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And when I say review… I just mean my opinion kay?  I don’t for one second believe myself to really be a ‘book reviewer’.  I have no street cred, no authority and no educational background that has prepared me to properly review a book, but I do have my own opinions.  Oh dear – am I ever full of opinions!  My opinion of The Lost Symbol is unfortunately – very poor.  Let’s just say that it was a struggle to care enough about this story to get to the end.  I figured out what was ultimately going to happen about half way through the book… because it is the only thing that could happen… and then it was just about turning enough pages until the inevitable thing did happen.  And then it happened.  And then for some reason I can’t even begin to fathom, there were still fifty pages to wade through!

Under normal circumstances, I am not even sure I would have finished this book and it’s not because I have any problems with a writer toying with prescribed religious beliefs or historical facts. I loved The Da Vinci Code! It was a fun book to read and there were moments in that book where I really found myself wondering if all the things Brown mentioned were true! Did Jesus get married?  Are his descendants still walking around on the planet?  Does the Catholic Church have a select group of monk/assassins to eliminate the threat of church history being turned upside down?  I was ‘swept away’ by that story and was looking forward to The Lost Symbol in the hopes of being swept away again.  Sadly, I was not.  

 

 

I also wanted to throw another book into this giveaway.  It is called The Doomsday Key written by James Rollins.   This book is very similar to Dan Brown’s type of writing – that of mixing historical secrets, religious fervor and of course, world domination. I bought this book at the Houston airport during a four hour layover on our flight back home from Europe to Kansas.  After my recent tour of a Doomsday Church, it seemed appropriate.  

Although The Doomsday Key is clearly an imitation of Brown’s fast paced, world traveling, frantic, life or death, hop from one ancient mystery to another, Da Vinci Code, it was much more fun to read than the The Lost Symbol.  I found it hard to put The Doomsday Key down long enough to grab my carry-ons and board the plane.  The book made a long layover and a bumpy plane ride hardly matter at all.  

 

 

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

87	97

Timestamp: 2009-10-29 17:13:39 UTC

So the winner of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is…….

#87 -

shelley  - who wrote…

I’m in between! I loved it, & got all caught up in it, but at the same time, I totally recognized it as FICTION. I got in a pissing match w/my church (all in my head, of course) for preaching against it, b/c “hello?” these people must all be idiots to be afraid of a FICTIONAL NOVEL! How come there’s no series on the evils of Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean? Where are the sermons about how bad Harry Potter is? Oh wait, don’t answer that 

And the winner of James Rollins’ Doomsday Key is..….

#97 -

Katie who wrote - 

I was fortunate enough to read the illustrated copy – the one with color picutures of most of the art and architecture – it was amazing and a lot of it made sense – who says it isn’t true? Who really knows the truth?

Thanks everyone for entering and for reading this totally cracked out blog!

Winners please email my your mailing addresses at mysistersfarmhouse@live.com  - and I will send out your books!

I don’t want to show you the book I bought at Wal-Mart yesterday.

I don’t want to admit even to myself that I bought this book… and especially that I bought it at Wal-mart.

I like to support local bookstores with my book buying dollars and I could have bought this book at a local bookstore.  I passed it up several times over the past few weeks.   I was trying to be all strong… I was trying to be tough… I was trying to be better than I usually am.

I told myself that I would check this book out at the library.  I knew I would have to get on a waiting list, but I could do it.  I could dig down deep and find the necessary strength to wait.

But yesterday… while buying a few groceries I passed the book one more time and well… this time…

It ended up in my cart.

And I didn’t take it back out either.

It’s Dan Brown’s follow up to The Da Vinci Code.

The Lost Symbol.

I will send my copy to one lucky (or unlucky) commenter after I have finished it.

You can respond to one of the following statements if you would like…

When I read the Da Vinci Code, I found myself thinking that it was true… all of it was true, the secret societies,  the child of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the horrifying albino monk and his spiky cilice… all of it.  I got weirdly in the grip of this book and it made me question the entire history of Christendom.

