Book 12 of 52: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Okay... I've gotten myself out of my whiny woe is me fest (mostly by making some seriously awesome lists related to moving... yes, I recognize I need help).  I also, finally finished this book (4 days after it was due... don't worry, I renewed it today so hopefully I won't get charged for it).  I now have 2 books to read my next book before it's due.

This book was really interesting.  Like really, really interesting.  It's one of the most well-written books I've read in awhile, but it's also a book I couldn't in good conscience recommend to anyone I know.  In Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides tells the story of a hermaphrodite and the path that leads to this boy discovering that he is in fact a boy and not the girl he spent the first 15 years of his life thinking he was.  Enough said for way I couldn't recommend it to anyone.  Like I said though, the writing was really really captivating... and so was the story line.  Who didn't struggle in middle school with feeling like they didn't belong?  Who didn't at some time wonder if they were maybe supposed to be someone else? 

The most interesting part of this book though, was the narrator telling the story of how he ended up with 2 recessive genes that caused him to be a hermaphrodite.  He tells the story of how his grandparents met and got married and how his parents met and got married (hint, there's a lot of inbreeding).  The author is able to very convincingly tell these stories through the narrator. 

Overall, I liked the book.  It's definitely not a book for everyone, but the English major in me really enjoyed the themes it explored and how well it was written.

Next up though... back to the YA lit.  WOOHOO!  Then my Nook should be here and I'll have some fun with classics (I may or may not have 118 books ready to load onto my Nook when it gets here... gotta love the free classics).

Sometimes...

Sometimes I wish authors would all collaborate and decide not to publish anything new for a year.  Wouldn't it be nice to get caught up on all the books on your to-read list without new books being written and printed?

Sometimes I wish I wasn't a compulsive list maker.  Even if authors and publishers didn't print anything new for a year I would still discover a whole realm of books to read that I hadn't looked at yet... just because I need to make a list (Have I mentioned recently that I'm extremely Type A??  My children are probably going to hate me for that.).

Sometimes I wish I could just reread all my favorites from when I was younger without feeling guilty because there are so many books I've never read.  I really want to re-read the Anne of Green Gables series, Little House on the Prairie series, The Kingdom and the Crown series, Little Women series... the list goes on and on.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I also have over 120 books on my to-read list I feel guilty whenever I think of re-reading those books.  I tell myself that this year, once I hit my goal of 52 books then I'll treat myself by reading all of those books again.

Sometimes I wish I had never even thought of going to graduate school because then I would feel like I had a whole lifetime to catch up on my reading rather than trying to cram it all into the 18 months before I hopefully start grad school (and then spend the next 2-6 years with my to-read list growing ever longer... the curse of being an English major... no matter how much you read, your to-read list will never get any shorter).

Sometimes I hope and pray, that if I'm good enough, I'll get an eternal assignment in that big library that I just know exists in heaven (I know we're going to be busy and all, but we're still going to be able to have some time for reading... right?).  I mean... someone has to catalogue all the books?  Unfortunately, my to-read list would grow impossibly long since since I'll have access to millions and millions of books I'd never heard of.  Fortunately, all the worthless/crappy books wouldn't be allowed there AND I'll have all of eternity to get caught up. 

Sometimes though, I am so grateful to live at this time in history where it is so easy to have access to books!!  Sure, there are times when I think that I'll never have enough time to read all the books I want to, I also feel incredibly blessed that I have access to pretty much any book I could ever want to read.  Could you imagine living before the printing press?  Or heck, even in the 1800s?  I love the fact that I live across the street from a rather good library (and that I'm still going to live across the street from it when we move!) and if that library doesn't have the book I want, I can get my husband to check it out from the BYU library (I may or may not steal his ID card before he goes on his internship so I can check out books there during the summer).

What do you sometimes hope for?

Happy Early Birthday to Me!

I would like to start off by saying that I am fully aware of the fact that my birthday isn't for another 3 weeks, but sometimes you just need to start the celebrations early... so I did.  It may also have something to do with the fact that the day after my birthday we get the keys to our new apartment and once that happens we'll be busy packing stuff up, buying practical stuff like a washer and dryer, and moving stuff over... so there will be no birthday celebrations after my birthday.

Last night, after many hours, days, and weeks spent in deliberation, I bought a Nook!  Barnes and Nobles sells certified, pre-owned Nooks at a bit of a discount, so I bought one!  In just a few short weeks (or hopefully less) it'll be here!

I decided to go with a Nook mostly due to the fact that it gives me more options.  The Kindle (as much as I love it) doesn't support ePub format, which means there are a lot of books that aren't accessible to you if you have a Kindle.  The Nook on the other hand, does support ePub format.  The best part about it is the fact that the Provo library (and I think all libraries in Utah) have a eBook component, so I can borrow relatively new books using my Nook just like I'd check them out from the library!  This is really important if you'd prefer not to spend oodles of money buying books. 

