Year of the book challenge!

I'm ready to sum up my one-year, 100-book challenge.  It seems a little stupid in retrospect, but at least it made me read something new instead of just picking up the same old junk.  I got rid of a few books that had been hanging around my neck for years, but I added as many more.
The winners were:

The Shelf Discovery books trended out like this:
    Read: 57  Gave up on: 3
    Loved: 3
    Glad I read: 19
    Could have lived without: 32
    Loathed: 3 (plus the 3 I skipped)

My (mostly) apathetic results weren't caused by the books' target audience.  Some of the YA books became new forever favorites; some of the grown-up books had to be skimmed or skipped altogether.  And since a lot of the YA books were short, I didn't waste a whole lot of time on them. 

It was fun to be a kid again.  But next year, I'm going to seriously concentrate on clearing out my shelves.   I have a list (always!) of about 50 books that need to be read, re-read, or discarded.  No excuses!

Starting tomorrow.

Loved

Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, audiobook read by Kerby Heyborne

(I thought the author was a man all the time I was listening to this.  How odd.)

It was adorable!  Is it polite to say that about a book?  I hope so, because I'm saying it.  It's one of those well-written children's books set in an unusual place, a curious time, and peopled with wildly interesting characters.  Moose--the hardheaded boy who loves both baseball and his "little" sister, despite being forced to choose between the two of them for a time.  His autistic sister who has to stay ten years old forever because his mother can't stand the pain of seeing her son grow up and do things that her daughter will never be able to do.  Conniving Piper, the warden's daughter.  Clever Theresa, the eight-year-old welcome wagon.

And Moose's mother and father, simple, hard-working folk who will never give up trying to find help for their daughter's disability.  I like people who don't give up.

(I like Frodo Baggins, too, but that's not the point.)  This one's a jewel.

Cereal with bananas

...is not as good as cereal with sugar and bananas.  Sigh.

                          Domestic Arrangements by Norma Klein

             Wins the award for the worst book cover designed by man--


It reads like this:
"How did the interview go?" said Joshua.
"Okay.  I hope I didn't come off too silly," I said.
Joshua rubbed my breasts.  We had sex.  Then we curled up in blankets in front of the fire.
I really didn't know how I felt about all this.  Dad was clearly wrong.  Our relationship wasn't all about sex.  We talked about lots of things.
Next day I....

Does that give you the idea?  (This thing reads like stereo instructions!)

I was just curious enough that I wanted to skip to the end and be done with it...but it's part of the 100-book Challenge.  And it wasn't quite bad enough to give up on.

Or so I thought.   For a book that was primarily concerned with sex, contraception and love, the only thing vaguely interesting was the narrator's desire to be a "doctor who delivers babies" some day.  She's only fourteen--I guess she never heard of the term obstetrician.   It doesn't matter, though.  Clearly she's going to grow up to be a clueless idiot like the rest of the people in the story.

Lovely lonely Saturday

Washed car; cleaned kitchen; messed up kitchen; cleaned one bathroom and read half of my last book on the 100-book challenge.  I'm so domestic!

Yuki investigating how a Christmas tree ornament magically descended from the tree and became a plaything.

Stupid vegetarian diet

Little good it does to read about how people are suffering needlessly due to poor food choices--when the pinto beans I ate last night are still roiling in my stomach.




Book #99 is On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta


Warning: heavy duty stuff, not for the faint of heart.

I had to stop halfway through this and read some reviews, because I was about to give up on it.   It's challenging--to say the least.  So challenging that I stopped listening to the audiobook production because I couldn't tell if I'd somehow downloaded the chapters out of order.  The paper version used italics to denote the dream sequences and flashbacks.

Now that I've struggled through to the end, I kind of understand the beginning.  Some of it.  Maybe I should save the audiobook and listen to it someday--I think I'd "get it" the second time around. 

Eating like an idiot

The China Study by by T. Colin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell II

Do I feel like an idiot. 