Or…

I found The Da Vinci Code to be utterly ludicrous and couldn’t even finish it.

Yes or no or something in between?

This giveaway will stay up until I finish The Lost Symbol.

 

Early this Spring, I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  It is an excellent book and has everything that a good book must have.  It is set on an island in the English channel during an war-time occupation.  There are vivid characters and a fashionable heroine who  is dating a very rich, exciting and handsome man.  This rich man wants nothing more than to marry the heroine, but she is a writer and after she stumbles upon the Island of Guernsey, stories start popping up in all their various sad, tragic, joyful and absurd permutations, including an feisty orphan, a recalcitrant pig farmer and the discovery of a valuable treasure!  The heroine is completely unable to leave Guernsey until she finds her happy ending and the reader never wants to leave the Island of Guernsey because it is a perfect book and they are so HARD TO FIND!

 

 

 

 

 

 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, is a epistolary book, meaning it is a book of letters.  The various characters write to each other and this is how the story unfolds.  When I came to the end of this book, I was sad to discover that Mary Ann Shaffer, the author of this wonderful book died before her book was published and she never wrote another book.  Her niece, Annie Barrows, finished the book for her aunt and saw it through the editing and publishing stages. 

Two other books immediately sprang to my mind as I was reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  They are also epistolary books and I love them as ferociously as I love The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

 

 

 

 

 

The first book is Daddy Long Legs.  Over the course of my childhood and teenage years,  I probably read and re-read  Daddy Long Legs twenty times.  I loved this book, and I always thought that it was a true story.  The copy that I read as a child had photographs in it… black and white photographs on slick pages and I honestly believed that they were photographs of the main characters of the book.  I was sure that ‘Judy’ or Jerusha Abbot was a real orphan who was sent to a real college by an actual rich trustee of the John Grier Orphanage where she grew up.  I thought that Judy’s letters to her ‘Daddy Long Legs’, (the person who was anonymously paying for her education) were real letters and that someone had placed all the letters and photographs in a book to tell people about this wonderful story.  I believed this my entire life until a few months ago when I ordered a copy of Daddy Long Legs and discovered that a woman named Jean Webster wrote this book and she was neither an orphan nor the benefactor of an education by a long-legged trustee of The John Grier Home!  There was no Jerusha Abbott!  There was no Daddy Long Legs!  There were no orphans in blue gingham suits, no trunk full of surprise ball-gowns, and no gas house where Jerusha burns her first novel after it is rejected!  It was all a story!  A made-up story!  But the letters!… the letters!… the letters were so real!  It was like discovering that there was no Santa Claus… no Easter Bunny!  I am still trying to deal with this shocking news, but I did find a bit of information with which to comfort myself.  Because Jean Webster the author of Daddy Long Legs… the book I so loved as a child… WROTE OTHER BOOKS TOO!  

 

 

 

 

 

So I ordered all of them!  And I have made it through most of them.  So far, all of her books are as wonderful as Daddy Long Legs … so maybe there is an Easter Bunny after all.  

 ___________________________________________________________________________________________
A bit about Jean Webster the author of Daddy Long Legs…

Jean Webster’s mother was a niece of Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain.  Jean’s father was Mark Twain’s business manager.  The business and personal relationship between Jean’s father and Mark Twain was a successful one for both parties for a while, but it eventually began to erode causing Jean’s father to take a leave of absence from his job and a few years later, he committed suicide from a drug overdose.  Jean became an accomplished writer early in her life, but due to this sad history, she never talked about her famous relative.  

Jean came from a family that was always interested in social reform especially temperance and suffrage.  Jean herself became active in penal and orphanage reform during college and remained active in these issues her entire life.  Her two most well-known books (Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy) revolve around orphans, orphanages and people who work to make their lives better.  

The Book, Daddy Long Legs has been re-worked into plays, musicals, Japanese, anime’, and foreign television series.  It continues to inspire adaptations to this day.  I watched the Fred Astaire/Leslie Caron musical version of Daddy Long Legs, recently and was horrified by the whole thing.  It is so far removed from the actual book, that I don’t see how it could possibly be related.  The only similarities are that the main character is an orphan and an anonymous rich guy pays for her education. Everything else… well… not even the dancing of Fred and Leslie can make up for this silly story that in no way resembles the great book that supposedly inspired it.

