As part of my reading deliberately, one of the books I was intent on reading this year was The Outlander. It seemed right up my alley and I know I read good reviews of it, so when I told my real life book club (as opposed to my fake life book club) that I thought we should disband the book club, but I found out they all wanted to continue, I said, Fine, but here’s the books I want to read. The Outlander was one of them, and thus our February book was picked.

I don’t know if you remember, but I really disliked The English Patient. I only bring that up because I should have known I wouldn’t like this book because Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, gushed all over this book. In fact, I think my book might even have the remnants of Ondaatje’s spittle.

Oh, wait. That’s from when I fell asleep reading. Nevermind.

Here’s why I thought The Outlander sounded so fantastic: Mary, 19-years-old in the year 1903, kills her husband and has to flee for her life from his crazed brothers intent on seeing justice prevail over their brother’s killer. But she lives out in the middle of nowhere, so she flees farther into nowhere (the Alberta Rockies), and almost dies. I don’t want to tell you too much, but that’s the gist of the story.

Because Mary killed her husband, she flashes back to scenes from her married life. I’ve seen this done beautifully, seamlessly, but I really thought Adamson was choppy in the way that Mary doled out to the reader the details of her married life and why she killed her husband. In a story where the main character has KILLED HER HUSBAND and is RUNNING FROM HIS CRAZY BROTHERS, there should be a certain amount of suspense and Oh my god I wonder what happened. Instead, I felt rather ho hum she killed her husband *yawn*. Instead of suspense and back story and Mary obsessing over how she might survive, there was a lot of description of the mountains and a rather linear telling of the story.

One thing that bugged me was that Mary’s name is used a handful of times. For most of the book, she’s referred to as “the widow”. I wondered at around 50 pages why I was unengaged and didn’t really care about Mary, and I couldn’t help but surmise that I felt turned off by the lack of a proper name, even though I knew her name was Mary.

I couldn’t help but feel a little cynical at the love story in The Outlander and how the story ultimately wrapped up. Even as cynical as I am at happy endings, I do like them, but this just seemed a little too pat, a little too easy, a little too…unrealistic.

When I read books for my book club, I’ve got little tabs ready so that I can mark passages I find interesting, inspiring, important, funny, etc. I didn’t use a SINGLE TAB in this book. I couldn’t find anything remarkable to note for the future.

To be honest, I didn’t realize how much I didn’t like The Outlander until I just wrote this review. I don’t like disliking a book, so maybe I should just pass this book along and say, It’s not you, it’s me.

Rating: Don’t bother.

Gil Adamson’s website: http://giladamson.com/

Other reviews:

The Written World (loved it)

an adventure in reading (really liked it)

caribousmom (loved it)

Book source: I bought this book myself.

And one more thing? If you click on one of The Outlander links and buy something from Powell’s, I’ll make a commission! Mwahahahaha!! Maybe with the pennies I make I’ll be able to call someone who cares.

You can thank the FTC for this disclosure!

You haven’t seen me posting much of anything, really, since BEA because I was hoping to get my BEA posts written and posted, but obviously THAT didn’t happen, so because time is marching on whether I type up my experiences or not, I’ll take the first step in giving up on writing the BEA posts at all by doing a Which Would You Rather.

So, uh, this question comes because I have a problem at work with the thermostat. It seems like everywhere I’ve worked, no one can agree on the thermostat temperature. You can usually find me huddled over my keyboard at work, teeth chattering year ’round. And it makes me wonder sometimes, Do the ladies who turn the thermostat down (i.e. colder) ever *get* cold? Or are they perpetually hot and sweaty?

So then I was surfing some blogs yesterday and came across a blog that I instantly clicked with, so I checked her Twitter stream and BAM! I found this at the top:

*dies* I have found my soulmate. Unfortunately, I don’t think she knows I’m *her* soulmate.

Anyhoodles, this whole office thermostat thing got me thinking about whether I’d prefer to be perpetually hot or perpetually cold. Sooo…would you rather always be cold or always be hot? If you’re always cold, it’s not life threatening or anything, it’s just that you’re toes and fingers can’t seem to warm up, and same goes for your nose and ears. You forget about it if you’re busy, but it’s always *there*, that you’re cold. If you’re always hot, you’re always a little moist sweaty glistening. You know how it is when you’re just a *tad* too hot.

I’m wondering which you would rather deal with for the rest of your life: always being slightly cold, or always being slightly warm?

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Me, I’d rather always be on the warm side. I can’t FREAKING CONCENTRATE when I’m cold, and while I get a little sleepy when I’m too warm, at least I’m not cold.

You?

I was highly anticipating Allison Winn Scotch’s latest book, The One That I Want, because I absolutely adored her previous book, Time of My Life.

In The One That I Want, Tilly is 32-years-old and blithely happy. She’s a guidance counselor at a high school (which is perfect, since she absolutely loves prom), in love with her husband, Tyler, with whom she’s trying to have a baby, and living in her hometown. She comes across an old friend from junior high, Ashley, who’s a palm reader and gifts Tilly with “clarity”. Ashley seems to see something that Tilly doesn’t see, and insists this clarity is a gift that Tilly will eventually thank her for.

Instead of receiving a gift, Tilly starts seeing things before they happen, and what she sees she doesn’t like: her dad relapsing into alcoholism, her husband packing up a moving van, despite the fact they’ve both agreed that they’ll stay in this town indefinitely. At first Tilly tries to change these things that she sees, but she eventually realizes that she can’t change anything and she has to accept these things as they come. Tilly is so boxed in by what she thinks does and will make her happy, that these changes force her to reassess her life.