A fat stupid American idiot.  I read Francis Moore Lappe's Diet For A Small Planet a thousand years ago and came to believe, implicitly, in protein combinations.  I experimented with vegetarian eating for a while, but since protein was king, I made sure to combine my beans and corn.  My weak, unevolved human body wasn't capable of nourishing itself without complete (a.k.a. animal) protein.

Then, a couple of years ago, I read Sears' The Zone diet.  At the time, I was interested in losing weight, period.  For losing weight, it's a winner.  You don't even feel hungry.

Now I'm interested in heart health, endurance, and cancer prevention.  And it took me all
these years to question what Big Mother National Dairy Council and Big Papa Animal Torture Organization was feeding me.  In simple, a pack of lies.

It's all I can do to keep from ordering a handful of copies of this book and sending them to everyone I care about.  But I won't--a good example and kindly dropped hint or two will hold more power than any amount of bludgeoning.

Do you know what's the highest praise I can give this work?  It's that early on, it got me thinking about science, research, and honesty, which in turn made me think closely about the contents of the book as I was reading it.  Which meant that any little exaggeration--any hint of inaccuracy--jumped out at me like a hot vegetable.  (No pun intended.)  Places where he states unequivocally that animal husbandry decimates the environment bugged me.  There are many landscapes that are unsuitable for agriculture but can easily nourish goats or rabbits.  Cheap food and unhealthy, but food for the starving nonetheless.

So much for my cheese cubes and sliced (free range) turkey breast.  Pinto beans for supper.

Non-review...skipped book. Shoot me.

Non-review: Flowers In The Attic
I quit, or rather, I refuse.  I will finish the books from Shelf Discovery--I have one more of those on my list.  but I'm not going to read Flowers In The Attic.

Why?  It's dated.  I don't like V. C. Andrews.  I don't like horror in general other than really cool sci-fi horror like The Passage or really well-written horror like 11/22/23.  And above all, I don't like authors who write without humor.

I'll substitute Speak (already reviewed) for it.  It's a little shorter but a whole lot better.

A quick kid's book

Indigo's Star by Hilary McKay

I didn't like this nearly as much as I did Saffy's Angel.  I think the reason was the medium--I listened to Saffy's Angel audiobook and I absolutely loved the reader.      
    Michael, darling!  Don't call me darling.  I'm a driving instructor.

But this one had its funnies.  Rose's increasingly weird letters to her father, trying to get him to come home, tinkled my funny bone.

So, I dunno.  I think I might have liked it more, if listened to.  I have the next book in the series on my table and will try again asap.

Movies to see. Finally.

Couldn't resist seeing Frozen today, with Callie and friends.  Pretty good for a Disney Princess musical.  And yes, the princess's eyes were bigger than her wrists.

500+ pages but back on track

By working only a half day and liberally applying the free time to my reading, I struggled through The Toss Of A Lemon.  It's hard to give so estimable a work less than four stars, but I will.  Because really--as a novel--it didn't work for me.

It was absolutely fascinating, engrossing, interesting and any number of 'ings I might dig out of the theasaurus for synonyms to "way cool."  My beef is with the plot, or lack thereof.    It was a novel that read like a biography, starting at Sivakami's marriage and ending when she was an old lady.   There was never any of that suspense that drives a good story.  There are questions, but not burning ones.  "Will she ever regain closeness with her son?"  "Will her love allow the kids of her daughter to survive their deadbeat dad and apathetic mother?"  "Will anyone ever really how badly their faith in horoscopes screwed up peoples' lives?"  Will she--Sivakami--survive progress without losing her pride?" 

The questions were all answered--sort of--but not convincingly, resoundingly, like they should have been in a novel.  The answers were real life answers--ambiguous and only vaguely satisfying.

Sivakami was a Brahmin and the years of her fictional lifespan would have been roughly 1886-1940, the time of my great-grandparents.  There was nothing like that culture in America.   We were heathens, hooligans worshiping a primitive, punitive god.  Where were our daily devotions?  The making of a puja on a new undertaking?  The ceremonies and blessings?  Such a rich, ancient culture! 

