Book Journey

Moneyball

Published on March 21, 2012March 21, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)20 Comments

Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), is the general manager of the Oakland A’s, who has just had his best players poached by teams that can afford to pay a lot more. Fed up with how money twists the game, he listens to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who persuades him that certain players are being undervalued for trivial reasons, such as age, ability to catch, ability to hit the ball hard enough to run all the bases… Statistics revealed hidden strengths that could, when used in the right combinations, produce a winning season. Beane takes Brand’s advice going for the more “bang for our buck” strategy, then has to fight everyone else around him to follow it through. His job is at stake but Billy Beane hangs tight, believing that this formula could change the way people think about baseball, and the value of players.

I am not a big sports movie fan and at first sight, this movie for me would have been (and was) a pass for me. It was not until the night of the Oscars when I listened to the awards it was up for, and seen a few clips of the movie that it started to peek my interest.

What sealed the deal?

It is a true story. Always one to cheer for the underdog, I do like true stories of triumph against all odds. When I did rent Moneyball for Al (hubby) and I to watch, in my head, it was more for him. As busy as he is, it is hard to engage him in a movie, any movie, without him falling asleep.

He fell asleep.

But here is the kicker, or I guess the hitter, in this case… instead of turning it off at that point and seeing if he wanted to finish it the next evening, I kept on watching. Billy Beane sets out to beat the budget, and the big wigs who have far more years and experience than he, fight him all the way to the field.
I was invested, connected to Billy Beane and his vision of taking several lesser valued players, benched in some cases, and giving them back their dream, or at least the chance to reach for the stars again. And the magic of this? Is that they do just that, and the rest is history at its finest.

As for Al, well… he did finish the next night, which is not always the case, and when out with friends I heard him asking the guys if they had seen Moneyball as it was an incredible movie.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes true stories, great goals, Brad Pitt (or not), baseball (or not), an excellent drama that is easily family friendly.

Morning Meanderings… Being Flynn giveaway!!!!!

Published on March 21, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)25 Comments

Good morning. 😀

Happy Wednesday and all that. I don’t know if I am excited about Wednesday because we are now officially half way through the week or if I have a little anxiety as each day brings me closer to next week which is FULL FULL FULL and I don’t like my weeks that full….

HOWEVER.. there is some great things happening yet this week that I do not want to miss so I think I should just chill… and enjoy.

For instance… tomorrow morning is the Spring Library sale which means… I will be there über early because that is just fun. They open the doors at 9, I plan to be there around 6 am. 😀 Then I work, and I have a lunch date with friends, then back to work and then home and a nap…. because…. midnight is the showing of Hunger Games and yes, myself and a few crazy friends will be there. Yes, because it is fun.

AND then… Friday opens up the movie Being Flynn, based off the Memoir by Nick Flynn, and I am giving away 2 copies of Nick Flynn’s book! For my readers in the Twin Cities area, please note that the film will be showing at the Uptown Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis.

Ok… about the book. Ummm… yeah, how about that title? Did not see that coming.. but here is what it is about (and that I do like!)

Flynn’s wayward father, a self-styled writer and ex-con, describes his life on Boston’s streets as “another bullshit night in Suck City”: he hangs out in ATM lobbies, stuffs his coat with newspaper and is often “still drunk from the night before.” This biting memoir describes the years poet Flynn (Some Ether; Blind Huber) spent, in his late 20s, working at one of the city’s homeless shelters, where his path crisscrossed with his down-and-out father’s. In examining their troublesome relationship, Flynn admits to feeling lost, as he turned to alcohol and came close to being on the other side of the shelter admissions booth himself. Punchy language and short chapters make what could otherwise be excessively painful more palatable (e.g., “Fact: In 1839 Dostoyevsky witnessed a mob of peasants attacking his father…. they poured vodka down his throat until he died. Fact: I can watch my father pouring vodka down his own throat any day of the week. My role is to play the son, though I often feel like a mob of peasants”).

The movie…

Being Flynn is the new dramatic feature from Academy Award-nominated writer/director Paul Weitz (About a Boy). Adapted from Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bulls—t Night in Suck City, the movie explores bonds both unbreakable and fragile between parent and child.

Nick Flynn (portrayed in the film by Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood) is a young writer seeking to define himself. He misses his late mother, Jody (four-time Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore), and her loving nature. But his father, Jonathan, is not even a memory, as Nick has not seen the man in 18 years.

