The Potato Chip Puzzles by Eric Berlin ***

I'm going to attempt to read all the Mark Twain Award nominees again this year, & this is my first one! 
If you like solving all kinds of puzzles, then this may be the book for you.  Eric Berlin does a good job of injecting math, word, geometry, & other kinds of puzzles into this fairly entertaining book.

Winston Breen is a puzzle sleuth, so when he helps the principal of his junior high solve a puzzle they find out that there is going to be a puzzle-solving competition, & of course Winston will be on the team from his school.  The team of three students & one teacher must solve 6 different puzzles in order to win the prize:  $50,000 for their school.  But they're up against some of the best puzzle pros in the area.  Can they win?  And which team is cheating?

There was a lot of excitement in this book as the teams raced to solve the puzzles, but I was confused by the difficulty of some of them.  Some were so hard to me that it seemed like I'd never have solved them on my own (lucky for me the answers are in the back of the book!).  Yet I was surprised that the final puzzle wasn't as hard as I expected.  Also I thought there would be more of a twist in the story at the end, so I was mildly disappointed when I reached the end of the book. 

Overall, though, I think it's a great book for the puzzle-minded kid aged 8-14.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes ***

Tony is remembering his first girlfriend from back in the 60's.  He's retired now, divorced, & rather confused when he gets an inheritance from Veronica's mother.  Why would he get 500 pounds from his ex-girlfriend's mom 40 years later?  He soon finds out it has something to do with his friend Adrian. After Tony & Veronica broke up back then, she started dating Adrian.  A few months later, Adrian killed himself.  Is Tony remembering the past correctly?  And what is the past, if not what we remember? 
Overall, this was a great book.  The writing was excellent & it read quickly.  You tend to feel Tony's confusion along with him, & you can become very emotionally invested in the outcome.
That said, there are two things about this book I didn't like.  The first is something that has happened to anyone who reads. You've heard of a great book, everyone says it's the wonderful.  So you get it & read it.  And you just don't quite get it.
That happened to me with this book.  It has a twist at the ending & I understood that.  But there was an aspect of it that I just didn't grasp, & it's not because the author didn't supply it, it's because sometimes I just don't get the obvious.  I don't want to give away the ending, but it's so hard not to & properly discuss this book.  So I'm going to make an announcement:

SPOILER ALERT!!!  PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!!

OK, so in the end we find out that Adrian killed himself because he'd gotten Veronica's mother pregnant.  Alright, I get that.  But what I fail to grasp is why Tony has anything to do with that.  There's the implication that maybe he somehow encouraged it in his angry letter to Adrian when he found out he & Veronica were dating.  But I don't see how that has made him some sort of accomplice to the whole affair.  I just don't get it, so if you've read this book & you understand what the heck is going on, please leave a comment & tell me!
The second thing that upsets me is the portrayal of Adrian's son.  He obviously has a developmental disability of some sort, but lame approach is taken that this is a horrible tragedy.  I guess I'm tired of seeing people with those types of disabilities as being tragic figures.  They can be tragic, don't get me wrong, but not because of their disability.  The only tragedy that I saw was the fact that a young man would rather kill himself than deal with impregnating someone, even if it is his girlfriend's mom. 
And that brings me back to the first problem--why would she leave money to Tony? 
I think I better just leave it there & start reading a new book!

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens *****

One of the main reasons I love this book is just because of it's title.  It says it all.  Who among us hasn't had great expectations when we were younger of what our lives would be like?  We were going to be different.  Individuals, living how we wanted, not like our parents.  Not stuck in some small town or small mindset, but living large.  I was young enough when I first read Great Expectations to realize that's how I felt, but old enough to hear the nasty voice of doubt whispering in my ear. Since then I've come to realize that giving a child the gift of great expectations is actually a curse--they'll be like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up the hill but having it crush them at the bottom in the end.
Pip grows up in the country being brought up "by hand" by his shrewish older sister & her gentle husband.  Joe, Pip's brother-in-law, is actually Pip's greatest childhood friend.  Joe is a simple & ignorant blacksmith, but his kindness & care for others makes you realize how wise he actually is.  Joe & Pip simply live for the day that Pip will be apprenticed to Joe & then "what larks!" they will have together.  But a series of events that seem to be unrelated conspire to make Pip wish to be more than he ever thought he could be, & to then give him the means to that end.
Great Expectations is about the foolishness of youth & about growing up & leaving behind those that we love.  It's about the abandoning of the people that made you good in favor of those that you think will make you great.  And it's about the journey back home after being led far afield.
It's also a book about judgement.  I can't tell you how many times I've labeled people in my mind based on some small aspect of their character that I think I've had some sort of special insight into.  It's all rubbish.  The label always comes from within the labeler-- you see something of yourself you'd rather not like to admit to in someone else.  There are several quotes from this book that I like, but by far my favorite is one where Pip refers to his great friend Herbert:

We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.

Thanks Mr. Dickens.

Thousands of Tiny Dots...

Just thought I'd pop on here & tell you all what I've been up to.  Haven't been reading anything new, unfortunately.  But I have been re-reading some of my favorite books.  Right now I'm tackling Great Expectations again.  I haven't read much of Dickens, but this is by far my favorite book by him.  I think it has a lot to do with my own great expectations, & how it seems like they just set us up to not appreciate all  the small things that happen to us that, when added together, make up a solid life.  When viewed in hindsight I think most of us would think a great many people have lived important lives in some way or another.  I often wonder, though, how many of those people thought they were supposed to achieve something large, or great, all at once in the course of their time on earth.  Only in retrospect can you look back & feel that you've lead a "good" life.  At least that's what I hope.  My expectations are still making my life difficult.  I hope that once I'm out of my 40's (& God help me, I've only just gotten into them!) I can maybe start to forgive myself for what I consider my lack of acheivement in my life.  I hope that I can start to see in a few years the solid wall of something built of the many little things that make up my daily life.

