A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read If Your Book Club Likes Love Stories

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s prompt was to choose ten books for a book club based around our choice of topic. I don’t read a lot of romance as a genre. But love and relationships are a huge part of our lives, and have proved a steady source of inspiration to writers. If your book club likes books where romantic relationships are a key part of the narrative, here are ten books about love, five of which are a little less conventional and five of which are a little more so.

High Fidelity: Anyone who has gone through a rough breakup knows how it can send you spiraling. Record-store owner Rob uses his latest breakup as inspiration to go back through his life and puzzle out what went wrong in his previous relationships and where his exes ended up. It’s funny and unexpectedly touching.
The Remains of the Day: I never shut up about this book, but that’s because it’s brilliant and I love it. Anyways, this book, about the regrets you can’t even admit to yourself, has as a major plot point a story of two people who might have loved each other and it will rip your heart out in a really lovely way.
Stardust: Catching a fallen star for your beloved seems really romantic, doesn’t it? It’s this fairy-tale-esque conceit that sets off the action in this sparkling Neil Gaiman story and it turns into an adventure story with some romance on the side. 
Jitterbug Perfume: I love Tom Robbins, first of all. Second of all, your book club is going to need to be ready for some unabashedly adult talk. But if Alobar and Kudra can make it through hundreds of years together, there’s hope for the rest of us, right?
Lolita: Sometimes the line between love and obsession is pretty shaky, like this literary classic about the “love” a grown man has for a preteen girl, Delores. He thinks he loves her, but does he or does he just want to possess her? It is definitely creepy, but it’s just an incredible book. 
Persuasion: Many of us have read the “major” Austen works: P&P, S&S, Emma. But this, her last completed novel, is a less straightforward love story. Anne Eliot listened to her family instead of her heart when she broke an engagement in her youth and never found herself another fiance. But when her ex comes back into her life unexpectedly, after she’s all but given up hope of marriage, will the two find their way back to each other? 

Bridget Jones’s Diary: Speaking of Austen, there are some definite shout-outs to Pride &Prejudice in this hysterically funny book. That they made a great rom com out of it isn’t surprising, but it loses the little touches like the notes Bridget keeps for herself about her weight and smoking so it’s worth reading the original if you haven’t yet!
The Rosie Project: I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy this, I bought it because it went on sale for the Kindle and figured it would be worth a few bucks. But it’s not as cliche as I thought it would be, and while it’s not great literature, it’s sweet and funny and a light, quick read. This could prompt a really interesting discussion about dating and mental health!
The Time Traveler’s Wife: This is an off-kilter love story about a man, who experiences time jumps throughout his entire life, and the woman he loves, who doesn’t. It sounds like something just dying to be considered “quirky”, but it doesn’t lose sight of the very real pain that could be created by this kind of thing. Very worth a read! 
Dead Until Dark: Even readers who would consider paranormal romance outside their wheelhouse (like me, for example) should give the first book in this series, the basis for the True Blood TV show, a try. The first season of the show hews pretty close to the source material (this happens less and less as time went on), so there’s already an introduction into this world out there. And if you like them, there’s a whole series!

A Month In The Life: October 2016

If you missed my first-year-of-blogging update a few weeks back, I’ve decided to start doing monthly summary posts: not only what I’m reading (which at this point, is months ahead of what I’m posting), but of what’s going on in my life outside of books. I like seeing what the lives of other book bloggers entail outside of solely the written word, so hopefully you like seeing mine too! Let’s get to the important stuff first-

In Books:

  • I read… 
    • Sophie’s Choice: Yes, the movie was based on a book. It’s like 2/3 of a brilliant novel but suffers mightily for a too-strong focus on the author-insert character and the lack of a firm editor. 
    • The Mothers (ARC): No, not the one everyone’s been raving about lately. This one’s by Rod Jones. This was just kind of blah, honestly. Not special, not terrible, didn’t say anything new or particularly interesting. One of those things I suspect I would forget I read but for this blog. 
    • The Life of the World to Come (ARC): This book seems like a screenplay from the early-to-mid-2000s when the manic pixie dream girl thing was a big trend in movies. The entire book is about a young lawyer trying to get over a bad breakup and although the writing was often quite good, I just couldn’t bring myself to care.   
    • Border Child (ARC): I wanted this to be so much better than it was. Rather than a sensitive depiction of the issues that drive Latinx migration over the border and the incredible disruption it can have on families, it was trite and not very well-written.
    • The Executioner’s Song: A sprawling, 1000+ page epic about the first execution carried out in the United States after the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-70s. Gary Gilmore killed two men and, when he was sentenced to die, decided to accept his sentence as imposed and did not appeal. Impressive ambition and scope, but deeply uneven. There’s a brilliant 500-600 page book in here but it’s far too bloated. 