I initially found Tilly to be unlikable and annoying. Instead of trying to understand why her husband doesn’t want to live in this small town anymore, she tries to force him and guilt him into staying. She’s unable to see past her own desires and conceptions of the way things should be that she can’t see how the people around her really feel.

One of the things I love about Allison Winn Scotch is she brings up these universal questions: What if things were different? What if I hadn’t actually married this person, but instead married that person? What if my life doesn’t end up the way I imagine and hope and pray it does?

Allison Winn Scotch’s writing is just how I like it: fluid, effortless, with an undercurrent of humor. She makes writing look like something anyone could do, from her blog posts to her tweets to her novels. And yet I know from reading many many books that not everyone is as natural as she is.

If Tilly had been more likable, I would have liked The One That I Want more. I’m not saying I didn’t like it, because ultimately I did (like it), but I think some of the depth that I found in Time of My Life was lost in The One That I Want because Tilly was so self-involved. I expected Tilly to start out that way, but she showed no signs of changing until the book was well over half way through. I thought I might see small changes, small insights from the beginning and getting larger and more profound as the book progressed, but her bull headedness continued.

When Tilly finally did start changing, though, that’s when the book came together for me and I started really enjoying the story. Tilly has a revelation half way through that I loved:

…I wonder if being too satisfied with your life and becoming numb to it aren’t somehow intertwined. Like there isn’t something just as dangerous about playing it safe.

And another:

Because there are burdens that we bear together, and then there are burdens that we have to bear alone, but even those, the ones that we must forge ourselves, are easier to shoulder when we can sense the firm assuredness of our sister, of our friends, standing right beside us, holding us up in case we falter.

Like I said, I have some quibbles with the book, but they weren’t enough to make me not enjoy the book, and certainly not enough for me not to recommend this to you. I hope you pick this up, and if you do, let me know what you think!

If you do one thing today, make sure you follow Allison Winn Scotch on Twitter. If I could only follow one person on Twitter, she’d be it.

Also be sure to check out Allison’s blog; it’s fantastic.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this tour (yes, I begged to be on it). You can see the full tour schedule for Allison Winn Scotch’s tour here. Here’s the other tour hosts this week:

Tuesday, June 8th:  Write Meg!

Wednesday, June 9th:  Life in the Thumb

Thursday, June 10th:  The Brain Lair

Buy The One That I Want from Powell’s today!

One of the cool things talked about at BEA during the 7x20x21 session was literary tattoos. I’ve long pondered getting a tattoo, and since I love books, what could be more fascinating than literary tattoos?

There’s a book coming out in October 2010 by HarperCollins entitled The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos From Bookworms Worldwide.

There is also a whole website dedicated to literary tattoos, Contrariwise.

Here’s a few literary tattoos that caught my eye from the website (clicking on the pics will take you to the post at Contrariwise from whence they came):

Those are just a few tattoos out of hundreds. If I were going to get a literary tattoo, then I would want something simple, like the tree in the third pic, but all the things I love about books are that they’ve changed my life perspective, and those things can’t be summed up in a graphic (for me). For example, one of the most mind blowing things I’ve ever read in a book came from Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures:

(The nun is talking about her life before she entered the convent. She and her husband had desparately wanted children but were unable to conceive.)

We had no children. That was a disappointment. Like Sarah — Abraham’s wife. We tried everything, doctors in Milan and in Switzerland, but nothing worked. I had to accept the fact that I was barren. That changed the direction of my life. What I wanted most was denied to me. You come up against something, a roadblock, you’re so sure of the direction you’re going in, the road you want to take, that it’s inconceivable. But a bridge has been washed out. You have to find some other way.

And now look. God has given me these children, my daughters, you see. I could never have foreseen it. Daughters in adundance. That’s what I wanted to say to you. People say that God works in mysterious ways when they really mean that life, or something in their own lives, doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s wrong. I think it means that we can’t make any sense out of life until we give up our deepest hopes, until we stop trying to arrange everything to suit us. But once we do, or are forced to . . . That’s what’s mysterious.

I’m definitely not getting that tattooed on me, no matter how profoud it is for me.

Another book that had a big impact on me was The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. The lengths that people will and won’t and can’t go to for their marriage was very powerful to me. And even as profound as it was, I don’t know that I want something with such melancholy connotations as a tattoo.

I could go with something from Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. But as much as I loved it, haven’t circus freaks tattooed on my body isn’t quite the look I’m going for.

A lot of folks seem to go for the childhood books, but, well, those aren’t what hold meaning for me. I’m sure my parents read to me, but I don’t remember it. And the first books I do remember picking up and reading on my own (very vividly) are the Babysitter’s Club books.

So then I go back to what I really love that can be represented graphically: pinup girls. I love everything vintage, and pinup girls have been a favorite of mine for 10+ years now. Every year I buy a pinup girl calendar, and for quite a few years I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a pinup girl photo shoot (and have since found Ambitious Misfit Photography (thanks, Ti!) who I will do a photo shoot with if it’s the last thing I do).

(found here)

(found here)

But getting a pinup girl tattooed somewhere is so typical, and how is it going to look in 10 years?

One of the things you’ll see girls do who are in to vintage/rockabilly stuff is have a flower behind their ear. Taking that idea to a tattoo, my friend had a little flower tattooed behind her left ear, so you only see it when she pulls her hair back, and it’s really cute! I’d do that, but I’d just be copying my friend and that feels weird.

So that’s why I’ll probably never get a tattoo. I’ve got the idea in the back of my head that maybe one day I’ll get a tattoo, so if anything ever comes to me, I’ll do it. But until then, I’ll leave my skin the way it is.

If you were going to get a tattoo, what would you get? Have you thought about getting a literary tattoo?