gave themselves girls names, like there was one boy named Brenda.They also could change them without warning, which made for some confusion.

The college took every opportunity to throw a banquet, especially if they were politically related. This always ended in everyone getting absolutely ripped. There would be toast after toast and everyone was in the bag at the end of these multi-hour celebrations. 

Here's some rapid fire depressing stats: More than half of female suicides in the entire world take place in China. The suicide rate for women in China is 5 times higher than anywhere else in the world. China is the only country in the world where women are more likely to commit suicide than men. One of Peter's most promising students (though one of the most socially awkward) jumped off of a bridge.

Another thing that I thought was interesting was the noise. Horns honked constantly, people shouted at the men in the streets no matter where they went; I think that would drive me up a wall!

In general I liked this book. I thought it went a little too long. I was more interested in the day to day life than  the things that the students were doing in class.I give it a low 3 out of 5.

Linked up over at"


 

Book Review: "American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning" by Katie Sweeney

I like cemeteries. I love the artistry of the headstones, the historical aspect and that it's quiet.

This is not me.

So this book kind of fell into my wheelhouse. In it, Kate explains the logistics of burial are kind of foreign to us and that when we are confronted with planning a funeral (especially if i's totally unexpected) we are somewhat at a loss. It's not a taboo subject as much as it is something that we don't think about until we absolutely have to.

There was a museum in Springfield Illinois, The Museum of Funeral Custom, that sounded like it would have been awesome if it was still open. It had artifacts about how people dealt with death and funerals through different times. There was a quilt, and all around the corners were the families names inside of a little patchwork casket, and when that person died, you moved their coffin into the middle of the quilt that looked like a little churchyard. My question is, where do you display that? Does that get casually thrown over the couch? Do you snuggle up with the dead relatives quilt while reading? There was also a wreath made out of the hair of the creator's dead mother. I won't be doing that for my mom, and not just because she has short hair either. I don't mean to mock people, but it's amazing how different it was.

Kate visits an old wonderful cemetery in Atlanta, Oakland. Famous Georgians are buried there including lots of politicians, soldiers from the Civil War and Margaret Mitchell of Gone With the Wind fame. Did you know that you can figure out a lot about a person by their headstone? If you see a tall angel holding a torch it means "a life snuffed out too soon", so it might be on a younger persons grave. Cradles and lambs are often used to indicate very small children and babies. If the headstone has hands holding each other the people buried their were parents, or at least spouses.

There was a whole section on green burial and how for a lot of people, it's like burial and funeral traditions during early times. Since no embalming is used, funerals have to be held quickly after death. A lot of people hold wakes or showings in their own homes. Family members can help dig the grave. I'm kind of all about this. I always say that whoever is around when I die can just take all my organs that someone might be able to use, say a prayer over me, put me in a cardboard box and bury me.

I really liked this book. It wasn't sad, which was kind of surprising considering the subject matter. It wasn't cheaply morbid or voyeuristic on people's sufferings. It was even funny sometimes. It gets 3.5 stars!


Author Katie and I had the following conversation on twitter:

@whoffs Probably the quilt; like idea of one object for all loved ones, love quilts, plus 21st c aversion to giant human hair wreaths.
— Kate Sweeney (@KateSweeney15) August 5, 2014

@whoffs The hair wreath talk about in the book was HUGE. But I love how it challenged my squeamishness & ideas about what's normal.
— Kate Sweeney (@KateSweeney15) August 5, 2014

Can I say how proud I am that I figured out how to embed a tweet. Holla! So what would you pick, wreath or quilt?

My First Book Signing

So I went to my first author book signing on 7/16. I was nervous and didn't quite know what etiquette for something like this was so I asked T of Traveling with T for advice since she goes to many of these things. She said: bring your camera, take notes, and if you can't think of something to say just say "I really enjoyed the book!". That is good advice.

The tour was for Ben Winter's last book of The Last Policemen Trilogy which is called "World of Trouble".Here's the post I wrote about Ben's work previously. I didn't write a book review about "World of Trouble" because I didn't know how to effectively write a review about a book that is last in a trilogy without giving anything away. Here's the publisher blurb though.

My mom was my co-hort on this trip, since she had also read the books (I passed along my ARCs so she got first peeks too!). The signing was at the Mystery One Book Store in Milwaukee. It is a (very) small shop that exclusively sells mysteries. I'd say it's about 600-700 square feet. Also the owners are interesting. I will just leave it at that. I don't read a ton of mysteries (or what I consider mysteries, I don't really like putting books into categories. My categories pretty much consist of "fiction" and "nonfiction". ANWAY) so I'd never been before.

Me and Mom are first to arrive (we both dislike being late) .There's no chairs or really any open space so everyone is just standing amongst the bookshelves. It was super informal and low key. Ben was friendly and laid back and it was more just everyone talking, not much structure.

