Tag Archives: Fun Friday

Book Review: Firefly Island

Posted on by
1

In the past month, I’ve read two books with firefly in the title! The one I most recently finished was a review book from Bethany House called Firefly Island by Lisa Wingate.

A common theme I’m finding with Bethany House books is that they all have beautiful covers: striking photographs, a silky-smooth feel, and a satisfying shape and weight. I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but a nice cover sure does enhance my reading experience!

The book centers on Mallory, a successful and upwardly ambitious Congressional staffer who’s living up the single life in D.C. until she’s swept off her feet by a striking stranger. They enter into a whirlwind relationship and when he’s offered a seemingly top-notch job with an eccentric, wealthy researcher in Texas, she takes the plunge and marries him, becoming a step-mom to his toddler son and finding herself at loose ends getting used to small town life.

From the description on the back of the book, I expected this to be a pretty straightforward sweet romance, with some cutesy Southernisms thrown in as she acclimated to Texas. I somehow didn’t catch onto the fact that it was a mystery and somewhat of a page-turner!

Since I knew it was going to be a romance, I was okay with accepting the speedy transition from single girl to wife and mother. Daniel, the husband, was not a fully fleshed out character, but he was appealing enough to make the romance believable. I couldn’t quite believe his son Nick, though, and was really bothered by the way the author chose to transcribe his “kid speak.” It was distracting and not even that realistic to me. Other than that, their family unit was sweet and satisfying to follow.

It was fun to “get to know” the characters who inhabited Mallory’s small-town Texas, but I ended up feeling like I’d been left hanging by the way the conclusion came together. I’ll try not to give anything away, but it seemed to me like Wingate abandoned the mystery right at its climax and switched to explanatory prose in an epilogue, rather than continuing to let the reader follow along with the action. That was annoying to me. I felt like there was history with Mallory’s family and some of the other characters that was similarly brushed aside in favor of wrapping up the story, but I’m sure there’s a fine line between writing a book that reads well and writing a thousand page tome that no one will buy.

Another fun element was that Mallory becomes a blogger as she’s trying to find ways to fill her time. While her astronomical overnight success felt a bit unrealistic to me as a fellow blogger, I guess it could happen, and I was a little jealous of it!

While this was an enjoyable enough read, I found some of the plot structures to be a bit tenuous. It was as if Wingate wanted to write a book about legislation and so she had to find ways to fit that in, and it didn’t necessarily work for me. I can’t say that this book will have any sort of lasting impact on me.

Discovering Podcasts

Posted on by
1

I am notoriously late to trends. Not only am I late, I usually scoff at them (at least internally) until all of a sudden one day I decide I MUST have fill-in-the-blank trendy item.

Maybe I get so accustomed to seeing them around that they become part of my psyche. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve done this with a lot of things: North Face jackets, Tom’s shoes, skinny jeans, cowboy boots. Once I decide I want it, it becomes my quest in life to find the perfect version, and once I acquire it I love it. I guess by waiting so long to buy into trends I get past the impulse of it and have already decided it’s something I like and will use rather than buying it just for the sake of fitting in.

ANYWAY, this is an odd facet of my personality but one that I fully acknowledge. And the latest fodder for my late-coming ways are podcasts. (I know podcasts aren’t exactly a trend, but my process of coming to enjoy them has been just like my trend-personality, so I thought it was relevant.)

Andy has seemingly always listened to podcasts. I’ve always had trouble paying attention to someone talking unless I was also reading along or was able to watch them or something else going on in front of me, so I never understood how he could process them. He listens to them while he runs, and I’ve always thought, “Oh, I HAVE to have music when I exercise.” I’d listened to a few podcasts here and there at his prodding, and I’d caught bits and pieces of ones when he and I listened together, but I still thought podcasts were not for me.

As I was preparing for my last book club gathering, though, I found myself wanting to listen to the Slate audio book club podcast about the book we were discussing so I’d have some ideas of what to talk about. I didn’t think I had time to listen to it, so I put it on while I did dishes. It was long, so I left it on while I Googled for discussion questions and wrote out a few thoughts. Its 45 minutes flew by, and as we were talking at book club I realized I had absorbed a fair amount of what they had said!

Shortly after that, my dad sent me a link to an episode of The Splendid Table that had to do with Alabama cuisine. I was intrigued enough to actually listen, and I tried it on a Saturday morning while washing dishes again. A switch had been flipped–all of a sudden I liked podcasts!

They key for me was figuring out when the ideal time to listen was for me–my use case, if you will. Washing dishes is perfect because you can’t do much else at the same time. Your hands are busy but your mind is idle. Folding laundry is also good. And, in fact, I have listened to a few while running or elliptical-ing; I found that if I was excited about what podcast I had to listen to, it served as motivation to get to the gym!

