Well, we certainly started out like it was August, but August petered out and started acting like Fall halfway into the month. Cool enough temps to warrant a sweater—it’s a cool wind that blows off those Great Lakes.
Still, some warm days and cool nights along with a couple gully washers produced an abundance of cucumbers and cantalopes, followed immediately by a surplus crop of cherry tomatoes. (I started adding cantaloupes to the cucumber juice—pretty good!) Not sure what happened to the Early Girl tomatoes, but hopefully we can dry enough cherry tomatoes to make several days of candy—so sweet and good. Also, in the crop this year, purple bell peppers and Japanese eggplant. I’ve started a second crop of peas and beans in the hope they’ll be ready to harvest prior to the end of the season—but realize I’m pushing my luck.
The August book pick at the Y Book Club wasThe Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. I’d read it years ago for a library book club in 2020 and opted to listen to the audiobook this time. I enjoyed both but this application was to refresh my memory for the Y book club.
Once again, I love the insight brought to the novels by the participants. Most of us had never been aware of the “blue” people prior to reading the novel. While I voted 4.5 stars this time, I was surprised to see the average at four stars. Looking back at the vote for the same book by the earlier book club, was further surprised to see the average was the same. Four stars.
We reviewed thirteen books in August—half of those in audiobook form. The source of our books is our library, NetGalley, author and publisher requests. As always, the links on titles are to our reviews that include purchase information.
This is a tough one as I believe I set a record at three books with five stars in August, only one of those by a favorite author, the other two being new to me. I love Michael Connelly’s books, but really, have to give the nod this month to Alfred Lansing and his book Endurance. I’ve set the CE to reading Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. If you know anything about that masterful historical writer, you know his books are seldom under 700 pages. The CE will be reading it for awhile. (evil grin)
My Reading Challenges page…I’m behind again and doubt I’ll catch up in September as we will be taking a short vacation.
The Goodreads landing page shows 132 of a goal of 150 or 88%. I suspect I’m doing well in the audiobook challenge as well, but can’t vouch for the NetGalley goal. May have to reassess those goals.
As always, it’s your visits and comments that keep me going and I appreciate them all. Kids are back in school (they don’t wait for Labor Day around here) and now’s the time we enjoy a short trip.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
#1 New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb, celebrated for two prior Oprah Book Club selections, returns with an exceptional third pick, a propulsive novel following a young father grappling with unbearable tragedy as he searches for hope, redemption, and the possibility of forgiveness.
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?
My Review:
I’ve read a number of Oprah’s Book Club picks before. Sometimes she’s wrong.
This isn’t one of them.
I’m not sure whether I should sob uncontrollably or be angry. But then who would receive the wrath? The main character, Corby Ledbetter, or “the system”?
This is a book that will rip at your heart—first at the tragic beginning to the novel, or how it all ends?
I’m torn. Should I feel sorry for Corby? No. I just can’t.
First, it’s an intensive, insightful look at the heart of a man thrust into a role he’d never conceived of performing—that of stay-at-home-dad of twins after the loss of his ego-cementing job. When it is increasingly obvious that employment won’t come back easily, he begins to deal with his anxiety and growing depression first with doctor-prescribed narcotics, then self-enhanced by an increasing demand for a hard liquor kicker.
It is the pills and booze, along with a neighbor’s innocent distraction on a morning out of routine, that cause a disastrous accident. One that he’ll not recover from, nor his wife forgive. Even as I could see what was coming and cried out, I could not change the plot.
The grief is crushing. The prison is a new brutal reality, cruel, desperate. The narrative eases the reader into merciless prison life and follows Corby as he learns to cope with prison life. The characters are given such intensity the scene can fill the reader with dread or heart-pounding blood pressure.
The writing is alternately filled with compassion and empathy while at the same time painting a picture of deeply flawed characters, each seeking to survive another day. The author presents the staff in humanity (as in the librarian) and inhumanity (as in the prison guards), juxtaposed against each other. There is no time to catch a breath—you don’t have that luxury.
Corby alternately blames others and himself. An authentic story of friendship, grief, love, and forgiveness. But can a heinous act ever truly be forgiven, whether accidental or deliberate?
My first book by this author—it was heavy and one that has sticking power. Did you read it? Did it continue to nag at you?
Many thanks to the publisher and my local library for providing me with the opportunity to listen to and review this book. The narrator does a great job emotionally delivering the novel. The thoughts expressed here are my own.
The Author: Wally Lamb’s first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into eighteen languages. Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present. Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his twenty-five-year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program. Wally Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my characters’ lives don’t much resemble my own, what we share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the lives of others. That’s also why I teach. As challenging as it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching are, for me, intertwined.” Honors for Wally Lamb include: the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks to Teachers” Award. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She’s Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992. Wally Lamb’s third novel, The Hour I First Believed, explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book will be published by HarperCollins in November of 2008. Find Wally Lamb at Wally Lamb dot net.
Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and they have three sons. [Goodreads]
Rosepoint Publishing 