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.