  And one thing blew my mind--there were as many different subcultures within the culture as there were religions in America.  Two people could grow up side by side and live a different life, by different rules.  Wow.

In progress (a good book)

It is odd reading The Toss of a Lemon shortly after reading The Valley of Horses, because I find that the same lengthy descriptions that I criticized in Valley I am admiring in Lemon.   Is it because these are true, or is it just better writing?

Toast? White bread? Sinful!

My family is eating toast for supper.  Devouring it.   Last night I fixed frozen shrimp, tater tots and corn.  They ate it--mostly--but I should have just pulled out a loaf of bread and the margarine.

I really need to start cooking again.

Cats and me

I have a new job description--bowel stimulant.  I get up in the morning; cats use litter box.  I get home in the evening; cats use litter box.  If I slept in one day, would they get constipated?

How to make really tedious traffic seem almost bearable

For some idiotic reason I got started listening to Middlemarch in the car.  Is this like the largest word count of any book in the English language?  Will I be able to keep the CDs from the library long enough to finish it?

The reader confounds me--she goes on and on and on, never needing to clear her throat or correct a misreading.  Never seeming to get tired at the endless roundabouts and dissolutions and meanderous poeticity that the author tacks on to decorate a rather slim story.  It reminds me of an illuminated manuscript--a lot of style and very little substance.

For all that griping, I'm still listening to it.  The CD player does have an off switch--I know where it is.

Followup on Wifey

By the way, I found a foreword for Wifey by Judy Blume and I also read all of the auto-biographical data on her web site.  Norman is not a real person--she says--but many of his characteristics were borrowed from men she knew.  The breakup of her first marriage inspired the book--maybe not the sexual liberation parts, but definitely the ideological liberation ones.  She left the marriage and took her two kids, and I'm sure she believes shedid the right thing.  Maybe the reason she didn't end up Wifey with a decisive, glorious breakup was a sign of the strength of her writing.  She's making us readers write our own endings...and lovely they be.



Meanwhile....

I finished Melanie Martin Goes Dutch by Carol Weston. 

I need to be careful which kids books I choose to read.  Some, like Saffy's Angel, are funny at any age.  And others, like The Great Brain, have a classic charm that wins you over.  But this one wasn't "age appropriate" for me.

I think I'd have adored it when I was younger.  I'd probably have clamored to be taken to the library so I could check out the rest of the series.  But, since I don't really know what I would have thought, I'll refrain from giving it a "star" rating on Goodreads.com.  It's not fair to take a chance on skewing its rating with my old fuddy-duddy opinion.

Blah. So glad when this is over.

After I write my thoughts on Wifey, I'm going to go look at Judy Blume's web site to see if she hated writing the ending as much as I hated reading it.  You know how they describe people as enablers when they allow an abusive person to continue their behavior without challenging it or attempting to prevent it?  There was no "abuse" in this book but there was definitely an enabler...which maybe means, there was abuse.  Isn't it considered abuse if a person continually hurts another's feelings and makes them feel bad about themselves?

I think I just wrote a big fat spoiler, but that's okay.  The book was published in 1978.  Anyone who was going to read it already has.  As usual, the people who might benefit from reading it, won't.  A person as controlling, rigid, and thoughtless as her husband wouldn't recognize himself--if he were capable of seeing how awful he was, he wouldn't be so.

So let me talk about the woman.  IMHO, she gets what she deserves.  I'm sorry for her, truly sorry, but what she needs is to get out, make herself a life, and then see if she wants to go on with this miscarriage, I mean, marriage.  The implication is that she's going to try to work things out gradually, from within.  She's going to try and she's going to fail--every word, phrase, and tone of voice in the husband's last remarks shows that clearly.  He's not going to change.

