Catch Up (#7-13)

I've seriously fallen behind on this blog, so I'm going to just run through what I've finished reading since my last entry.

#7/2011:


Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
Very interesting, especially if you're into music and/or odd neurological case studies.

#8/2011:


Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll
I will make my own cheese one of these days when I finally get around to it. I just need to buy some cheese cloth and a gallon of milk. It really only takes about 30 minutes to make your own homemade mozzerella! Who wouldn't want to say they can do that?!

#9/2011:


Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
I love Ian McEwan books ever since I read Atonement a few years ago after they made it into a movie. All his books are great, but Atonement is still my favorite.

#10/2011:


Mrs. McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie
Not especially one of my favorites.

#11/2011:


The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Much better than I hoped it would be. I was a little bit afraid I would think it was horribly offensive and wonder why everyone was so crazy about it, but I did think it was a very interesting story with great characters. Worth reading.

#12/2011


Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The story of Bertha Mason, Rochester's crazy arsonist wife from Jane Eyre. A really beautiful but sometimes confusing reimagining of the story from a secondary character's perspective.

#13/2011:


The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
This YA book caught my eye in the book store because the illustrations are done by Carson Ellis, who does all the album art for the band The Decembrists. It's a great little story and I'll probably read the two other books in the series when I get a chance.

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie

#6/2011:

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie

I actually finished this book last weekend, but I've been having a bit of a week and just forgot to post it here. This is a strange one for AC, although after WWII she did start to change things up a bit from the country house murder mystery plot. They Came to Baghdad was published in 1951 and is a Cold War era espionage thriller set in the Middle East rather than a the-butler-did-it English drawing room mystery.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

#5/2011:

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (A Memoir of Going Home) by Rhoda Janzen

Ask my friend Val and she will tell you that I'm fairly interested in small, unusual, minority religious groups living in America - as is she. We share a fascination with Shakers and Quakers and the Amish, etc. So when I heard about this book, I was super curious. The author grew up Mennonite in California, left the community to become an academic and marry an atheist, got a divorce after her husband left her for a guy named Bob, survived a serious car accident, and then decided to return to her parents' home for a while to convalesce. She's a fairly funny writer and obviously very smart, and I was definitely intrigued by having a peek into the lives of modern Mennonites, their Germanic culture, and as she calls them, their "shame-based foods" (recipes included!). I'd have to say this memoir beats Elizabeth Gilbert's any day.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

#4/2011:


The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

I actually finished this book about a week ago, but I've been a real slacker lately. This book, like my last few, was a Christmas present, this time from my friend Val. The narrator is a dog and, as the title suggests, there are a lot of references made to auto racing. I'm not necessarily a dog person and I'm definitely not a NASCAR person, but the plot line is actually about the relationship between a father (dog owner and professional driver) and his daughter after the death of his wife/her mother. The racing references have to do with the way drivers try to predict loss of control and how they handle it when it occurs and how that kind of driving zen applies to our lack of control in life. It's a book about family and relationships and philosophy on life actually written by a man instead of your typical female writer, and I think that brought an interesting spin on the genre. It took me a little bit to get into the story, what with the dog's eye view, but in the end I liked it.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

#3/2011:


The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Alex and Jasmin gave me this book for Christmas, and I was really looking forward to reading it since I had enjoyed The Lovely Bones. This book is probably even more shocking and emotionally challenging than that one was. The main character kills her mother right there in the very first sentence of the book! The rest of the book is just the 24 hours following the murder combined with a series of flashbacks and remembrances that tell the story of a very complicated mother-daughter-father relationship.

On the back cover of my copy is a quote from a book reviewer at the Philadelphia Inquirer which kept running through my mind as I was reading because I think it really captures the feel of the book: "Alice Sebold may be our true heiress to Edgar Allan Poe [Sebold actually references Poe at one point in the book], a novelist who dares to write honestly about the banality of violence, and about how it lives next door to normalcy, in a mist."

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

#2/2011:


A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

It usually only takes me a couple of days to get through an Agatha Christie mystery, but Kate's birthday and other chaos really slowed me down this time.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Book #1:


The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett

A book about a book thief and the rare book dealer who tracks him down - the perfect way to start the year!

A New Start in a New Year

I'm not really a New Year's Resolution maker, generally speaking. I think they're a waste of time because I forget about them and don't follow through, or they're so easy and obvious that I never need anything as formal as a resolution in the first place to get them done. So why stress myself out like that?

But I'm going to give this here blog the old college try again. I like it, I like it a lot, but I got bogged down feeling like I needed to write a book about every book. I'm starting afresh with a new agenda to just record every book I read this year because I want to see how many books I actually do read in a year. I also like having a place to keep lists of books I want to get and what I already have on hand to read next. Yeah, I'm all kinds of type A like that; what are you looking at me like that for?! Don't roll your eyes.

I might make a few comments (or long rants) on a book now and then if something particularly engages me, but I'm not going to make myself nuts doing it. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason why anyone else would ever want to or bother to read this blog (not that anyone is at the moment since it died months ago), so you can all just go back to doing whatever it was you were doing.

Ah, the relief.