 

Jean married Glenn Ford McKinney in 1915 and the two of them honeymooned at McKinney’s cabin near Quebec.  Former president Theodore Roosevelt visited the honeymooners and he is quoted as saying, “I’ve always wanted to meet Jean Webster. We can put up a partition in the cabin.”  Within a year, Jean became pregnant and entered the hospital to have the baby on June 10, 1916.  She passed away one day after giving birth to her daughter who was named Jean as well.  

Jean’s books are upbeat, full of wit, breezy and yet steeped in the important issues of her day.  It is this combination of a writer pointing to how to make the world better, while writing with such vivid settings, quirky characters, wit and optimism that make her books uplifting and fun to read even to this day.  

Now who would like a Jean Webster Book!

 

 

I ordered several copies of Daddy Long Legs for a giveaway, but I quickly realized I was not going to be able to give them all away.

Each copy that arrived in the mail, was a little different.  Clearly, I can not give away this one with the sweet book jacket!

Blue and gold… with a heart and roses!  I can’t give away this one!

 

 

 

Plain red cover and kind of blurry… I can probably give away this one…

And I eventually got two copies of the green cover with the red roses, so I guess I can part with one of those.
To enter to win one of these two copies of Daddy Long Legs, leave a comment.

You may answer this question if you like in the comments…

Do you think the art of letter writing is dead?

Winners will be chosen at random on Friday September 25, 2009 around 9 pm.

I often think of the book Angela’s Ashes. It is one of those tales, so vivid, so brutal, and yet so powerfully full of the force of life that it is impossible to forget. I spent some time today watching McCourt in various videos around the internet. He spoke of the authors that he clung to during his desperate childhood and guess what? They were all humor writers. P.G Wodehouse, Mark Twain… people that made him laugh in the middle of his miserable childhood.

Frank also credited his low-life alcoholic father who abandoned him, and the rest of his family to utter poverty for giving him a love for language and a great story. I often see this capacity in authors to see the good in their ‘captors’. Another example that immediately springs to mind, is Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle. Both of these writers have an amazing sympathy and love for the very people who caused all of their misery. They have a generous perspective to see the good in the people who caused them the most pain. And they almost always have a ferocious sense of humor that helps them battle the demons of their lost youth. More often than not, it is one of their misbegotten parents that taught them how to laugh at life.

Want to give your kids a great gift?

Give them the ability to laugh.

To laugh at hardship.

To laugh at difficulty.

To see the absurdity of some of their most trying circumstances.

And most of all, to laugh at themselves.

We all need to be able to laugh at ourselves.

It is a basic survival mechanism.

I don’t think that there exists a single act that promotes mental health more.

After surviving a bitterly poor childhood in Limerick, Ireland, Frank McCourt came to America and eventually served in the Korean War. When his tour of duty came to an end, the GI bill funded his education and he became a teacher. Frank McCourt taught creative writing in New York public schools for 27 years. He retired in his mid sixties and wrote three memoirs. His first book, Angela’s Ashes won him the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie. If you have not yet read this book, might I highly suggest it?  It is a story that you will never forget.

I lead a very exciting life.  Very, very, very exciting.  It is probably too exciting for most people to bear.  If you suffer at all from any sort of nervous disorder, you may want to stop reading this post right now.

Lately, the most exciting thing that has happened to me has been watching the new Agatha Christie mysteries online.  Did you know that you can watch them online?  I told you my life was exciting!  You can watch them at this link here.  It’s free, but the various episodes are only up for a few weeks at a time.  

 

In other very exciting breaking news….

In the new PBS Mystery series, there is a new actress playing Miss Marple!

Are you still with me?  

I hope you didn’t pass out from all the excitement!

Julia McKenzie was chosen to play Miss Marple after Geraldine McEwan announced her retirement.  

