Keep on Keeping on

So, I'm pretty sure Miri is so far ahead of me, but that's okay. I read 28 books in Jan-Apr! I'm pretty impressed with myself actually. haha.

So, to add to my list, here's what I've read since my last update:

All You Need to Be Impossibly French
Percy Jackson 1-5
Dead and Gone (A Sookie Stackhouse novel. Don't judge. haha)
The Book Thief
The Wednesday Letters
Nine Stories
Jane Eyre
The Glass Castle
The Outsiders

So I bawled during The Book Thief and The Wednesday Letters - probably didn't help that I read them together. J.D. Salinger's short stories were kind of heavy, but that was expected. Jane Eyre was actually not terrible. I listened to it mostly driving to and from Indiana and I was very happy with the ending. When I started it, I had a hard time getting Wuthering Heights out of my head. I kept expecting the worst, but then was pleasantly surprised when things would turn out okay. The Glass Castle was also kind of heavy, but a great book and The Outsiders made me cry as well. I didn't bawl like with Book Thief and Wed. Letters, but it had it's moments.

So I don't know what to read next. Probably The Elegance of the Hedgehog, maybe A Lion Among Men (3rd in the Wicked series). I may have to look around and try to find something a little more light hearted.

You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried

I just finished reading You Couldn't Ignore Me if You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes and Their Impact on a Generation. I read it because Pioneer Woman read it and because I love all of those movies.

I loved getting some of the background info about the movies and the actors and about John Hughes. There were a lot of interesting little pieces of information that I was fine not knowing, but love that I know it now. It talked about the music of the movies (which I love just as much) and the impact of the name "The Brat Pack" on the careers of the actors who were unlucky enough to have it hoisted upon them.

Anyway, I really liked it and now I have to go make a John Hughes inspired iTunes playlist and maybe also have a movie marathon.

Miri's Update

Finished so far:

nonfiction
Going Rogue--Sarah Palin
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--Barbara Kingsolver
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children--Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Dreams from My Father--Barack Obama

recommended
Running with the Demon--Terry Brooks
The Alchemyst--Michael Scott
Abarat--Clive Barker

foreign
Say You're One of Them--Uwem Akpan

award-winners
March-- Geraldine Brooks

adult fiction
Prodigal Summer--Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna--Barbara Kingsolver
The Gathering Storm--Robert Jordan

MML
The Enchantress of Florence--Salman Rushdie
The Book Borrower--Alice Mattison

series
The Chronicles of Narnia--C.S. Lewis

self-improvement
Forced to be Family--Cheryl Dellasega

15 from my 1o/10/10 challenge, plus 15 extras (17 with the two that I'm reading now)

Some of them have taken a long time (AVM, Sarah Palin) but hopefully I'll be able to pick up the pace a bit now. I'm starting to question that self-improvement category, by the way... It's a good one and I probably should make myself do it, but I'm envisioning a November/December cram to fit them all in because I neglected them the whole year because they're boring... So we'll see. :)

On a roll...

I finished six more books! Go me! It helps that four of them are technically children's books, but they were all at least 200 pages so that's got to count for something. They were:

Duty and Desire
These Three Remain
Coraline
The Book of Three
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Llyr

The first two went with An Assembly Such as This to finish up the Fitzwilliam Darcy novels. They were actually pretty good. Duty and Desire was my least favorite since it's mostly made up, new stuff filling in the time when Darcy isn't around in Pride and Prejudice. It's not terrible, I enjoyed it, just not my favorite of the three books.

Coraline is a great little book that scared the dickens out of me even though I have already seen the movie and knew the whole story. Something about the way Neil Gaiman writes just gets to you. I had freaky dreams while reading this book, and my dreams are rarely effected by things I read or watch. I loved the book, though. Coraline is a great character and I want to name something after her. A child or a puppy or a kitten or something. And now I am going to watch the movie again so I can get the full effect. We'll see if the creepy dreams come back.

The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron and The Castle of Llyr (all by Lloyd Alexander) were all good, I enjoyed them each for different reasons. I am looking forward to watching The Black Cauldron even though I hear it's crap. I've never seen it, and I want to see how they butcher a good book. That has always interested me. haha. I really love the characters in the books. They are simple and sweet and heroic and brave for all kinds of different reasons. All three books are quick and easy to read, they capture your attention and hold on to it, and they each offer a great little adventure that could stand individually.

