Water, Marilyn, and Death

My first books of 2011 are making my heart palpitate! I love them, well, two out of the three.

The books from 2010 I've yet to finish are dragging. Boredom is not something that sits well with me. So, The Shack and Eat, Pray, Love are officially sidelined. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I'm reading on the train to work. Loving it! Naked In Death, I finished and will discuss at another time on another blog.

I digress. I bought three books for MYSELF the other day. I had some Borders Bucks to cash in and I used them all on ME! SQUEE!

FRAGMENTS, Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe~ Edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Glory In Death by J.D. Robb

Let me explain the second J.D. Robb purchase.  A little birdie told me, here on this blog, that the series really picks up after the third book.  Pretty soon I will be a blogger on a Romance and Mystery site and this is part of my research. That's another thing I will discuss later. Super stoked about that. Not super stoked about the first pages of the second book.

Water for Elephants was on my to-read list for 2011. When I saw the trailer for the movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, it immediately pulled me in. It moved the book to the top of my list of books to buy. I love anything Depression Era but when you use the circus as a backdrop, you had me at Dumbo. 

Gruen breaks all the rules we read about as Aspiring Authors, all but one. She tells one heck of an amazing story. I noted an overabundance of the word WAS, telling and passive phrases, dialogue tags like I said or he says, and it opens with a PROLOGUE! A prologue that is a flashback. BAH to that agent intern who turned her nose up as such literary devices and the authors that use them. I guess this must be terrible writing too.

Anyhoo, I laughed out loud reading the first chapter, wanted to cry in the second, and now that I am in the third I can't seem to stop reading. When Gruen described the music in the prologue and said the "tuba farted", I snorted, twice.  Who doesn't laugh when they see the word fart? This man's journey starts with a stampede and a murder, fast forwards to him in a nursing home, then goes back to his journey on The Greatest Show On Earth. I can't wait to finish it. Below is a photo from the book, different photos open each chapter.

Fragments, a simple title that illustrates not only the prose within but the author's life. Marilyn Monroe has been an icon of mine since I was a tweener. There was something about her that I admired, something in a photo that spoke of her vulnerability, gorgeous and undeniably tragic. I often described her as tragically beautiful, something my head just blurted out when reading about her. It was hard for me to understand how someone with such beauty could truly believe she was ugly. Through the years I have read different things about her, never the conspiracy theory type stuff.

This book caught my eye when Christmas shopping and couldn't wait to snatch it up. Marilyn/Norma Jean reveals who she really was. Her own words and the words of those closest to her portray the avid reader, learner, poet, and actress. In it is a letter to Mr. Strasberg while in a psych ward, her thoughts about self worth, and poetry about loneliness. The words make you feel as if you are sitting on a sofa with her, chatting about life in general. This is a fragment from one of her poems. "Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others..." Lovely. I can tell this is a book I will be picking up time and again. Below is a letter written in 1956 to Lee Strasberg. It just made me really sad.

What are you reading? What do you plan on reading this year?