In Life:

  • Both my husband and I celebrated our 31st birthdays this month! I’m exactly two weeks older than he is and one of these days I’m just going to stop reacting when he calls me a cougar because I know he only does it because I get huffy. My birthday was pretty low-key, just a quiet dinner at La Famiglia (my favorite restaurant in Reno…the gnocchi are amazing), but we got a little more social for Drew’s, with a stop at the now-Patton Oswalt approved Noble Pie and some bar hopping afterwards. 
  • The second week of the month was pretty hectic, actually. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a state government lobbyist in Nevada. Nevada usually has a 120 day legislative session every other year, but they can be called into special session if there’s a pressing issue to be dealt with. If you pay attention to sports news, you’ve probably heard that Nevada approved a deal for an NFL stadium to be built in Las Vegas for the Raiders. Since we have clients who were interested in that, I monitored (read: watched and took copious notes) on the proceedings. It took from Monday until Friday afternoon…and I managed to come down with the seasonal flu on Wednesday! That didn’t mean I didn’t need to monitor, though, so I just kept my germs at home and watched it all from my couch looped up on DayQuil and Sudafed. I was glad when it was over and I could actually rest. 
  • I voted! Nevada has early voting, so it actually started on October 22nd and I went on the 25th. As a political professional type, I’m always going to make a pro-voting pitch, so here it is. I know voting seems boring. Wait in line, have to pick between people you’ve barely heard of OR are really tired of seeing commercials about. And it feels like one vote doesn’t make a difference. But they do! Since they’re down the ballot, state and local elections can be won and lost on just a handful of votes (one state representative in Nevada won his race by only 11 votes in 2014!). And really, it’s the state and local races, and their results, that are going to be the ones that deal with and change the laws you interact with the most on a daily basis. So take an hour or so and Google the candidates and issues on your ballot, and then go out and do it. People will be getting elected regardless, so give it the best chance to be the people you’d rather see in there!

One Thing: Here’s where I’ll highlight one thing I’ve been really into this month, whether it be an album or a website or a beauty product or whatever. This month, it’s the New York Times’ election podcast The Run-Up. It’s smart and informative and I can’t wait for 8 days from now when it’ll finally be Election Day and it’ll all be over.

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

Book 48: Enchanted Islands

“But I found his dedication to the craft a sign that he was an enlightened being, like those monks who spend years crafting sand paintings only to sweep them away once they’ve finished. Now I see he was keeping himself busy, keeping the demons at bay. But demons are not dissuaded by oceans or preferences; they stow away like sea lice, unwanted visitors from another place, coming ashore with you wherever you go.”

Dates read: May 2-5, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I turned 31 earlier this month. I still don’t feel like a grown up. I don’t pick up after myself with any sort of regularity. I eat frozen dinners at least a couple times per week. I laugh at fart jokes. I love T-Rexes and have a model skeleton of one in my office (courtesy of our incredible office manager, who not only got it for me but built it for me as a gift). I can take down a whole tube of Pringles in one sitting if I’m not paying attention. I’ve only recently started flossing regularly, and insist on using the little picks or I won’t do it. My life only vaguely resembles the one I thought I’d have when I was younger: I was going to stay in Michigan and be a prosecutor. But here I am, a lobbyist in Nevada. I don’t think of myself as an adult, even now that I’m married. When are we finally done growing up?

The answer, as gleaned from Allison Amend’s Enchanted Islands, is much later than we think. Frances Frankowski is a shy, bookish girl growing up in a poor family in Duluth when she meets fellow youngster Rosalie at the library and the two become instant best friends. They grow up together, but when Frances learns that Rosalie is being exploited when the two are teenagers, they run away to Chicago. After some time there, Rosalie betrays Frances’ trust, and Frances flees…first to Nebraska, then to San Francisco, where after a stint as a teacher, she eventually winds up as a secretary for naval intelligence when she’s in her late 40s. She runs back into Rosalie and they are reconnecting after decades apart when Frances is offered the chance for marriage to a handsome younger man as part of a secret mission in the Galapagos, and when she accepts it, she alters the course of the rest of her life.

