Book Nook

Tuesday, December 20thI've been reading...I promise! The book club has yet to meet this year, BUT I think we're going to give in a go in 2012! We DID start using the site Goodreads.com. We enjoy using this site. You can rate books that you've read and get suggestions for new ones. There are also free giveaways. I've won four books since October! Who does't like free stuff!?!?

Again, I have been reading, but haven't read anything AMAZING to share with you as of late. My next read (January T.I.R.E.D. selection) will be Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.


Confession...I have not been reading this summer. Big fail! Now that school is in session, I'm in the process of getting my "routine" down & mandating that I read at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. It's not much, but it's more than nothing!
The things I have been reading aren't anything to rave about. Quicky novels & my school selected Summer Reading book (All the Broken Pieces).
Since it's sittig out on my side table, I did want to leave you with a book I read last year that I really enjoyed. It was brought up in the book club several times, but ultimately vetoed (which I personally think is a shame because the discussion of what's ethical and legal would have been interesting).

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skoot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Book description from Amazon

 Friday, July 8
The first book we decided to read was This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper. I'm really happy this book was chosen first to because it lead to some very lively discussion at our first meeting! If you have ever needed verification that your life was awesome, I'd suggest you read this book (even though it's fiction...I hope)!

Jonathan Tropper writes compulsively readable, laugh-out-loud funny novels, and his fifth book, This Is Where I Leave You is his best yet. Judd Foxman is oscillating between a sea of self-pity and a "snake pit of fury and resentment" in the aftermath of the explosion of his marriage, which ended "the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake." Foxman is jobless (after finding his wife in bed with his boss) and renting out the basement of a "crappy house" when he is called home to sit shiva for his father--who, incidentally, was an atheist. This of course means seven days in his parent's house with his exquisitely dysfunctional family, including his mom, a sexy, "I've-still-got-it" shrink fond of making horrifying TMI statements; his older sister, Wendy, and her distracted hubby and three kids; his snarky older brother, Paul, and his wife; and his youngest brother, Phillip, the "Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead." Tropper is wickedly funny, a master of the cutting one-liner that makes you both cringe and crack up. But what elevates his novels and makes him a truly splendid writer is his ability to create fantastically flawed, real characters who stay with you long after the book is over. Simultaneously hilarious and hopeful, This Is Where I Leave You is as much about a family's reckoning as it is about one man's attempt to get it together. The affectionate, warts-and-all portrayal of the Foxmans will have fans wishing for a sequel (and clamoring for all things Tropper). --Daphne Durham

Friday, July 8
As some of you may know, I started a book club last year with a co-worker called T.I.R.E.D. (Teachers Interested In Reading, Eating, and Drinking). We have been able to gather a very diverse group of people together for wonderful discussions and recipe swaps.
In the inaugural year, we read the following books:
1. This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
2. An Idiot Girl's Christmas by Laurie Notaro
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic
5. Oprah by Kitty Kelley
To help keep former members abreast of current reads and to let the rest of you in on some fantastic reads, I'll be posting some information from our meetings and maybe even our newsletters if I get around to it! Happy Reading! :)

*If there are any titles you'd recommend, PLEASE share! Your suggestions are welcome!