But for right now I'm still stuck not seeing the whole picture.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett ****

I'm a sucker for a good historical fiction novel, and this is one!  It follows 5 families (one Welsh, one Russian, one American, one Brit and one German) from the turn of the century to just after WWI, showing how their stories meet and part while they live in those turbulent times.  Now you know there are going to be a lot of characters when you have to have a list of them in the front of the book, but these are even organized by nationality and sometimes even by job.  And I'm so glad Ken Follett did that, because I'm one of those people that has a hard time remembering who's who. 

It's a big, sweeping book, and Follett is planing of following it with two more just like it, since it says on the front cover that this is book one of The Century Trilogy.  I think it's fascinating to see how war brings very different people together that would never have met and creates a new reality that our ancestors would be rather surprised to learn about (for example:  both of my husband's grandparents never would have met each other without WWII happening).  So I can't wait for the next book, which will undoubtedly deal with WWII and how the same characters and their children experience it. 

Thanks Ken Follett for another great read!

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain ****

I needed a new book to read, something recent that looked good.  I can't remember where I saw this book listed, maybe on the New York Times bestsellers list, but the idea of reading a pseudo-memoir about Hemingway's first wife was intriguing. 

Hadley Richardson was from my hometown, St. Louis, and was considered a spinster at age 28 when she met Ernest Hemingway.  He was 21 and just starting his writing career, not yet the man he would later become.  They fell in love, married, and moved to Paris so Ernest could be where all the great writers of the age were:  Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and more.  There they lived for several years in what for Hadley was marital bliss, but for Ernest became a tightening noose around his neck. 

I appreciated this book on several different levels, one of which was the character of Hadley herself.  I've seen that many people who've reviewed it thought that Hadley was a wimpy character, but I found her to be quite real.  She was the only person in a circle of very bright stars that wasn't a writer and wasn't trying to be famous in some way.  She was very ordinary, and as a rather ordinary person myself I liked her.  It was as though she were trying very hard to not be eaten alive by the people around her, and somehow she came out the other end intact. 

I would like to read The Sun Also Rises now since Hemingway's life while writing it was the model for this book.  And my husband's favorite Hemingway book, Islands in the Stream, would be good to read also--it has so much to do with Ernest looking back on his life and his wives with regret and longing.  And it's obvious that though she wasn't a flashy flapper, a love-starved socialite, or a petulant  beauty queen, Hadley in many ways was the love of his life and an anchor that he lost and never could find again.

Joplin

I've been reading a lot of magazines lately and haven't felt up to finishing my current book, Say Her Name, yet.  It's a good book, but the author's grief is hard to handle all at once.  I've been taking breaks.  One break was June 25th. 
I work at a hospital that is part of a large system of Catholic health care providers, and one of the medical centers in our system was struck by an F5 tornado on May 22.  My mother-in-law happens to work at this medical center, and also happened to be working that Sunday evening when the tornado hit.  I'll refer readers to Dog's blog for the details of what she went through.  The destruction was massive and the last I heard 156 people died in Joplin, Missouri that day.
Stuck up here in St. Louis, we didn't know what to do for the people of Joplin.  Our family was lucky--no one was hurt and their homes were fine.  But seeing the destruction on tv was hard.  This is a town that Dog knew well.  He hadn't lived there, but had grown up in several of the towns and cities in the surrounding area. 
When my work started to organize employees to go help with the clean-up, I volunteered.  So on June 25 I boarded a chartered bus at my place of work along with about 40 of my fellow employees and took the drive to Joplin.
One word to describe what was seen--overwhelming.  There was so much gone.  Just flat out gone.  Even the trees were stripped of their leaves and bark.  I could have been told that a bomb had been dropped on Joplin and I would have believed it. 
We worked for only 1 1/2 hours on a small house near the hospital.  Our short work duration was due to us getting there late (not sure why) and then the heat being so bad that they stopped us at 3 instead of 4.  But I think we got some work done while we were there.
What we did was sort the damage out into piles.  There was the masonry pile, the metal pile, the electronics pile, and the personal belongings pile.  I regret now not taking pictures, but at the time that seemed like a very...disrespectful thing to do.  That's the only word I can think of to describe when you're literally picking up the pieces of someone's life.  I was able to guess at the sort of people that lived in this little house by what we found.  I'll list some of the things that struck me the hardest:

• a frilly little girl's umbrella
• the top of the stove
• the back-drop for a small aquarium
• Are You My Mother? (one of Puppy's favorites when he was younger)
• a huge stuffed teddy bear
• curtains from Target
• a gallon of milk
• an extra large box of off-brand snack crackers
• a child's collection of plastic blocks with letters on them
• a VHS tape of Fievel Goes West
• a picture of two young women

The last item was given to an Americorps volunteer--they were in charge of any and all photos.  And those volunteers were some of the nicest people I've ever met.  They were all young folks, college aged I'd guess, and they kept thanking us over and over for helping them.  I was flabbergasted--they were the ones living down there in tents, doing some very hard work, both physically and emotionally.  It was so good to see them caring about the people of Joplin, and caring about us volunteers too.  They took good care of us, taking us right to where the work needed to be done and pressing water and Gator-Aide on us constantly. 
I want to go back sometime in September and maybe get some other people from my department to go with me.  I worried when driving down there that they wouldn't have much left for us to do.

There is more than enough.