Category Archives: Reading

Jan21

I’m 20 Days Late in Speaking About It

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I’m 20 Days Late in Speaking About It

But I did manage to complete my goal last year!!

My goal last year was to read 100 books. I’d decided to try doing one dedicated goal rather then the 3-8 New Year Resolutions everyone always does, which are inevitably lists of all the things we don’t actually do.

At the end of 2011, I’d finished 101 books. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

It’s not a challenge I’ll do every year, but maybe every 2-3 years. It’s nice to have a reason to force yourself to keep reading and to pick up books you might not have before. I read so many more recent books that are generally not part of my interest because when you’re plowing through books so quickly, you don’t really have to worry about wasting time or some bad book dragging on.

The downside to this sort of challenge is that you have to really scoot. Some books are fine to be digested in a couple bites but most books benefit from taking time to savor, think, and reflect. Often I’d finish a book in a whirlwind and be left wondering what just happened.

It also directly influences the types of books you read. I didn’t eliminate long books all together. The Three Musketeers was probably the longest book I read. Wicked and the Devil in the White City were both pretty dense reads too. But I did find myself frequently, sometimes without even realizing it, pushing off some of the longer books I’m interested in reading, or grabbing for shorter books when I felt overwhelmed by deadlines. In the end, it all evened out to probably an average of 300-400 pages a book. But I am entering 2012 with 10 500+ word books at the top of my queue (Moby Dick, Bleak House, Adam Bede, Les Miserables, Harry Potter 4, Little Women, Game of Thrones, The Bone People, 20 Years Later, Of Human Bondage, Autobiography of Mark Twain, etc.)

I set myself a new goal this year to finish 50 books, just to give myself the opportunity to track again. I also set a mini-goal of reading 100 short stories. That shouldn’t take a year, but I’ve been awful the past year about not reading them and figured I could use the motivation. I definitely enjoy novels more but as I’m hoping to write more short stories, I need to read more short stories!

If you’re on GoodReads, feel free to friend me on there! Sometimes I post book reviews, if I feel inclined, and I’m always up for a good book discussion. Mostly, though, I just like spying on what other people are reading!

Apr17

Sunday Sunday

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Sunday Sunday

I really will post the blogs from Belize. I just wound up getting a massive allergy headache (spring is here! hurray?) so online time was limited. On the plus side, I did have a lovely walk with my dog in 58 degree weather.

Also I finished two old knitting projects (added a ribbon and the buttons) and completely did the March knitting project for my KAL because I got so busy I forgot about it in March. Oops! Here are pictures. Also included is the baby blanket I started knitting in the hospital during Mom’s surgery, since I just happened to photograph it as a WIP today.

I promise I’m going to try to be better about posting about things other than knitting.

Or reading.  Finished four new books and started three new ones. :) My mom gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday so I’ve been downloading a bunch of new stuff.

15. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie
16. The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
17. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
18. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

Feb26

Home for a bit

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Home for a bit

Home to Texas, I mean, for my mom’s surgery, which I won’t go into detail about here. Suffice to say, she’s home from the hospital as of Friday and doing great.  A home full of flowers, from what I hear.  I’m glad I got to be with her to help out as long as I did.

I start my new job on Monday.  At this point I’m more nervous than excited, though I’m sure everything will be great.  First day jitters, is all.

Started a new knitting project during my four solid days at the hospital, and also finished two books which I don’t feel like analyzing but I do want to add to the list.

1. The Hangman’s Daughter, by Oliver Pötzsch
2. Bel Ami, by Guy de Maupassant
3. Water For Elephants, by Sara Gruen
4. Room, by Emma Donaghue
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
6. Life, by Keith Richards
7. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, by David Sedaris

I will say that I feel like I have a vague but colorful understanding of the Rolling Stones now, and it makes me want to listen to their music more.  I also now want to read more by David Sedaris, as this was my first experience with him.  I’m trying to break my habit of staying away from really popular current authors, you know, seeing as I want to be one of them.  I was delightfully surprised with this short story collection and will probably end up rereading some of my favorites from it.  It’s a super quick read, but short story collections are always helpful.

I also just joined a bookgroup one of my friends put together, so that will also give me book suggestions, although the thought of picking out a book for everyone that I haven’t read yet makes me really nervous!

Feb15

More Finishing of Things

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More Finishing of Things

These are my February ornament of the month.  They’re little mittens (hopefully you can tell that) using pretty sparkly yarn I’ve had for ages without knowing what to do with it because it is WAY too scratchy for anything wearable.

