Links ‘n Books

Links:

• Michelle (Brocco) Baruch, an ex-Highland Parker, has beautiful tree photos on Arutz Sheva.
• Gail posted her wonderful charcoal portrait drawings.
• Pesky Settler posts a solution to the energy crisis: oil drum fields.
• Haveil Havalim: Edition 153 is up.

Books I read recently:

• Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism by Jenny McCarthy: turns out to be a controversial book, if you read any of the blog reviews. Very easy to read.

  If I am brave, I will consider a longer post about this book.

• Borderlines, a memoir by Caroline Kraus. Very disturbing. Her mother suffers from mental illness when she is a teen, then the mother dies of lung cancer. She moves far from home and gets involved in an unhealthy relationship with another woman with a borderline personality disorder. And takes up smoking.
• Digging to America, by Anne Tyler. A WASPy American family and an Iranian American family connect when they both adopt Korean infant girls. A subplot of the story is a grandmother of one of the adopted girls is ill from cancer and then dies. At the end of the book, her daughter is diagnosed with breast cancer. As there is a lot about food and cancer in the book, I would certainly like to write a longer post about the book. As I said to my friend who married into an Iranian family, the book is definitely fiction. But I did learn a bit about Persian food.
• Love in the Time of Cholesterol, a memoir with recipes, by Cecily Ross. Cecily Ross writes about how she and her husband love cooking and gourmet food; when her husband needs bypass surgery and nearly dies, their whole life changes. Cecily Ross intersperses her memoir writing with her recipes.

Books my husband just gave me for my birthday and so I intend to read:

• Second Chances: Transforming Bitterness to Hope and the Story of Ruth, by Levi Meier
• and a book of Winslow Homer Watercolors

I was telling Jill this past week if you find yourself drawn to reading about the Holocaust and want to read something perhaps a bit more uplifting or at least great literature, read anything by Aharon Appelfeld.