Jonathan Flynn (two-time Academy Award winner Robert De Niro) has long defined himself as a great writer, “a master storyteller.” After abandoning his wife and child, Jonathan scrapes through life on his own terms, and ends up serving time in prison for cashing forged checks. After prison, he drives a cab for a number of years, but with his drinking and eccentricities now accelerating, he loses his job. Despite the occasional grandiose letter to his son, he has remained absent from Nick’s life.

Suddenly facing eviction from his apartment, Jonathan impulsively reaches out to Nick and the two come face-to-face. The older man is eloquent and formidable; overwhelmed, Nick nonetheless prepares to integrate his father into his own life. But, as quickly as he materialized, Jonathan flits away again.

Moving on, Nick takes a job at a homeless shelter, where he learns from Captain (Wes Studi) and Joy (Lili Taylor) how to relate to the guests who arrive night after night. Seeing the homeless – some permanently, some temporarily so – and hearing their stories, Nick finds purpose in his own life and work. He also sustains a romance with a co-worker, Denise (Olivia Thirlby). Then one night, Jonathan arrives, seeking a bed, and Nick’s senses of self and compassion falter. To give the two of them a shot at a real future, Nick will have to decide whom to seek redemption for first.

Evocatively told, ruefully funny, and moving in its depiction of the ties that bind, Being Flynn tells a story that reveals universal truths.

SO in recap, two copies of this book are being given away here and I will announce the winners here (using random.org) on Friday morning, in honor of the movie release.

How to enter? Leave me a comment here giving the book a different title from reading the synopsis… 😀

Have a great day!

Carry The One by Carol Anshaw

Published on March 20, 2012April 8, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)25 Comments

It started with a wedding. And then there was a reception. There was a lot of drinking, and a lot of drugs. In hindsight, it probably was not the best idea they had ever had to drive that night in a drunken drug induced haze but they did.

And that is when they hit the girl.

For Carmen, Alice, and Nick, the accident is carried with them wherever they go, far into the future. The girl shows up in Alice’s paintings in the gallery…. a girl, wearing the same clothes she wore that fateful night…. a girl who Alice can not find closure for. Casey has memories of the girl she never knew and Nick all these years later still tries to hide inside a bottle.

How… in the flash of a wrong choice, that alters lives forever… HOW do you move on with out carrying the one?

When I first read the synopsis of Carry The One I could not wait to get my hands on it. A tragedy… an accident… and how a family moves on from something so terrible, so senseless, so their fault….

and so I listened to this on audio and…

let’s just say Carry The One was not what I had thought it would be. I was expecting a deeply involved novel that did carry the victim throughout the pages. That was not the case. In fact, the book is really more about the three siblings, Alice, Carmen, and Nick… and their lives. Alice paints and searches for love, but that is no different from what was happening prior to the accident. Carmen’s choices may have an underlying hint of the accident and a need for closure, but mostly she is just doing life, and Nick… well Nick was in trouble before the accident with his drug use and alcohol abuse and that remains the same throughout the book.

I hate to use the word disappointed, but that is what sums this one up for me. I really thought this book was going to show how one struggles to move on when the unthinkable happens and I really thought the center of the book was going to be about the little girl, Casey. To me, it was just a book about the lives of three people and day after day how they tried to get it right. The girl, is not mentioned much, but occasionally, yes.

Maybe I set myself up for failure on this one by having an entirely different idea of how this would play out. I wanted to like this, shoot… I wanted to love this.

I did not.

There are some interesting reviews going around about this book. Quite a few loved it. I think a few more found it an average read. Be sure to check out other opinions on Carry The One and if you have read this, please let me know in the comments and I will be happy to link up your review to mine.

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Morning Meanderings… I May Be In Favor Of Cloning

Published on March 20, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)29 Comments

Good morning!

Seriously…. how does life balance get out of whack so fast? Suddenly I have reviews to write, books I want to read, places to go, things to do, a job, and so far… I have not figured out a way to bypass sleep. In fact… I have discovered…. I really really like sleep. 😀

BUT – I also like to read and comment on blogs. I used to be soooo good at that! Really I was!

If only there was a way to clone me….

Lets dream a little about that…

Clone Sheila could go to work for me… I do actually love my job so I am hoping I could still get the satisfaction of that while I stayed home, worked out in the morning, caught an iced coffee on the way home, and spent my day reading and writing.

Clone Sheila could then do all the “time suck” tasks such as grocery shopping, bill paying, house keeping… OOH – and appointments that I want the benefit of but don’t have the time such as hair cuts, check ups, manicures…

Ok… enough of the dreaming. This week is going to be less crazy then last week so reading should get done and posts should go up. I even got around to some blogs last night and commented and plan to do so later today as well 😀

How do you keep a balance between life and books? Life and blogging? Life and …. life?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 18, 2012March 18, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)47 Comments

Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from!

