Review: Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

Book Title/Author: Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale
Publisher/Year Published: June 2012 by Bloomsbury
Where I got it: NetGalley first, then I accidentally let it expire and had to wait a long time to finish it from the library
Rating: 3/5 stars

Summary:via Goodreads

Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs. Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then with two sons, to Edinburgh’s elegant society in 1850. But Henry traveled often and was cold and remote when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies.

No doubt thousands of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but Isabella chose to record her innermost thoughts—and especially her infatuation with a married Dr. Edward Lane—in her diary. Over five years the entries mounted—passionate, sensual, suggestive. One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced on the diary and, broaching its privacy, read Isabella's intimate entries. Aghast at his wife’s perceived infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Until that year, divorce had been illegal in England, the marital bond being a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause celebre, threatening the foundations of Victorian society with the specter of "a new and disturbing figure: a middle class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid for arousal." Her diary, read in court, was as explosive as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, just published in France but considered too scandalous to be translated into English until the 1880s.

This was a really cool book! I love that it's actually true and not just the normal romantic fiction that I read. In between the story of Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace is woven other tales of the Victorian Era. Charles Darwin features often in the second half of the book. Dickens is mentioned as well. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about the life and times of the upper-middle class in Victorian England.

The romance and inevitable disgrace itself is told through tidbits collected from Isabella's letters and infamous diary. I find it interesting how often that diary is used. I mean, I have tried to do the diary thing but I lose interest in it pretty quickly. At one point, Summerscale makes the point that due to her horrid marriage Isabella is lonely. Thus her diary becomes her friend. I guess if I had no friends, and no internet, to talk to my diary would be used quite frequently as well.

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace held my interest more than a plain old biography. I was so caught up in it that sometimes I forgot it was real. I really didn't know how the book would end up going through it. It read more like a fiction novel intersperced with real history, but then I would shake my head and think, "No. This is real."

As a reader of historical romance, I enjoyed this. If romance readers want a hint of a REAL romance story, check this out. This is one history book I wouldn't miss.

Why not more stars though if I loved it so much? Well as interesting as it was sometimes there was just too much history for me, especially during the trial. I really wanted to know what happens, not how Darwin would take to the waters. But this particular criticism is probably mostly due to my own struggles with non-fiction.

Overall this was pretty much just a good book. Check it out!

PS: I found about this book through NetGalley, but I waited too long to read it and my book expired! So I waited and immediately grabbed this from the library to finish it because I wanted to so badly know what happened to Mrs. Robinson.

Review: Paris in Love by Eloisa James

Book Title/Author: Paris in Love: A Memoir by Eloisa James
Publisher/Year Published:April 3rd 2012 by Random House Publishing Group
Where I got it: The library
Rating: 4/5 stars
Summary:via Goodreads

In 2009, New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James took a leap that many people dream about: she sold her house, took a sabbatical from her job as a Shakespeare professor, and moved her family to Paris. Paris in Love: A Memoir chronicles her joyful year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog).

Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a most enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour.

Every once in a while, I am up for a good memoir. I think memoirs are my favorite form of non-fiction. When I heard that one of my favorite romance novel authors was publishing one, I immediately added it to my to be read shelf. The funny thing was, I had already had a secret inside look into this book and didn't even know it.

Let's backup. A few years ago when authors starting Facebook and Twitter accounts became the thing to do, I started following Elosia James. Little did I know I stumbled into the most eloquent and beautiful status updates ever. Eloisa and family were living in Paris at the time, and she would frequently post snippets of life while she was there. These would range from the sound and sights of the city to (my favorite) exploits of her then 10-year old daughter. Scrolling through the news feed, I would always stop and read those.

For Paris in Love, Eloisa took that same format of short paragraph like status and collected them seemingly chronologically to tell the story of her year abroad. Some I remember reading real time, but a lot she took an expanded on (including some very good longer essays) and she included some more personal introspection.

The result is a wonderful journey through her and her family's year in Paris that takes you out of whatever location you are and sets you down in Paris.

