Challenge 1: A Book You Own But Haven't Read

Ida's book: "Love: Great Short Stories for Women by Women" compiled by Victoria Hislop (Head of Zeus, 2014)

Reasons for choice:

This book is a part of a set of three (the other titles being "Life" and "Loss") and as the title says, it is a compilation of short stories written by women. The authors include Alice Walker, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, so seeing those names I just had to buy the set. 

I've had the books lying around for some time now so I'm going to use this reading challenge as an excuse to sit down and read them,  this month I will tackle the book on "Love" because I'm a sucker for love stories. 

I really like the medium of short stories, there's something very satisfying about finishing a story quite quickly, it's as if you're thrust into this world and after 10 pages or so you're kicked out again, but they always leave you wanting more, wanting to know what happens next: that's why I like them they make you think and use your imagination.

Comments:

Here we are at the end of October and the first month of the reading challenge is over. I chose to read a collection of short stories written by women, a book that had been lying around but which I hadn't gotten round to.

I was actually quite disappointed with this collection, it being titled "Love" I expected lots of love stories, however this book casts a much wider net and includes many different aspects of love. Still, there were some stories that I felt didn't fit in.

I have chosen to highlight a few of the stories that stood out, and the first one is "Faithful lovers" by Margaret Drabble which focuses on the meeting of two  previous lovers and the realisation that they still love each other. This was probably what I expected the whole collection to contain. I love its notes of bittersweet resignation to life, while still giving the reader enough glimpses of hope for the two characters.

One of the reasons that I bought the book was that it had the story "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter in it. It is a reworking of the fairytale of Bluebeard's Castle and the story centres on a young girl, recently married to an older, many times widowed man. She arrives at his castle and is given the keys to all the rooms, but is also forbidden to enter one room in particular where her husband could go and "savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless". Of course, after such a statement the young bride seeks out the room and discovers the bodies of her predecessors and the author really succeeds in painting out the horrors of this particular chamber and the subsequent race for the young bride to escape the same fate.

"My son the hero" by Clare Boylan was a rollercoaster ride about a single mother looking after her son who, it is made out in the story, is not quite 'normal'. The story evolves around her son rescuing a cat from a tree, but at the same time a girl is found murdered and the mother wonders whether her son did it. The reader is also kept in suspense and we are presented with evidence for both cases to be true. From the aspect of 'love', the story offers a convincing but also horrifying image of what a mother would do out of love for her son.

The last story that really stood out was "The Heart of Denis Noble" written by Alison McCloud which is about a professor of cardiovascular physiology who needs a new heart. It makes use of flashbacks to let the reader into his early career and how he met his wife but the real gem of this story comes right at the end as his new heart is in place and McCloud casually mentions the new character traits that Denis Noble is experiencing as an outcome of him having a new heart from a young donor, such as a taste for kebabs.

I found that the book's later half was much more interesting and succeeded much more in drawing me in and making me care for the characters and their fates. It was a pretty good bedtime read, as it was possible to finish one story every night and then be done with that story, no overarching storylines to keep track off, although that also makes some of the stories slip from memory. All in all, it was a decent collection, but I could have wished for more gripping stories.

Challenge 1: A Book You Own but Haven't Read

Donna's Book: "A Full Life: Reflections at 90" by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

Reasons for choice:
When I was an exchange student at Georgetown University in 1995/6, I took a class on American foreign policy.  The professor, Dr Q, gave a lecture on Carter's presidency and talked about how he'd ignored the Cold War when formulating his foreign policy and it absolutely fascinated me.  I wanted to learn everything that I could about Jimmy after that.  I wrote my PhD on his foreign policy towards the Horn of Africa and published my first book on that subject.  Without Jimmy Carter, I wouldn't be where I am today: I wouldn't have the career that I have and I wouldn't have the life that I have.  But besides that, I think he's a really amazing man.  He works constantly to make the world a better place, and even though he's battling cancer he's still working for that same cause.  He is my inspiration and I adore him.  And that's why I want to read his latest book.

Comments:

Having read this book, in which Jimmy Carter reflects on his ninety years of life, I feel more like I've had a conversation with him rather then having spent a few hours reading about him.  Jimmy has packed so much into his life that it would have been impossible for him to go into any detail and there seems to be a basic assumption that most readers would already know much of what happened.  The sections on the presidential years read more like a series of lists of what was accomplished -- which is far more than most critics would give him credit for -- and what still remained to be done.  Even with the latter, the foundations laid by Carter were far-reading and widespread and many subsequent presidents too credit for achievements that were not theirs alone.  But what this book did for me was make me feel like I knew Jimmy-the-man a little better.  His memories of his childhood were endearing but probably shocking to the average childhood, even in the rural south, today!  His attitude and approach to his life was, if anything, a bit daunting.  This man was clearly a force of nature ... but maybe that's the reason why achieved as much as he did, and why the Carter Center has the recognition and the reputation that it does.

Carter's honesty was also refreshing, especially when he talked about his relationship with his beloved Rosalynn.  At times I was left wondering why she put up with him, but then I'd turn a page and read some more, and I realised why she did.  And why he cherishes her so.

Perhaps the hardest section to read was when Jimmy was discussing his family medical history and the deaths, at relatively young ages, of his father, brother and sisters from pancreatic cancer.  At the time of writing, Carter explained that he was being regularly monitored for signs of the disease but was still in good health.  As we all know, that has since changed and his rather stark assessment that, should he develop the disease and it spread to other vital organs, his life expectancy would likely only be a few months was, given his current health condition, chilling.

Having read this book, though, and learned more about Carter-the-man, I know that Carter is not dwelling on that but instead is focusing on what needs to be done today.  Carter has LIVED every one of his ninety-one years and, if nothing else, his "Reflections at Ninety" proves that.

It also proves that the world would have been a much poorer place without Jimmy Carter. And I know that my life would too.