I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment telling me how many you visited. **You do not have to have a blog to participate! You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.

This past weeks winner:

Juliababyjen’s Reading Room

WOO HOO!!!! Please choose an item out of the Reading Cafe Grab Shelves and email me your choice with your mailing address as well! journeythroughbooks@gmail.com

What a BUSY week but, not sitting here Sunday evening and looking back… it has been an awesome one. I had something just about every night and a weekend out of town. I just came back this afternoon and pulled in my yard at 3:30 pm. I had a floor hockey game at 4 pm so changed quickly and off I went. I finished up at 4:50 pm, drove home showered and went to a birthday party for a friend that started at 5 pm…. I got there about 5:30, tired, but clean…. and happy. 😀

Not as productive as I would have liked this week, here is what is true:

Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson (book review and Bookies food to go with the book!)

this beautiful life by Helen Schulman (a book tour on an all too real subject!)

Carry The One by Carol Anshaw (review to come)

I have made no progress this week on Jane Eyre.

Oh. Thats it. 😯

as for this week… well, still catching up apparently. So not going t go too crazy so I think I will leave the books as they were last week and add this:

A novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

Kate Appleton needs a job. Her husband has left her, she’s been fired from her position as a magazine editor, and the only place she wants to go is to her parents’ summer house, The Nutshell, in Keene’s Harbor, Michigan. Kate’s plan is to turn The Nutshell into a Bed and Breakfast. Problem is, she needs cash, and the only job she can land is less than savory.

Matt Culhane wants Kate to spy on his brewery employees. Someone has been sabotaging his company, and Kate is just new enough in town that she can insert herself into Culhane’s business and snoop around for him. If Kate finds the culprit, Matt will pay her a $20,000 bonus. Needless to say, Kate is highly motivated. But several problems present themselves. Kate despises beer. No one seems to trust her. And she is falling hard for her boss.

Ok I know… a couple unusual choices but I have several books to finish of different genres. 😀

I now want to know what you are reading! There was a time I used to get around to read and comment on all your posts but with the additional hours at work and working a full day on Mondays now it makes it hard to do so… in the next few weeks I will go back to my regular hours and then I can get back to more comments. razz: In the mean time please leave a comment on this post and I will be sure to get around to all of you who do (I just love to chat books!!!)

Leave a link to your Monday What Are You Reading post below where it says click here.

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and those of you who read mainly childrens through YA reads – please also link your post here:

Morning Meanderings… Sunday Salon

Published on March 18, 2012March 18, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)32 Comments

Good morning!

Normally on Sundays I talk about the past week and show you what books have come in to my home, either for review…or self inflicted.

Today, this morning, however… I am in Fargo Minnesota finishing up a girls weekend and my books that came in… are back in Brainerd and I can not recall what they are well enough to share them at this time.

However… I can share my week. Typical week this past week but a fun one. Monday I have a lot of people over and that was fun and my house has not been more clean in quite a while. 😀 Tuesday was book club which is always fun, even when I am not overly thrilled with the book. Wednesday I did not have my usual volunteer commitments as it is spring break so instead I came home and watched Survivor and Modern Family with my hubby….. no crazy over committed evenings are the best. Thursday I worked and prepped for the weekend, and Friday after running around to the gym and to the grocery store….

left for Fargo with three friends.

Ok… let me clarify. Fargo is nothing like the terrible movie called…. ummm…. errrr…. Fargo.

IN the movie, people talk with a “you betcha” and a lot of “ayyyyy” and “oh ok”. I do not talk like that. The movie is probably number one for making me angry…. all time. 😀 Hated it. Really I did.

What Fargo is actually is a fun town to shop in, great restaurants and about three hours from my home. It is a jaunt… yes, but occasionally a fun trip to make. Last time we came here was three years ago. So we shopped, and we ate, and we watched a movie. Good times. 😀

Soon we will pack up and head towards home. I have a floor hockey game at 4 pm today.

Life is full, but good.

What does your Sunday look like? Any plans?

Morning Meanderings… Feast or Famine

Published on March 16, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)19 Comments

Good morning! 😀
The last few days when I get up and come into the kitchen to make coffee and read emails, I reach for the cd player to push play as per habit and…

crickets.

My kitchen cd player is one of the three audio spots I have and as of this past week I have had no audio to put in it.

