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I’ve been on a bit of a reading kick lately. I have always loved to read, but I seem to go in spurts where I read a lot of books… or stick to reading Facebook and Twitter before bed. Anyway, a few days ago I finished a book that I loved so much I had to share it with you!

Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money, by Geneen Roth.

Geneen Roth is the author of a number of books about the psychology behind emotional eating and relationships with food, but this is the first of her books that I’ve read. In it, she describes the transformation of her and her husband’s lives after they their entire life savings was stolen by Bernie Madoff.

The Amazon description says it better than I can:

Geneen Roth, who received big kudos from Oprah for her messaging on eating disorders and spirituality, is back this spring with Lost and Found, a new book that explores how emotional issues with money mirror those with food and dieting.When Geneen Roth and her husband lost their life savings, Roth joined the millions of Americans dealing with financial turbulence, uncertainty, and abrupt reversals in their expectations. The resulting shock was the catalyst for her to explore, in workshops and in her own life, how women’s habits and behaviors around money-as with food-can lead to exactly the situations they most want to avoid.Roth identified her own unconscious choices-binge shopping followed by periods of budgetary self-deprivation, “treating” herself in ways that ultimately failed to sustain, and using money as a substitute for love-among others. As she examined the deep sources of these habits, she faced the hard truth about where her “self-protective” financial decisions had led. As in all her books, Roth relates her personal experience with irreverent humor and hard- won wisdom. Here, she offers provocative and radical strategies for transforming how we feel and behave about the resources that should, and ultimately can, sustain and support our lives.

Like I said, I loved this book. I found it really insightful and it made me think a lot about my own issues with food and money and how they might be connected. I’m anxious to read the rest of Roth’s books, particularly “Women Food and God” and “When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair.” (I actually don’t know anything about that second one, but with a title like that it’s got to be a winner.)

What have you been reading lately? Anything you recommend?

*ahem*

Tonight (or last night, by the time you’re reading this), I did something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I went to dinner with my girlfriends. Seriously I can’t remember the last time I did that! It was nothing fancy – just Max & Erma’s and half of us (including me) had a kid tagging along, but still. It was so nice to just sit around and talking, laughing, gossiping and of course eating with women I enjoy so much.

I felt so refreshed afterwards that I made a pact with myself to do it more often – and what do you know, I’m going to have the chance to do it again this coming Monday! And you’re all invited!

Jenny & I are hosting a One2One member meet up at the Dayton Mall Barnes & Noble this Monday, May 23. The fun starts at 6:15 in the cafe, where we’ll hang out with each other and have a private meet-and-greet with Kaira Rouda, author of Here, Home, Hope. After the meet-and-greet, we’ll listen to Kaira talk about her life and her novel, and then she’ll be doing a book signing.

Written with a bouncy sense of humor, this lighthearted novel delights the reader while delving into serious issues such as eating disorders and addictions, typical problems of middle-class America. Rouda will touch readers who can relate to the frustration of being sidelined on the field of life, never allowed to play and always needed behind the bleachers, until finally experiencing the joy of participation.

I can’t wait to read it!

And I also can’t wait to hang out (and drink coffee and eat cake pops – courtesy of the One2One Network) with Jenny, our friends, and Dayton-area Mommin’ It Up readers!

If you need a girls’ night, please join us at the Dayton Mall Barnes & Noble at 6:15 p.m. on Monday, May 23!

Here are a few that are on my list – but I want to add more so please leave recommendations in the comments! (and in case you were wondering, no these are not affiliate links, because I am too lazy to do all that on the off chance I might earn 11 cents that I would then have to split with Jenny.)

Also, if these books are crap, don’t blame me – I haven’t read them yet but they look good.

Without further ado…

1. If You Were Here by Jen Lancaster. I love all of Jen Lancaster’s books (as you might remember, Jenny humiliated me and I met her a couple years ago). This one is a novel, though, which confuses me because all the others are memoirs. But I’m sure it will still be hilarious!

2. Girl with the Dragon Tatoo by Reg Keeland. I actually started listening to this a year or so ago, but I found that I couldn’t pay enough attention to it while I was out running to understand the plot. I need to give it another shot, though, with a real actual book, because I hear it’s a fantastic trilogy.

3. Bossypants by Tina Fey. Because it’s a book by Tina Fey.

4. Every Last One by Anna Quindlen.

5. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I actually own a couple of the books in this series, but I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. Everyone I know raves about them, though, so I need to get started on them!