The book is split into four parts comprising two real halves: Frances’ life before she meets her husband Ainslie and goes to the Galapagos, and after. The first half takes us through Frances’ family life and the beginnings of her deep friendship with Rosalie. The book actually starts with Frances and Rosalie together in a nursing home, having both outlived their husbands, so we knows theirs is a relationship that stands the test of time going in. But the seeds of their break are planted early, and when it comes, we’re as saddened as Frances herself is but not really surprised. What is surprising is that they manage to find their way back together early in the second half: a chance encounter in a movie theater in San Francisco, thousands of miles from where they once were girls together. By then, Frances is already contemplating the offer of a sham marriage and an adventure overseas, and it’s as much a vain desire to announce to her friend that she IS married, thank you, that convinces her to go for it as anything else. The relationship she and Ainslie create, which sustains long after their mission has ended, is just as lovely but never more important than Frances’ relationship with her real soulmate…her best and dearest and oldest friend. I’ve always had a soft spot for stories about female friendship, because my relationships with my girl friends have occupied such a central place in my own life.

This was a good book, and I’ve actually gone back and added one of Amend’s previous novels to my to-be-read list, because I really enjoyed her writing, which is sure and strong. It actually struck me as I was reading it that this seems like the book that Sena Naslund thought she was writing when she wrote Ahab’s Wife…minor personage (in this case, Frances Conway was a real person, who wrote two books about her time in the Galapagos, but she’s not notable enough to have her own Wikipedia entry because all the secret spy mission stuff is completely made up), fiercely independent, facing obstacles, adventures, and hardships with strong will and determination. But Amend’s work is far superior: she allows Frances to be flawed: prickly, occasionally small-minded, and petty. In doing so, she creates a beautifully realized character who is sympathetic and compelling. All three of the main characters are, really. Amend is a gifted writer and I would recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Tell me, blog friends…when did you start feeling like a grown-up? Or do you at all?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

One year ago, I was reading: The Nazi Officer’s Wife

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Horrifying Books I’ve Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! With Halloween around the corner, it’s fright season. I enjoy a good pumpkin patch and seeing the neighborhood kiddos in their costumes, but actually scary things like haunted houses have never been for me (I don’t like corn mazes either because being lost makes me panicky). I don’t read much in the way of “horror”, but I do read things that creep/freak/wig me out more often than you’d think for someone so jumpy. Here are ten favorites:



Go Ask Alice: Huge caveat here- I thought this was horrifying when I first read it at like, 11. A young teenager tries drugs and before you know it’s she’s getting sexually abused and runs away from home (I think, I can’t really remember it very clearly) and it was supposed to be a true account of someone’s life. Even though I think of it as laughably overblown now, I somehow was surprised when I found out recently it was complete fiction written by someone who’s done a lot of these “scared straight” books.

The Stranger Beside Me: Ann Rule was a volunteer at a suicide hotline in Washington, and often worked the late shift beside a likeable young man named Ted. They became friendly, and sometimes spoke of what was then front-page news in Washington State: a series of murders of pretty young women. Ted, of course, was Ted Bundy…the serial killer who was committing all those murders. Realizing how little we actually know about other people is definitely frightening to consider.

In Cold Blood: The horror of this one comes from the sheer unpredictability of the gruesome murders of the Clutter family of Kansas, and Truman Capote’s rendering of how their murderers came to them. The Clutters were just sleeping in their beds, minding their own business, when their home was broken into and they were brutally slaughtered. That’s so scary to think about.

The Hot Zone: We’ve all heard, after the Ebola scares that happened fairly recently in America, about what that virus can do to you: bleeding out internally is not a pleasant way to go. But before those few cases that developed on American soil, there was another close brush with Ebola: an outbreak of a strain among imported monkeys just outside Washington, DC. Ebola-Reston turned out to be a version that didn’t infect humans, but how easy it would be for a pandemic to spread in our globally linked world freaks me out to think about.

Under The Banner of Heaven: This is not really a book about Mormonism (even though there’s a lot of interesting historical information in there), it’s a book about fundamentalist religion. As a lady person, the treatment of women is especially awful.

Devil In The Grove: You learn about Jim Crow-era injustices and violence and lynching and the profound mistreatments of African-Americans in school, but it’s sanitized. Reading this book, about four young men on trial in Florida for raping a white woman, doesn’t sanitize anything. The actual constant threat and terror of black existence in the South during Jim Crow is eye-opening and just gut-wrenching.

The Pianist: The Holocaust is flat-out horrifying. There aren’t words for it. Of the Holocaust memoirs I’ve read, this one’s elegant-but-unsparing prose hit me the hardest.

