Tooni Musing: Feel-Good Reading
Enough doom, gloom and watching videos of old people yelling “Keep your dang gubment hands off my Medicare!” (?!)…don’t we all need some feel-good reading? I know I do (but then, I’m a reading addict, any excuse will do to indulge…;-)
So, here are some recommendations (from my crammed shelves and teetering stacks):
My Life In France, by Julia Child. If you’re not smiling by – oh – page 2 of the introduction, there’s just no hope for you. Julia lived life full out, with a long and happy marriage. And, ah…the food!
The Gardening articles in NYT. Really. Just about any week, there’s an article about somebody growing a bit of heaven in some god-forsaken city area. This past Wednesday, it was a young woman with a “garden on Union Street, right by the drawbridge to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where shuttered warehouses meet the cracked, treeless cement.” She kicked aside the crack vials, pulled up the concrete and got to growing.
Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers, by Jane Robinson. While this won’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy – it WILL give you incentive to get off the couch and experience life, live and in person. If all those oh-so-veddy proper Victorian ladies could slog through steaming jungles in corsets and petticoats…welll, what are YOU whining about? It’s “eminently dippable” and a fun read. (If you fall asleep and lose your place, no harm done.)
Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Anything Bryson writes makes me laugh out loud…and this story of his growing up in the 50s is a classic.
Not feel-good reading, but if you’re in the mood to lay in the A/C and escape, check out Robert B. Parker’s two westerns, Appaloosa and Resolution (first two in a trilogy; third is Brimstone, which I’ve not read.)
If you’re not in the mood to read – and haven’t already seen it, run, don’t walk to see Up. Instant classic (and you’ll smile almost all the way through…a few tears will also be shed.)
Happy Friday! I’ll be hitting the Abq library used book sale tomorrow (what a surprise!)
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