Trudi, If we have some outstanding tomatoes, which is likely I will send you some seeds. I will be show casing my new "Emily" tomatoe :-) I know about being busy. We have been just nuts lately. We had a new baby 8 weeks ago and that makes 5 kids. 8, 6, 4, 2 and 0. Also our newest one had a heart condition at birth and required surgery two days after her birth. The following week I was diagnosed with a hernia and Luanne's brother died. The week after that I had a camping vacation planned. I went with the kids and left mon home with the baby. She was glad to have the peace and quite. I am currently recuperating from my operation which really was a breeze but still and anoyance. All the while the tomato plant haved needed love and care. :-0 Oh boy! Anyway we will see you next year if conditions permit. Greg

Here is an exerpt from the official Booker Man site: "The prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008 after launching in 1969, aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland." Okay.........WHY change the whole premise? I understand the " every kid is equal and every one has to get a trophy" epidemic that seems to be sweeping our country ...but let's leave some things alone.

Sorry for being late here, but I didn't get a chance to finish the book till the past weekend. As usual, my understanding is broadened after reading the discussion here but I remain lukewarm about this book. Veronica a sympathetic character? Not really. She's stuck in stanza one of the Larkin poem--oh, look what my family did to me and my brother. And that was what? I did believe Nugent abused Liam until she started on the "well, not in the front room, maybe the garage..." track. Nugent and his sister in an incestuous relationship, Ada's passiveness in the face of child sexual abuse, Ada's love/sex thing with Nugent, this whole who did what to whom began to strike me as looking for the sole pat answer to explain generations of dysfunction. At first, I thought Veronica's fascination, and disgust, with all things sexual stemmed from her parents' incessant breeding and Veronica's expressed embarrassment about her very large family; next, I thought witnessing her brother's abuse did it; finally, I started thinking maybe whatever mental illness plagued her uncle was inherited. I do agree TG is a story about Veronica's reaction to her "closest" brother's suicide and childhood memories, especially traumatic ones, are tough to accurately recall. Were the religious references significant? The priest/brother pretender? Nolo me tangere/Nolly Lamb? "Comfort me with apples" (the rest of which is "for I am sick of love.") from the Song of Solomon? (had to google that one.)

I keep a reading journal and it has a place to rate your reads on a scale of 1-10. So, I'll list the books I read this year according to how I rated them. (I know this message is way too long, but hey--I hardly ever get a chance to post, horrible lurker that I am, so a once-a-year overly long posting isn't too horrible, right?) 10-Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey Sentimental 10 rating--remember reading it as a child and it held up. Good fun. 10-Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell What a mind-blowing book with so many layers and connections. LOVED IT! 10-Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Such a beautiful and contemplative book that examines aging, new life, regrets, families, grudges, grace and God. Particularly loved how the main character finds beauty in sunlight catching a sprinkler's spray or birds roosting on a phone wire (two things that would have been impossible to see in the 1800s). 10-Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Company: A Road Novel with Literary License by Maria Amparo Escandon This is the "One City, One Book" pick for 2009 in our town. It is such a page-turner! The main character is in a women's prison in Mexico for a crime that remains a mystery for most of the book. She starts a reading group for the inmates, only she doesn't actually read the text, rather tells her story. 10-I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith This book has been mentioned time and again on this forum and I finally got around to reading it this year--THANK YOU to whoever recommended it. I loved it so much! 10-There is Room for You by Charlotte Bacon Such beautiful descriptions of India, both in the 40s and the 90s. Loved the two intertwining narratives of mother and daughter, both outsiders in India but at two different times. A very lush book. 10-The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys I'm sure everyone in the world had read this but me. Written in the 1960s, it imagines the story of Mrs. Rochester (Mr. Rochester's crazy wife that he kept locked in the attic in Jane Eyre.) It was hard to read and I gave it a 10 not because I loved it, but because it did perfectly what it meant to do. It said so much about patriarchy, post-colonialism, feminism, and madness in ways I'd never thought of. I need to re-read. 10-The Woman I Kept to Myself by Julia Alvarez This book of poems was so great that I am going to buy the book. There's one poem in the particular about how she can tell who her husband is talking to on the phone by the tone of his voice. Another one talks about how she can't bear to throw out her headbands, even though she has short hair now, because they are such a symbol of her girlhood. You have to read these poems out loud so that you can hear the sound of them. 9-Five Skies by Ron Carlson Loved this book! Three men out on the plains building stuff and eating really good food. I have no idea why I related so strongly to them! It was downgraded to a 9 because of the...