The biggest reason I'm excited about this purchase though?  I no longer have to spend hours before any trip agonizing about what books to take with me on a trip and how many books I'll realistically read on a trip.  I can just make sure my Nook has some interesting books and I'm good to go!  Yay for not needing an extra bag just for books (you only think I'm exaggerating)!

Once it arrives and I get to play with it I'll let you know how I like it.  Hopefully I'll love it!

What I've Been Reading Lately

So much for being good about updating this thing... the midwinter blahs definitely set in around mid February.  I've been reading a lot, but not too much else.  My recent bout of strep throat/laryngitis probably didn't help to much either (is it bad if I thought strep was just a kid's illness since I haven't had it since 6th grade?).

Anyways, here's what I've been reading lately.

Book 6 of 52:  People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I loved this book!  It was everything I love in a book: a slight conspiracy theory, jumps back and forth between multiple plots, slightly fragmented, a little mystery, and of course a little romance.  I also have to make a confession about this book.  Part of the reason I liked it so much is because this book talks a lot about Jewish history and I have a slight obsession with Jewish history.  If I had to be born into a family of a different religion, I would like to be born into a Jewish family.  I love the fact that I have an ancestor way back there who was Jewish (unfortunately it was a male so I can't claim to be Jewish in any way shape or form).  There's just so much history and culture in the Jewish religion to be proud of!  Sure, there are not so good things as well, but could you imagine growing up with the stories of the Old Testament and knowing that your family took part in that?  I just think it's phenomenal!  Hopefully I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Anyways, end of confession, this book tells the story of a modern day woman who is a book preserver and is called in to verify the authenticity of a an old Jewish haggadah (the book used to tell the story of Passover every year).  She finds a few random items in the book and starts wondering how they got their.  The rest of the story goes back and forth telling the story of these items and how they got into the book at various points throughout history as the book was created and also how the woman is researching the items in the present day. 

Is it worth reading?  YES!  This author tells a very good story, and this story is worth telling!

Book 7 of 52: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

This is another very good book.  It has a fragmented story line about this one man's life.  It's very interesting to see how it all comes together at the end. 

Is it worth reading?  I enjoyed it and it does have some very pretty passages.

Book 8 of 52: The Lost Hero  by Rick Riordan

If you enjoyed the Percy Jackson books, you'll love this book!  It's a new series that uses many of the same characters from the previous series and introduces some new ones as well.  It's a YA book, so it's a very enticing read.  Riordan definitely knows how to get kids reading.

Is it worth reading?  Absolutely!  This book, like the Percy Jackson books, made me feel like I was learning something about the Greek/Roman gods.  This book would be great for a kid who's learning about Greek history in school!

Book 9 of 52: The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

This is the first book in the Kane Chronicles by Riordan.  It's much like the Percy Jackson series, except it talks about Egyptian gods.  The first book seems to move a little slow while he's setting up everything, but the second half is action packed!  In case you haven't noticed I've developed a bit of a thing for books by Riordan and have decided I feel comfortable buying any YA book by him without feeling like I need to read it first to see if I like it.  There are very few authors I feel comfortable doing that with, but Riordan has proven he can write good stories consistently!

Is it worth reading?  I think so!  If you're looking for a good easy read, this is definitely a good one!

Book 10 of 52: Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

I've been on a bit of a YA kick lately, so this is another YA book.  I really liked it.  The book tells the story of two girls in the Asian steppes a long, long time ago.  It kind of has a Repuzel-esque story line, but much more interesting.

Is it worth reading?  If you like retellings of fairy tales, you'll probably like this book.  It's also a fairly quick read.

Book 11 of 52: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

I just finished this book today.  It's a non-fiction book about recent discoveries about life in the Americas pre-Columbus.  If you're LDS and reading this book, you'll definitely have to put away your Book of Mormon timeline in order to appreciate the book--otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy trying to decide how everything fits together.  I really enjoyed the book though, it took me awhile to get through (nonfiction and illness do not go well together!), but it was definitely worth it.  I feel like I learned a lot not only about the Indian populations pre-Columbus, but also how they interacted with the environment and what that means for us today.

Is it worth reading?  Yes and no.  It's definitely a nonfiction book, so if you don't enjoy those, I would stay the heck away from it.  However, if you're interested in the topic then it's definitely worth reading.

If you've made it this far, Congratulations!  Now go get yourself some ice cream as a reward!

