Staff Review: Ten Things About "Ten Things I've Learnt About Love" by Sarah Butler

1. Reading it took my breath away. The writing is simple but true.
2. Each chapter starts with lists written by the two main characters, Alice and Daniel. “Ten Things I’m Frightened Of”, “Ten Things People Say to You When Your Father Dies”, and “Ten Things I’d Rather Forget” are a few of them. It’s a good writing technique and helps the reader find out a lot about a character’s interior thoughts in a small amount of words.
3. Daniel has synesthesia so sees words and letters as colors. He describes someone’s name as “the color of sun-warmed sandstone”. The letter D is “a pale orange, like powdered sherbet”. Alice’s name is the color of “milky blue water”.
4. Butler does a wonderful job of capturing the ache of wanting someone to love you.
5. Daniel walks around London, collecting things like bottle tops, paper clips, a string of plastic pearls, and an empty photo frame to make found art he uses to express himself.
6. This sounds weird, but I felt like my heart was also reading and reacting along with me.
7. “When the whisky is finished, I screw the top back on and slam the bottle into the ground. It doesn’t break. I want something to break.” Those lines perfectly capture the frustration of feeling broken and wanting everything around you to be broken, too, so you're not alone.
8. Butler’s writing style put me so into the novel that when a character was distracted, I felt it, too. A character’s thoughts would interrupt lines of dialogue and leave me with their feelings of uncertainty in my head.
9. Lines like these: “And I carried on doing what I’ve been doing for years. I have written your name more times than I can remember. Always, at the beginning, I write your name.”
10. I didn’t want it to be over.

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love is the debut novel of Sarah Butler. Alice is the youngest of three sisters and has never felt a true part of the family since her mother died when Alice was young. She’s off in Mongolia, escaping heartache, when she hears that her father is dying and returns in time to be there when he dies. Daniel is homeless and looking for the daughter he’s never met. We watch as these two characters slowly come together. As I mentioned before, Butler’s writing is simple but true and shows how the hope of love can root us when nothing else can.

~Aisha, Adult Services

Tech Thursday: Photography

Take a look at these amazing photographs, Slide Show: Secret Lives of the Serengeti,

PHOTOGRAPH BY SNAPSHOT SERENGETI

then take a look at some of our items to help you with your photography skills. You may not catch a giraffe walking by you in the twilight, but you may catch your child's first steps.

David Hume Kennerly on the iPhone: Secrets and Tips from a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographer by David Hume Kennerly

Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers: The Essential Guide to Digital Techniques by Alan L. Detrick

The Mobile Photographer: An Unofficial Guide to Using Android® Phones, Tablets, and Apps in Photography Workflow by Robert Fisher

Photographing Your Family: And All the Kids and Friends and Animals Who Wander Through, Too by Joel Sartore and John Healey

~Aisha

#WCW WomanCrushWednesday: Cheryl Strayed

No author has affected my life in the past few years as much as Cheryl Strayed has.

Photo found at http://www.cherylstrayed.com/

I loved Strayed before I knew her name. TheRumpus.net is an online magazine whose advice column, Dear Sugar, was a favorite of mine because of its honest, humorous, and heartfelt offerings. The column was done anonymously, but a few years ago, it was revealed that Strayed was Sugar. Some of my favorite Sugar-given advice is, “Every last one of us can do better than give up”; “The only way out of a hole is to climb out”; and “Be brave enough to break your own heart”. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of her Dear Sugar columns and I highly recommend you read it.

A few years ago, when I finished the first chapter of her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, I put the book down and with tears in my eyes, said out loud to no one, "If the rest of the book is like that, I cannot handle it." In the book, Strayed's mom dies of cancer and at the time, my mom was four years cancer-free. I didn't want to read about a mom, anyone's mom, dying of cancer. I did get through the book and it remains a favorite of mine. I'm a person who prefers not to feel emotions and that book made me feel so immensely that I should have thrown it across the room and instead, I embraced it. I embraced it so much that when a friend told me his mom didn't like Wild because Cheryl Strayed wasn't prepared for the hike she takes in the book, I actually told him to tell his mom to come say that to my face. No one says anything bad about Cheryl Strayed around me.

When my mom was rediagnosed with cancer in mid-2013, I could not look at my copy of Wild (sometimes just a glance at the book would make me tear up), but I frequently turned to Tiny Beautiful Things and a poster with Dear Sugar quotes I had on the wall above my computer. I can't say I always took to heart sayings like "The thing about rising is we have to continue upward. The thing about going beyond is we have to keep going", "The unifying theme is resilience and faith", and the above-mentioned "Every last one of us can do better than to give up", but I wanted to. As I'm sure many other people who've read Strayed's work can attest, Strayed makes you want to hope, makes you want to try. Some days, I would see "The only way out of a hole is to climb out" and think, "Maybe today, it's okay for me to stay in my hole, but tomorrow, I'll get started on climbing out of it."

My mom died in October 2014 and again, Strayed helped me, this time with her advice of "Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there." "Gutted" is the perfect word to describe how I felt when my mom died and one of the reasons I'm not curled up in a ball on the floor is Cheryl Strayed and her advice. For that, she's my WomanCrush.

~Aisha