Too many books!

I used to be a monoreader--one book at a time. At some point I abandoned this strategy. I think that I kept getting bogged down in award winners and found myself reading very little for long stretches of time. Now I normally have several books going at once, but lately things have gotten a little out of hand.

I am currently reading:
1.) Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy -- a memoir of the author's recovery from having a malignant tumor (and half her jaw) removed at the age of 9.
2.) Animal Farm by George Orwell -- do I really need to say? The story of what happens when some communist pigs convince the other animals that they can run the farm without evil humans. Somehow I've never read this before.
3.) The Sea by John Banville -- An old man living by the sea remembers vacationing by the sea. Sort of. It won the Booker prize and thus far confirms my suspicion that Booker prize = boring.
4.) The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs -- A man writes about his attempt to read the Encyclopedia Brittanica in its entirety. It's best in small doses, much like an encyclopedia.
5.) The Complete Guide to Women's Running by Runner's World magazine -- um, or something to that effect. Too sore and lazy to go downstairs and get it right now.
6.) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling -- Not sure this should count since I am reading it aloud to my son every night.
7.) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling -- I couldn't resist the urge to (re)read ahead of my reading with my son.

And I think that's it. Too much? I try to read a piece of each book every day. Which reminds me that I need to read The Sea now. It's not that it's bad. It's just slooooow, and it's just not working for me.

Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

First line: "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did."

A few years ago I read and enjoyed Jeannette Walls' childhood memoir, The Glass Castle, so when I saw that she had written a novel of her grandmother's childhood, I was intrigued. Last week I read it. I liked it, but not as much as The Glass Castle. I'm not sure if it was because it was less horrifying or if it was because the authorial voice seemed less real. After reading the book I was not surprised to learn that Walls had tried to write it initially in the third person. It felt like a story someone told about somebody else, and that's what it is.

Raised in west Texas and the New Mexico desert, Lily Casey Smith, Walls' grandmother, was a strong, spirited woman. She suffered a lot of setbacks in life (a theme throughout the book), but never let them get her down--the story of her first husband is a good example. Ultimately she ends up remarrying and working with her husband on a ranch in Arizona, having more setbacks, and settling in a remote town in Arizona.

The book dragged for me a little in the middle and picked up a bit with the appearance of Rosemary, Walls's mother who played such a large role in The Glass Castle. I felt like major episodes in history like the Great Depression and WWII were largely glossed over. Perhaps because they were no match for Lily Smith and her spunkiness?

Anyway for me the book was entertaining and worth reading, but was helped by my prior knowledge of the family from the previous book. I got The Glass Castle from the library again the other day and reread parts of it. It's funny to see Lily Smith getting in yelling matches with Rex Walls, but it feels like a disconnect almost. A little more yelling before the wedding might have been good.

Four stars.

A New Year?

I mean to post more often (by which I mean ever), but it never happens. Now a full calendar year (and a half) has passed since my last post.

I am going to try to post weekly and worry less about my reviews. I let myself get hung up on whether I thought my reviews are good enough. If I'm being honest, I've always had a hard time articulating what I did or didn't like about a book. I remember wishing when I was younger that book reports could be more like "Solid Gold": I liked it. It had a good beat. You could dance to it. The end.

2010 in review:

I didn't keep track of everything I've read. If I had to guess I'd say it was only about 50 books, give or take 20. How's that for being precise?

My favorite book that I read last year was Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. I picked this one up at the library on a whim and just adored it: the tone, the characters (even the annoying son), the stuffy Britishness of it all.

Other notable reads: the Percy Jackson series helped me rediscover my love of Greek mythology, Serena by Ron Rash made me want to reread Shakespeare even as I hated every character in it (including the sympathetic ones), and well, I don't remember anything else. Isn't that sad?

So far this year I have read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (loved it!), Little Bee by Chris Cleave (didn't quite work for me), This Is Not the Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness by Laura Munson (dragged, but I admire her moxy), Coraline by Neil Gaiman (not sure what to think), The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly (hated it!). I am currently reading My Antonia by Willa Cather and The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs, both of which I am enjoying immensely.

If I'm feeling energetic later this week perhaps I will try to put into words how much I hated The Tea Rose. It just irritated me that much. Note to self: If someone recommends a YA book by an author, read the YA book, not an adult book, or skip it altogether.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I forgot a book last time. I also read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak last month. I am in the minority of not caring for the Death as Narrator device, but it did allow the author to insert some background exposition in a new and different way.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is about a young girl Liesel Meminger living in the fictional town of Molchen, Germany, during WWII.
I don't want to do a big plot summary right now because I am trying to get caught up. The book is YA. It is well-written. I liked Liesel and cheered for her. I liked the way her relationships with Rudy Steiner and Max Vandenburg were handled and the relationship between her and her foster father Hans Hubermann. Oh, and Rosa, I loved her too. Basically the characters and relationships are top-notch. Just Death didn't quite work for me, but in the end I got over it and enjoyed the book. I did not love the way the story ended, but I know others loved the ending or at least the narration at the ending.
4 stars.

