December 11: The Best Place #best09

A coffee shop? A pub? A retreat center? A cubicle? A nook?

Gwen Bell Best of 2009 Challenge

This is easy. I have an area off my bedroom I call my retreat. It is the one area in this big house which is all mine. Last Christmas Big Boy gave me a beautiful reproduction french lady's writing desk. It fits perfectly and has turned my little room into my place to write. I am surrounded by books, plush seats where my children can come, sit and chat, pretty bits and pieces.

My sanctuary.

December 4: Book #best09

What book - fiction or non - touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge

 

I have come to the recent realisation that my life still revolves around my oldest son and the impact of his Asperger Syndrome. The Gwen Bell challenge has brought this fact bubbling to the surface. I guess as we do not have the three trips a week to various specialists or therapists, our lives have felt relatively normal. Then you start blogging about questions for your 2009 favourite preferences and whack! Up from the depths pop all these submerged bits and pieces of emotional debris. Not all bad, just a little lightbulb moment to remind you.

Thus, my choice of book should come as no surprise to you all. Again, my subconscious has directed me to a compatible selection. Meandering through QBD booksellers I stumbled onto this one...

Description of book
Ever since he was small, John Robison had longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” No guidance came from his mother, who conversed with light fixtures, or his father, who spent evenings pickling himself in sherry. It was no wonder he gravitated to machines, which could, at least, be counted on.

After fleeing his parents and dropping out of high school, his savant-like ability to visualize electronic circuits landed him a gig with KISS, for whom he created their legendary fire-breathing guitars. Later, he drifted into a “real” job, as an engineer for a major toy company. But the higher Robison rose in the company, the more he had to pretend to be “normal” and do what he simply couldn’t: communicate. It wasn’t worth the paycheck.


It was not until he was forty that an insightful therapist told him he had the form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way Robison saw himself—and the world.
Look Me in the Eye is the moving, darkly funny story of growing up with Asperger’s at a time when the diagnosis simply didn’t exist. A born storyteller, Robison takes you inside the head of a boy whom teachers and other adults regarded as “defective,” who could not avail himself of KISS’s endless supply of groupies, and who still has a peculiar aversion to using people’s given names (he calls his wife “Unit Two”). He also provides a fascinating reverse angle on the younger brother he left at the mercy of their nutty parents—the boy who would later change his name to Augusten Burroughs and write the bestselling memoir Running with Scissors.
Ultimately, this is the story of Robison’s journey from his world into ours, and his new life as a husband, father, and successful small business owner—repairing his beloved high-end automobiles. It’s a strange, sly, indelible account—sometimes alien, yet always deeply human.

Product Details

ISBN: 9780307395986

Format: Hardback

Imprint: Crown

Published:15/10/07

Subject: Autobiography/Biography

I must admit after John Elder Robison's younger brother wrote "Running with Scissors" I wondered how I would find this book. For me it was uplifting, humorous, and gave me hope. Am going to let Boy 1 read it over the holidays (he reads and comprehends at a 17 year old level). See what he gets from it.

Have I bought multiple copies and shared it? Let's see. Gave one to Boy 1's teacher, aide, principal, and my last copy... Go check Sharalyn's bookshelf. It left with her after our catch up a few weeks back.

Oh, and conversing with electrical fixtures? Well, I may have had a light bulb moment but that's as close as it gets...

Challenge 27: Secrets of a Literary Whore

Deception permeates my pores. I reek of duplicity. I am a book slut, a literary whore. I meander wantonly in the realms of trash literature. Highbrow? Never! Umberto Eco leaves me cold and wasn’t Truman Capote the King of Queens? Maeve Binchy or Janet Evanovich are more my style. Why am I telling you this? Well, so you will know of course, and it will be our little secret. Cross your heart, hope to die, be my friend for foes I fry. Oh, do not take me literally my newfound reader, I swear on the tome trollop oath it would be naught but a tart written roasting.

