Sunday Scribblings: Wedding

I hate this prompt.

I'm going to hate wading through other people's posts about the day they married their husband/wife. All very romantic stories, I'm sure. I'm not against marriage. It's just the older I get the more complicated the whole thing seems. I don't know if I could ever hand someone my heart on a platter. And I don't know what I would do if they served me theirs on a platter.

I went out to dinner a few months back and a woman I didn't know very well told me that she met a guy, they had two, like, awesome months together and then he left for a trip to Europe. There were many tears and promises (most of them hers I am guessing) and now she had just quit her job and was going to fly to Europe to holiday with him for a while before they both came back to start their lives together. Part of this hideously romantic tale was the line "Two weeks after I met him he said I was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with and he could see himself with me forever."

At this point I was ready to leave the table if she continued with "He said he could see his unborn children in my eyes". Luckily she stopped for a breath and I said "Maybe there is something wrong with me, but I'd run a mile if a guy said that to me." She looked visibly annoyed. I guess I was supposed to gush and giggle and look wistful as I told her she was the luckiest woman in the world and I was so envious.

Sorry, no. I'm not against relationships, love and romance. I like all three, sometimes mixed together. But I'm not willing to mortgage myself for something that isn't real, doesn't make sense and is based purely on emotion. Just because you love one another, doesn't mean it is going to work. Life leans much more towards the practical than the romantic and the various expensive weddings I've attended over the years have made me decidedly cynical about the whole thing. One in three couples who marry divorce. I think they should be made to give the wedding presents back, or offer a cash equivalent.

Friday Words of Wisdom

The lesson I am learning lately is that there is no waiting for the perfect time to start anything. There will never be a perfect time to:

start a business,

have a baby,

quit your job,

go for the job you want,

go back to school,

call that person,

paint those empty canvasses,

leave your comfort zone,

learn to surf,

travel to India,

write your book,

follow your dream.

There will never be the perfect time for anything, so you may as well begin now imperfectly.

- Words of wisdom from the remarkable Stacy over at Bella Wish.

Because sometimes photographs say it better than words...

Dark and damp and quiet

Because sometimes I just feel so darn insignificant

A friend in need can always be comforted by a Mollie paw

Believe

I am no longer sure

if I

believe

in

me

(or you).

Sunday Salon: Week 6

This week I have been reading Garden Spells, Cerulean Sins (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter # 11) and Coraline.

I wrote about Garden Spells last week, and as I finished the last 100 pages or so the assessment I made was pretty right on - it was an enjoyable read, but fairly forgettable. I read some reviews and a lot of people likened Garden Spells to the movie Practical Magic. It had been a while since I saw the movie, so I could only remember some vague similarities. However it was on tv last night and I watched it again and yeah, pretty much the exact same storyline. But the books is still a fun, light and fluffy read. You could do a lot worse than to pick up Garden Spells.


Next up was Coraline, which I had never even heard of until I read about it on Bookgirl's Nightstand. She thought she was the last person to read it, but as I hadn't even heard of it, I think she's safe. I added it to my list of books to read and then noticed it on the shelf at the library. I checked it out and wow, I'm glad I did. It's a young adult book, but it is genuinely creepy and all that business about the imposter parents having buttons for eyes is very weird and is creeping me out even as I type this. It's a quick read, but a wonderful fairy tale with a dark underbelly. *insert shudder here*

When I sourced an image for this book I heard that there is a movie being made based on the book. The image above is an early poster promoting the movie. Um...don't take your kids until you've read the book!


Finally, I started and finished Cerulean Sins, the 11th book in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. These books started out with a serious bang and to almost universal applause from critics and readers alike. Then around book 9, our heroine met with some...changes. From about book 10 onwards it has been nothing but hate from critics and readers alike. Amazon is populated with hundreds of 1 and 2 star ratings for books 11, 12, 13 and 14. Pretty much everyone turned on author Laurell K Hamilton and gutted her with a very long very sharp sword. Was this a great book? No, not great. But it was good, it was engaging and it kept me reading. Hamilton is gifted with a wonderful imagination and Anita is so very practical and real and solid. She's incredibly likeable, despite the fact that she kills monsters for a living and *gasp* sleeps with more than one man at a time. However, the finer points of plotting and story development are not really Hamilton's gifts. In the beginning books she was clearly heavily edited and the books were better for it. But like some other authors I can think of, as she became more popular and sold more books, her books got bigger and bigger and not necessarily better. Typos and grammatical errors (truly appalling ones, like the use of "isle" instead of "aisle" in a wedding setting) crept in and gave people who hated what Hamilton did to Anita Blake even more ammo to throw her way. And really, the publishers should be ashamed of themselves.