THAT is so weird. 😯

It just happened that all good audio I have listened to and returned to the library. All the poor ones have also been returned. I have several I am waiting for but none were in yet. A quiet kitchen is odd… a couple of times I pulled the IPOD home out of my bedroom so I could listen to that audio while in the kitchen/living area but that was a pain and then that one was never where I needed it to be.

Yesterday I stopped at the library thinking I had a book that I had requested in. I did not. Instead I had 4 audio books…. delicious audio books…. all waiting for me in a row with my name on them.

The famine is over.

Dont they look good? A nice mix to listen to over the next couple of weeks! 😀

Today, well, this morning, I am off to the gym. Then I am coming home and preparing to go to Fargo (yes, like in the movie but not scary like that…. trust me!) for the weekend with a few girlfriends. Laptop is coming with so I plan on popping in when I can and updating. Minnesota is breaking all sorts of weather records here and word is we may reach 80 degrees this weekend. It is March. In Minnesota. That is INSANE. In a good way 😀

Morning Meanderings… Not Always The Sharpest Tool In The Shed

Published on March 15, 2012March 15, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)28 Comments

Good morning! Yesterday it was almost 70 degrees in Central Minnesota! I stared out the window as often as I could while at work yesterday. I was like a kid who could not wait to get outside! Right after work I ran home, grabbed my roller blades from the garage and my dog from the house.

Yup. You read that right. Ever since we lost Elmo in October Bailey (our shih-tsu) has not been the same. He mopes around, he has put on weight. AL and I are both very busy and don’t spend a lot of time with him except in the evenings, and that is usually not active time but “come and lay down by me while I read or watch TV” time.

SO…. I felt guilty just running to grab my blades and leaving… and in my head, I pictured a happy Bailey trotting ahead of my while I bladed.

What was I thinking?

So I get to the trail. I strap on my modern-day fanny pack thing… yes, I am THAT cool…. with my water bottle, a place to hold keys and cell phone and gum. Necessities. Bailey waits patiently in the jeep while I put on my blades and then put a retractable walking leash on him and off we go!

What I did not think about:

Bailey is 13.

He has very short legs.

He is overweight.

We have never done this before.

Bailey was not ahead of me as I bladed he was behind. He trotted but I had to go very slow. I got my heart rate all the way up to an exhilarating 113. I know… I know… “Slow down before you pass out!” 😛

The original goal was to go up to the 2 mile marker to check to see if the trail was clear for biking. I instead went to the one mile marker, and for over half of it I bladed while carrying Bailey. Heart rate while carrying Bailey: 144.

There were other people on the trail and many had dogs. The dogs loved Bailey. Tails wagging they approached him big and small. Bailey froze like he was stuffed. One pup was 9 weeks old. Bailey was a statue.

*sigh*

Oh well… the good news is the trail is clear and that means my bike is going to get the tires checked and then I am hitting the trail first chance I get…. yes, without Bailey. I think maybe, he is more of an indoor dog. 😀

I was talking with my friend Wendy last night and as I told her the blading story I said “I don’t even know if I can blog about this. It doesn’t seen real that so much crazy stuff can happen to one person. But then again… I suppose if you tend to bring on crazy…. things are going to happen. 😀

Enjoy your day – today promises to be lovely as well. I wish I had time to hit the trail again, and maybe I will after work. I have some things to do tonight and early tomorrow to get ready for a weekend out-of-town with friends.

Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson (with The Bookies book club)

Published on March 14, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)24 Comments

Every day when Christine wakes up she wonders who the man is sleeping next to her. She does not recognize herself in the mirror. Every day her husband Ben patiently tells her who she is, what has happened, and how long it has been. And it has been a long time.

Christine, as is explained to her, is amnesiac, the result of a serious and mysterious accident. At the urging of her doctor, Christine is encouraged to write in a journal every day to help jog her memory of what has been happening in her life. One morning as she goes to read her journal and see who she is she opens it to find one big header:

Do not trust Ben.

What does that mean? Why would she not trust this patient man who has stood by her patiently day after day as she tries to remember. And then slowly, very slowly Christine with the help of the journal and her doctor, starts to see glimpses of a past that does not coincide with what she is being told by those she trusts the most. And for that matter, can she even trust who she has told herself she is?

Word on the street is Before I go To Sleep will be a movie. I would love to see this as a movie, I think it would translate to the screen in a big way that would keep your heart racing until the end!