I'm reminded of the wise phrase--
           You can't change the world.  You can only change yourself.

Enjoying a light mystery

The No, 1 Ladies Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith

I just loved this book.  It seems slow-paced but never drags--it meanders like a springtime walk in the woods.  It only took me a minute to fall in love with Mma Ramotswe and I'm eager to read all her adventures as the first lady private detective in Botswana.  It's not Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty, but who cares?  Sherlock Holmes gets boring when he's always one step ahead of the rest of us.  Mma Ramotswe is right there beside us, drinking a cup of tea and relaxing in the shade of her acacia tree.

Life, interrupted.

The ice came down on Thursday night.  Sometime Friday morning the power went out.  And stayed out.  No episodes of Kevin or Supernatural were viewed.  No one worked a shift at Lowes on Friday or Saturday--we couldn't get the cars down the driveway.  No social life happened for Callie.  No computer time for me.  Nada.

We spent our days reading books, playing games, and huddling under covers.  Sometime on Friday the power came on for a minute or so, just long enough to bring up all our hopes...Nope.   Again Saturday morning...nope.

We managed to scrounge up enough Coleman Fuel to fry bacon and eggs for supper Friday night.  We managed to dig up enough lamp oil to have light for reading, and we had a car with a full battery charge for Nintendo DS's and phones.  Other than those, we lived as an eighteenth century family for one and one-half days.

The power came back on at about four p.m. today, although it's gone off briefly at least four times since then.  Trouble with these newfangled devices--like electricity--is a fellow gets to depending on them.  I should dig up that exact quote but I'm too cold.  Did I mention that the temperature didn't get about 26 all day?  The power has been on for three hours and its...54 degrees in here.  Brrr.

The animals want to know why the stupid humans are keeping it so darn cold--

Time for a new audiobook!

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Disclaimer: I listened to it on the IPod, but for the first time in my audiobook experience, I wish I'd read it on paper.  Because... It dragged. A lot. Before it even reached the halfway point I started muttering under my breath...waiting, endlessly waiting, to find out what "the big secret" was. At times I even said it out loud--
          "Enough already! Tell us the big secret and get on with the story!"

Most infuriating quote ever:
             "But I'll get to that later."
When he finally "got to that", the focus switched to why it was happening and how it happened and that made for an ending of shivering surreality. You'd cry for these poor kids if that wouldn't have meant admitting that they could have been real people in a real world and maybe they were and we just didn't know it!

If I'd been reading the book with my eyes on paper, my pace would have been roughly 4x the speed of the audio version, and I think I'd be giving this book a solid 4 stars--really liked it.

Wouldn't have read if it hadn't been on the list, but...

I substituted Valley Of Horses for The Clan Of The Cave Bear because I'd already read Clan and couldn't bear reading it again.  This one wasn't nearly as bad, just way...too...long.  I expect a writer to do her research but that doesn't mean every single bit of it has to be crammed into the finished work.  There are too many huge, honking descriptive paragraphs that read like non-fiction, which might have been fine if I were reading non-fiction.  Non-fiction is a different style of reading, for me--it's a whole different "attitude" about the material and how I expect it to flow.  This book kept making me switch between the two different styles of reading and it irritated me.

And--a personal quibble--there's such a thing as too many words.  If, for example, you describe a horse as a "small filly the color of hay," then do you later need to say, "...watching the hay-colored horse..."?  Is it possible that the author edited this book simply by adding a bunch of words to enhance the "color" and increase the word count?

In any rate, I more-or-less finished the book and I enjoyed a little of it.  Of the 500 or so words, I read about 300--beginning, end, and some of the middle.   Such careless reading behavior would have been inexcusable if I were ever going to read a sequel, but I'm not.  Cro-Magnum man will have to procreate the world without me.