Anyway, the book itself was good. The plot was a bit thin, with a gaping hole in the middle resolved with a last minute tie up that was a bit too convenient. It was nice to see some development with Richard actually growing a pair and Asher finally getting back into Jean-Claude's (and Anita's) bed (at the same time! Shock! Horror!). Anita's character only moved forward marginally, but some of the scenes with her and Belle Morte/Musette were vintage Anita and really well done. Part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much was because it has been well over a year since I read Anita Blake number 10. I have discovered that a little Anita goes a long way. I have number 12 sitting on my bookshelf as we speak, but I'll be giving it at least a few months breathing room, maybe more.


Anyway, I'm one chapter into Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojurn to Kyoto which is a travel and food memoir. So far so good. I visited Kyoto a few years back and I can visualise the underground mall where the author is having her first meal of eel in Japan. It is so nice to be able to relate to the setting a book. It adds layers of meaning that you don't even realise are missing.

Happy reading and happy Sunday!

Sunday Salon: Week Five

This week I've been reading The Horse Whisperer, If I Am Missing or Dead, and Garden Spells.

Let's start with The Horse Whisperer which is the first of the books I'm reading for the Lit Flicks Challenge.


I saw the movie some time ago and will probably see it again, as part of the Lit Flicks challenge is to read the book and see the movie. The book was certainly engaging, but it also had its rough spots. Nicolas Evans has the bones of a great book here - girl and horse experience a horrific accident, career woman in crisis, lone wolf horse whisperer on a ranch in scenic Montana, bland husband...a perfect recipe for affairs, accusations, love, healing and redemption. Something, however, gets a bit lost in the translation. Maybe if the book had been tighter, about 50 pages less it would have been a really good book. It's a bit bloated and I got a bit sick of career woman Annie and her boring husband Robert and some of the other very one dimensional characters. By far the most intriguing character is the horse whisperer Tom Booker, closely followed by the daughter Grace. Anyway, I have to say that I was surprised at the end which is radically different from the end of the movie. I'd recommend the book, but I wouldn't say it was amazing or anything.



I have been waiting for Janine Latus' If I Am Missing or Dead since April, and when I picked the request up at the library on Friday I noted for the first time a marker that informed me the book was in "heavy demand" and there would be no renewal. I've been borrowing books from the library for about 20 years and I've never seen one of those markers before. I guess I don't read a lot of popular books! This book actually has quite a misleading title. Janine Latus' sister was certainly killed by her boyfriend, but this is Janine's story about her abusive relationship with her husband and the echoes of abuse in her family home as she grew up. Her father is painted as a complete and total pig, sexualising his daughters, groping their friends and telling inappropriate stories. It is hard to know what is true in memoir, but if half of this book is true, I think Janine Latus has had a very tough and sad life. Again the book is bloated - the fact that her husband is a jerk but they have a great sexual relationship is mentioned oh, about 100 times. It is an interesting side of domestic violence and not one usually explored, but it was overdone here and in the last 100 pages or so I simply couldn't understand why she wouldn't leave him. Her only defence seems to be "I was scared to be alone" which didn't seem to hold water to me. I'd recommend the book, but from the reviews on Amazon it seemed a lot of people were misled and thought this would be a "true crime" (a genre of books I personally hate) about Latus' sister Amy. So as long as you know up front it is Janine's story it's a compelling, interesting and ultimately tragic tale of a family mired by domestic violence.



Garden Spells is a lovely little book about the Waverly family who have an unusual apple tree in the backyard and a legacy of being "magical" in their home town. he book centres of Claire, and her sister Sydney (and Sydney's daughter Bay) who has recently returned home after a lifetime of running away from what it means to have the magic Waverly touch. I love the descriptions of the lovely food Claire cooks from the magic garden and her almost-relationship with the boy next door is sweet. I've read some scathing reviews of this book, and I think they were a little harsh. I once described a book as being like cotton candy - sweet, fun and good while you're eating it, but basically unfulfilling - and I think Garden Spells is another one of those books. I'm not quite done with it yet.

Next up will be something from the shelf...maybe the next Anita Blake book or even the last Harry Potter!

Happy Sunday. :)