Book 5 of 52: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

This book begins a group of books that I'm really excited about--books about books (yes, I have fully accepted that I am a major reading nerd).  It's also the first medium length book I've read this year.

I loved this book.  I thought it was very well written and I fell deep into the mystery of the book.  The premise of the novel is that a very reclusive author who has never told her true life's story invites a young woman (who loves 19th century literature and has written a few biographies about obscure authors of the time period) to come and hear her life story and write it.  This book has everything a good 19th century romance would have: love, madness, mystery, deaths, old creaking houses falling apart.  It reminded me a bit of Jane Eyre (which plays a big part in this novel). 

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking about what a great book this could be for a creative writing class or an Introduction to the Novel class.  The author uses so many different writing devices to make her story flow together.  There's great use of symbols, foreshadowing, allusions, etc. that are fairly easy to see and define as different things.

I'd be really interested to read more by this author to see if she has other books similar to this one.

Is it worth reading?  Yes.  Especially if you enjoyed Jane Eyre or other 19th century literature (Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, etc). 

Book 4 of 52: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This book wasn't thought provoking in and of itself.  Instead, it sparked that never ending debate in my head about what is children's literature.  This book was written for children, but I have a hard time picturing a child reading it (if you read it as a child or know someone who read it as a child I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts on it!). 

Here's the thing.  It's written at an appropriate reading level for children.  It has cute pictures children would enjoy in it.  The narrator's voice is age appropriate for children.  The subject matter just doesn't seem appropriate for children. 

This book is primarily about the travels of a boy who is only referred to as "the prince" or "the little prince" throughout the book.  He's from a teeny-tiny planet inhabited solely by him, but one day he decides to travel.  He travels to several other teeny-tiny planets before ending up on Earth and meeting a man stranded in the desert (the narrator).  Long story short, the little prince causes the narrator to reevaluate his life. 

Ultimately, it feels more like a book aimed at helping adults rediscover their inner-child.  If that was the author's intent, I think he succeeded. 

Is this book worth reading?  Sure.  It'll only take you an hour or two to read it, and you won't feel like you've wasted that time at the end of reading the book.

Book 3 of 52: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

I really loved this book.  It was everything I didn't find in Anna Karenina  and The Alchemist.  It had an interesting plot.  It had subplots.  All the characters were well developed.  It caused me to pause and reflect on my life.  All told, it was probably the best piece of literature I've read in awhile.

This 985 page book tells the story of a group of families and people in medieval England.  The overarching story is the building of a cathedral in the village of Kingsbridge, but there are lots of little detours into the lives of the people involved.  There are intrigues and love affairs, marriages and deaths.  Since the story stretches out over a period of 35 years, by the end of it you really feel like you know the characters better than you know some of your neighbors.  You find yourself hoping that they'll succeed in life because you've been watching them since they were 12 or 13 years old.

Unfortunately, something happened about halfway through it that will keep me from buying the book.  My mother-in-law saw me reading it and asked me to let her know what I thought about it when I finished the book.  Once that happened, I realized one very glaring problem with the book--the author is very... how should I put this... very open about his characters' sexuality.  Not in that any of them are homosexual, but he's very open about the physical relationships between different people.  I kept thinking about whether or not I could recommend this novel to her (or anyone else for that matter).  The explicit scenes are fairly rare and you usually have ample warning that they're approaching so that you can skip over them.

Ultimately, I kept remembering the poster below.  It really summed up my feelings about the book--It's great except for the bad parts.  Do I think it's a good novel?  Absolutely.  Do I think it's worth reading?  More or less... if you're stuck having to choose between Anna Karenina and The Pillars of the Earth, the later would win every time.  Would I ever recommend it to anyone though?  No.  The sexually explicit scenes are for the most part gratuitous (I'm sure the author would vehemently disagree with me on that though).  They could have easily been shortened or taken out without losing too much.  Due to that, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this book to someone.  There are some instances (such as in the book Deerskin by Robin McKinley) where the explicit scenes are absolutely necessary to move the book forward.  This isn't one of those books though.

Where do you draw the lines in terms of what books you'll recommend or buy?

Next Book: The Little Prince

Book 2 of 52: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This is actually the book that made me decide to get back into writing in my blog.  It was a thought provoking book, but probably not for any of the reasons the author intended.  After reading it I felt like I needed to rage and storm to someone... a week later and the violent reaction has left me, but I still feel like I need to share my side of the story.

Let me start off by saying that this book was the perfect book to read after Anna Karenina.  It was everything Anna Karenina wasn't--it was short, thought provoking, and had a very limited cast of characters.  I read it in one day (and I even went to work for 8 hours that day)!

