Saturday, January 7, 2017

Favorite Author Found! Catherine Ryan Hyde

As my last post elucidated, I've taken up reading.  One of the first books I downloaded on Kindle Unlimited was Take me With You by Catherine Ryan Hyde.  She has easily become one of my favorite authors in the three books by her I have read.  The other two are When I Found You and Walk me Home.  (And I didn't realize until this moment, she wrote Pay it Forward.  I enjoyed the movie years ago and now I may pick up the book!

There is something about the way she writes that I connect with emotionally.  I often "catch" myself thinking about her characters and their life choices, personalities, and stories.  I can't say that I relate to any individual or story personally, but I develop a fondness for each one and feel like I understand that particular plight a bit better.  Each character seems to be an average person.  He or she may or may not go above and beyond expectations and maybe will only do something extraordinary once or never in their lifetimes.  This leads to realistic narratives and plots, easily to follow and enjoy.

Take me With You starts with a middle-aged widower at a mechanics shop waiting for his RV to be repaired.  August, the widower, ends up bringing the mechanics two young boys with him on his annual National Parks trip with the goal being Yellowstone.  My dad felt it should have ended when he dropped the boys off at the end of the summer with their alcoholic father, but I'm glad it went a bit further.  I needed the ending to cry my happy and sad tears and to feel the story was complete.  I do not care for stories/movies where the ending is left up to the audience's imagination.

Walk me Home is about two tween/teen sisters who attempt to walk from New Mexico to California.  Their mom and her boyfriend are killed in a car accident (murder-suicide, we never find out) and the older sister decides they need to find their mother's ex-boyfriend who was the only other person who ever cared for them.  They stumble onto a fictional Native American reservation where they come face-to-face with a shotgun belonging to an almost blind woman.  I was elated when the younger sister chose to stay with the old woman, they each needed each other and their bond developed organically, unspoken.  The older sister continues her journey to California solo, unable to believe that anywhere else could be home except with her mom's ex boyfriend.  I won't spoil the ending!

When I Found You was my least favorite of the three because it was a difficult read, emotionally.  Don't get me wrong, it was well-written, but every step of the way I wanted the plot to resolve and the characters to find peace.  There was too much toil and turmoil and I felt uneasy while reading, maybe even too much despair as your hopes were constantly dashed by the choices of one of the main character.  The story begins with a childless, introspective tax accountant/duck hunter finding a day-old newborn in the woods.  He asks the police to adopt the child, who ends up with his maternal grandmother.  Although he buys a present for the child every birthday and Christmas, it isn't until the boy reaches his teens that they actually meet.  At 15 the grandmother deposits the boy with "The Man Who Found Him in the Woods," seemingly washing her hands of him.  The accountant tells him that no matter what happens, he'll never wash his hands of him, and he doesn't.  Maybe he should have, far to many times along the way.  It is sticking with me, constantly on my mind.  Could the accountant have done anything any differently?  The grandmother?  The boy's young wife?  His boxing coach?  Fortunately, the "boy" finds a semblance of peace at the end, otherwise I would have been tempted to hate the book!

The beauty of her writing is nothing feels forced, neither dialogue nor circumstance.  I never felt she sat in front of her manuscript wondering what she could write that would get her characters to do x.  Maybe the stories take her to the end with a life of their own, or possibly it all develops naturally for her?  There were a few times when I wished I could shake some sense into the characters, especially in When I Found You, but that's only normal.  In real life I want to shake sense into people more than I care to admit.  Catherine Ryan Hyde continues to give us hope every step of the way, even when everything feels lost.  The hope is in the relationships, not only hoping the individuals with do the right thing or read a self-help book!  She seamlessly connects disparate characters with not just their FOILs, but the person they most need to find personal fulfillment and happiness.

Stay tuned to see what other reading adventures I have!

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Reading as a Hobby - I never knew how much I enjoyed reading until now!

I've been trying to find a hobby.  That sounds like I started the other day and I am still going strong, though the truth is that I have been searching for years!  Google tells me that a hobby is "an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure."  I have never had a true hobby in the long-term.  I was in band, I played the piano, I was on the golf team my senior year of high school and then again my senior year of college, never really did any of those things on the weekend, though I do still enjoy music and golf.  In Japan (the first time) I did crossstitch to bide my time in classes I didn't understand and when I was supposed to be doing homework I couldn't read and tried my hand at naginata.  In college I had a part-time job and studied languages (maybe that is the closest thing I've had to a hobby?).  Post-college I started beading, failed at knitting (except for "easy knitting" which is amazingly fun and easy!), and had spurts where I swam, did yoga, biked to work, etc.

The kids are slightly older and now I have a few minutes each day where I can spend time on myself or a hobby!  So the other day I renewed my search by googling "how to pick a hobby."  There are A LOT of ideas out there, many of which I had heard or seen, but never really considered.  Did I mention I'm pretty conservative spender, so that ruled out starting an acrylic ring making business by suspending nature in clear resin (for eternity?).  Buying a Stand-Up-Paddle board or a kayak seem great, but they start at a few hundred dollars!

[SIDE NOTE: I'm sitting outside in Dar and I just killed a mosquito on my leg as she was mid-suck.  :-(]

I still have hundreds beads upstairs, I spent a lot of money on them, but I never was a passionate beader.  My neighbor has offered to buy them all from me once I decide on a price = start-up costs for new hobby, check!  I'm not sure why I hesitate to sell them, I haven't done it for years, why I am so worried I will pick it up again?  In addition, I still have some yarn left from my 6 months of knitting (but I'll keep that to use with the looms).  Theoretically I could make money off both these as hobbies, with high quality and high output, but with a full-time job and full-time kids, that doesn't seem likely.

Now, back to the first word of title of this post, "Books."  Reading is a timeless hobby that has withstood the test of time (until my generation and our electronics addiction), why couldn't it work for me?  I never particularly enjoyed reading as a kid, but I wished I had been a voracious reader.  My dad blamed my mother for only letting us read library books, but truthfully I'm not sure why I never got into it until now.  There are only a handful of books which have stuck with me, Black Rain Einstein's Dreams, Anne of Green Gables, The Five People you Meet in Heaven, and others.  I'm excited for my 12 months of KindleUnlimited and simultaneously filling up my book wish list.  Is there a way to flag the books on my list for Amazon sales?
Wish me luck on my new hobby!  Maybe I'll even post some book reviews here?