Reading List 2013
Back to unemployment. My intuition saw this coming, though the reasons given to me seemed more like excuses. Regardless, I've used this past week to catch up on a few literary endeavors, such as catching up on Weave submissions, reading The Bell Jar, submitting a poem a bunch of times, reading a friend's story (which will take forever because it requires many revisions and rewrites), writing in my own novels, working on reviews, working on review revisions, etc... Living the writing life! I get one more paycheck plus a reimbursement plus paid out unused vacation days. So... I should be okay for the next couple weeks until unemployment kicks in.
Michael has been pushing me to look for jobs outside of PA. I... don't think I'm ready for that just yet... so it's been a point of tension lately...
Anyway! To the book list! I don't know how I managed 20 in May, but there it is.
January:
1. Sam Harris - Letter to a Christian Nation
2. Matthew Cody - The Dead Gentleman
3. Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth
4. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
5. C.N. Edwards - Love Poems
6. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
7. Flannery O'Connor - Everything That Rises Must Converge
8. Jessica Gregson - The Angel Makers
9. Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
10. Veronica Roth - Divergent
11. Eoin Colfer - The Atlantis Complex
12. James Joyce - Dubliners
13. Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being a Wallflower
14. Mira Bartok - The Memory Palace
15. Shel Silverstein - Every Thing On It
16. John Lithgow - Poet's Corner
February
17. Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire
18. Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
19. Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
20. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
21. Paulo Coelho - Brida
22. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl - Beautiful Creatures
23. Lisa Malvarose - Psychic
24. Bruno Bettelheim - The Uses of Enchantment
25. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
26. Sherman Alexie - The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian
March
27. Patrinella Cooper - Gypsy Magic: A Romany Book of Spells, Charms, and Fortune-Telling
28. Marilyn Donnelly - Coda
29. Deborah Slicer - The White Calf Kicks
30. Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist
31. Elizabeth Kirschner - My Life as a Doll
32. Brian Brodeur - Natural Causes
33. Orson Scott Card - The Lost Gate
34. Albert Camus - The Stranger
35. Anne Marie Macari - She Heads into the Wilderness
36. Leonard Gontarek - The Deja Vu Diner
37. Free State Review - Issue 1
38. Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, Dave Marshall, and Gurihiru - Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise
39. George Eliot - Middlemarch
40. Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
41. Kate Chopin - The Awakening
42. Alice Walker - The Color Purple
43. Geraldine Brooks - Foreign Correspondence
44. Alexandre Dumas - Man in the Iron Mask
45. Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: Space Odyssey
46. Marsha Mehran - Pomegranate Soup
47. Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
48. Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days
49. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
50. Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
51. Margot Berwin - The Scent of Darkness
52. Annie Dillard - The Writing Life
53. Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
54. Patrick Suskind - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
55. Jim Crace - Being Dead
56. Robert James Waller - The Bridges of Madison County
57. Jorie Graham - This
58. Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
This novel pissed me off, but it was supposed to. The author intentionally put the main character in bad situations in order to show how hypocritical society is. It's rather interesting to note that the themes in this novel are about rape, marriage, childbirth, affairs, and being "impure" before a wedding. It's about how men sleep around with women and expect to be forgiven, but if a girl is raped and is forced to spend time with her rapist, she's unclean and impure and how dare she expect to have any good prospects after that because it's all her fault... And it's written by a male author! Kudos to him.
59. Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity
This story held great promise. The notion of people stepping into history to alter something... But that wasn't explored at all. And the relationship that develops between the main character and his love interest isn't... believable. The story barely held my attention and I didn't care for it.
60. Sue Ellen Thompson - The Golden Hour
This AHP poetry collection is mostly about the author's life throughout and after her mother's illness and death. It was very pretty and nostalgic.
61. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Given the reputation this book has, I expected some worldly character who is strong and independent and fully aware of her sexual freedoms. Instead, I find a naive country girl whom I can't stand, who marries a doctor, grows to hate him, and then begins an affair with two other men who try to control her life. And then she dies. Good riddance. The only character I felt anything for is the doctor, because he honestly loved her.
62. Nancy Pagh - No Sweeter Fat
Another AHP poetry collection. It's taken from a fat girl's perspective about fat girls. Although many of the poems were amusing, they also contained deeper messages and lessons. It was fun to read.
63. James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
This is a story about an expat during the 20s who lives in Paris and struggles with the fact that he's gay and engaged to a woman. He doesn't love, and people hate him for it. And he goes from one relationship to another without any emotional consequences on his side. The novel is basically everything coming to a head and his former lover being accused of murder.
64. Andrea Hollander Budy - Woman in the Painting
This was the type of poetry that you read and don't understand much of, but you read it because it's poetry, and you hope that something along the way clicks. For some poems in the AHP collection, it seemed as if the author went around and wrote poetic stories about the contents of paintings, and in others it seemed to be about her life.
65. Richard Adams - Watership Down
Damon wanted me to read this. It is a graphic, somewhat frightening adventure story about rabbits who flee from their home to find a safer one away from humans. It details encounters with hostile rabbits and efforts to get female rabbits in order to breed. I'm still not sure what I think of this one.
