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.