Oh bother…I forgot to update when I switched from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to The Silver Chair. The dates listed on the Book List are just about what I think is right. I’m getting ready to start on The Last Battle, the final novel in The Chronicles of Narnia. The books have been really great, and I wish I had read them when I was younger. They are great now, but I think I would have found them even more awesome as a kid. I’m also glad to know the stories other than just The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I had seen the BBC version of in grade school.
I would recommend them as good reading material for reading to/with grade schoolers, but I really recommend The Hobbit before anything else. I’m biased.
Book #26 is coming up soon, and that will mean I’m halfway to 52!
I finished Devilish by Maureen Johnson tonight. I surprised myself by reading about 130 pages of it in one sitting and finishing it that way, actually. Not to say that it wasn’t a good book, but I was really just motivated to move on to book #24, The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis. A lot of people who know me have found it hard to believe that I’ve never read The Chronicles of Narnia, if the topic has ever arisen. I can’t really explain why I’ve never read the series, as I’m a huge fantasy fan, but it is the truth that I just haven’t read them yet.
Needless to say, I’m pretty excited to get started on them…C. S. Lewis was a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, after all. Any one friends with Tolkien is good in my book. I have a slight (okay, maybe more than slight) obsession with The Lord of the Rings series. I’ve read quite a few articles that cite Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship as something that shaped works by both of them, as they would discuss their ideas and progress. I’m secretly sad that both authors passed before I was born.
Ahem. Anyway, I’ll be leaving on vacation soon, and I hope to bring a few of the Narnia books along for the long plane rides!
I did finally wrap up American Gods, which I loved. I moved on to Now & Then by Jacqueline Sheehan, a book that was lent to me by a co-worker, as she had seen me reading Lost & Found in January. She actually gave me the book to read earlier this year, but I hadn’t read it until now. Needless to say, I’m glad it was good, because I read it quickly and I can finally get it back to my co-worker! I’m sure she probably thinks I’ve either lost or stolen her book at this point.
The book itself centers around Anna O’Shea and her nephew, Joseph. A series of events end up sending them back through time to 1844 Ireland. The two wash up on separate stretches of beach in the past, and have vastly different experiences. Anna finds herself with an Irish family, while Joseph ends up being taken into the home of a wealthy Englishman. The advantages and disadvantages of living in 1844 are both brought up, and even though a good deal of the book takes place in 1844 Ireland, it still left me dying to visit 2010 Ireland (not that I didn’t want to visit Ireland before!).
I’m moving on next to The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer, just because I feel like I should. I read and liked the Twilight series. However, if I’m being perfectly honest, I haven’t been all that excited about this book being released. What I do find interesting is the actual concept of taking a minor character in one of the books of a series and expanding on her personal back story. I’m looking forward to see how it is and how it works into the “bigger picture” of the Twilight series.
On an unrelated note, I am going back to school this fall and I’m so excited! I just had to share that.
Okay well almost a month has passed, but I’m still reading the same book. I’m sure it isn’t smart of me to be picking a few long books to read during the challenge, especially when I’ve been having limited time to read. It really is no excuse, but I have started going to the gym in the past couple months, and I have really been trying to get up there at least four nights a week lately.
The good news is that I will be going on a vacation soon and I plan on spending some quality time with a book during my break from normal life. I have been debating buying a Kindle to make it easier to bring books with me when I travel, but as much as I love to travel, I unfortunately don’t have the opportunity to do it as much as I’d like anymore. With that in mind, I don’t know if I can justify the expense. Plus, I really like the smell of books. Oddly enough, I’ve heard quite a few people say the same thing. I guess that is one thing that a book lover really cherishes.
So I’m still reading American Gods, but I’m really enjoying it. Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap it up soon and move on to the next book in queue – and then maybe there will be less time between updates!
I meant for my “update to follow” to be May 7th, but life gets in the way and here I am. Okay, so really, I just have a bad memory and I’m good at procrastinating. especially when I feel like the only people reading it are the people who only read it because they are nice and they know it makes me feel good when they tell me they read my blog. I have good people around me!
Anyway, I finished Spooky Little Girl by Laurie Notaro on the 6th, and I loved it. I loved it more than any other book I have read in a while, and I think everyone should read it. For being a book about death, it manages to have realistic emotions for the (fantastical) situation and not completely be a Debbie Downer (*cough*WheretheWildThingsAremovie*cough*). I am usually easily depressed when the topic of death is brought up, and this book has it main stage – and I never felt too down. Most of the time, I was laughing to myself, which is a usual occurrence while reading Notaro for me. Also, for those who liked Ruby Spicer in Notaro’s first novel, she is back in this one! It was a good role for her, too. Glad to see how she is getting on now (and find out WTF happened to her).
After Spooky Little Girl, I read a little bit of fluff from the Morganville Vampires series, by Rachel Caine. The newest novel, Kiss of Death, was good. Let’s face it, most of the vampire novels I read aren’t because they’re masterpieces. If there is a decent story, I’ll read them. I enjoy the Morganville series because of the complex structure of the town of Morganville, and the main four characters are all likable. Plus, the main love story is not a human/vampire forbidden love drama – which is also nice, just because it’s out of the norm for vampire novels right now.