I love the things she describes to, the way the horses on the carousel look, the windows in the subway, the laughing statues on the bridge. But what really drives this home for me is the family stories. Again the worse paint a picture for you that made me just cringe or laugh or insert appropriate emotion while reading it. I am pretty sure I even face-palmed while chuckling at the thought of 10-year-old Italian students trying to do a play in French that no one understood with all the calamity that you would think would happen, does.

Despite the short format, there are some cohesive threads that travel through the book which make you want to keep reading. At the same time it was easy for me to find a "stopping point" (in quotes because, really, is there ever such a thing as a stopping point in a book?? Maybe the words 'the end'). It made it really convenient to shove in my purse and open at random times.

Overall, the book was a light-hearted read that was at times touchingly poignant. I feel like I would read anything that Eloisa wrote, even if it was a limerick on a bar napkin. If you enjoy memoirs with a splash of French travel and family shenanigans (oh! and a rotund dog) definitely check this one out. Who could say no to rotund dogs?

Reviews Galore! Just not here...

I had a couple of reviews at other sites this past week. I meant to link them here on the day they posted but alas lots of things happened this week that kept me away from the computer.

Better late than never.

On Wednesday over at Seductive Musings I reviewed Laura Lee Guhrke's Wedding of the Season. This is the first of her Abandoned at the Alter series.

On Thursday over at The Broke and the Bookish I reviewed Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to know everything which is a book about the computer IBM has created to play Jeopardy!

Check them out if you are so inclined.

Featured at the Broke and the Bookish

Guess what? I have a review up over at The Broke and the Bookish. It's a review on the awesome trivia dictionary Phraseology:Thousands of Bizarre Origins, Unexpected Connections and Fascinating Facts about English's Best Expressions.

I think when I find awesome entries, I may post them here. Maybe I'll make it a feature. Trivia Today! We'll see... though I will do one now

to gird ones loins literally means "to wrap a belt around ones waist" - as belting loose clothing would allow for freer bodily movement, and the saying is now used to mean "to prepare oneself for something requiring strength and endurance"

Great Minds Think Alike

For this task we will find out if this saying is true when in comes to reading preferences. Go to the individual page for the last book you gave a 5 star rating to (i.e. if the last book you rated 5 stars was The Help by Kathryn Stockett you would go to this page The Help). Scroll down to the section for other reviews and click on the link for 5 stars...then click on the link to organize the list by date. Once you do that you will need to click on page 6,7, or 8 (if the book you use does not have that many pages of 5 stars use page 1-3) and select a person. Visit that persons profile and select another book (one that you haven't read before) that they gave 5 stars to and that will be the book you need to read for this challenge task.

Yeah. This one was a bit confusing, but somehow at some point in time this summer I stumbled on someone reading the following.

Book Title/Author: The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University by Kevin Roose
Publisher/Year Published: 2009 by Grand Central Publishing
Where I got it: My local library
Rating: 4/5 stars

I've been wanting to read The Unlikely Disciple since I found out about it through a Goodreads giveaway. When I found out he was a protegee of A.J Jacobs (whose The Year of Living Biblically I absolutely adored!), I needed to read this book.

Here is some of the summary from Goodreads:

As a sophomore at Brown University, Kevin Roose didn't have much contact with the Religious Right. Raised in a secular home by staunchly liberal parents, he fit right in with Brown's sweatshop-protesting, fair-trade coffee-drinking, God-ambivalent student body. So when he had a chance encounter with a group of students from Liberty University, a conservative Baptist university in Lynchburg, Virginia, he found himself staring across a massive culture gap. But rather than brush the Liberty students off, Roose decided to do something much bolder: he became one of them.

I have to give him credit. Going into it I thought it would be more biased than it actually was. He did a great job of separating himself from what he already knew and trying to understand the things he didn't. I don't know if I could have been so forgiving to some of the things he witnessed. Also I think it would be a whole different experience for a woman (not to mention the fact that I was raised Catholic).

