I’m grateful for……a great book!
23 Jul 2011 3 Comments
in Books, I'm Grateful for Tags: 50 Books in 2011, Books, grateful, Reading
This week Maxabella is on a road trip and BabyMac is hosting.
As part of my mission to read 50 books this year I have been keeping an eye out for interesting books to read and new authors to try. When I was at the movies with my Mum & friend to watch Bridesmaids we saw the trailer for The Help, which looked like an interesting movie. And then to discover it was adapted from a novel gave me something to hunt for.
I couldn’t find it on book depository, but on a late night shopping trip to the most amazing bookstore in Manuka I stumbled upon it.
And I was so very pleased. I have been reading a lot of books lately, but this has been the first one in a while I lost myself in. One I wanted to take everywhere & so desperately wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters.
The book is primarily about the white Miss Skeeter and two black maids, Aibileen & Minnie. It is set in 1962 Mississippi, a town without integration and a very strong divide between black & white. Miss Skeeter has come home from college to discover the maid she grew up with has disappeared. She begins to grow uncomfortable with the way the maids are treated and as part of her desire for a writing career she suggests to a New York publisher that she would write a book about how the maids feel about the white women they work for. Miss Skeeter then has a huge amount of convincing to do, but ends up with the story being told.
It is well written and enthralling. At first I was aghast at how women could treat other women so rudely, and in such an inhumane fashion, but as I began to feel like I was in 1960′s deep south I began to understand.
One of my favourite lines of the book sums it all up to me:
“Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
I was very grateful to stumble across this book, and grateful that I had found a book so wonderful I could read it again straight away.
And now to wait for the movie!
Hop on over to BabyMac to see what everyone else is gratefule for this week!
I’m grateful for…….old friends
03 Jul 2011 5 Comments
in Friends Tags: friends, grateful, School reunion
This weekend I have had a lovely visitor. A girlfriend I have known since I was 12 years old. Kylie drove 5 hours to spend some time with me and I am so very grateful for having a friend willing to do that.
I met Kylie in year 7 and our friendships had ups and downs over the 4 years we spent together at school. We went on holidays together, had many sleep overs at each other houses, and spent a lot of time hanging out and talking about books, boys, movies and all those other teenage things.
We went our separate ways when we were 16 – me to stay on at school, and Kylie started growing up & joining the real world. But we were still friends, we still saw each other at parties and had dinner and went to the movies. Then I left our small town to go to uni. We saw each other in the uni holidays, but we were really growing in different directions. I went to her wedding, she had lunch with me & my then husband when we visited that small town on our honeymoon. And then that was it. Life moved on, each of us busy with our own lives.
8 years ago we found each other through the schoolfriends website. I was a Mum with 2 small children, and she was about to have her son. And then again we lost touch. A school reunion last year, and the wonders of Facebook, put us in touch again. And so she came to visit and we were able to spend some wonderful time together.
And it was like time hadn’t passed. We were able to talk about some many things, and to be able to just be together comfortably. To catch up on the last 20 odd years of each others lives, talk about our children, the wonderful things that have happened to each us, and the not so great. To be able to talk about our plans for the future & just to sit together. To know that I could do all the normal Saturday things with my boys, and she could meet up with another friend, and that it was OK to be doing that.
Long friendships and old friends are special – I am so very grateful to have an old friend like Kylie, and so many others that I have held dear to me for a long time. These friendships help to ground me, make me remember where I have been, who I was and who I now am. And I am also so very grateful for all the amazing methods we now have to be able to easily stay in touch with these friends, no matter where they live or how often you see them.
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