Also finished my two shawls; pictures to come soon.

I also finished reading Portrait of Dorian Gray but I feel sort of silly reviewing a classic.  I will say that while the concept is awesome and I can see why Dorian has become such a character of legend, and while the philosophical discussions were interesting and enjoyable, the story itself was not as good as I’d hoped.  In order for the whole concept to make sense, Gray has to do some things that felt just sort of out of character — perhaps because the first half of the novel has 19-year-old Gray and the second half as 38-year-old Gray, but we’re just given a chapter to get us caught up between the two, and it’s not enough to explain the drastic change . . . Also the whole method of the “magic” of the painting doesn’t make sense.  Gray made a wish?  Barf.  If you need something out of the ordinary to happen, just to do.  Don’t sort of half-ass it with an implausible suggestion.  We’ll accept the painting, but that it happened because someone just made a wish was a little bit too Wish Upon A Star for me.  (See what I did there?  Anyone besides me even remember that movie.  Oh, Katherine Heigl, how fall you have fallen.)

With the job search taking over my time, I haven’t had much time in February to read, but as my commute time just doubled, I have a feeling I’ll start plowing through books much more quickly!

Jan31

A weekend for finishing

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A weekend for finishing

All in all, it was a very productive weekend.  I finished another brain study with Harvard, netting me $125 for five days of testing.  I finished interviewing for a possible new job.  I finished washing the dishes that had been piling up.  I finished trying to convince my boyfriend to watch Psych because he finally did and liked it.  I finished a season of Arrested Development.  But the two most important things (well, as far as this post is concerned) would be that I finished a new book, and I finished, not one, but two knitting projects.

Behold!

The bluebird ornament is part of a year-long Christmas Ornament Knit-Along I’m participating in on Ravelry.  The blankyphant was originally a baby gift for our neighbor’s new baby, but I may chicken out and not give it to her because it’s sort of embarrassing.  Undecided.  We’ll see.

The other important thing is that I finished another book:

Room by Emma Donaghue

I started this book very torn, because it had something I loved and something I hated.  Imprisonment/abduction and the psychology of it is a topic I’ve covered in my own writing multiple times.  However, the book is told from a five-year-olds Point of View, which is almost as much a no-no as writing a book from the point of view of a dog (imagine me sobbing that such a book is a NYTimes Best Seller . . .)

This book is engaging and stressful and beautiful.  I didn’t think it was line-by-line beautiful the way so many others apparently did (thanks, kindle, for letting me know what others highlight when I really don’t care), but Donaghue is actually able to take a 5-year-old, albeit an intelligent one, and his limited understanding of the world and tell the story of his mom.  Never does it feel contrived when Jack says something incorrectly to give you a real clue — like he guesses that Ma flashes lamp out the skylight at night to help herself fall asleep.  There is the perfect blend of minute detail and mystery to give what feels like an accurate atmosphere of a horrible situation — a situation that remains both real and surreal for the entire book.  Action, emotion, discovery, it’s all written painfully real and gritty and beautiful.

Main characters: 10/10 – Jack and Ma are both multi-dimensional characters, and even Old Nick is a strange mixture of terrifying monster and floundering idiot
Supporting characters: 9/10 -I hate some of them, I love some of them, but that they were real enough to get emotion from me is great
Plot: 10/10 – biased, but the plot falls right in line with my interests, is logical and believable and clearly well-researched
Subplots: 9/10 – we’ll say the subplot is Ma’s relationship with herself and the world, and this is handled about as well is it can be through the eyes of a 5-year-old
Setting: 8/10 – while I was able to formulate a picture of room in my head, I was still left with general questions: where geographically are we? did Old Nick not take her far?
Dialogue: 10/10 – felt appropriately natural and stilted and believable for a very intelligent 5-year-old
Action: 9/10 – action was conveyed well. towards the second half of the book, it felt sometimes like the action was skipped over.
Emotion: 10/10 – a thoroughly fascinating and upsetting book that had me so captivated I missed my subway stop
Lingering/Thought provoking: 9/10 – it’s impossible not to be left with lingering questions about Jack’s and Ma’s and Old Nick’s future, as well as questioning repeatedly what seven years in captivity would feel like
Ending: 7/10 – not a great ending but not a bad one. it makes sense to have ended it where she did, and doing so doesn’t feel contrived, but I guess I wanted a little last something from Ma.