A moral imperative

I've decided that it is imperative that I make some kind of blog post. Do you know that blog "Everyday I Write the Book Blog" (um, I should link, but I'm lazy!)? Well, I think I should rename mine "Everyday I Think about Writing the Book Blog".

In order to get the ball rolling, I thought maybe I'd take it easy and just list the pathetically few books that I have read thus far this year.

1. You on a Diet by Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz. I borrowed this from my dad's wife over Christmas. This book might have been good if it didn't sound so much like what a diet book would sound like if it were written by Dr. Phil. And yes, I know he wrote one, and no, I haven't read it. I can imagine and cringe. 3 stars.

2. The Fireman's Wife by Jack Riggs. I got this through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. It didn't appeal to me. Although it captured the scenery wonderfully (Carolina low country and the mountains), I could not stand the characters or well anything else about it. I think the writing might have been okay. At least I don't remember it being awful. 2.5 stars.

3. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. Wow, I never noticed the word everything in the title before. I think that makes me like the book a little less. Anyway, I finally got around to reading this memoir. Elizabeth Gilbert has a spiritual crisis after going through a divorce and a tough breakup, so she decides to spend a year abroad. Sometimes I like her, and other times I think she is whiny. 3 stars.

4. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. This was for my book group. I was sorry that I missed this book group because I think that this book could have made for a good discussion. I wasn't sure what the author wanted us to think about Hanna. Obviously her illiteracy can't really be her excuse, and pride seemed too simplistic. 3 stars.

5. The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey. No, I am not going to cut up my credit cards, but I do think Ramsey gives a lot of sensible advice. Don't expect the book to teach you how to budget. It focuses more on learning not to overspend and pay off debt so that you can build wealth later. Fully funded emergency fund here we come! 4 stars because a lot of it didn't apply to us.

6. The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle. Better than I expected given the subject matter--boy who is sexually abused by his parents and used in child porn is taken in by his classmate's family. For the most part it felt honest and not overly sentimental. I know some had it on their best lists from last year. It won't make mine, but I don't feel the need to toss the book in the trash either. 3.5 stars.

7. Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moaveni. Another LT Early Review book. A fascinating memoir about an Iranian-American journalist living in Iran during Ahmadinejad's presidency. She meets a nice Iranian man, falls in love, gets pregnant, then has to scramble to get married in a hurry to avoid an encounter with the morality police. In addition to her own story, Moaveni discusses the pieces she is writing for the American media, which give the book a broader view than the standard memoir. I had not read her previous book, Lipstick Jungle, and do not think it negatively impacted my reading. 4 stars.

8. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows. Another book group book. I really liked this. It is quaintly charming. I imagine reading it was a bit like reading Izzy Bickerstaff's columns: a light touch on a serious subject. The letter format was a different way to tackle multiple viewpoints in a book while preserving the central character. 4.5 stars.

9. 84, Charring Cross Road by Helene Hanff. I saw this book frequently mentioned as a close cousin of Guernsey. It is a collection of correspondence between the author, a struggling New York writer, and the employees of a small London bookstore from 1949 to 1969. Rather than trudge through New York only to find inadequate copies of the books she desires, Hanff orders them from a British used book dealer, who doesn't always deliver to her satisfaction. This book is so short that everyone should just read it. You will have a hard time finding someone who uses all caps so effectively. 5 stars.

And that brings me to the present. Now I just have to sweep away the cobwebs and fix my sidebars.

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Breaking Dawn

Stephenie Meyer

2008

754 pp.

First line: "I've had more than my fair share of near-death experiences; it wasn't something you ever really got used to."

This is the fourth and final (?) book of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Like the other books in the series, I found this book compulsively readable. I also found it frequently exasperating and sometimes slow. Like in the other books the plot seemed to move in circles in the beginning and middle before making a mad dash to the end. This book was not an exception.

I don't want to say too much about the plot. I read a spoiler several months ago, and even though the thing that was spoiled happens relatively early in the novel it was still upsetting to me that I knew it going in. Edward and Bella follow through with their agreement from the previous books. Their actions have a surprising consequence, and the rest of the book deals with that and its aftermath.

I recommend this book to fans of the series. I know a lot of people have disliked it. For me it is the weakest book of the series, but it didn't seem to me like such a great drop off in quality that people who enjoyed previous books should avoid it. I think this book deals with some more mature themes, and it is not necessarily appropriate for the same age group as say the first book.

Overall I give it 2.5 stars.

Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway

Driving with Dead People

Monica Holloway

2007

336 pp.

First line: "It changed everything: a school picture printed on the front page of the Elk Grove Courier, the newspaper my father was reading."

Holloway's memoir recounts her difficult childhood in smalltown Ohio. The one bright spot appears to be her friendship with the town mortician's daughter. As she grows up she enters into a string of bad relationships and she asks herself why. It is her sister's breakdown that ultimately reveals the truth about her family and allows her to start her own recovery.

I did not care for this book. Somehow I had got it into my head that it would be funny; the title seems ironically humorous. I had read a review that compared it favorably to The Glass Castle. Even in the beginning it seems like it could be funny. It's not funny. It's harrowing. The Glass Castle is harrowing at times, but still manages to be funny. It seemed like this book tried to be funny sometimes, but didn't quite succeed. For me anyway.

