Book: The Book Thief

The Book Thief

by Markus Zusak

Length: 552 pages

Format: Hardback
Price: Free - checked out from library

How I heard about it: It's been recommended over and over by trusted readers

Basic Premise: Set at the height of the Third Reich in Germany, young Liesel Meminger loses her brother and mother to the Nazis and ends up in a foster home where she learns how to read books and steal them.

My Take: 4 out of 10 (scale here)

It seemed like this book and I would be a match made in heaven. It had lots of things going for it - It's Holocaust literature (I wouldn't call this an obsession exactly, but I read pretty much every YAL title in this genre that I can get my hands on). It's very well-written. It's popular. So I was pretty excited when it was actually on the shelf at the public library. I had been told it was a slow start, but when I was halfway through and the book and it still hadn't picked up, I started to get concerned. It took me FOREVER to read this book. I ended up taking a sick day today and the only way I finished it was that I planted myself on the couch at page 270 and DID NOT MOVE until I was done. Took me all morning. I don't know how I would have made it through otherwise. The book truly picked up on page 400, and the truth is, the 400-page exposition could have been whittled WAY down. This could have easily been a 300-pager.

There are things I really liked, like the fact that Death was the narrator. Like the fact that Liesel's foster father taught her to read. Like the relationship between Liesel and the Jew that was hidden in her home. Like the fact that her foster father took risks and stood up to the wrongs he saw happening all around him. Like the incredibly moving way the author penned the end of the story. But I didn't feel like it could quite redeem 400 pages.

List progress:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Parenting with Love & Logic by Jim Fey
Silver Star Jeannette Walls
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Mocking Jay by Suzanne Collins

New Recipes...

It's starting to become fall. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE soups in the fall. I would eat them year-round if it weren't for my husband, who believes (as most people do, I think) that soup should only be consumed in cold weather.

Whatever.

First New Recipe: Egg Drop Soup
I love me a good bowl of egg drop soup and my favorite Chinese restaurant in town (which sadly closed its doors about a decade ago) had the most DELICIOUS soup. So one day I was messing around on Pinterest and thought I'd see what was out there in the way of EDS. I found this. I'm not going to do my usual step-by-step with pictures 1) because I didn't like this recipe that much and 2) because I kept forgetting to take pics.

I had all the ingredients except ginger root, which I had to ask Lindsey where to find and how to use. The soup was souper-easy (see what I did there? ha!) to make, but when it came to eating it, I was a little let down. There was WAY too much soy sauce taste for me, but Rick loved it. Next time I will tone that down a bit.

Sorry for the bad pic...the lighting in our kitchen is terrible.

I paired this with our favorite everyday home cook crab rangoon recipe, and my son was happy.

Second New Recipe: Homemade Beef Broth
We bought another quarter of a cow, and this time we split with my parents. They didn't want the beef soup bones, but since I make my own chicken broth, I thought I'd try my hand at beef broth.

I looked at recipes for a long time because, to be frank, I wanted the easiest one I could find. Apparently beef broth is a little more complicated than chicken broth. I finally settled on this recipe. I liked it because the lady said specifically in the post "You can save even more money by using the equivalent in vegetable scraps instead. Save the celery tops and carrot peelings to use in broth rather than a stalk of celery or a whole carrot. The broth will taste the same!" I am down with stuff like that. So this is what my crockpot looked like pre-bones:

The end of the celery stalk, the split top celerys, carrot tops and peelings, and the ends of my green onions. I did use an actual whole onion, but I really felt pretty good about the rest! I roasted the beef soup bones (which looked like this after they were done):

I filled the crockpot with water, turned it on, and walked away. When I came back, I discarded the vegetables, peeled the meat off the beef bones (which I wasn't expecting much of, but it was enough to make quesadillas for the whole family!), and divided the broth into containers for the fridge. I came back 48 hours later, scraped the fat off the top, and voila! Ready for the freezer and then my delicious fall soups!

It made way more than this...this is just what I'm taking to my parents.

Third New Recipe: Black Bean & Butternut Squash Enchiladas
OHMYGOODNESS! These were AMAZING.

I so wish I had taken pictures. But no matter - there will be a next time THIS WEEK, and I will be taking pictures and devoting an entire post to these. They were that good. But if you can't wait for the post, here is the recipe in the meantime. I deseeded and didn't use the entire jalapeno and omitted the cilantro, but otherwise this was how I did it. Post coming soon.

But...can we have a moment for butternut squash? I'm not sure where it's been all my life, but I am so glad to have discovered it. See this? This is steak Rick grilled from the cow (which was actually very good, despite my aversion to steak), half a baked potato (that, as you can see, is drizzled with butter and cheese), and roasted onion, zucchini, and butternut squash, seasoned with rosemary and some other spice I grabbed from the pantry that looked good. The whole meal was delish, but I ate everyone's share of the veggies.

MMMM MMMM GOOD!

Can We Have a Moment?

Can we have a moment for my precious little girl?

I'm about a month shy of her birthday, but my heart is just so full of this little girl that I had to share some of my favorite things about her current phase of life:

• Her vocabulary has SOARED in the last few months. I've been discouraged for quite some time about her lack of verbal communication. When Charlie was her age, he was speaking in sentences and he knew every letter in the alphabet and the sounds they each made. Lucy wouldn't even repeat sounds I made after me...until recently! Someone told me that when she went to daycare her vocabulary would take off. True story.
• The girl LOVES books. When we get in the car, the first thing she does is reach for a book from the bin between the car seats, and if she can't reach it, she looks at me and says "Book? Book?" over and over again until I give her a book. And, thanks to her vocabulary surge, she's now saying things like "apple book" or "tuck (truck) book."
• Lucy understands what it means when we pray. Before we eat she grabs our hands and shouts "Ayyy-MEN!" when we are done. She's even started closing her eyes. We pray as soon as we get in the car in the mornings, to which she also adds her hearty "Ayyy-MEN!"
• I refuse to carry her places 1) because she is HEAVY and 2) because I feel like she's too old to be carried around all the time. However, she has a hard time staying focused when I let her walk. Even if I hold her hand, she drops it and wonders off to look at the fill-in-the-blank. So brother has started taking her hand. She follows him with no problem wherever he goes.

 

•  First thing in the morning, when I pull her out of bed, she nestles her head on my shoulder with her face in my neck and we have a little snuggle moment. Even if I'm running late, I take time to do this sweet thing. We also do it when she's right out of the bath - I get her snuggled in the towel and I squeeze her tight and rock her. She is quiet and still for a spell. It's wonderful.
• She is a momma's girl. I've never experienced this before, as my son never seemed to care who he was with - mom, dad, grandma, stranger - we were all one and the same. Lucy, on the other hand, doesn't even want DADDY. She wants me. This is mostly annoying, but a small part of me is trying to savor the fact that she wants to be with me.

What a sweet, sweet girl.