The Shining: I don’t read much traditional horror, hence this mostly-nonfiction list. But I love the Kubrick movie, and even though the original Stephen King book is almost entirely different, I love it too. Like most of the rest of this list, it’s mostly about the monster inside of a man (the malevolent hotel plays a role, too, but it’s Jack Torrance’s internal demons that are the root of the issue).

The Stepford Wives: I’ve tried to keep the politics to a minimum here on this blog (we’re here for books, after all), but I will never keep my passionate support for women’s rights, including rights to control our reproduction, to myself. This quick-read satire makes you wonder, particularly in this election cycle, what men really do want from women.

The Circle: I read this very recently, so there’s no review up yet, and it’s problematic in a lot of ways. But the picture it paints of a world in while we give up more and more privacy to the internet is really scary to consider, because the slipperiness of that slope is real.

Book 47: Chasing The Sun

“Andres always speaks last; Marabela has never cared for last words because her power lies in silence.”

Dates read: April 30-May 2, 2016

Rating: 6/10

During my second year of law school, the house I lived in was broken into. It wasn’t the first bad thing to happen while I lived there; I actually grew to think of that house as cursed. But besides the break-in, those are stories for another day. It happened on a weekday night, sometime between about 7 and 10. My then-roommate and I were both at a party. They got in by breaking our bathroom window: a quick grab of our electronics (including, in what to this day still infuriates me, my external hard drive) and out. The things were mostly replaceable (except my digital music and photo collections), but my sense of security in that home was gone forever. The knowledge that someone had been in there, rifling through our things, set me on edge every day until the one I moved out.

And knowing how scary and violative it felt to have my house burglarized when I wasn’t even there, I can’t even fathom how it must feel to be kidnapped. Which it would seem was a real risk for the upper class, particularly women, in mid-1990s Peru. In Natalia Sylvester’s Chasing The Sun, Andres and Marabela Jimenez would seem to have it pretty darn good: they’re wealthy (Andres owns his own company), have a nice house in Lima City, been married a long time, and have two great kids. But of course, things are not as they seem. Marabela recently walked out on Andres, and although she returned, their marriage is cracking and they’re circling each other warily. So when she doesn’t return one night after running some errands, Andres assumes what he thinks is the worst: she’s left him again.

It turns out to be much, much worse than that: he gets a ransom note from her kidnappers demanding a sum he can’t possibly produce to ensure her safe return. Andres is forced to reach out to his long-estranged mother for help. She connects him with a man who negotiates with kidnappers for a living…in fact, this man recently helped secure the release of Andres’ first love, Elena, the woman he (and his parents) had always expected him to marry. While the plot progresses forward through the negotiations to get Marabela back and Andres’ reconnection with Elena when he finds out she’s in a mental hospital to deal with the fallout from her own abduction, it also looks backwards to show the reader the relationships between Andres, Elena, and Marabela, and how things got to where they were right before Marabela was kidnapped.

This is an enjoyable, if not especially substantial, book. The subject matter is a little too heavy for a beach read, but otherwise about that level: good but not great, decently-written but not special, compelling enough to keep your attention but can easily be put down. The plot moves along at a nice clip and doesn’t drag, characters aren’t flat but aren’t deep and rich, either. The ending ties its loose strings into knots too easily, but not in a way that’s infuriating, just kind of annoying (I wish there’d been a little more ambiguity left in it). I liked reading it, but it didn’t make much of an impact on me. This is worth a read, but isn’t unmissable.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever lived in a place that felt like it was cursed?

One year ago, I was reading: Through the Language Glass

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Name A Child After

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is characters we’d name a child after. I’ve got lots of thoughts about baby names (as a nine-and-ten year old, I’d read baby name books like they were actual books, cover to cover) and I’ve got lots of characters I love, so here are my ten!

 

Lyra Belacqua (The Golden Compass): I love this little hotheaded, stubborn, intelligent girl so much that I’d love to name a child after her and hope she could be nearly as delightful and challenging as her namesake.

Sabriel (Sabriel): Her strength and resourcefulness make her a wonderful role model for a little girl to look up to…and the name is familiar and yet different enough to be special.

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): A little more morally complex of a heroine, Emma is handsome and clever…and spoiled and selfish and convinced of her own rightness even when she probably shouldn’t be. But she’s charming and she learns a lesson by the end and no one’s perfect, right?

Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre): I didn’t expect much when I read this one a few years ago…gothic drama has not tended to light my fire. But I really liked it, and Jane herself is strong and bright and while Mr. Rochester is problematic, Jane herself is very much rootable-for.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): I LOVED Natasha for most of the (long) runtime, so to speak, of this classic that more people should actually tackle. She’s a shining presence in the midst of a lot of very Russian sturm-und-drang (I know that’s German, but I don’t know what the equivalent would be in Russian). Like many, I’m disappointed in how the best character ended up…if you want to know why, you should read it!