But Roose takes a very open-minded stance, but he does this without losing himself. Many of the passages he wrote, I could feel the struggle within him between what he thought he knew about Liberty students and what he was seeing before his eyes.

If you are at all interested in religion and the perception thereof in modern American society, this is a great book, especially for the college sect. It was something I could relate to while learning a lot about a major religious demographic that I know next to nothing about.

It's Time For The Swim Suit Edition: Book A

Pick one of the following swim suit styles to fit your reading type.

A. Tank Suit - Read 1 book of at least 850 pages.
B. Bikini - Read 2 books totaling at least 850 pages and first published in 1946 (date of first named bikini) or later.
C. Tankini - Read 850 pages of book(s) published in last 5 years.
D. Victorian (The kind with sleeves, skirt & bloomers.) - Read 850 pages of book(s) published between 1834 and 1901.

I decided that the Tankini would fit me best as I a) hate tomes and b&d) older books. For the beginning of these pages I chose to read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

Book Title/Author: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow (Goodreads Author)
Published: 2008 by Hyperion
Notes: Audio book from the library
Rating: 4/5
I had heard a lot about the lecture and his book, but had yet to experience either. As a recently graduated college student, I thought this would be a good get out into the world book. So I found the audio.

Even though he wasn't reading it, I could hear his orators voice in the wording. The man who did read it was excellent. Each chapter dealt with a different anecdote and the lesson he learned from each. It was ridiculous how many cool things he has done in his life. Being a computer science graduate, I also really enjoyed the bits of that he put into the story.

Overall I would recomend this to anyone who is at a juncture in their lives. Any juncture really. It's good to read at the begining of something, to give you hope for the change to come. I gave it 4 stars.

Birthdays and Birthmonths: Book A

Since roughly 90% of the people in my (Ms. Anderson's) life were born in June, I thought it would be fun to do a task related to birthdays!

For your first book, pick out your birthday month from this list and read a NONFICTION book about that topic.
...
December: History of Language (EXAMPLE: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World)

For your second book, find out what day of the week on which you were born (if you don't know already) and read a FICTION book from that genre.
...Tuesday: Alternate History (EXAMPLE: The Yiddish Policemen's Union)
...
Note: The books are two distinct categories, so therefore do not need to be related at all.

I truncated the task for this one because just listing out all that it entailed would be a substantial post! I just left Tuesday in December since that is what applied to me, but if you are interested in seeing what you would have had to read, check it out over here.

The Mother Tongue: English and How it got that way by Bill Bryson

When I read the description of this book it sounded really intresting:

The author of the acclaimed The Lost Continent now steers us through the quirks and byways of the English language. We learn why island, freight, and colonel are spelled in such unphonetic ways, why four has a u in it but forty doesn't, plus bizarre and enlightening facts about some of the patriarchs of this peculiar language

"Wow," I thought "I've always wondered this! Why is there that u in four? Tell me oh non-fiction book of research!"

There were times when this book was really interesting. Certain chapters made me nod my head in wonder, excited that I would be able to answer that Jeopardy question correctly. But other times, though the information slightly interesting, I felt cheated. You know that forty four thing? Well it pretty much was answered "I dont know. It just developed that way"

What?

Why even tease me, book! Overall though, it was interesting and it takes a lot of a non-fiction book to keep me with it. So I gave it three stars.

Roll the Dice!

So today I am the featured blogger over at The Broke and the Bookish. I reviewed Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo by Beth Whitman.

The challenge for this was outlined below:

Do you feel lucky...are the dice on your side? For this task you will need to visit the website (3 Random Dice). The amount shown on the dice (+/- 10) will be the amount of pages that you will need to read for this task. I.E. if you rolled a 3,5,2 you would need to read a book between between 342 and 362 pages long (EXAMPLE: Son of a Witch (Wicked Years, #2)). You can only click on the link one time.

I rolled a 262 and Wanderlust was 272 pages.

Check out the link above for the review!