So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading
And I am blogging about this book by Sara Nelson, the story of her year reading as much as she could, as my 100th logged book this year. Yay me!
This book is not just a book log, though. It's the story of the romance of reading, the experience of reading. It's not the log of the books themselves, but of the experience. It is an immensely satisfying book not because I've read a ton of the books that she read, but because I could relate to how she felt while she was reading.
This is not a book you should read if you are not a gigantic book nerd. It is entirely about one woman's relationship with reading and books. I think part of why I liked it so much is that Sara's husband is not a huge book nerd. Although Jamie reads a lot more than her husband does, there were a lot of similiarities that made me feel kind of better about not marrying an equally book-obsessed guy. It's probaby just as well, since if he read as much as I do we'd probably never eat, but there are moments when I wish he'd get a little more enthusiastic about reading some of the stuff I read.
He would not like this book, though, I don't think. That's ok. Sometimes I like that books are all mine and no matter how much our lives intersect, I can still escape into my own world.
100 books in a year. Sure, half of them were probably YA books, but still. That's pretty darn good.
The Tightwad Gazette
This is not a book that there is a lot to say about - it's a collection of newsletters that was written for six years, full of tips about how to live frugally. And while I did snag a couple of good tips, it's (a) set up mostly for families in a lot of places, (b) extremely outdated - especially the lengthy article about why personal computers aren't really very economical and quite often a word processor will do fine, and (c) way more hardcore than I can be bothered to be. Still, interesting to read simply to see how much money I could save if I weren't so damn lazy.
Saving Francesca
by Marlena Marchetta. This is a book that a lot of people have recommended to me over the years, both online and in real life. I read another book by this author,
Looking for Alibrandi, and I was severely underwhelmed by it. Still, people assured me that this one was better, and they were quite right.
Set in Australia, this is the story of a girl who has recently begun attending what was previously an all-boys school. As if that isn't trouble enough, her mother has sunk into what appears to be an endless depression.
What I liked most about this book was the development of Francesca's relationships with the other girls at her school. I have always loved and probably always will love books about a group of girlfriends. I like movies about it, too. Those have always been my favourites - my favourite book of all time is
Look Through My Window by Jean Little, about the development of a friendship between two girls. Part of it is that it's one of the things in books I find most consistent with my real life. I have had many best friends in my life, and I love reading about that relationship because it's one that I think is often hard to capture. People know the shortcuts for romantic love but I think the bonds of friendship between two girls are harder to describe and put into words. So that was really why I loved this book so much.
It also reminded me of another of my all time favourites,
Feeling Sorry for Celia, which is also...about two girls becoming best friends. (And oh, it's glorious. The relationship between the two girls in that book is fantastic.)
The portrayal of Francesca's mother's depression is also quite well done, and I like that it wasn't neatly wrapped up at the end as stories about depression often are. I wasn't so impressed with the "depression doesn't need to be treated!" angle that the book occasionally took, but I think they ended up with a mostly satisfying portrayal.
So. Good book. Much better than
Looking for Alibrandi, in my eyes. A good YA book for a fairly wide audience, I think. (Plus, there are Buffy discussions! That always improves a book.)
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
A book by Shyam Selvadurai, for my YA Book Group.
This book is the story of a Sri Lankan boy whose Canadian cousin comes to visit him, throwing his life into somewhat of a tailspin. It was chosen in conjunction with Maya Running, and there are distinct and obvious comparisons.
This book, however, was much better. First of all, it didn't suffer from the unclear genre situation - it set itself up to be one kind of book and stayed that type of book throughout. Secondly, the characters were given much more depth. The Canadian cousin could have been fleshed out a little more, but Amrith, the main character, is pretty 3-dimensional and quite sympathetic.
The story is relatively simple - over the course of a visit from a cousin he'd never met, Amrith comes to some conclusions about himself and discovers that he's gay. Of course, being that this is set in Sri Lanka, it's a significantly more complicated situation than that.