Daine Sarassri (Wild Magic): I never got into much else in the Tamora Pierce bibliography, but I think it’s because none of her other heroine spoke to me the way that Wild Magic’s Daine did. Literally raised (in part) by wolves, she’s connected to nature and animals and spunky and brave and great.

Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes): He doesn’t seem to be much of a functional human, but damn Sherlock is clever and interesting and it’s weird but not too weird of a name for a kid, right?

Rhett Butler (Gone With The Wind): I will say that he’s not as dashing on the page as he is on the screen, but it would have been really hard to measure up to Clark Gable at maximum charisma no matter what. And even on the page, he’s still way better than Scarlett.

Samwise Gamgee (The Lord of the Rings): He’s not the protagonist of LOTR, but I would argue that steadfast, truehearted Samwise is the hero. When I first read the books as a teenager I found him an irritating tag-a-long, but as you get older you see that the power of his devotion to his friend is the power that really destroys the Ring at the end.

Tyrion Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire): There are so many indelible characters in this series that it’s hard to pick just one. But to name a child after? The deliberate, strategic Tyrion, who recognizes that his body isn’t going to be what gains him the respect he craves and develops his brain instead.

Book 46: The President’s Club


“For the former presidents, the club can be a vital, sometimes surprising benefit of post-presidential life. They have relinquished power, but not influence; and so their influence becomes a piece of the sitting president’s power. They can do more together than apart, and they all know it; so they join forces as needed, to consult, complain, console, pressure, protect, redeem.”

Dates read: April 25-30, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Books are the best but hardest present to give. Someone liking a book you bought them feels so much deeper than liking a piece of jewelry or a new gadget. It feels like a genuine connection. But books-as-gifts are really hard to get right. What if the recipient doesn’t care for the genre, or doesn’t like the writing? It’s not fail safe, but as a person who likes to buy books as gifts, I try to find a non-fiction book about something the recipient is interested in. Like The President’s Club, which was a gift to my presidential history nerd husband and I borrowed because I thought it looked interesting too!

Despite having worked in politics for a few years now, presidents have never been a particular area of interest for me (perhaps because of my legal background, I tend to gravitate towards writing about the courts). Many presidential biographies feel too much like hagiographies for my tastes. But Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy’s The President’s Club covers an angle I wouldn’t have given much thought to: how do those in the Oval Office relate to those whose tenure there is over, and vice versa? 
The list of former presidents is pretty short: there’s only 43 of them, and there’s never more than a handful (if any) still living. Assuming nothing happens to anyone before the end of Obama’s term, there will be five of them. Many of them go on to do charitable work for causes they feel strongly about, but they don’t tend to be the kind of people to just go away quietly once their time in the spotlight is over. They tend to meddle, either to the good or ill of the current tenant at the White House, and part of that depends on how the current president uses them. 
Gibbs and Duffy’s book explores the relationships of the post-WW2 presidents, comparing and contrasting as they go along. As someone relatively unfamiliar with many of the presidents (I’m informed for an average person, but since the presidency isn’t a particular interest, I’m not even close to actually informed), I found the book absolutely fascinating. I found it especially compelling to look at how each president related to their predecessor as opposed to those who came after them: for example, Truman’s willingness to reach out to and ask for help from Hoover (and the close relationship they ended up having) informs his obvious hurt when Eisenhower apparently wanted nothing to do with him, particularly considering that they had been close during Truman’s presidency and Truman had even encouraged him to run for office. Death and scandal unite the club, illustrating that for all of personal emotional threads that may or may not unite the men within it, it’s really fundamentally about ensuring the legacy and protecting the role of the presidency itself.

I think there’s a basic human urge to want to find people who have important things in common with you to hang out with. I know that one of the reasons I blog, besides enjoying the sound of my own voice (so to speak, anyways) is that I enjoy being part of a community of people who really love books and reading. I would never personally want to run for or become the president, but I can only imagine if I were to be, how grateful I would be to have the people around who’d done it before and be able to join with them when I was done to support the new kid. Even if politics isn’t your usual thing, this book is much more about the relationships between people. I really enjoyed it and I think you will too!

Tell me, blog friends…do you have a favorite president?

One year, ago, I was reading: Unbelievable 

On the Blog

Join the Listt

[instagram-feed]

Copyright © 2026 A Portable Magic · Theme by 17th Avenue