Book #93

My diet thing is really sucking.  I've having trouble distracting my mind--I really hate the book I'm listening to and I'm not especially pleased with the one I'm reading.   Things should be better soon.
Meanwhile,

When one group of people was given six jams to sample and another group was given twenty-four jams to sample, both groups tasted about the same number of jams.  Thirty percent of the people who had the six-jam array actually bought a jar; but only three percent of the people with the larger array did.

This sums up one of the themes of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz.  Having too many choices confuses us, makes us second-guess our decisions, and makes us ultimately unhappy with our choices.  Other themes of the book deal with comparisons--how we rate ourselves against other people; memory--how we give a higher weight to the end of an experience rather than the whole of it; and adaptation--the way we get used to a good thing and learn to expect it rather than appreciate it.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this book, but I wish it had been 100 pages long instead of 200.  He repeats himself.  Sometimes what I take to be a repetition might actually be a slight alteration of the theme, but such subtle nuances are lost on me.  I keep thinking I'm reading the same thing over and over again.

A couple--but only a couple--of his themes bugged me.
In the chapter, Everything suffers from comparison, he states, "Comparisons are the only meaningful benchmark."  Huh? A benchmark is a standard which is used for comparison.  So the statement is saying, "Comparisons are the only meaningful standards for comparisons?"

He goes on to say that when we evaluate an experience, we always do so by comparing it with other experiences, and that always causes it to suffer by comparison.  Who compares a sunset?  A child's laugh?  A strike in bowling?  I, personally, have seen "the best movie I've ever seen" many times, and I see no inconsistency in that statement.  It is the best.  There are a lot of bests.

I also disagree with the statement in a later chapter:
          "The result of having pleasure turn into comfort is disappointment."

The point he's trying to make is this: buying a new car is thrilling; the first few weeks of driving it makes you happy; after that, it's just comfortable and therefore, boring.  You want a new new car.

Maybe that argument is true of movies--the third time you see a movie, the thrill is gone--but I'm not sure it's true of things you use, like cars or clothes or computers.  Maybe it's just me, but I'm pleased every time I start my car and hear the quiet hum; put on my hoodie and feel comfy; turn on my computer and see the welcome screen.  The pleasure will only vanish when the owned thing starts to wear out.

Maybe my satisfaction is a result of my advanced age. I expect that the younger you are, the more relevant this book will be.

Monday, wasn't expecting much

Seventeen Against The Dealer by Cynthia Voigt.

I'm puzzled about this one.  I know and love the Tillerman family so much that I couldn't help devouring it, but it left me feeling a little sad.  I wouldn't have expected a happy, tidy, Little Women-type of ending.  I wouldn't have been happy with one if she'd given it to me.  So I guess I got just what I expected.  But it wasn't enough.

Is she going to write another two books, at least?  To carry on Maybeth and Sam's stories a little?  I sure hope so.

Good movie alert

Catching Fire--even in the front row, thoroughly enjoyable.  Disturbing trend in movie-making to cast children as killers.






I struggled through to the end of My Sweet Audrina by V. C. Andrews.  Just for the reading challenge.

On Goodreads, one star means "didn't like it" and two stars means "it was okay."  So I'm going to give this one-and-one-half stars.  In all honesty, I didn't like it.  I wasn't interested in reading a story about a freakshow family, two messed up girls (and then a third) who'd seen so little of normal human love that they couldn't help but grow up functionally insane.  A few people showed a perverted kind of love that caused more hurt than pleasure; everyone else seemed to hate everyone and be determined to live their lives as miserably as possible.  The one person who was somewhat sane turned out to be, "a brutal, evil man when it all came down to it."

Other than the fact that I disliked it royally, it wasn't a poorly written story...if that's what you're interested in.  I suspect that most of its popularity came from teenagers who snuck it into the house in their book bags and searched out the dirty parts with flashlights under the covers.  Everyone and everything seems to be about sex, and even the most normal of couplings are a little unclean.

To sum up--if my teenage daughter were going to sneak something forbidden off  my bedside table, I'd vastly prefer she found a Sandra Brown "romance" there.  At least the sex is fun.