Total: 91/100

Difficult subject matter for sure, but it was worth the $12 to me.

That brings finished book count so far this year up to 4, with three more mid-read.

1. The Hangman’s Daughter, by Oliver Pötzsch
2. Bel Ami, by Guy de Maupassant
3. Water For Elephants, by Sara Gruen
4. Room, by Emma Donaghue

Jan21

Book Journey 2011

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Book Journey 2011

I’ve decided I’m going to read 50 books this year.  That might actually a way underestimate for what I’d do on my own any even without a challenge, so that number might go up.  But for now, it’s 50.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

I was intending to write a very long review of the book I finished yesterday, however I discovered it was difficult to do so without spoiling it, and without making it sound like I absolutely hated the book.  Plotwise, the book was really great, except for the ending which got incredibly . . . convenient.  The book never made me feel like the main character, who I already thought was a bad friend and pretty watery/blank as a character, had to actually struggle for or against anything.  Big Al and August were sort of easy to confuse.  Walter, actually my favorite character in the entire book, never gets his due (I would much have rather read his story, anyway).  Old Man Jacob was interesting and empathetic but his younger counterpart made more bad decisions than good — which would be fine except that he never earned his redemption from me, so I never wound up liking him that much, and didn’t feel he deserved his convenient happy book ending.  I could totally see what the author was going for with him: intelligent, charismatic, handsome, talented, good with animals, innocent.  But then his sudden explosions of emotion were not built up well so they just seemed random and rather August-like.  I really liked Marlena for the most part, but she was clearly a strong female character written by a woman and was sometimes borderline too strong — she felt more like Jacob’s mother than anything and fluctuated from kicking butt to crying and fainting in a way that felt sort of superficial.  The author wanted a damsel in distress who was also a feminist, and that’s hard to do.  I wanted more face time with Rosie and the animals (Jacob was supposed to be a vet, after all) and I wanted Jacob to have to actually fight for something, not just attempt to do so in order to look like a knight in shining armor.  This needed to be his coming of age story, his personal discovery journey, and it didn’t feel that way.  I also would have liked a bit more ambiguity about August’s death — but that’s not a spoiler because the book literally opens with it.  Way to steal the wind from your own sails.

Also, the book starts with his parents conveniently dying, which is way too easy a way to start a hero’s journey.  Way too easy.

BUT, lest that make it sound like I completely hated the book, I didn’t.  Walter is a complex, fascinating character.  A scene with an orangutan lingers with me.  Walter’s story actually got a raw, emotional reaction from me several times.  Gruen does a great job of describing the day to day of a train circus’ life and making it so familiar that it feels ordinary.  Sure, Jacob’s time is a bit too easy in it, but we have Walter and Camel for reality.  The plot is good for the reader who wants romance but with a bit of adventure and an extraordinary setting, who likes glamour alongside grit.  Dialogue flowed naturally, and while sometimes the plot felt like it skipped, it never dragged.  The book isn’t the most high brow of literary reads, but it’s enjoyable and actually quite good compared to a lot of what gets published.

I don’t know if I’ll go off about every book I read.  But here’s the rubric by which I’ll be keeping notes for myself:

Main characters: 5/10 – didn’t like them, didn’t hate them
Supporting characters: 10/10 – Walter and Queenie were worth the book
Plot: 7/10 – interesting plot but frequently relied on convenience, things ran too smoothly
Subplots: 4/10 – what subplots? other characters’ stories got very little facetime, and it was easy to forget Jacob was actually taking care of animals
Setting: 10/10 – awesome setting for a novel
Dialogue: 8/10 – very natural dialogue; not super unique or memorable, but read smoothly and realistically
Action: 7/10 – it happened here and there but was frequently difficult to understand; pacing of action could have used some tweaking
Emotion: 6/10 – I couldn’t really empathize with Jacob because his own emotions were kind of wacky; Walter and Old Jacob earned those 6 points
Lingering/Thought provoking: 7/10 – Walter’s story has really, really stuck with me and a surprising reaction from me, so high on that
Ending: 3/10 – Everything finishes up way too cleanly and nobody really learned anything

Overall: 67/100

I’m a touch critic.  67 means it’s worth your time to read, and that most people who are casual readers will really enjoy this.  Overall, it’s a good, enjoyable book, it just left the tough critic in me wanting more.

(I’ve read two other books so far this year, so they’ll be getting this same treatment soon.)