 

Over the course of film history, at least seven different English speaking actresses have played the role of Miss Marple.  (There have been a few Miss Marples in other countries as well.)  Gracie Fields, Helen Hayes, and Angela Lansbury were three of them.

 

Margaret Rutherford played a memorable Miss Marple in some comic adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels.  Agatha herself, hated these goofy versions, but later became a personal friend of Rutherford.

 

 

 

Joan Hickson played the role of Miss Marple for the longest period of time from 1984 to 1992.  All twelve Miss Marple stories were eventually filmed starring Hickson.  Joan’s Marple was penetrating, observant, and almost searing.  Her outfits never varied much from the gray tweed and simple hat.  The interesting part of Hickson’s Marple was the deliberate delivery and the way you could almost hear her brain grinding the characters into pulpy clues as she sat quietly knitting and observing everyone who passed her way.

 

 

 

 

After Hickson, Geraldine McEwan took on the role.  Her take on the character was far more feminine and friendly including more lace, more color, and more curls in her hair.  McEwan’s voice is higher, her gait is more lively, she has a sort of perpetually pleased look about her.  Her vast knowledge of human behavior truly seems to come out of left field as McEwan’s Miss Marple is more reminiscent of Mary Poppins than it is of Sherlock Holmes.  

 

 

 

 

Julia McKenzie is the latest actress to give Marple her own unique spin.  Clad in a sensible grey suit, she definitely reaches back towards Hickson’s Marple in her appearance, but her open demeanor is more like McEwan’s.  I’ve only seen one of the new Agatha Christie’s at this point, and am still smarting from both the exit of Hickson and McEwan.  I suppose after a while I will learn to accept this new Marple, but I do hate to start all over again!  I suppose in my heart, it will always be Joan Hickson who is the ultimate Miss Marple.  She is the one I watched first, and something about her seems just right to me, though I learned to love Geraldine’s Marple too and her outfits are unsurpassed in the world of elderly woman detective fashion.  

Speaking of elderly woman detective fashion…

Who’s up for a Miss Marple fashion show?

 

Here we have Joan Hickson sporting plain brown hat and plain brown jacket…

Only her sparkling blue eyes betray any sort of superior powers underneath that prim and austere exterior.

 

 

Julia McKenzie sports a humble grey jacket, minimal jewelry, and hat with only the most simple of trimmings.  It is a bit more flash than Hickson, but not much…

 

 

 

 

Comparitively, Geraldine is all about the flash.  

 

 

 

 

Extraordinary flash…

 

 

 

 

Shocking flash…

 

 

 

 

 

We better get back to Joan Hickson in plain brown hat and plain brown jacket to calm ourselves back down.

Hey!

I told you that it was exciting around here!

Now off with you!

Go watch the new Agatha Christies for free on PBS.org.  

And just try and get your heart to slow down and beat normally when you are done!

It has been a rough couple of weeks here at My Sister’s Farmhouse.  I don’t even want to think about how many miles I’ve put on my car driving to and from Arkansas, to and from the Western end of my state, to and from Atchison and Kansas City.  I thoroughly enjoyed all these trips that I have taken in the past few weeks.  I met Sarah Susanka for crying out loud!  I met and toured the home of Mary Carol Garrity!  I went with nine teenagers (along with my friends Jenny and Dave) to Heifer Ranch!  I ate dinner in Appalachia, spent the night in Guatemala, and breakfasted in the urban slums!  I went to puppet camp!  I played a gig in Kansas City!  

I didn’t just visit a bunch of different places… I visited a bunch of different ideas too.  Ideas on how to build a good house.  Ideas on how to beautifully decorate your home… and then at the opposite end of the spectrum… ideas on how to sustain your family on two cups of rice and a stolen egg… ideas on how to stretch your meager food supplies through the monsoon season… ideas on which assets are more important to keep… your health… or your groceries…

These two opposing worlds forced me to take a hard look at my own life and determine if I am not possibly the most shallow person on the face of the earth.  Just when I was about to find a way to merge moving to a third world country to help the utterly destitute with which of these super cute designer platters should I purchase at Nell Hill’s?… an old songwriting buddy called me up and asked me to come to KC and sing with him at an honest to goodness gig.

