Favorite Books from 2009

I've noticed many blogs posting lists of their favorite books from 2009.  Many of the books that I read this year were published in previous years, so I am following Ti's example from Book Chatter and Other Stuff and listing my favorite books that I read during the year.

So here were my absolute favorites, not in any particular order:
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner
Beach Trip by Cathy Holton
The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Three Cups of Tea  by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini
Cleopatra's Daughter by Michelle Moran
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

And here were my favorite audiobooks:
One for the Money by Janet Evanovich
Two for the Dough  by Janet Evanovich
Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst
BoneMan's Daughters  by Ted Dekker
Still Summer by Jacquelyn Mitchard

If you posted about your favorites this year, feel free to leave the link to your post.  Did you happen to read any of the books that I have listed here, and if so what were your thoughts?  I am definitely looking forward to another great year of reading!

Wondrous Words Wednesday-Dec. 30

Bermudaonion asks you to share new words that you have learned during your reading adventures in the last week. Feel free to join in the fun!

Here are a couple of new words that I learned this week while reading The Lone Star Legend by Gwendolyn Zepeda:

Kitschy: something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste.

Vitriol:  something highly caustic or severe in effect, as criticism.

Here is how these words were used on page 194 of the ARC edition:
Sandy sat in a kitschy diner in South Austin, miles away from the university and Daniel's stomping grounds, where she read the latest string of anonymous commenters' vitriol and her loyal readers' defense.

So did you learn any new words this week?

WWII War Through the Generations Challenge Completed!

Hooray for me!  This year I signed up for the War Through the Generations challenge and committed to reading five books.  Well I certainly cut it close, but I accomplished my goal.  Here are the books that I read for this challenge and you should be able to click on the title to see my review..

1. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne--completed 2/10/2009

2. Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas--Completed 2/28/2009

3. Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay--Completed 5/17/2009

4. Guernica by Dave Boling--Completed 11/25/2009

5. A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal--Completed 12/13/2009

These were all great books but my favorites were The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and A Lucky Child.

I'm so glad that I signed up for this challenge and actually completed it too!  I want to give a special Thank You to both Serena and Anna for co-hosting this challenge as I'm sure we can all appreciate the work you put into this for us!

Review: A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal

Here is a summary of A Lucky Child from the Hachette website:

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A LUCKY CHILD. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A LUCKY CHILD is a book that demands to be read by all.

My Review:
This is a wonderful memoir that Thomas Buergenthal has created that not only gives us a glimpse of what it took for him to survive during such a vicious period of history, but also how these events helped to make him into the man that he is today.  Buergenthal does a great job of sharing how his emotions changed from fear, to anger, and eventually forgiveness once he was able to finally heal.

The title of this book comes from the idea that Thomas' mother truly believed that he was a lucky child because of what a fortune teller told her many years before.  After reading some of the things that Thomas had to endure throughout his ordeal, it is definitely hard to disagree with her.  Isn't it curious that when he was in Auschwitz a boy that he slept with on the same bunk came down with diptheria, while Thomas never showed any symptoms at all?  Considering how young he was and having a low immune system I find this to be a miracle in itself.

Before the Holocaust, Thomas' parents own a beautiful hotel that was very profitable.  When his father learns what the Nazi regime is doing to Jewish families and businesses he decides to sell everything so they will have enough money to live on and hopefully not draw any attention to themselves.  Of course they do not expect the extent of power that the Nazi's will have, because before they know it they have spent all of their savings and find they have no other choice but to move into one of the ghettos.  They are thankful to be around friends again, but eventually realize that they will be taken away to a work camp.

After living at Auschwitz for some time, Thomas does become separated from his parents and will not know for quite some time if they are even alive.  His creativity, intelligence, and wits help him to survive the abuse of the German guards and from being selected by Dr. Mengele for experiments.  How such a young, innocent child could survive these conditions and the Auschwitz Death March is amazing to me...and once again lucky.

Buergenthal admits to us early in this book that there are many events that he does not recall as he decided to write this book very late in his life.  He shares that it may have been difficult to write about his Holocaust experience shortly after it happened and it may have taken him longer to recover.  But his experiences did help to shape him into the person that he has become and be a very active and successful human rights lawyer.

