Top Ten Tuesday: Platonic Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! While romances may get the swoons, some of my favorite relationships between characters in books are families and friends. So without further ado, here are ten of my favorite platonic relationships I've read on the page!

Vasya and Dunya (The Bear and the Nightingale): The bond between the old nurse and her wild young charge is so warm and loving that it makes the horror of what happens near the end even worse.

Lyra and Iorek (The Golden Compass): The strange, sober bear king and the clever, high-spirited girl make a great team and develop a geniune closeness.

Elinor and Marianne (Sense and Sensibility): As the older sister myself, I identify with the steady Elinor, and I love her connection with her open-hearted little sister.

Mariam and Laila (A Thousand Splendid Suns): These "sister wives" suffer through an awful husband together and become each other's rock.

Siskel and Ebert (Life Itself): The real love Ebert felt for the co-anchor who was in many ways his opposite and with whom he sparred regularly just shines through the pages of his memoir.

Madeline, Celeste, and Jane (Big Little Lies): The way the friendships between the main women are built, the realism underlying even the more over-the-top aspects of the plot, really make this book work.

Sabriel and Mogget (Sabriel): The tension between these uneasy allies, the way they vacillate between mistrust and fondness, is an enjoyable aspect of this book and its sequels.

Meg and Charles Wallace (A Wrinkle in Time): The fierce, protective love Meg has for her otherworldly little brother, and his love for her, are the emotional core of this whole series.

Matilda and Miss Honey (Matilda): Obviously this book is wonderful, and this relationship is what makes it so great. Two kind-hearted, cruelly treated people who find in each other someone to care for!

Wilbur and Homer (The Cider House Rules): If this surrogate father and son relationship doesn't get you in the feels, you don't have any.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Platonic Relationships In Books

Book 85: Life Itself

"Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can't even think about the movie's plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me."

Dates read: August 30- September 4, 2016

Rating: 8/10

When I joined Twitter, what feels like a million years ago, I joined for one reason: to follow Roger Ebert. I've loved movies for years, and there were no one else's reviews I enjoyed reading like Ebert's. He had a way of honing in on the essential truth about a film with understanding and eloquence. When I started reading his blog that he wrote after cancer complications took his physical voice, he brought the same style to his reflections on life. I know there's this showy public mourning that goes on when someone famous dies, but when Ebert passed, I felt a real sense of loss that I'd never be able to read something new from him again. Before he was gone, though, he wrote an autobiography: Life Itself. It was made into a documentary, which I watched but didn't think was particularly special. But I bought the book, hoping it would be better. And for me, it was. Not only was it better, it was wonderful.

Life Itself is structured loosely chronologically, beginning with Ebert's family history and going through to when he was near the end of his life and knew it. The first few chapters, which detail how his ancestors came to the United States and his parents' upbringings as well as his own early years, are probably the weakest. While most of us are interested in these details for ourselves and sometimes our loved ones, reading about someone else's is not exactly captivating stuff. Once Ebert gets to his own life, though, the book really finds its footing and takes off. He recounts his life with insight but largely without excess sentimentality: his father's early death and his mother's alcoholism, his experiences on the college paper at the University of Illinois, his journalism career, his international travel, his own alcoholism, the joy he found with his wife Chaz, his relationship with Gene Siskel, his meetings with prominent actors and directors, and his own insistence on an aggressive course of cancer treatment that likely lost him his jaw and ability to speak. He clearly knew that this book was his last chance to put his own story out there and it's obvious that he didn't want to squander the opportunity. Given that he spent his final years in a painful and uncomfortable situation, it's remarkable how little bitterness his writing contains. Instead, he uses his last testament to to reflect on a full life, with all the moments of joy and sorrow it contained. 

If you're thinking about reading this book, you're probably already interested in Roger Ebert and his writing. But if you haven't, I recommend going to his blog (still online) and browsing around a little. If you like what you find and enjoy autobiography/memoir style books, this will likely be a win for you. If that's not something that intrigues you, you may appreciate the writing but find it a largely pointless exercise to read. For me, I found it moving and a likely future re-read, but I could completely understand if it's not for everyone.

Tell me, blog friends...who would you like to read an autobiography of?

One year ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

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Book 85: Life Itself

Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated/Hidden Gem Books I've Read In The Past Year Or So

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're writing about books that we enjoyed reading in the past year-ish that never really got the mainstream love we we think they deserve. 

Life Itself: Roger Ebert was a portly movie critic who spent most of his life in the Midwest. But the reason his reviews became so popular is his real skill as a writer, and his application of that talent to the story of his own life yielded a really fantastic book. He wrote it as he was dying from cancer, and his reflections just tugged my heartstrings constantly. The early part of the book recounts a lot of family history and is on the boring side, but the rest of it is really wonderful.