Next up is American Gods by Neil Gaiman…and I’m really going to have to put my reading cap on to get through this one and keep on track. I think I’m falling a little behind, so I’m going to need to pick up the pace if I want to hit 52!
Spooky Little Girl was so good. I couldn’t put it down at the end, and now it is 1:15 am on a Thursday morning.
Must sleep. Update to follow.
Laurie Notaro is the nicest (and most funny) author I have ever met. That said, I have not met a whole lot of professional writers. I’m pretty sure that if I went around meeting more authors, Laurie Notaro would still be at the top. A few friends and I road-tripped up to Chicago on the 14th and met Laurie Notaro at a reading and book signing at the Borders on Clark Street. Not only was her reading hilarious, but she took time to talk to (and show interest in what they said) each person in line. Between meeting her and just falling in love with being in Chicago/Ikea, it was a really fantastic trip. The only issue I had with it was it was too short. Ah, Chicago (and Ikea), we shall meet again soon.
In related news, I just wrapped up reading Laurie Notaro’s first novel, There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell, and tonight I will be starting her second novel, and the subject of her reading/signing last week, Spooky Little Girl. (Slight) Chance did a great job of crossing over the same humor and charm from Notaro’s non-fiction essay collections into novel form. I was really pleased with this one, and I can’t wait to start Spooky Little Girl tonight.
My nephew was born this week! I really couldn’t be more proud of him. He is the cutest, most awesome baby I have ever met. Just to show him how much I love him, I gave him his very own copy of The Hobbit for his future reading – it is never too early to share Middle-earth. I hope he enjoys it one day just as much as I do…or at least a fraction as much as I do, because that would still be a lot.
One of the bonuses of spending about seven hours in a hospital waiting for a baby to come (when you aren’t the parent) is that you have a lot of time to read. I got through a lot of Paper Towns in that waiting room, and I finished it up yesterday morning. It is a really great book to help you re-evaluate the way you look at the people around you, and even the people you know of who aren’t directly a part of your life. I would definitely recommend it. It also makes me want to add in a book of poetry at some point during the Challenge.
I’ve moved on to There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell by Laurie Notaro. I’ve read four of her creative nonfiction books, but this is my first chance to sit down and read the novel she released a few years back. If you have never read anything by Laurie Notaro, you need to. I’m serious. My friend Anne lent me a couple of her books when we lived together in college because she is Anne’s favorite author, and I’m so glad she did. Her work is easy to relate to, intelligent, and hilarious – a combination of attributes which I have not often found in one book at one time. I am going with Anne and Brittany to a Laurie Notaro reading and book signing, and I would say that I couldn’t be more excited, but it is possible to be way more excited, just ask Anne.
I finally finished up A Reliable Wife, and the whole book is totally worth it. It may not end in the happiest, most expected, or most wanted of ways, but it ends in a way that I felt some sort of satisfaction and closure with. I did grow to care about Ralph and Catherine by the end, but I was glad that Robert Goolrick didn’t change them in ways that felt like the cheap scene in a feel-good movie where the evil character realizes the error of his/her ways and quickly goes about finding redemption to make for a happily ever after.
After I wrapped up A Reliable Wife, I relaxed for a bit with a copy of the first volume of the graphic novel adaption of Twilight. It was a good, quick read. Definitely nice to read something light and quick. I admit, I’m a Twilight fan, they’re like literary drugs – If you get started and you like them, you’re hooked and stuck reading until the end of the fourth novel, whether you like it or not at that point.
Next up is Paper Towns by John Green, a book that one of my roommates has been wanting me to read for a while. I’m honestly not even sure what it is about, but I’ll be starting it tonight before going to sleep. Hopefully I’ll be able to read it this week and move on to a Laurie Notaro book before going to one of her reading/signings in a couple weeks! I just have to pick out which one to read…
This must really be the week to slap me across the face with plot twists. Although some of them I probably should have seen coming, I didn’t. Most of them come from working on catching up with Lost, so by the time it wraps up this spring, I’ll be ready to watch the series finale when it airs. The last thing I need is to have invested all this time (and brain power) into a show for some yahoo on the internet to post the ending on Facebook or Twitter or something and I accidentally read it.
Getting back on track, the other twist to catch me off guard, is in A Reliable Wife. I’m between 1/2-2/3 of the way through at this point, and despite the foreshadowing that I now see, the latest chapters threw me for a loop. Between those chapters and watching Lost, I was beginning to worry my brain was starting to just turn to mush. At least in Lost, I like some of the characters. Even though I want one of the characters to end up happy, I don’t even particularly like him. I’m hoping at some point, someone starts developing a few more redeemable traits. Despite what I just made it sound like, this book is pretty good! I’m hoping I can wrap it up sometime in the near future to move on to the next, though. My book pile keeps getting larger, and I’m taking forever to get through this book…Lost isn’t really helping my cause at this point, but if I tried to ignore it and read instead of finding out what happens, I would just be thinking about Lost while reading, which I’m pretty sure isn’t helpful either.
Oh well, no worries. I’ll get through the 52 before the year is out! After all, it is the last season on right now…