Now in the midst of cataclysmic, life changing chaos, I am forced to deal with the ghosts of forgotten dreams.  

Then I start thinking about blogging.

And Oh Lord… here we go…

Why… Why… WHY???

Why do I do this?  

What am I doing?  

What am I going for here?  

What am I trying to achieve?

What is the point?

It can’t possibly be worth all the time and money I have spent on it.

Maybe it’s time to do something of real value… something that matters… something that means something.

Something that I could possibly even succeed at!

 

No wait…

 

That might be going too far…

 

 

But maybe something that comes with a real paycheck… and helps people… and gives back… and amounts to something…

 

 I was distraught.

I was sad.

I was overwhelmed by a feeling of uselessness and stupidity.

I felt empty and also…

like a total dumb-ass.

Then I remembered that my book club was meeting in just a few days.

I picked up the book that I was supposed to read and I started reading it.

Furiously reading it.

Reading  to distract myself from myself… 

To ignore myself…

To forget that I even existed.

And it worked!  

I didn’t put the book down until the last page.

And when it was over I still desperately needed to escape from my own miserable flesh…

So I fished around for another book.

And I found one!

And again I was swept away by a story.

And I didn’t put it down until the last page.

And then I looked up and saw four very hungry boys, one very messy house, a garden that needed tending, and a husband that kept calling from work every three hours because he knows that I have a tendency to fall deeper and deeper into a melancholy until I am nothing but inconsolable.

But I was consoled.

Two books consoled me.

My life still does not make any sense, but I feel better about it.

Reading a good book has always done that for me.

And these were two VERY GOOD BOOKS!

 

The first book was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

 

 

 

The second book was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

 

 

I hope to have both of these books in an upcoming giveaway and I will give you a synopsis at that time.

Until then…

If you are in need of a good read, might I highly recommend either one?

The life you save might just be your own.

I am going to have dinner with one of my heroes!

Well… not just me. There will be lots and lots of other people there too, but I will be one of the other people!

The person I am going to dine with is an acclaimed architect and author of a series of beautifully photographed books that changed the way America looks at home building. I spent hours of my life mesmerized by the content, the photos and the house plans in each of these books and I drew immeasurable inspiration from them as I planned my own house. The author of these books popularized the phrase ‘McMansion’ pointing out that instead of building bigger and bigger and bigger houses, wouldn’t it be far more intelligent to build smarter? The books show you how to design a house that maximizes every square inch. It shows you how to design rooms that have more than one use and to avoid ‘museum rooms’. This author created the ‘away room’ the place that every house needs to escape the general bedlam. This author insists on the proper siting of your home for the best natural light, on interior views that make small spaces seem larger, and on built-ins that are not only charming, but functional as well.

These books forced me to trim, cut, smoosh, and do away with things I didn’t really need when I designed our home. This author changed how I thought about houses and I built a much better home as a result.

If you can name the author of whom I write, I will enter your name into a drawing for a special autographed copy of one of her… I mean… uh… the author’s books.

I will have a few more autographed copies of ‘this author’s books’ to give away later, but this particular giveaway is for the architecture junkies… or at least for the ones that are capable of a good google search.

Comments will be not be published until the contest is over so no cheating can take place.

Not that anyone would of course.

Contest ends Friday June 5th 2009, at 10:00 PM

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

53 - Naomi B. 

ohhh, wedding stuff….
And Books! Yes, please!
And a boy camp out at your house? May you recover quickly.

44 - MamaHen 

All these sound fun. Good summer reading!

75 - becky up the hill 

I just celebrated my 30th! You guys are babies! We went to romatic Monterey, Ca. My husband got the flu and a parking ticket. Please throw my name in the ring/hat? Thanks!

 

Congratulations to the winners.  Summer reading on it’s way as soon as you send me your mailing addresses via mysistersfarmhouse@live.com

 

Thanks to all who entered and everyone who made it through that exceptionally long post.