6. Transition by Chaz Bono. Because this stuff fascinates me (and Emilie).

7. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman. Actually it sounds like that book was made for Jenny – it contains her favorite subject!

8. The Love Goddess’ Cooking School.

9. The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes. I love Marian Keyes but I haven’t read this one (at least I don’t think I have!).

10. Stupid and Contagious by Caprice Crane. Even the title is funny.

So what else ya got for me? What’s on your summer reading list?

(BTW if Sweet Valley Confidential isn’t on your list, it SHOULD BE.)

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For more Top Ten Tuesday, check out Oh Amanda!

She had her nose in a book.

On the way to the grocery store… not a peep. She had her nose in a book.

At the grocery store, she sat inside the cart instead of walking beside me. She had her nose in a book.

It was Junie B. Jones, not a literary masterpiece, and while Junie B.’s grammar drives me bananas, I can’t really describe how good it made me feel to see her unable to tear herself away from the story.

I love, love, love to read. Books have been such a companion for me throughout my life, and even though I hope Kate continues to be less backward and shy than I always was (her outgoing personality still catches me off guard at times), I hope she will develop a passion for reading the way I did.

Just this weekend, I remembered how much I enjoy a good book. I hadn’t read anything for a while… I had been plodding my way through a less-than-compelling book for a couple months, but I finally put it aside and grabbed some fun books as we headed out on our road trip.

While we were gone, I read these books:

They’re by two of my favorite authors, and I loved them both (as I have everything else those two have written).

Now, much like Kate, I have the bug. I am back on the reading wagon, and I’m looking for recommendations. We’ve got a week at the beach coming up and I need a stock pile!

So… whaddya got? What’s on your summer reading list this year? I can’t wait to find out!

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of historical non-fiction.  Despite my poking fun at Emily for her desire to further her education, I’ve been furthering my education unofficially with history books for years.  I love learning about the past, and I love switching from subject to subject.  I love thinking of something I’d like to know more about, looking it up on my library’s online site, and reserving a couple of books on the topic.  If I were going to go to graduate school just for funzies, I’d totally get a degree in history.  Obviously, just for pleasure, and not for practical reasons.

So.  I thought I’d share with you some of what I’ve been reading lately.

Recently I re-read a book my mom had loaned me a couple of years ago called Slaves in the Family. It was written about a dozen years ago by Edward Ball, a white man whose family had been one of the largest slaveholders in the South, rice planters from the South Carolina low country.  By the time he was born, that was all long gone, but as an adult he set out to learn about what had happened to the descendants of his family’s slaves.  It was a fascinating read!  I learned a lot from it, and was happy to learn that Ball had written another book, about the family of an African-American woman he had might while researching Slaves in the Family, who was a very distant cousin of his.

It’s called The Sweet Hell Inside and it’s the story of a mixed-race family, the Harlestons, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the decades following slavery’s end as part of a small group of the city’s “colored elite”.

They were undertakers, and made their fortune because no white undertakers would handle the remains of black citizens.  The Harlestons had more money than many whites but still struggled mightily against the racist laws in place at the time.  They were wealthy, cultured, well-educated, and – forced to live as second-class citizens outside of their own neighborhood.  Yet, it should be noted, that they were light-skinned and snubbed other African-Americans with darker skin, thus propelling discrimination instead of ameliorating it.  Ball’s narrative, with recollections from a Harleston family member Edwina Harleston Whitlock, is a really fascinating and heartbreaking read.

After reading Ball’s two books, I decided I wanted to read more about how slavery and race relations affected a specific family, so I reserved and read Annette Gordon Reed’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Hemingses of Monticello, about the family enslaved by Thomas Jefferson (though they came to him through his marriage to Martha Wayles, having belonged to her father.  He had plenty of slaves of his own before he married, however.)

The book details the lives of many members of the Hemings family and the social context in which they carried out those lives.  The most famous Hemings is Sally, who was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister (her father’s child with one of his slaves) and whom Jefferson took as a “concubine” (if you will) after his wife’s death (even though she was about the age of his own eldest daughter.)  He and Hemings had seven children together, four of whom survived infancy.  Three of those four left Monticello to “pass as white” – leaving slavery with Jefferson’s blessing to live in the white world (Sally Hemings was also mixed-race, and her children with Jefferson, being only 1/8 “black” were “white enough” to pass somewhere far away from home.)

