Karli’s Comments (group member since Feb 23, 2010)

Karli’s comments from the Busy as a Bee Books group.

Yay!!!! Take care of you!

Keep us in the loop. Baby bees are especially precious.

We need to populate the world - particularly the US - with readers. Readers grow into thinkers, and that's a start!

37 is good! Lots of healthy babies born at this gestational age! Love that more bee babies are coming. Gives me hope for the world.

Since Pat Conroy's death, I've read My Reading Life and then started The Death of Santini. I'm loving these memoirs and expect I will be reading/re-reading a lot of his work in coming months.

I'm with Adonica - I really believe a glass of red wine usually pairs best with books. And cheese and crackers.

My biggest, baddest snacking downfall is Smartfood White Cheddar Popcorn. OMG.

I love both - and I think I really am at the point if given a choice for comfort of reading, I want my Kindle. I love paper books, and my library, and the ability to loan a paper book so much more easily, but the small size of the Kindle along with the ability to read in the dark and adjust the font....yeah, LOVE.

I agree that the Harry Potter books are their own breed of amazing while being faithful to the books, they have their own life.

To Kill a Mockingbird is amazing on film and on the page.

I liked both the book The Martian and the movie The Martian, but honestly, you'd have to do a lot to make me NOT like a movie with Matt Daman "sciencing the shit" out of things.

All right, Adonica, you should pick for me...

I read this a few years ago - It wasn't what I was expecting, and I didn't love it. It's one of those that may have been more shocking at the time, but wasn't as disturbing read 60 years later.

Mad Girls in Love

Gone With a Handsomer Man

I liked Dollbaby. There are some twists in there I didn't see coming.

A friend gave me some old fashioned romance novels after a particularly difficult week, and I'm enjoying the romp more than I expected.

I liked Dollbaby. There are some twists in there I didn't see coming.

A friend gave me some old fashioned romance novels after a particularly difficult week, and I'm enjoying the romp more than I expected.

Our town had a 7th grader who committed suicide last week - she too had some counseling, but clearly the school and her mental health professionals didn't see how acute her condition was and the result was a tragedy. I wish there was some better way of helping children who struggle with mental illness.

I read this shortly after it came out, and I really thought it was good - with the perspective of all the controversy and the fact that it was pretty much un-edited. I am one of those who has read TKAM more than 10 times, so there were a few places that the book contradicted what happened in TKAM, but I agreed with this being an interesting look at what race and gender relations looked like at that time. I agree that Scout was willingly blind to the way that race relations really looked. If she lost Jem in her late teens, then my guess is she left Maycomb for NYC and had very little to do with it other than the brief visits. So, by that reading, it made sense that she moved to a place whose reality in race and gender equality were much closer to what they looked like in her head. Then, she goes to Maycomb and is forced to see the reality of where in their evolution her home town really is. I don't believe Atticus is a racist at all, but he is a realist. And the reality was that there wasn't a path for blacks to get immediate full rights without chaos. The community wasn't ready and the black community had been in a place of lower economic and educational status for so long that they needed to be given the tools to be successful. This was a radical idea in the town. And I know that hearing something that makes us completely re-see our parents can be devastating - I had that "eyes wide open" moment at 21 and I threw a tantrum too. So, I found this part of the story what redeemed it and made the publication important, and reading the book valuable.

Go if you can - he was so much fun to see live!!! There is nothing about him that makes him seem un-approachable, he is just a fantastic story-teller. And, breathing the same air as Stephen King is one of my favorite things I've ever done.

I'm reading The Water Method Man, which is an older John Irving. I like it to a degree, but also find it terribly pretentious/obnoxious. Have any of you read it? Garlan, I know you're an Irving fan too. Thoughts?

I'm reading The Water Method Man, which is an older John Irving. I like it to a degree, but also find it terribly pretentious/obnoxious. Have any of you read it? Garlan, I know you're an Irving fan too. Thoughts?

I was soooo frustrated when I finished this book because I couldn't find the thread to discuss it!!!

******SPOILERS*********

I was SO FRUSTRATED that the counsellor just finally started figuring out that Finch had an issue with bi-polar before the end. Seriously, when you have a child/student/patient with such acute depressive episodes, WHY is he virtually untreated? What is wrong with all the adults in his life???

(This may have touched a nerve as a mother and someone who has recently lost a bipolar family member to mis-medication)

I am wrecked for Violet - I cannot imagine how she will cope and get through this double loss.

And, am I the only teenager who read too much and was an uuber geek with those people who were also book nerds? I don't find this type of behavior totally unbelievable when I did similar nerdy things.

I have a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare - I'd probably choose that, because I could always discover something new in it. And...The Stand by Stephen King.