Mmmmm hmmmm…. I know right? Twisty and turny synopsis? Well it is a twisty and turny book! This book through my emotional meter out the window. As it opens, I think Ben is amazing, how patient to repeat the same thing to the woman he dearly loves day after day. Then…. I don’t like Ben… I have my reasons. 😀 And then… Oh Ben, you are awesome.

See what I mean? And it’s not just with Ben. As Christine learns more about herself, it is still like reading a book through a veil, you never quite see her clearly enough to say you know her. At the time of the reading, that annoyed me that I could not quite get a grasp on her. Now in hindsight, I wonder if that is not just a brilliant move by this new author…. after all why should I see Christine clearly when she can not see herself that way?

In the end for me, I was still frustrated… the twists the turns, I felt were too many… I was exhausted trying to keep up and annoyed with all the characters. Yes… all of them.

But – know this … I am in the minority.

Not only have I read raving reviews on this book, it was also our March book club pick for the Bookies. I was excited to not only read this for the TLC book tour, but to also include the opinions of a group of fantastic girls that LOVE books and discuss them well.

And so the Bookies reviewed. Out of the 12 of us in the room, only a couple struggled with the book the way I did. For the most part they loved the ups and downs and ins and outs never knowing… thinking you know… then realizing you know nothing. On a scale of 1 to 5, the book pulled in a strong 4 average.

And of course, if the Bookies do a house meeting… we have FOOD.

Check out Angie’s review of this book at By Book Or By Crook… Angie is in our book club and had a fantastic time with the book and wrote an amazing review!

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for allowing me

to read this book before I went to sleep 😀

this beautiful life by Helen Schulman

Published on March 13, 2012April 8, 2012 by Sheila (Book Journey)13 Comments

Jake Bergamot is your typical fifteen year old. Scratch that… Jake’s life might be better than average. He lives with both parents who are still in love and married. He has a little sister who is adopted from China. He lives in a nice home in a nice neighborhood and has great friends.

Then one evening after returning home from a party and barely turning down one girls advances, but yes, still turning her down. He turns on his computer and sees that this 8th grade girl, Daisy, has sent him a sexually explicit video, a dance of sorts. Stunned and not sure what to think of this, he forwards the video to his best friend… who of course, sends it on to his friends, and so on and so on…

Within hours the video has gone viral and Jake and his family’s life have been turned upside down. Jake is suspended from school and the students either look at him as a hero (the jocks, the rockers, the stoners) or as a real loser (the preppy girls – and most importantly the girl Jake really likes, Audrey).

Jake’s dad is asked to take a leave from his job just until things settle down, after all who wants to make business deals with the father of a son who is involved in a sex scandal. Sex scandal? All Jake has done is pushed forward on an email…

Jake’s mom takes to avoiding the public. She can’t handle the whispers and instead finds herself in her home day and night, not changing out of her sleep clothes, and really not doing much of anything other than surfing the net on her laptop to see where the story of her son is falling next.

Where will it stop? Will Jake’s momentary lapse of good judgement destroy his family in a world that is all too hung up on media and social networking?

When I initially read the synopsis of this book I knew I wanted to read it. After all, social media is HUGE, and as much as I love being able to Tweet something funny, post a status update on Facebook of where I am having dinner and with who, and texting my friend to meet me at the gym… it also scares me a bit too…. how much is TMI? How desensitized are we becoming when everything and anything is fair game to post for the world to see?

This Beautiful Life started slow for me… I picked it up. I put it down. I picked it up again. The beginning was confusing, didn’t seem to flow and I found myself back tracking to fully understand who these two kids were, why would you name your kid Coco and was she adopted? Did I miss that, oh no – here it is, further in.

And then suddenly, I broke through the books barriers and I was in. I followed Jake to the party, I seen what happened… I understood what happened… and I was with him when he got the email. I even understood why he passes it on… really what 15 year old boy wouldn’t, even if it was for a second opinion from a friend?

For the most part I liked the book and it felt real to me. The few things that stood out that caused me trouble were occasionally it seemed like the narration wondered off into an over described scene that didn’t flow or an odd parental flashback, and I really never felt Coco was a developed character so not really sure why she was there. At times, I forgot about her as the story mainly centers around Jake and his parents.

I feel the book had wonderful potential and hits on an all to real subject. In fact there is a line on page 112 that really made me think..

“Is there an operative shame factor? Or has the internet killed all that? I mean, if everything that’s private goes public, is it still humiliating?”

The ending wrapped up suddenly and quickly. This is a book I will think on for awhile, but I dont have a strong feeling on it now, one way or another. There are parts I thought were extremely well done, and other parts that dont seem complete.