And now I'm up to 15 or 16 books, I think. Still so far behind, but doing much better than I thought I would be. I'm about to start on Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thieves, then I'm on to a biography about the Brat Pack that I'm reading because The Pioneer Woman read it and because I love the Brat Pack.

As of today...

Okay. Here's a list of what I have finished as of today.

The Enchantress of Florence
Through the Wardrobe
The Magician's Nephew
The Silver Chair
Forest Born
Stop in the Name of Pants
Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
Julie and Julia
An Assembly Such As This
Inkheart
Ender's Game

That's 11 books in January and February.

I'm half way through Duty and Desire (book two in the Fitzwilliam Darcy novels) and I've started several others (Coraline, The Actor and the Housewife, The Book Thief and The Outsiders). I'm pretty happy with my pace, but hoping to get the ones I've started already finished this month.

Inkheart was great, although I don't know if I could have read the whole thing for this challenge. I'm glad I found it on audio.

I LOVED Ender's Game. I shouldn't be surprised by this since I'm pretty sure I know a lot of people who at least really liked it. It was another audio book, but I think that enhanced it a lot for me. I found myself sitting in my car after arriving to where ever I was going and listening. I loved the narrator's voice for Ender and I loved that they used several different narrators for which ever character's point of view was being read. I got a little frustrated toward the end, but still loved the book.

Finished:

Say You're One of Them, in my foreign category.

http://mirishorten.blogspot.com/2010/03/say-youre-one-of-them-by-uwem-akpan.html

Supsense and Sensibility

So... I'm not really a fan of the classic literature fanfic stuff--Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte--that kind of thing. It doesn't appeal to me.

However, I was at the Allen library and on a shelf across from me, I saw this, and it made me laugh:
Apparently it's the sequel to Pride and Prescience, and since they were both there on the shelf, I grabbed them. I'm sure they'll be ridiculous, but I can't help wanting to check them out. I don't know if I'm going to include them in a 10/10 category or if they'll just be extra, but either way I wanted to share. :)

March

Finished March, by Geraldine Brooks, in my Award-Winners category (it won the Pultizer in 2006). In other news, I think this book was given to me by Sam and Jennie for my birthday one year while we still lived at Glenwood.
But I digress. It was a pretty intense book, and I would have liked it a lot if the protagonist hadn't been the father from Little Women. I had very mixed feelings about him and ended up not liking him all that much, which was a little sad because of how I love Little Women. But judging it independently, it's an amazing, heartbreaking book; one of those horrible war books that just makes you wonder how anyone can ever live through such a thing.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

 So in idea form, this book is hilarious. It's even funny for the first 100 pages or so. But then I got stuck - for 5 months.

The problem is that the zombie parts just aren't written that well and aren't incorporated well either. I know that they made a big deal about it being 85% Jane Austen, but maybe it shouldn't have been. What it mostly did was remind me how good Jane Austen was and how not good this other guy is. While it was funny to have the final confrontation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine be an actual fight, and while it was funny to have Charlotte's reason for marrying Mr. Collins be that she had been infected by zombies, overall it wasn't well-crafted enough to really pull it off. I've read better spoofs and better serious zombie books. (Serious zombie books - does that work? Either way, World War Z put all of the zombie action in this to shame.)
It was also disappointing because I'd read some really good reviews and knew some people who really liked it. I was sad to come away being so unimpressed. It honestly wasn't any kind of self-righteous indignation about the desecration of Jane Austen either. It was just a big meh for me.
So yeah. A for effort, C for execution.

On the bright side, it wasn't Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, which I saw in the book store the other day and which made me throw up a little in my mouth.

One Series Down

Yay for finishing books! I finished my first series, the Narnia books (started over and read books The Magician's Nephew through The Horse and His Boy so I could say I'd read them all in 2010), and now I'm in the middle of a Nonfiction, an Adult Fiction, and an Award-Winner. It's taking me longer than it should to read them, but I'm really enjoying them all so it's okay.