But don't worry. The pace will slacken up a bit now that PapaC is back at work, McBaby is running me wild and the LAST YEAR OF HOMESCHOOL is fixing to start!
Book 25: My Sister's Keeper by Jodie Picoult. This was a book that I had read a review of in People magazine, of all places. While I was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital! It was on the "new books" shelf at the library when I was there picking up the last two Shakespeare videos for Zteen's Shakespeare course. This is a book about Anna, a 13 year old girl, who was conceived as a genetic match for her sister, 3 years older, who suffers from a virulent and deadly form of leukemia. Her cord blood is used for an infusion. Later she is expected to donate lymphocytes (or something like that), bone marrow, etc., in an ever-escalating drive to save her sister. The action begins when she is 13 and files a lawsuit for medical emancipation so that she doesn't have to donate a kidney--though it will almost assuredly mean her sister's death. Good look at how severe illness scars a whole family and how sometimes all the answers seem wrong and right at the same time. Actually fairly evenly balanced, which surprised me. Quick read.
Book 26: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. Loved it, loved it, loved it! I didn't realize that there was a whole series of "pimpernel books". Romance at its finest. Swashbuckling at its finest. I think the Scarlet Pimpernel was the prototype for Batman.
Book 27: The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge. When you read this book, I think it's important to keep in mind that it was written 3 years BEFORE Vatican II, when, apparently, there was much anticipation that the Church would change her stance on artificial contraception. Lodge obviously thinks that is what the Church OUGHT to do. Anyway, the book is the story of one day in the life of Adam Appleby, a doctoral student working on his dissertation (on the longest English sentence in three different novels--which he hasn't decided on yet). His wife thinks she may be pregnant with their fourth child. As the day goes on, and Adam's stress level rises, he begins to think in the patterns of different authors' writing--Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Virginia Wolfe. I'm not astute enough to tell *which* author he is "channeling" so to speak. But the novel was laugh out loud funny in some parts anyway.
Most interesting to me? Even though the protagonist and his wife both live in hope that the Church will change, they DO NOT step outside her teaching and just use contraception anyway. That was refreshing to read. If they considered themselves Catholic, they considered themselves bound by all the teachings, even the ones they didn't like very much. And at the very end, after such a long and convoluted day, Adam Appleby goes to bed thinking: "It was absurd, but he actually hoped her period hadn't started." Not a dissenting author alive today would write like that.
Read it!
Always enjoy reading your reviews MamaT!