Listening to them while driving does not work for me; for one thing, my car doesn’t have an auxiliary plugin, and my phone by itself is not really loud enough to hear over road noise. But I also find driving takes more of my brain than washing dishes and I can’t pay attention as well!

Another key, though, that I discussed with a friend of mine, is deciding that if you miss something it’s okay to just keep going. My instinct was along the lines of “oh, someone is teaching me something, I’d better take notes, I’d better not miss a single word, I’d better absorb everything they’re saying.” But it doesn’t have to be like that. As I saw with Slate, it was an enjoyable way to pass the time, and even by passively listening, I caught on to a lot.

Andy has not yet let me live down my 180-degree shift on podcasts. It’s okay. I’d probably make fun of me too.

Since my lightbulb moment, here are a few of the podcasts I’ve subscribed to and am enjoying:

  • The aforementioned The Splendid Table
    Host Lynn Rosetto Casper talks about a different kitchen or cooking-related topic each week and also takes calls from listeners with culinary questions.
  • America’s Test Kitchen
    Yes, another cooking show.
  • Slate’s Culture Gabfest and Double X Gabfest
  • Quick and Dirty Tips: Grammar Girl, Domestic CEO, Nutrition Diva, Money Girl
    These are short 5-10 minute weekly shows. I listened to 2 walking to church the other day and 2 on the way back. They’re just what they sound like: short tips on very specific topics! They probably won’t interest me every week, but I bet they will more often than not. There are a whole slew of tip-topics to choose from.

Do you listen to podcasts? What are some of your favorites? When do you find is the ideal time to listen to them?

Follow Friday: The Blog Edition

Posted on by
Reply

Follow Friday is a hashtag on Twitter. Hashtags are markers that catalog tweets from any number of users into a stream of related information that you can search. So, if you tag a tweet #FF (for Follow Friday), it will show up in the list of all tweets tagged “#FF.” This is particularly interesting or informative if you’re hashtagging an event or a place, for example, because then you can quickly look and see what others have to say about the thing you’re participating in. or the place you’re visiting For instance, I enjoyed checking out the tweets during the Miss America Pageant. Follow Friday’s directions are to “Tweet the names of Twitter users you’d like others to follow and tag it with #followfriday and/or #FF.”

I never really pay attention to the #FF tweets I see, and I’m fairly certain I’ve never actually followed anyone on the recommendation of an #FF. But lately, I’ve been wowed by several bloggers and really wanted to share them with you, so I thought I’d create a Follow Friday of my own this week here on the blog!

I’ve been reading blogs for years. Really, we could go all the way back to high school when I was into being emo on LiveJournal and Xanga, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. The real meat of my blog reading started in college; I’m not exactly sure what triggered it, but over the years I’ve curated a collection of feeds in Google Reader. These bloggers, whether I interact with them or not, are really a part of my life. If I’m away from my Reader for too long, I start to wonder what they’re up to. Sometimes I’m overzealous and subscribe to a bunch of blogs that don’t really do it for me after awhile, so I try to be intentional about culling my list pretty frequently. Lately I’ve been in a really good blog-reading groove and have found a few new voices who are adding a great feel to the posts I read every day!

Some of my current favorites:

  • Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
    I stumbled across this blog from MoneySavingMom.com. She writes about time management and work, and is much more career oriented than most of the blogs I read. From the description I wouldn’t have thought I’d like her blog, but I find so many useful little tips and tricks and find that I really relate to many of the things she talks about. Plus, I love Vanderkam’s voice, which is almost as important to me in a blog as the actual topic! I find myself wanting to comments on her posts quite often, which is a big deal to a self-proclaimed passive consumer such as myself. Laura came and commented on this little blog once and I felt like hot stuff. ;-)
  • Jessica at Faith Permeating Life
    I think I found Jessica through 20SB, a blog network that seemed promising but was really mostly a bust for me. Jessica is young and married like me, grappling with really tough issues of how Christianity relates to modern life, and I appreciate that she does it in a non-preachy way. Her blog is not deep and theological; it’s deep and real. Plus, not EVERY post is heavy and faith-related. I love reading about her marriage and her forays into the world of exercise. I find Jessica really relatable and approachable, and I hope I get to read her blog for a long time!
  • And for good measure, and actual Twitter account: Anne Lamott
    It’s no secret that I love Anne Lamott. She doesn’t have a blog that I know of, but she’s quite active on Twitter. Y’all, just about every tweet she posts has me in stitches. I think it’s a gift that her dry sarcasm even comes through in 140 characters. She’s authentic and hilarious and her words stick with me long after I read them on Twitter. 

There you have it! My absolutely unsolicited, unorthodox Follow Friday.

Have you discovered any great new or new-to-you blogs or Twitter accounts lately? Share them in the comments!

Book Review: The Air We Breathe

Posted on by
1

The Air We Breathe by Christa Parrish is the most recent book Bethany House Publishers sent me to review.