Yet, still you hesitate to request the object of my latent lustful desires?  Wouldn't you like to know what latest lingering letter addiction my wanton, waning favours have fallen upon? Yes? So, what do you offer the book slut in return? Will you feed my craving for comments if I tear down my walls of self containment and bestow to you a sliver of my tawdry tastes? Throw you a measly morsel from my overladen table of tarty treatises dripping with cheap, dirty thrills? Would you be satisfied with this? And honour the promise to feed my need for annotation gratification? Yes? Yes?

Sadly, I am doomed to disappoint for now I shall reveal to you my shameful secret. This slutty story harlot has taken a brazen deviation. Led astray by a word seductress once before, I have succumbed again, tantalisingly tempted by the same wench's writing wiles. 
So, I hear you ask reverently, who is this brave, brilliant author who has dragged the infamous literary whore from her tacky, tasteless trail? I give to you:

ISBN: 9780552773157

ISBN-10: 0552773158

Publisher: Transworld Publishers

Date Published: 21/04/2008

Format: Paperback Book

Pages: 592

Language: English

Book Description:

'Who died?' I said. 'Or is it a secret?' 'My mother, Vianne Rocher.' Seeking refuge and anonymity in the cobbled streets of Montmartre, Yanne and her daughters, Rosette and Annie, live peacefully, if not happily, above their little chocolate shop. Nothing unusual marks them out no red sachets hang by the door. The wind has stopped - at least for a while. Then into their lives blows Zozie de l'Alba, the lady with the lollipop shoes, and everything begins to change...But this new friendship is not what it seems. Ruthless, devious and seductive, Zozie de l'Alba has plans of her own - plans that will shake their world to pieces. And with everything she loves at stake, Yanne must face a difficult choice to flee, as she has done so many times before, or to confront her most dangerous enemy...Herself.

The book slut had been enamoured of 'Chocolat' many moons earlier, so 'The Lollipop Shoes' sequel was always going to pose another threat to her guarded existence. Word pictures again destined to draw this barefaced booklover deeply into another place, a world filled with shadows and mirrors, magic and mystery. Where one can hide from others for a little but not from yourself.

'Chocolat', was the story of Vianne Rocher and her impish daughter Anouk, blowing in on the breeze to pit religious zeal and the Church against the velvety indulgence of Chocolate. The first phrase leapt from the page to entrap:

We came in on the wind of the carnival. 

You are then held tightly clasped by her sensual creations throughout. A literary feast. Oh, how the book slut stuffed herself on that gourmet of a book.

Years pass with feverishly few drooling distractions and then came another breathtaking bound banquet. 'The Lollipop Shoes' leaps forward five years. Vianne has another daughter, Rosette, Anouk is at school and they are living in a rented chocolaterie in the Montmartre district of Paris. Vianne has learnt from painful experience to conform, blend in. The wind has stopped blowing for now.

Enter Zozie de l'Alba, a scavenger and stealer of identities and the wearer of the lollipop shoes, blowing into town on the Day of the Dead. She appears beautiful, passionate and bohemian -  all that Vianne once was, the mother Anouk mourns. Underneath the facade lies a cold and malevolent being, powerful, insatiable, greedily grabbing the life and identity Vianne has discarded. It is the age old battle of good and evil, but also the story of choices: be true to who you are, or live the life others expect.

The book slut has now bowed her head in supplication. The tarnished truth revealed. I await the judgement and wrath of my peers for this dismal disappointing debacle. I am worthy of your disdain and sit head bowed to be disciplined. At your leisure. of course.

Humbly yours.

 

Literary Whore

Oh Hell,

I knew it, I just knew it. It is like sitting in a wonderful old library full of first editions. Library ladder at the ready, where do you start? Blogs, so many delicious new blogs and so little time. I am drowning under my blog list, and my children are hungry, my man neglected, my life is falling apart around me as I voraciously gobble words, salivating, muttering under my breath:

"More, more, I must have MORE!"