Then we went on a drive in the country in the roadster and had a picnic. For those new readers who have no idea what I'm talking about with the roadster stuff, refer back to this entry (and be sure to read the comments section):
http://abookaday09.blogspot.com/2009/04/hardy-boys-tower-treasure.html
I can only imagine what people must have thought when they saw four people (one of whom was wearing a giant hat) and a dog piled into a convertible, driving 30 MPH, with forties music playing on the radio. It was like The Brady Bunch Movie where The Brady's are frozen in the past and the rest of the world is in the present day. I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that we got a few strange looks along the way.
And here are a few picnic pictures:
As you can see from this picture, we're perfectly comfortable with strangers in public thinking that we're a little . . .odd.
Miss Book enjoys the scenery as the wind blows through her pages. (You should have seen the strange looks we got while taking that picture.)
Clearly no one warned Miss Book about the danger of wearing a scarf in a roadster. I guess she's never read about Isadora Duncan.After the picnic, we had a family birthday party for my Dad and brother. I managed to fit reading time in between all of the activities, but it was a challenge.
Today's book: "In just a few months Caitlin Calhoun went from a wife to a widow to a mother-to-be. All she'd wanted was to honor her dead husband by having his baby. But that's not what she got. Thanks to an unfortunate mix-up, her child's father is her husband's half brother, Lucky. So how does she break the news that he's about to become a father? Family is the last thing the war-toughened Marine expected to have--not with all the bad blood in his own. But Lucky would never turn his back on a child...or the woman who's given him a second chance."
When I was trying to figure out what to read today, I wavered between reading a book about mothers and reading a book that my Mother would actually read. I settled on reading one of my Mom's books, partially because I thought she would enjoy reading this entry more if I read a book that she liked, but mostly because her kind of books are really quick reads and I knew I wouldn't have time to read a really long book today. I searched through her stash of smut books - which she keeps in the back of her closet as if she's a 13 year old girl hiding the books from her mother - and decided that I just had to read this book. I just can't turn away from a book with a plot that ridiculous - it's like an attraction/repulsion thing, the book plot is so horrible that it actually becomes exciting. It was like passing a car crash, it's awful. . . but I can't turn away, it's hideous. . . but I'll just take one more look. It was so mindless I felt like I was losing brain cells in the process of reading it. . . but I couldn't wait to find out what happens next.
Shallow thoughts:
- And the most disturbing sentence of the book award goes to. . . "A baby was how she would honor him in death." - What a wonderful reason for having a baby, to make a dead person feel better about being dead.
- I'm having a hard time imagining the main characters because two of them are named Luke and Lucky. I guess some one's a General Hospital fan. I had a very hard time crowding the images of Luke and Lucky Spencer out of my mind to picture the characters the way the book describes them, so I just gave in to it and let the images from General Hospital wash over me. Of course that presented it's own set of problems because I couldn't settle on Lucky #1, or the back-from-the-dead Lucky #2, or the mysteriously-ten-years-older Lucky #3 - the images battled it out in my mind throughout the book and I never really settled on one.
- I don't understand the chapter breaks in this book at all. Sometimes the chapter changes in the middle of a conversation. What exactly is the point of that, and why does the author think a person would want to read about a conversation one day and then come back the next day to read the rest. This is the advantage of reading a book in one day, I'm more easily able to overlook crappy writing - although the point could be argued that being able to more easily overlook crappy writing isn't necessarily a plus.
- I'm glad that this book deviated from the formula every other romance novel I have ever read has followed, in which the man is an arrogant jerk who is really rude to the woman. Why do so many romance novels seem to contain men like that? Are we supposed to find that appealing? Romantic? Exciting? I'm not seeing the appeal of rude men. Personally, I think there's nothing more attractive than a really polite man, manners are hot. But maybe that's just me - I'm starting to think that it is considering someone has to be buying, and enjoying, the books with rude men in them.
