Review - Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Title: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Author: Cheryl Strayed
Publisher: Knopf Double Day Publishing
Publish Date: March 20, 2012
Hardcover, 336 pages

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I absolutely love this book!! It was so funny and so incredibly honest. Couldn't put it down and recommend it so highly!!

Cheryl has had a really hard life. Her mother has died from Cancer and she had to watch her go through it all. And Cheryl has punished herself the entire time with drugs, strange men and all the while pushing her husband away from her. Not the greatest beginning. At a low point, she is standing in line and sees the book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and buys the book. And in that one small moment her entire outlook changes. She will go hike this trail and see where it leads her.

The very first chapter tells of her losing her book over the side of a mountain. Irretrievable, she tosses her other boot over as well. In the middle of nowhere, without her boots what will she do.

I love the part where she breaks down and allows another hiker to go through her backpack called the monster because of it's gargantuan size. He pulls out all sorts of things, including 21 condoms. Where she thinks she will be using these is beyond even Cheryl, but she felt the need to bring them anyhow.

She faces life with such a funny outlook. It is almost boarder line absurd. She sinks herself in to these crazy moments, all kind of her own doing and yet, she seems to climb out of them a tiny bit smarter. Until one day, she just gets it. This book is her journey.

If you liked the book Eat, Love, Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert you should definitely read this!

Summary -
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Review - Some Assembly Required by Anne Lamott

Title: Some Assembly Required
Author: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Publish Date: March 20, 2011

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Not my usual type of book to read, not that I have one, but this one just pulled at my heart strings and longed for me to read it. I haven't read her first book, Operating Instructions, but was pulled in immediately. The way Anne Lamott wrote this book is like wonderful poetry. She has letters from her son, his wife incorporating how they are doing as new parents. Anne deals with the trials of being in the middle as a grandparent, but trying to stay out of all the controversy. She wants to tell her son what to do and yet, she chooses not to. Anne Lamott is an incredible writer who spills her heart out in this book.

Summary -

In Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood.

Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax's life.

In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam-about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions-struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge new relationships with Jax's mother, who has her own ideas about how to raise a child. Lamott writes about the complex feelings that Jax fosters in her, recalling her own experiences with Sam when she was a single mother. Over the course of the year, the rhythms of life, death, family, and friends unfold in surprising and joyful ways.

By turns poignant and funny, honest and touching, Some Assembly Required is the true story of how the birth of a baby changes a family-as this book will change everyone who reads it.

Wordless Wednesday - Grandmother-made quilt

Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday - Tune In & Teaser

I rented the new Footloose and though I enjoyed it, it wasn't as good as the original. All the characters I preferred from the first one even the preacher, but Dennis Quaid was good. I absolutely love Willis!






A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson

"When guys in campflauge pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearson things done out-of-doors, I would not longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say, a slow, manly sniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."

Review - Crushed by KC Blake

Title: Crushed
The Witch-Game #1
Author: K.C. Blake
Publisher: Createspace
Publish Date: July 30, 2011
Paperback, 262 pages

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I wasn't sure what to expect with this book, but it was on sale, it had some pretty good reviews amongst the blog world, so I thought I'd give it a go. Oddly enough, it was lots of fun. I really enjoyed it.

These girls have a game they play every year. They pick boys that they can "crush" which equates to blowing witch dust on them and controlling them. They make fun of them, they play tricks on them and basically make them their slaves. It is cruel, but they don't seem to realize. Until they crush the wrong guy. Zach is a boy with special powers as well. But how long will Kristen try to play with him before he unleashes his fury?

Summary -
The Noah sisters rule Titan High with their beauty, brains, and magical powers. Each year they play a secret game: Crushed. The girls pick their targets carefully and blow enchanted dust into the boy’s faces, charming them, but this year Kristen makes a grave mistake. She chooses the wrong boy and almost dies that same day. Coincidence? Maybe. But something isn’t quite right about Zach Bevian. He doesn’t behave like a boy who’s been Crushed. He goes from hot to cold, from looking at her with contempt to asking her out on a date. She doesn’t know what to think. Does he hate her or is he truly falling for her? Is he trying to kill her, or is he trying to save her?