That's the basic crux of the story - there are other details but they are mostly incidental to the main concept. There some interesting side notes about family, friends, the nature of love, etc, but overall it's a simple story that's told quite well. (I shouldn't say simple because that makes it sound like it's this easy thing that's dealt with, and it isn't. But it's told in an uncomplicated fashion.)
Good book, and could lead to good discussions. It was also a very interesting look at Sri Lankan culture, which is not one I'm very familiar with.
Maya Running
This is a book by Anjali Banerjee that I read for my YA book group meeting this month. It's a quick read (as many YA books tend to be), and it's pretty good. It's about an Indian girl who lives in Manitoba and feels somewhat like an outcast as a result of her ethnicity, and it's a cute story. Her cousin Pinky comes to visit from India and, naturally, all hell breaks loose.
It's not a bad story but I found it a little one dimensional. I never got much of a sense of her daily life, or the traditions of the culture that she was upset by, apart from the now-standard embarrassing ethnic food in the lunch room scene.
The mid-way point of the novel features Maya, the main character, being granted wishes by Ganesh, the Elephant Hindu God. While I don't have a problem with that sort of concept, it felt a little bit out of nowhere to me. Sure, that's how it felt to Maya too, but it seemed like a perfectly normal book was trucking along nicely and then all of a sudden we were into magic realism.
The first half of the book was fleshed out quite nicely, with a lot of detail, and then things sort of went downhill about half way through. Not much happened in the first half, but then too much happened in the second half, and as a result it was a very unbalanced book - felt almost like two halves of two different books. I didn't dislike it, but I liked
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea much better, and the concepts were quite similar.
So: not bad, not great. But an immensely quick read.
Rituals of the Season
This is another Margaret Maron book featuring Deborah Knott, and I picked it up because it struck me as being closure of sorts for the character. I say that with no clue if she plans to write more Knott mysteries, but there was a certain element of wrapping things up to it. (Except I just looked it up and she's totally writing more. Oh well.)
The background to the mystery is the upcoming wedding of Deborah and Dwight, and the mystery itself features the mysterious death of a district attorney. I have to confess, I don't read mysteries because I like figuring out whodunnit and all that. I read them because they're quick, interesting, and I like the characters. I read too quickly to ever really spend time trying to solve the mystery myself - I figure it's faster just to zip through the book and let the author tell me. I know that's kind of against the point of the whole genre, but hey, I don't read them very often.
This was an enjoyable entry into the series, though, and Deborah Knott continues to be a character I'm fond of. I'm particularly partial to her 11 brothers, and I like the stories that weave them into things. If you aren't familiar with Margaret Maron and you like mysteries with spunky women characters, I highly recommend Deborah Knott's mysteries. She is a great character who manages to not be one-dimensional, which is always nice in these situations.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Ok, I haven't stopped reading (because, you know, I never stop reading), but NaNo has meant that I haven't been keeping up here because everything I write goes into my novel. But I'm falling farther and farther behind so here's a bit of a catch up.
A Series of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-12, by Lemony Snicket
Well, I did something I swore I should really quit doing, and that's read a series before it gets finished. Although I was somewhat underwhelmed by the first couple of Snicket books, I decided I'd read the whole lot of them since they are very quick reads. (I don't know - my logic is weird sometimes.) I think it was book five where I got more interested - the Quagmire triplets were better than the other secondary characters up to that point and I enjoyed the fact that the story became a little more overarching at that point.
I do not, however, think that this series need 13 books, and it sort of annoys me that I can tell he's only writing that many because it's a publishing gold mine. Still, the books are entertaining, and I can definitely understand why kids like them so much. I like how the author has become more than just the narrator (I should say "author", since he is fictitious), and I like that it has become significantly more grey rather than the black and white good vs. evil of the earlier books in the series. I will jump on 13 when it comes out simply because I want to know how it turns out, but I won't be rushing out to buy the series. (At least not for myself - I bought the first one for my nephew.)
They are definitely good if you're not in the mood for heavy reading - I got through all 12 in less than a week and that was with hold lists being a factor. Nice quick read, and entertaining. Maybe not as in-depth as some children's lit, but hey, sometimes you need some light reading.