Ben also brought his ukelele which made me laugh because, hipster please. But then he kept doing little bits of Bob Dylan songs which redeemed him to me and mom. He listened to a lot of Bob Dylan while writing the book and almost called one of the books after a song but Quirk, his publisher wasn't crazy about it. Did you know ukuleles are notoriously hard to keep in tune? Apparently they are!

Here's just some notes I took:

-Ben isn't interested in what happens after an apocalyptic event. He was more interested in what people did in the face of certain death. I agree with him. Apocalyptic stories (even good ones) are a dime a dozen, and I thought it was interesting to see this perspective.

-He doesn't think of the book as a scifi book necessarily, he thinks of it as a mystery. But he said something to the effect of "but if you have an asteroid from outer space in the story people are going to focus on that and spin it scifi"

-He also said that his wife only reads the ARCs and not before, because he would be crushed if she didn't like the story because he values her opinion so highly.

I had "World of Trouble" in an e-book ARC so I bought the finished paperback at the store, and had Ben sign that and my paperback ARC of the first book in the series "The Last Policeman". I also gave him the blog's card, which later on I was thinking "that might have been tacky", but I told him that I was going to write up a blogpost about the signing, so hopefully it was informative and not tacky.

Here's the couple of pictures I snapped.

Here are the 2 things that bummed me out a little, and one of them is my own making so I can't complain about that one.

My own fault - should have gotten a picture together. But I chickened out because no one else was doing it and store was small and there would have been no way to do it without everyone looking at us while we were doing it which would have resulted in me making crazy eyes in the picture. Still should have just nutted up and did it anyway.

Second- It sounded like at other signings there was fun prizes or the like. We just ran out of time with all of our chit chat, which is fine because I enjoyed it, but come on, who doesn't like prizes?

So that's my first author signing ever. It was a small laid back affair so I'm curious as to how that will compare to others in the future. I highly recommend seeing Ben if he comes to your town, and be sure to check out his books!

Book Review: "A Curious Man: the Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe it or Not" Ripley

Leroy Ripley (he later went by his middle name, Robert, and used Leroy for his middle name) grew up in Santa Rosa California. Gangly, awkward, shy among girls, desperately poor and almost comically bucktoothed, his childhood was not easy.One of the few things that staved of the taunts of his peers was his cartoons, mostly caricatures of mutually disliked teachers! Through hard work, dedication and some chance he got one of his cartoons published in a SF newspaper. But he knew if he wanted real success (like that of popular cartoonist at the time Rube Goldberg-you know the weird machine guy) he would have to go to New York City, which he did.
(Ripley also survived the great San Francisco earthquake.Even though SF is the focus of that terrible event, Santa Rosa actually sustained more damage (proportionally) then any other city, and a higher per capita death toll. This kind of scarred him and he would not talk about these events to very men people for the rest of his life).

It was a slow slow start but Ripley began to gain notoriety, especially for his sports cartoons. Eventually his newspaper sent him on a trip to Europe and Africa where he drew thousands of cartoons illustrating his travels and the strange things he saw there......There is a lot more to the story but that is our heroes beginnings!

(Ripley's first book came out in January of 1929. It was 188 pages and sold for $2.50. It was a bang up success. Many people tried to duplicate it's success but none came close.)

He continued to travel all around the world. He loved China, was horrified by a lot of the things that he saw in India, and thought that the people of Hawaii were about the darn nicest he'd ever met. He kept himself out of both world wars, but he always did work for veterans. He hated Hitler, but he hated what the Communists were doing to his beloved China even more. Spoilery- people even think that the fallof China to Communism was one of the reasons for Ripley's relatively young death of a heart attack at 59.)

Here's a quote that I think basically sums up the whole book: "The shy awkward misfit loner had become the champion of the freakishness of others. By celebrating the weirdness he made it mainstream, becoming one of the most widely read and influential syndicated cartoonists of his day-and among the best traveled men in history". All it takes is a few good turns of fate, hard work and a little bit of talent and you can move mountains, no matter where you started!

I would have never ever guessed that the Ripley's Believe it or Not that we know today started out as newspaper cartoons. If I had to have hazarded a guess, I would have said that maybe it was a radio program, you know when someone talks in that old timey voice about you know, a man who hopped on one foot for 15 miles or something.

My only qualm was that the book was pretty long and fairly stuffed with details.Neither of these things are bad per se, but I felt the book went on for longer than it should have because of all the details that they tried to shoehorn in.

I really wonder what he would of thought of his empire today. Would he have been pleased that it was still around? Would he have worried that some people think it's just a little cheesy? Would the internet worried him because so many oddities are just at fingertips 24/7? Deep thoughts! :) I give it 3 out of 5 stars, good content but maybe a little too much of it!

I recieved this book for free in exchange for an honest review from Blogging for Books