My Latest Evangelism-Worthy Books

 

Louanne Brizendine blew me away and made me an annoyingly pest of my friends after reading The Female Brain in April.  I recommended it to all my (many) male colleagues with tween and teen daughters as well as anyone going through or supporting a spouse through menopause.  In addition I used many of the astonishing lab result finds to start (or stop) many a dinner conversation [e.g. did you know a mothering rat will choose the button that releases a suckling baby rat 100% of the time over the button that releases CRACK!?  the feel-good hormones released when nursing are a better high for the human-brain-hormone similar rats!].  Well, I figured The Male Brain would be similar but now-familiar fare since she often highlit the differences in males and females throughout Female.  Yet, once again, I was blown away by Brizendine's voice and data.  I planned to buy a copy for my sister who has a baby boy when I was in the first chapter.  Then I read the Teen chapter, followed by Mating, Parenting and Retirement chapters and the epiphanies kept rolling in.  So in the end I purchased one for myself and both my siblings and have started a new evangelization compaign for this captivating book.  It's non-fiction which I rarely deign to read, but it reads like a narrative, is short (1/2 of the book is just reference material) and divides topics easily into 5 life-stage chapters.  It is emminently readable, and hopefully for others - awesome.  Super-highly-hyperbolically recommended!  These two were probably my favorite books of the year so far (and I've read some great ones this year!) 

August Reads Borrows & Bought

August's runaway winner (although it was an all-over interesting and enriching month of reading) is The Forgotten Garden, a book our bookclub chose to read and that was a delight to dive into.  It is compared to The Secret Garden in reviews and with some reason... they both have gardens.  Forgotten starts a little slow like Francis Hodges Burnett's novel does and Burnett makes a brief appearance in the tale.  Otherwise though the main similarities are the great female characters (in this case several generations of women across continents) and the feeling of wonder as you fall into the magic of the tale.  It's not perfect, especially in laying out the foundations of the personalities of the characters, but its memorable and satisfying and I'll return to it for a second (or more) reading in the future!

Otherwise, I bopped all around genres - some due to recommendations or a 2nd book club (Fermata and Hollywood), and some due to their classical nature and a desire to keep spreading my tastes or due to it catching my eye at the local bookstore display  (The Great Impersonation and Angelology).

With Borders bookstores going out of business (for real this time) and a surprise Amazon giftcard, I've been hard-pressed to refrain from buying sprees so I'm sitting on my hands figuratively through September to balance out my banner month of new books in August!  Highlights from purchases are/were The Forgotten Garden which I first read from the library but loved enough to own and reread, and I, Claudius which is a bi-annual favorite read and which I lost by enthusiastically loaning it out in years past.  My used copy from Amazon.com looks almost exactly the same as my old copy!  I have a lot of reading and a lot less acquiring to do this next month!

Books I Read Again and Again

I'm about to start a book I read about every 2 years and it started me thinking about books that I read again and again.  I basically keep every book I think I might read again some day or that I want to recommend to someone but these are the ones I have read 3+ times and will keep coming back.  Some (Twilight anyone?) aren't exactly the height of literature but are addictive and some are true classics that are both well written and enlightening.  The primary list is as follows:

Classics

1) I, Claudius by Robert Graves

2) Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott 

3) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
5) Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling 

Modern Fiction

1) The Princess Bride by William Goldman
2) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenger
3) Twilight series (somebody stop me!) by Stephanie Meyer

Fantasy

1) Sabriel/Lirael/Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
2) The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan

Children's or YA Lit

1) The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
2) Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
3) Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Bibliophiles Alternative to Cosmo Relationship Quiz

I came across this link from the Not Martha blog and it tickled me.  Ladies, if any of your chosen or sought-after mates name one of these books as their favorite, BEWARE!

Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky

If your man doesn't fall into one of these, congrats!  However, we've all men that guy who's favorite paperback was Salinger's Catcher in the Rye - so we can all enjoy the breakdown of his issues here!