The Last One: I've written about this one before, it was actually one of my best books of the year last year. This story of a woman in the wilderness on a Survivor-on-budget-steroids show that doesn't know that there's been a pandemic and is making her way through a devastated world is tense and thrilling and I could hardly put it down.

The Lords of Discipline: I'd heard of Conroy's Prince of Tides and The Great Santini before, but this was the one that went on Kindle sale first, so I picked it up. I wasn't expecting to love it, because military-themed stories don't tend to do it for me, but I was sucked in and completely loved it and can't wait to read everything else he's ever written.

I Am Livia: The Amazon publishing imprints haven't been great, honestly, but this book introduced me to a woman with a fascinating life: Livia Drusilla, wife of Octavian. I'm always down for a story about a badass woman, and even though there's a silly "instalove" component, this is a very solid historical fiction.

Enchanted Islands: This book about a lifelong friendship between two women (and how one of them found herself on a secret mission in the Galapagos when she was in her 40s) wasn't splashy, but was quietly powerful and very well-written.

Dead Wake: Most people think about Erik Larson's Devil In The White City when they think about his work, but I actually found Dead Wake better. I loved the shifting perspectives and found myself rooting for the ship to make it to the other side even though I knew going in that it sank.

Sex With The Queen: We all enjoy flipping through the occasional tabloid in the checkout line, right? This is basically a tabloid for European royalty over the ages and it's not super high quality literature but it's super fun to read.

The Big Rewind: One of my favorite reads of 2016, this is a fresh and fun murder mystery/romantic comedy/ode to the power of a good mixtape was a delight.

Mr. Splitfoot: I didn't rate this super highly when I first read it, but it's one of the books that I found myself unable to forget about, while things I thought more highly of initially faded. Really sticks with you.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Anne Boleyn has inspired novelists and playwrights and screenwriters for a long time, and Susan Bordo's look at what we actually know about her and the various myths that have surrounded her (and how they've changed over time) is incredibly interesting reading.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated/Hidden Gem Books I've Read In The Past Year Or So

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That Have Been On Your Shelf (Or TBR) From Before You Started Blogging That You STILL Haven't Read Yet

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! There are LOTS. Like, a couple hundred lots (one of the reasons I started blogging was to hold myself accountable for actually reading all these). So, I'm just going to list the next ten books (excluding ARCs, all of which I've gotten after I started blogging) that I'm scheduled to read. Yes, I have a reading schedule, and spreadsheets, and the whole deal. I'm a nerd like that.



Bel Canto: I actually had to Google the plot synopsis, because I didn't honestly know anything about it. I'd just heard good things about the author, Ann Patchett, and the book for so long that I grabbed a secondhand copy and I'm looking forward to reading it!

Inamorata: This was one I scored from the Kindle First program quite some time ago. Reviews indicate that the writing is very good, but the rest of it not so much. Sometimes solid writing can salvage an otherwise mediocre book for me, so we'll see.

Life Itself: I love movies (I used to watch a lot more of them before I started reading so much all the time) and whenever I see an older one, the first thing I do afterwards is go track down Roger Ebert's review. He was so good at critiquing movies without being mean-spirited...unless, of course, they deserved his disdain, and then he let it rip. But his wit and insight made him a pleasure to read, and this is the biography he wrote as he was dying.

The Bridge of San Luis Ray: I like to read prizewinners, and this won a Pulitzer in 1928. It's a fairly brief novel so I should be able to read it pretty quickly, which is always a bonus.

The Other Side of the River: I'm pretty sure I found this on a list of best non-fiction reads set in each state (Nevada's was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, of course, which I could not be less interested in). This takes place on the west side of Michigan, where two towns divided by a river are also divided by race and class. When a young man dies and is found in the river, the tension between the two communities escalates dramatically.

The Professor and the Madman: Like any good book nerd, words are my jam (my favorite has long been "effervescent" but I could put together a top ten list without much trouble). This book is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and apparently is being made into a movie!

David and Goliath: I've somehow never read Malcolm Gladwell before but my husband got a copy of this book, so I figure it's as good a place to start as any!

A History of the World in Six Glasses: Beverages are an important part of cultural experience, and Tom Standage's book uses beer, wine, liquor, coffee, tea, and cola to tell the story of humanity from the Stone Age to today.

The Circle: I've never read David Eggers before either, and this book about an internet company that grows to emcompass more and more parts of the lives of its users feels super relevant to today. This was a bit of a flop, and I'm curious whether I think that's fair.

Sophie's Choice: I've seen the movie so I'm spoiled on the "twist", but I'm interested to read the source material. The book isn't always better than the movie, so we'll see how this one actually works.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That Have Been On Your Shelf (Or TBR) From Before You Started Blogging That You STILL Haven't Read Yet