It was a quick and mostly engrossing read, but I honestly can’t come up with a whole lot to say about it. The book is divided into chapters that each follow a different character in one of two years–Molly in 2009, Hanna in 2002, Claire in 2002, and the same Claire in 2009. It’s clear from the get-go that their stories are interconnected somehow, but it takes most of the book for the connections to be explained. For what it’s worth, I made the biggest leap well before the author explained it, so that made it sort of a letdown when Parrish finally spelled the connection out for me.

I had trouble accepting the underlying plot structure of the book. Hanna was out with her father when a horrific event occurred (I won’t say more than that for fear of ruining some of the surprise!). While I know events like this do occur, it was handled in such an understated way. It was simply part of everyday life for Hanna and her mother. But I felt like I needed it to be focused on a bit more–for someone to say, “Whoa, that is a really awful, unexpected thing! Let’s talk about it a little bit!” Hanna goes through counseling and has a chance meeting with a woman (Claire) who has lost both of her children in a car accident. The two have an immediate and inexplicable bond until another crazy, unbelievable event occurs. The resolution of the book depends on another chance occurrence, which was once again hard for me to swallow.

The relationships are what make this book, but I found even those to be a bit shallow for my liking. The bond between Hanna and Claire is beautiful. Claire is a Christian, though she is struggling with anger and doubt stemming from the accident that killed her, children, which I wanted the author to delve into more. However, this is the basis of the relationship they build, and it was cool to see how a child sought out someone to answer the deep questions she had. Molly and her mother had a lot of tension between them, walls that had grown thicker and thicker through years of anger, and I really wished that had been addressed more fully. Molly has a sweet friend named Tobias, and I liked watching their relationship develop throughout the pages. All of the characters were likeable and believable, which made me want to keep reading to find out what happened to them.

As with other Bethany House books I’ve reviewed, I was pleasantly surprised by how understated the Christianity was in this book. It didn’t try to beat you over the head with religion, but it was definitely an important theme in the book simply because it was an important part of the lives of several of the characters. I think including Christianity in that way will be instrumental in breaking down the barriers between “Christian fiction” and mainstream or literary fiction. That said, the writing itself in this book was nothing to write home about, as they say, and I’m not sure it would succeed outside of the comfy niche of Christian fiction.

I didn’t dislike this book, but I can’t offer much to strongly recommend it either.

Book Review: Relentless Pursuit

Posted on by
Reply

The most recent book I received from Bethany House Publishers as part of their blogger review program is called Relentless Pursuit by Ken Gire. It jumped out to me from among the titles available because of its subtitle: God’s love of outsiders, including the outsider in all of us. Especially since our move, but really always, I have struggled with feeling like I have a niche, and so I was interested in reading this author’s take on how to deal with those feelings of being an “other.”

I have to say, Bethany House hits the nail on the head with covers. I loved what I found when I opened the mailer it came in and couldn’t wait to dive in!

The prologue intrigued me, as it hinted at the author’s own struggles with feeling left out and different, but the first chapter found my eyes glazing over a bit as he delved into a somewhat literary and academic analysis of the poem “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson. I’m all about some literary analysis and poetry, but it was not what I expected from this book, nor did it seem to fit the bill of what I was looking for.

However, after that, the book picked up for me. I normally skim over the study questions at the end of chapters in Christian lifestyle books, but the ones in Relentless Pursuit were well-written and particularly relevant to the preceding chapter, so I found myself underlining many of them for further contemplation. And the literary and philosophical references in the rest of the book were wonderful, introducing me to some authors I had never heard of but now want to explore and providing me with some beautifully thought-out definitions for a life of faith.

Though I was into the premise of the book, I found the execution to be a bit pat. I wanted either deeper exploration of the biblical nature of God’s love for the outsider or a more nuanced depiction of the author’s life story (more of a memoir). Instead, I found both of these elements lacking: the “God stuff” was mostly vague and not detailed, and the personal recollections were scattered and didn’t really show me how the author had come to believe so deeply as he does. I also struggled with the precise definition of “outside.” It felt like the term was used throughout the book to mean one of several different things, and “outsider” was applied to both people literally outside of some group or another AND those of us who just feel like outsiders. All of the above are valid, of course, but I wanted a more concise use of the term. All in all, though, if I hadn’t been enjoying the book for the most part, I wouldn’t have cared that these bits felt shallow.

Throughout the book, I gleaned bits of wisdom and particularly apt turns of phrase that I’m looking forward to considering as I continue my walk of faith. But I unfortunately don’t feel any more convinced of God’s love for the outsider than I did before reading Relentless Pursuit, and this is coming from someone who already knows and believes that to be true. It seems like this book was written more for those who are “inside” but struggle with feeling like they’re not accepted. I can’t imagine what takeaway someone of another faith might have from this book, and that seems to betray its purpose. I’d share this book only in a setting where there could be open discussion about it, or with someone else like me who enjoys adding new thoughts to their repertoire.