Let me also say, that this book has a great message.  Long story short, this book is an allegory about the importance of finding and fulfilling your life's work.  What I like about this message is that the author recognizes that not everyone's life work is something big and grand and he says so fairly directly.  Sometimes people get it into your head that if you are a mother and a homemaker you must have unfulfilled dreams.  That may be true for some people, but for other people, being a wife and homemaker is fulfilling all their dreams.

Now that I have all of that out of the way, I have to get into my beef with this book.  Part of the premise of the book is that those who are striving to fulfill their life's work stand a much greater chance of having their heart broken because they have more emotionally invested in their work compared to those who are just slogging through life.  I believe this is a true concept, which is why this book bugged me.

For me, there is nothing more satisfying than finding some little gem in a book.  I feel about reading the same way other people feel about running or starting a new business and succeeding in it.  You could almost say that my life's work is to read all the best books in the world (I'm quite aware that this is impossible in this life, but that's why I'm hoping that if I'm really good Heavenly Father will call me to work in that big library I feel quite certain exists in heaven).  This book is an allegory, but it's a very thinly veiled allegory.  Unlike The Chronicles of Narnia which are enjoyable whether you read them as a child's fantasy novel or an allegory of the history of the world, The Alchemist is only enjoyable if you agree with the author's message.

As a result, I was a little disappointed when I finished the book.  Sure, I felt like I had gained something useful, but I can think of half a dozen novels whose messages will stick with me for far longer due to the work I put into understanding the message.

Is it a book I'd recommend to people?  Absolutely.  I think it's a book worth reading and I think that most people aren't going to be bothered by the things that bothered me.  Would I ever want to own a copy of it?  Probably not.

Can you tell I'm anxious to get back into an English program?

Book 1 of 52: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Word to the wise, don't pick an 800+ page Russian novel to kick off a goal to read a book a week.  It will take longer than a week to read.  I heard a theory once that the reason Russian novels are so long is that the authors had all winter to write their books and the readers had all winter to read the books.  As a result, they could write incredibly complex, long novels and still sell them.  After reading this book I totally believe that theory.

It literally took me a month to finish this book.  Sure, I read the entire Percy Jackson series for one of the weeks in there, but really... it took me a month.  To be perfectly honest, it didn't really inspire me when I was reading it and it doesn't really inspire me now.  Maybe it's just that the bar was set too high.  Anna Karenina is one of those books that you always hear about in connection with Literature.  The kind you know you're supposed to read and think about and then write a 20 page paper about.  You imagine that you're going to learn the secret to life by reading this book because heck, if it's so thick it had better have the secret to life hidden in its pages. 

Unfortunately, I felt like this book was the opposite of everything that it was supposed to be.  The story dragged on and on.  I felt like the author was so busy telling the story that he couldn't go into any depth about what was going on--it was a mile wide and an inch deep.  As a result, I didn't feel like it raised any thought provoking questions.  I was just glad when the book ended and I could check it off my list.  I can now say I've read Anna Karenina.

Don't you hate it when books disappoint you like that?

2011 Reading Goals and an Update

Last year I had pretty ambitious reading goals for 2010.  I was going to read all the books I own that I hadn't read yet and read all the books on my to-read list that had been on there since before 2010.  I think I finished about 25% of my goals.  I read all the books that I owned, but then Andy brought all his books from his parents' house and I never got around to reading the ones he owned that I hadn't read yet (the entire Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites series).

And as for getting mostly caught up on my to-read list?  Well... let's just say it didn't happen... or come anywhere close to happening.  I am firmly stuck in 2008 (with a few leftovers from 2007).  Try as I might, reading over 100 books in one year is just too much for even me to handle.

So this year, I thought through my goals for reading before I made any.  I didn't set any grand goals to get completely caught up with my to-read list.  I didn't vow to read the entire College Board reading list (way too many books that don't look interesting).  Instead, I set what I think is a fairly achievable goal.

While at a recruiting dinner for my husband fall semester, I talked with the campus recruiter about books.  She mentioned that a few years ago a friend of hers challenged her to read a book a week and that she's kept that challenge ever since.  I was shocked.  Here I was complaining that I never had time to really read a book, when she was able to read a book a week with a super busy schedule.  I decided then and there that if she could do it, so could I.

So there you have it folks.  My goal for this year is to read a book a week.  Theoretically it's going to be the next 52 books on my Goodreads to-read list, but we'll see how that goes.  I'm already failing miserably, so if you want a bit of a challenge for yourself, I'd encourage you to join me.  If you can't commit to a book a week, try a book every two weeks, or a book every month.  You could pick a topic that you want to learn more about, read the classics, or just pick up books at random from the library shelves and read them.  You could read them on your computer, your Kindle, in paperback, or in hardback.  Whatever you do, just read.

What's your reading goal for 2011?