Mandatory for vacation: some reading material

My vacation helped me reach my goal of reading 10 new books this year. Before I took a week off in August I wanted to make sure I had some good books to read. I'll admit I'm kind of a nerd for going to the library the Saturday before my boyfriend and I headed for a few days on the Central Coast to make sure I was well prepared.

I wanted a mix of books so that if one turned out to be a dud, I'd have some others for back up. I picked a few books that looked like light reading such as one about a chef who works for a morning show and a senior citizen who turns back the clock to the age of 29 for one day. I also got a few more that seemed a little hardier, such as one about a single mom raising her daughters and a young girl growing up in the South during the 1980s.

When we were packing my boyfriend asked which books I'd be bringing with me, to which I replied that I would be bringing them all. I knew I wouldn't read them all, but I wanted to have a few options. The first night when we stayed at a hotel in Cambria that had an oceanfront view, I started reading "Bitter in the Mouth" by Monique Truong. The book was not light reading, but it was well-written and kept me interested all the way through. In the book, Linda is a lawyer who looks back on her life in a small Southern town. She loves her great uncle and her father, but she clashes with her mother and her grandmother. Linda has the strange ability - or curse - that when she hears certain words she has a strong taste of something in her mouth. The sensation seems almost science fiction, until later in the book the author has her main character discover a brain disorder called synesthesia, in which the senses get mixed up. The book has a lot of dark moments in it, but it written in a way that really brought Linda to life. I read the book all through vacation, finishing it on our last night in San Simeon.

When I got home I still had a stack of books left so I started another one that wasn't nearly as well written. "Romantically Challenged" by Beth Orsoff had some funny moments but I mostly found the main character irritating. She is a single 30-something lawyer who doesn't want to end up alone, but she nitpicks at every person with whom she goes on a date. She finds something wrong with every single guy and is whiny about it without acknowledging her own short comings.

The next book had something of the same attitude. Ellie is a senior who is turning 75, but she is unhappy about getting older even though she still has her own apartment, all her capacities, her best friend lives upstairs and her grandaughter visits often. Ellie wishes to be young again on her birthday - and she wakes up the next morning to find herself 29 again. Written by Adena Halpern, the secondary characters are not very well developed. The writing is rough and the dialogue is awkward.

From there I moved on to "Last Bite" by Nancy Verde Barr. The book is about a chef who works on a morning show, preparing the cooking segments. It is written by a woman who worked with Julia Child so its no surprise that one of the main characters seems to be based on Child. The key character, however, is the 30-something chef whose dentist boyfriend has just broken up with her. She is unlucky in love and when a troublesome agent comes into the life of the TV chef personality, her job also comes into jeopardy. She quickly finds another love interest in an Irish chef who has opened a restaurant in New York and does a guest appearance on the show. She is skeptical about him, though, and assumes he is a player. The storyline is unbelievable, but a fun read. The only thing I didn't like about the book was that instead of developing some of the side characters, such as the prep chef's parents, they became caricatures of the typical Irish or Italian family.

The last book I read, to complete the 10, was "Juno's Daughters" by Lise Saffran. This book was back into the serious realm with its topic. It is about a single mother raising her two teenagers on a secluded island off the coast of Washington State. The central premise of the story is that two island residents put on a professional production of a Shakespeare play every summer, inviting professional actors to try out for it. The islanders get bit parts in the play and help out behind the scenes. The main character has often helped with the costumes and set pieces but she has never been in the cast. This year to appease her 17-year-old daughter she signs on to play Juno from the play "The Tempest." Her daughters have the roles of other spirits in the play. The main conflict in the book is that the oldest daughter happens to be interested in the same 40-something actor as her mother. The youngest daughter is dealing with abandonment issues as her best friend moves away, and then her sister departs for college. The book had the good skeleton of an idea - an abused mother leaves her husband to raise her two children alone and now is struggling with them becoming independent - but Saffran glosses over the impact that the early abuse had on her and the girls. More than that, her interactions with the two girls ring false.

Before I read this batch of books I'd also read "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, which I enjoyed even though I felt the movie version released in August fell short. I also read another book I checked out of the library whose title and author elude me now. I do remember it was about a woman who lost a bunch of weight, opened a store to sell healthy home-cooked meals and whose husband left her for a much fatter woman. This was another book whose main character came across as whiny and whose secondary characters where more caricatures than realistic people.

For now, it's back to the New Yorker magazine, which I've been neglecting since July.

The library in my life

I've rediscovered the Gilroy Library in recent months. The local library was part of my life long before I even remember it. My parents' first apartment together when they got married was a small one next to the library, where the City Hall is now. My mom would take me on walks to the library at least once a week to check out kiddie books. When I was old enough to walk on my own, I'd collect leaves along with the books.

Storytime and summer reading clubs were a part of my life when I was a kid and 'tween (well before the that term was invented.) My sister and I would sign up for turns on the computers in the kids area to play computer games such as the Oregon Trail and Reading Rabbit, since we didn't have a computer of our own at home.

Every three weeks, we'd turn up to turn in the books we'd finished and check out more. I'd leave with an armful of books I could hardly carry, many from the adult section of the library long before I was an adult. I devoured Christopher Pike books and William Faulkner and anthologies of poetry.

When I was a teenager and spent the summers babysitting a toddler cousin, trips to the library became part of our ritual, too. In the kid's section, there was a tub of wooden puzzles for little ones and my cousin could play with them forever. He loved pop up books and the kids' books on tape where the narrator would make different voices for each character.

I stopped going to the local library when I went away to college. My time for leisure reading dried up, and when I finished school and had more time to read again, I also had more discretionary money. I started buying books. It was easy when Barnes and Noble opened up in town, and then Costco with its discounted Oprah Club books. I created an Amazon.com wishlist and it made it easy for people to get books for me for birthdays or Christmas.

It was just a few months ago that I decided to mix in a book or two with my regular reading of New Yorker magazine. But instead of buying books, I thought I would save the money (and the space since my bookshelf is already overflowing) by going to the library. I was a little embarrassed when I went back and tried to use my library card only to discover it had expired. But it's the public library so I had a new card in minutes and an armful of books.

The great thing about stopping in at the library is that since I don't have to pay for the books I can pick up things on a whim. After all, if their no good, I can just return them in a few weeks with no money wasted and just a little time. And with the online Web site, I can request books so that I have access to books from the entire Santa Clara county public library system so there is a lot to choose from. That means now when I read a book review that looks good, I can just log into my library account, request the book and then I get an e-mail when the book has arrived in Gilroy. Easy.

On my last trip I checked out a book I'd read about in a magazine that I'd requested, "The Girls from Ames" and I picked up two books from the new arrivals shelf at the library. All in all, it's been good to get back to a public place that has been such a part of my life. The only downside is that I've stayed up way too late engrossed in a good book a few times, just like I used to when I was a kid and I would read until 2 a.m. to finish off a novel.