66. L. M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
This was amusing and I can see why so many people like it. It's about a rambunctious and honest orphan girl who's adopted by two elder siblings who wanted a boy but fell in love with Anne after a mix-up lands her at their house. It shows readers all the wild adventures and imaginings that she gets into and how she grows to be a respectful young lady.
67. John Updike - Witches of Eastwick
This novel was so hard to read. I don't like Updike's style at all. I also prefer the movie to the book. There's so much more in the novel, and the outcome is completely different. I don't think I'll read the sequel for a long time.
68. John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
This novel was ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. But it's supposed to be. Ignatious is a large, obese man who has obsolete beliefs but holds everyone else to them, leaps to far extremes, is a hypochondriac, is so dumb despite managing to get a master's degree in... whatever he got it in. The story is mostly about his and his mother's interactions with people in New Orleans, him "trying" to maintain a job, and everyone reacting to him.
69. Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club
This was interesting. It's a story about a girl whose mother recently died. She sits at a table of mahjong and plays with her mother's friends, who tell her stories of their own lives. At some point, the girl learns that she has sisters who are still in China, and she travels to see them to break the bad news. It's a collection of short stories, basically.
70. Robert Gibb - What the Heart Can Bear
Another collection of AHP poems about life and the environment in general. It was nice, but nothing memorable.
71. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
I had such high expectations for this story and was rather disappointed. Dickens again provides a bizarre cast of characters, which is fine, but... everything seems to get out of hand in the end. A little boy helps an escaped convict, who saves up a bunch of money to turn the boy into a gentleman. But the boy gets into debt, and then learns who his benefactor is. So after being aghast for a while, he helps his benefactor to try to leave the country and ends up returning home penniless. He doesn't get the girl, but learns the value of hard work... I guess...
72. Ann Hood - The Obituary Writer
Review to come.
73. Maya Angelou - The Complete Collected Poems
This was interesting to read. Her style changed a lot throughout and much of it was kinda sing-songy, which makes sense with her actor background.
74. Rick Riordan - Sea of Monsters
Oh, this was such a fast read. Enjoyable, but I definitely wanted to smack the characters because of how dumb they were being, and then smack the writer because of how inconsistent he was. This book would probably appeal to kids who find out that they have half-siblings and realize that their parents aren't as faithful to each other as they initially thought. It's also about how much family matters despite how angry you get with them.
75. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
I was so close to smacking my head against the steering wheel, window, or computer desk because of this thing. The poem itself doesn't take long, maybe an hour and a half in a nine-hour audiobook. The rest of the story is told through the "notes" and "footnotes" in the poem by the fictional autobiographer. It's all about his relationship with the fictional author, the fictional author's death, and a lot about drama surrounding the royal family. I was so glad when this finished.
76. Cassandra Clare - City of Bones - The Mortal Instruments Book 1
I did not like this book at all. The concept was intriguing and complex and well-integrated, sure, but the writing itself was atrocious. From what I can see in other reviews, it is almost word for word from Draco Dormiens, the Harry Potter fanfiction that this girl became known for back when I was in high school. She writes the same way, too, which is why I couldn't stand it. So many issues...
77. Katie MacAlister - You Slay Me
I thought this going to be your typical horrible romance novel with a fantasy spin and agreed to read it because a friend recommended it a while ago. Turns out, it's brilliant. It was so much fun to listen to. It's a murder mystery and definitely an introduction to that particular magical society, but the main character is great and the sex scenes are rather tame. She's a bit of a Mary-Sue (some great Guardian that can do things no normal Guardian can, a dragon's mate, etc.) who needs to be taught everything at first, but that's forgivable.
Michael has been pushing me to look for jobs outside of PA. I... don't think I'm ready for that just yet... so it's been a point of tension lately...
Anyway! To the book list! I don't know how I managed 20 in May, but there it is.