I also didn't care for the way some of the portions that dealt with her sister were handled. The change in point-of-view felt false to me. It's her memoir, and I wanted to from her.

I give this book 2.5 stars. It has 5 stars on amazon and bn.com though, so maybe it's just me.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Cry, the Beloved Country

Alan Paton

1948

312 pp.

First line: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills."

Isn't that just a great first line? I love it, and I think it is a great example of the prose style of this book. Paton had a great voice. This was a wonderful book. The powerful story was supplemented with these great bursts of lyrical exposition that helped to describe the setting and set the scene. I got this book in a big box of Oprah books, most of which I have passed on without reading. I am really glad I read this one.

One of the passages from which the book gets its title:

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the velt with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much." (p.111)

Great description of what can drive a person to apathy and one of my favorite passages:

"There are many sides to this difficult problem. And people persist in dicussing soil-erosion, and tribal decay, and lack of schools, and crime, as though they were all parts of the matter. If you think long enough about it, you will be brought to consider republics, and bilingualism, and immigration, and Palestine, and God knows what. So in a way it is best not to think about it at all." (p.224)

Overall, a 5-star book. Probably my favorite of the year or close to it. I think this is my third book about South Africa this year. The others were Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward and July's People by Nadine Gordimer.

Austenland by Shannon Hale

Austenland
Shannon Hale
2006
194 pp.

First line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirty-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little, and Jane Hayes, pretty enough and clever enough, was certainly thought to have little to distress her."

Plot synopsis: Jane Hayes is a single New Yorker with a disastrous love life. After all, what man can measure up to Mr. Darcy? When her aunt dies and leaves her a trip to an exclusive Austen-based resort, Jane decides to go and try to get Mr. Darcy out of her system once and for all. There she finds herself immersed in Austen's England, which is not quite how she imagined it.

I really cannot find too much to say about this one. It was a cute, fun, read, just as good chick lit should be. It managed to be both predictable and unpredictable at the same time. While not as good as Austen, I recommend it for chick lit readers that also enjoy her work. I am not sure how much fun it would be for someone who was unfamiliar with Jane Austen's work.

Best line: "Jane announced to the empty room, 'If you're listening, Big Brother, I refuse to be Fanny Price.'"

I give it 3.75 stars. For chick lit this is high praise from me. Don't miss the dedication page.

Weekly Geeks #21

I've decided to start doing Weekly Geeks hosted by Dewey over at The Hidden Side of the Leaf.

This week Dewey listed 100 first lines and asked everyone to identify only the ones for which they are 100% sure (no cheating with google!). You can copy from other people's lists once you think you've gotten all the ones that you can.

Unsolved lines:

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.

35. It was like so, but wasn’t.

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded.

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.

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1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (thanks, Brad, by way of softdrink!)
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
7. Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce (thanks, Eva!)
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
10. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
11. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
12. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Tom Sawyer
13. The Trial by Franz Kafka
14. If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
15. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (thanks, Maree!)
16. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
18. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (thanks, Nymeth, by way of Maree!)
19. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (thanks, Susan!)
20. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
21. Ulysses by James Joyce
22. Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (thanks, softdrink!)
23. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
24. City of Glass by Paul Auster (thanks, bookzombie!)
25. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
26. Beloved by Toni Morrison
27. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
28. The Stranger by Albert Camus
29. Waiting by Ha Jin
30. Neuromancer by William Gibson (thanks, Jessi!)
31. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (thanks, Megan!)
32. The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (thanks, Mary, Penryn's friend!
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (thanks, icedream and Penryn!)
39. Paradise by Toni Morrison (thanks, Yasmin!)
40. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
43. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (thanks, Amanda, by way of Shelly!)
44. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
45. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (thanks, Susan!)
47. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis
48. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
50. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
51. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
53. Fahrenheit-451 by Ray Bradbury
54. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (thanks, bookzombie!)
56. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
58. Middlemarch by George Eliot
59. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
61. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maughm (thanks, Tammy!)
62. Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (thanks, Valerie, by way of softdrink!)
64. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
65. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
66. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (thanks, Eva!)
67. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
68. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (thanks, Lenore, by way of Joanne!)
69. Herzog by Saul Bellow
71. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (thanks, melydia!)
74. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (thanks, Susan!)
75. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (thanks, Susan!)
76. The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley (thanks, Lethe!)
77. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (thanks, Susan!)
78. The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (thanks, Katherine!)
79. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (thanks, maree!)
81. Crash by J. G. Ballard (thanks, Susan!)
82. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (thanks, softdrink!)
83. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (thanks, softdrink!)
85. Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (thanks, bookzombie!)
87. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
88. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (thanks, Yasmin!)
89. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (thanks, caite, by way of softdrink!)
90. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (thanks, Susan!)
92. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (thanks, Lana, by way of Megan!)
94. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
96. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood (thanks, Susan!)
97. Orlando: a Biography by Virginia Woolf (thanks, dreamybee!)
98. Changing Places by David Lodge (thanks, penryn!)
99. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
100. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (thanks, icedream!)