I appreciate how Buergenthal honestly shared his feelings and emotions with us, especially his state of mind after the war was over.  When he was still a young boy and living in liberated Germany he wanted revenge on many of his German neighbors with such a fierce intensity.  He cannot understand how these same people just a couple of years before would not even look at him on the street and now they smile at him as nothing had happened.  Once he is able to deal with his feelings he shares the shame that he felt for the vengeance that he so desparately wanted at that young age.  Here is an excerpt from page 163 where he talks about struggling to stop this vicious cycle:
It took me much longer to realize that one cannot hope to protect mankind from crimes such as those that were visited upon us unless one struggles to break the cycle of hatred and violence that invariably leads to ever more suffering by innocent human beings.

I am so thankful to Thomas Buergenthal for taking the time at this stage of his life for putting together this memoir for us.  Not only does it give us a glimps as to what he had to endure, but also how he dealt with his conflicting emotions.  I could feel the different stages of healing and forgiveness among the pages and this obviously helped him to become the person he was meant to be.  This book includes a map and a few pictures that help you feel a little closer to his family and what a cute young boy he was!  I highly recommend this book!

My Rating:  5/5

Disclosure:  This book is from my personal collection and I read it for my own entertainment.

New Feature Box - Main site, blank 65359

• Sign up for Newsletters & Alerts

Teaser Tuesday-Dec. 29

Check out Teaser Tuesdays from Should Be Reading.  TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

Grab your current read.

Let the book fall open to a random page.

Share with us two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.

You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week my teaser is again from Lone Star Legend by Gwendolyn Zepeda:
"If he wants to know what a certain woman wants, the best thing to do is ask that woman herself.  But if he's thinking all women are the same-that they all want the same thing out of life-then he needs to go back to school and pull on little girls' pigtails until one of them hauls off and smacks some sense into him."

pg. 139
***Please note that this is from an Advanced Reading Copy so the final printing may change.

Mailbox Monday from my Secret Santa!

Thanks to Marcia of The Printed Page for hosting the Mailbox Monday Meme that has us list the books that we received last week. You can go to her blog to see what everyone else got last week or to play along.  This week I thought I would share what I received from my Secret Santa since I didn't open the gifts until Christmas morning.

I am so glad that I participated in the Book Blogger Holiday Swap again this year.  I always look forward to events like this as they are a great opportunity to find new blogs that I wasn't aware of before.  And it happened again!  This year my Secret Santa was Sharla from Winter Write, and if she is new to you, you should really go check out her awesome blog!  The following books have been on my wishlist for quite some time and thanks to Sharla they are now on my shelf!

Thanks so much Sharla and I can't wait until I can dive into these books!

Here are a couple of other books that I received from my family:

From my loving husband I received Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

My wonderful son gave me The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

I think that is a pretty good haul for Christmas!  So what was in your mailbox?

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all are having a safe and Merry Christmas!  Things have gotten a little hectic for me as we ended up having to take my Grandma to the hospital last weekend and found out that she had a heart attack.  Just yesterday they put a pacemaker in and she appears to be recovering well from that surgery.  Unfortunately, the hospital where they did the procedure is an hour and a half away and since we are in the middle of a snow storm here, I haven't been able to spend as much time there as I would have liked.  But I am planning on spending the day with her tomorrow. 

After opening our gifts this morning I was surprised(not really) to have received four books for Christmas!  I received two books from the book blogging Christmas exchange, which I will post about later after I take a picture, and I also received Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from my husband, and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle from my son.  Woohoo!  We decided this year not to exchange a lot of gifts among our family as we are planning a nice Cancun vacation in March and consider that a Christmas gift.  I might have to bring my new books on vacation with me!

I hope everyone is having a relaxing Christmas vacation, and if you don't hear from me very much over the next week, it is probably because I am traveling back and forth to the hospital.  With all of the events of this last week I haven't had much time for reading and the roads are still too cruddy for travel,I think I will just go and relax with a good book for the rest of the day.