Hemingses was dry in parts but so, so thorough and really, truly heartbreaking.  The lives of the Hemings men – Sally Hemings’ brothers and nephews were very fascinating.  Jefferson had many of them trained as artisans and allowed them to work on their own and keep their earnings when he himself was traveling away from Monticello – so long as they would hop to it as soon as he called for them.  To this end, he allowed them to get tastes of freedom many times – but it was always temporary.

So there’s a brief summary of what I’ve  been learning lately.  Next up, I’ve decided to conquer World War 2 Germany.  What books have you had your noses buried in?

I was spraying my bathroom sink with my favorite cleaning product a few weeks ago, when the warning label caught my eye. “Hazard to humans and domestic animals. Get immediate medical attention if swallowed. Beware, danger, poison…” And as I watched the bubbles ooze down the sink and into our water supply, the thought occurred to me that perhaps there was a better way to make my sink shine.

I went to the library and checked out “Clean and Green” by Annie Berthold-Bond. When I brought it home, I couldn’t wait to try it out. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I already had may of the needed ingredients, most of them in my kitchen cabinet. “Clean and Green” tells me how to clean all kinds of things – everything from rugs and carpets to bathrooms to cars – and all the recipes are non-toxic.

The first one I tried out was a glass cleaner. I chose this because it was easy to make and because I had the necessary ingredients on hand. It worked great.

Next, after picking up washing soda and borax at the store, I tried out a recipe for a tub and shower cleaner. For me, this was the real test for how well these recipes worked. I hate cleaning the bath tub and shower. I’m using the word “hate” here. But what I hate even more than cleaning the tub/shower is cleaning it with a product that doesn’t work. On many occasions, I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed, only to discover that spots remained on the shower walls. The “Clean and Green” solution worked well, as least as well as the cleaning products I had been using, maybe even better. And the apartment didn’t smell like chlorine for the rest of the day. The “Clean and Green” solution didn’t leave the faucets and fixtures as shiny as I would have liked, but the book does have some recipes specifically for them that I will try out next time. I’m also eager to try out the recipe for cleaning the oven.

I’ve found making my own cleaning supplies to be strangly motivating. It’s like doing a science experiment. I make no promises on how long this will last, but for now I’m much more excited to clean if I get to test out some new concoction.

I haven’t really researched it, but it seems to me that putting poisonous chemicals down the drain isn’t the greatest idea. I don’t know for sure if using brand-name cleaning supplies is harming the environment or not.

But here’s what I do know:
–When I use the tub and shower cleaner from “Clean and Green,” I can stand barefoot in the shower while cleaning, without fearing that the cleaning product is going to cause the skin on my feet to melt off.
–It’s cheap to make. Many of the ingredients you probably already have, and those that you need to buy last a long time, as the recipes usually only call for a tablespoon of this and a teaspoon of that.
–They work. (At least the ones I’ve tried). I’ve been very satisfied with the results of the solutions I’ve made.

Cleaning supplies that work, are cheap to make, and that won’t harm me, my family or the world… that works for me.

For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, check out Rocks in My Dryer. Thanks, Anna!

It was probably the best book on actual parenting I’ve read – not like what to do when babies have fevers and how to change diapers, but about what it’s really like to be a parent. For me, at least, motherhood is not always easy, and it was quite a shock in the beginning. This book tells the story much more frankly and clearly than I could, and it was very heartening for me to discover that I wasn’t (completely) nuts.

Here’s the official book description:

According to Andrea Buchanan, “mother shock” is the state in which many new parents exist during those first confusing, chaotic, and often comical years of parenting. It is the clash between expectation and result, theory and reality; a twilight zone of 24-hour-a-day living where life is no longer neatly divided into day and night. It is the stress of trying to acclimate quickly to the immediacy of mothering; of formulating a new conception of oneself, one’s role in the family and in the world; of shouldering a fearful new level of responsibility and a new delegation of domestic duties. In this much-needed and delightfully funny collection, Buchanan shares the insight she gains as she moves through the stages of mother shock. From “Fear of the Double Stroller” and “Confessions of a Bottle Feeder” to “I’m an Idiot” and “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Playgroup,” Buchanan details the unimaginably difficult and unbelievably rewarding process of becoming a mother. Spanning the first three years of her daughter’s life, these amusing ruminations on mothering will strike a chord with every new mother.

Head over to Amazon and pick it up… I highly recommend it!