Bookclub Fun...Eat Pray Love!

Last spring I took Eat Pray Love with me on a trip to Europe and it turned out to be a GREAT companion for my travels! Over the weekend I joined a dozen bookclub friends and we had a great time being together and discussing what we learned from Elizabeth Gilbert and her three journeys she welcomes us to join along with her! We also had a great time enjoying delicious food as we all loved how Elizabeth was not bashful in writing about her passion for food...especially her love affair with pizza in Naples, Italy! She loves that pizza so much that she even shares with fans in her FAQ how to get your own slice of that famous pizza if you are lucky enough to find yourself in Naples :) I think for every person who asks her about joining the ashram in India or working with the medicine man she worked with in Bali that there are double (maybe even triple!) the amount of people asking her about the pizza :) I can just see people making pilgrimages for that pizza, especially the chocolate pizza she made us all have dreams about!!

You can read a description of Eat Pray Love HERE but I think Anne Lamott (one of my favorite authors) sums up the feel of the book pretty well..."This is a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight, filled with sorrow and a great sense of humor. Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide, of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she's wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter."

And remember this post...well, it looks like I can finally uncross my fingers as Elizabeth will be in Portland on April 3rd!!! YAY!!!

(*photos not mine, borrowed from flickr)

Fall Into Reading Challenge

I have a pile of books sitting on a bench in my apartment that I have been wanting to read ALL SUMMER! Well, summer is over so I better open the books and finally get to the reading! Today I saw that there is a Fall Into Reading Challenge popping up in the blogworld so I thought I would join! Maybe it will be encouragement for me to turn the tv off (except for Thursday night when Grey's Anatomy and The Office finally returns!!!) and dive into a world beyond my own outlined on the pages of these chosen books:

*The Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer
*Suite Francaise by Viene Nemirovsky
*Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Last Days Of Dogtown by Anita Diamant
The Audicity Of Hope by Barack Obama
Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

*Books I'm in the middle of reading. I'm one of those who read multiple books at one time!

Summer Reading

I just finished reading Forever Lily which is the story of an unexpected Mother's journey to adopting a daughter from China. I rarely buy books brand new (I usually have really good luck finding them at my favorite used book store in Salem) but when I picked up this book at Borders and read the caption I was hooked and knew I had to get it that very day..."When Beth travels to China to help her friend Alex adopt a baby girl from an orphanage, she thinks it will be an adventure, a chance to see the world. But her friend, who had prepared for the adoption for many months, panics soon after being presented with the frail baby, and the situation develops into one of the greatest challenges of Beth's life."

I have always felt connected to international adoptions and am drawn to stories such as this. The part of the book that got to my heart the most is when they went to visit the actual orphanage where Beth's daughter is from and the descriptions of all the babies being untouched and unloved in the metal cribs brought back many memories of the baby orphanage I spent time at in Romania. She describes how hard it is to walk away from them and how the world just doesn't make sense when you see children in this state and that is exactly how I remember feeling. How is the world a just world when things like this happen to the innocent. Makes no sense.

Another reason I enjoyed reading this book is because a good friend of mine (Hi Katie!) and her husband just recently adopted a daughter from China and I have really enjoyed reading their family's journey on their blog that dates back to when they started the adoption process a few years ago. The author of Forever Lily shares the day-to-day adoption experience in China and I was able to compare it to how Katie and her husband wrote about it on their blog. Get your China photo's ready Katie, when I come over in a few weeks I want to see them all :)

Here are the rest of the books on my summer reading shelf...are there any books that you've recently read that should be added to my pile??