January:
1. Sam Harris - Letter to a Christian Nation
2. Matthew Cody - The Dead Gentleman
3. Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth
4. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
5. C.N. Edwards - Love Poems
6. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
7. Flannery O'Connor - Everything That Rises Must Converge
8. Jessica Gregson - The Angel Makers
9. Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
10. Veronica Roth - Divergent
11. Eoin Colfer - The Atlantis Complex
12. James Joyce - Dubliners
13. Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being a Wallflower
14. Mira Bartok - The Memory Palace
15. Shel Silverstein - Every Thing On It
16. John Lithgow - Poet's Corner
February
17. Suzanne Collins - Catching Fire
18. Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
19. Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
20. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
21. Paulo Coelho - Brida
22. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl - Beautiful Creatures
23. Lisa Malvarose - Psychic
24. Bruno Bettelheim - The Uses of Enchantment
25. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
26. Sherman Alexie - The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian
March
27. Patrinella Cooper - Gypsy Magic: A Romany Book of Spells, Charms, and Fortune-Telling
28. Marilyn Donnelly - Coda
29. Deborah Slicer - The White Calf Kicks
30. Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist
31. Elizabeth Kirschner - My Life as a Doll
32. Brian Brodeur - Natural Causes
33. Orson Scott Card - The Lost Gate
34. Albert Camus - The Stranger
35. Anne Marie Macari - She Heads into the Wilderness
36. Leonard Gontarek - The Deja Vu Diner
37. Free State Review - Issue 1
38. Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, Dave Marshall, and Gurihiru - Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise
39. George Eliot - Middlemarch
40. Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
41. Kate Chopin - The Awakening
42. Alice Walker - The Color Purple
43. Geraldine Brooks - Foreign Correspondence
44. Alexandre Dumas - Man in the Iron Mask
45. Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: Space Odyssey
46. Marsha Mehran - Pomegranate Soup
47. Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
48. Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days
49. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
50. Flannery O'Connor - The Violent Bear It Away
51. Margot Berwin - The Scent of Darkness
52. Annie Dillard - The Writing Life
53. Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
54. Patrick Suskind - Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
55. Jim Crace - Being Dead
56. Robert James Waller - The Bridges of Madison County
57. Jorie Graham - This
58. Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
This novel pissed me off, but it was supposed to. The author intentionally put the main character in bad situations in order to show how hypocritical society is. It's rather interesting to note that the themes in this novel are about rape, marriage, childbirth, affairs, and being "impure" before a wedding. It's about how men sleep around with women and expect to be forgiven, but if a girl is raped and is forced to spend time with her rapist, she's unclean and impure and how dare she expect to have any good prospects after that because it's all her fault... And it's written by a male author! Kudos to him.
59. Isaac Asimov - The End of Eternity
This story held great promise. The notion of people stepping into history to alter something... But that wasn't explored at all. And the relationship that develops between the main character and his love interest isn't... believable. The story barely held my attention and I didn't care for it.
60. Sue Ellen Thompson - The Golden Hour
This AHP poetry collection is mostly about the author's life throughout and after her mother's illness and death. It was very pretty and nostalgic.
61. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Given the reputation this book has, I expected some worldly character who is strong and independent and fully aware of her sexual freedoms. Instead, I find a naive country girl whom I can't stand, who marries a doctor, grows to hate him, and then begins an affair with two other men who try to control her life. And then she dies. Good riddance. The only character I felt anything for is the doctor, because he honestly loved her.
62. Nancy Pagh - No Sweeter Fat
Another AHP poetry collection. It's taken from a fat girl's perspective about fat girls. Although many of the poems were amusing, they also contained deeper messages and lessons. It was fun to read.
63. James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
This is a story about an expat during the 20s who lives in Paris and struggles with the fact that he's gay and engaged to a woman. He doesn't love, and people hate him for it. And he goes from one relationship to another without any emotional consequences on his side. The novel is basically everything coming to a head and his former lover being accused of murder.
64. Andrea Hollander Budy - Woman in the Painting
This was the type of poetry that you read and don't understand much of, but you read it because it's poetry, and you hope that something along the way clicks. For some poems in the AHP collection, it seemed as if the author went around and wrote poetic stories about the contents of paintings, and in others it seemed to be about her life.
65. Richard Adams - Watership Down
Damon wanted me to read this. It is a graphic, somewhat frightening adventure story about rabbits who flee from their home to find a safer one away from humans. It details encounters with hostile rabbits and efforts to get female rabbits in order to breed. I'm still not sure what I think of this one.
66. L. M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
This was amusing and I can see why so many people like it. It's about a rambunctious and honest orphan girl who's adopted by two elder siblings who wanted a boy but fell in love with Anne after a mix-up lands her at their house. It shows readers all the wild adventures and imaginings that she gets into and how she grows to be a respectful young lady.
67. John Updike - Witches of Eastwick
This novel was so hard to read. I don't like Updike's style at all. I also prefer the movie to the book. There's so much more in the novel, and the outcome is completely different. I don't think I'll read the sequel for a long time.
68. John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
This novel was ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. But it's supposed to be. Ignatious is a large, obese man who has obsolete beliefs but holds everyone else to them, leaps to far extremes, is a hypochondriac, is so dumb despite managing to get a master's degree in... whatever he got it in. The story is mostly about his and his mother's interactions with people in New Orleans, him "trying" to maintain a job, and everyone reacting to him.
69. Amy Tan - The Joy Luck Club
This was interesting. It's a story about a girl whose mother recently died. She sits at a table of mahjong and plays with her mother's friends, who tell her stories of their own lives. At some point, the girl learns that she has sisters who are still in China, and she travels to see them to break the bad news. It's a collection of short stories, basically.
70. Robert Gibb - What the Heart Can Bear
Another collection of AHP poems about life and the environment in general. It was nice, but nothing memorable.
71. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
I had such high expectations for this story and was rather disappointed. Dickens again provides a bizarre cast of characters, which is fine, but... everything seems to get out of hand in the end. A little boy helps an escaped convict, who saves up a bunch of money to turn the boy into a gentleman. But the boy gets into debt, and then learns who his benefactor is. So after being aghast for a while, he helps his benefactor to try to leave the country and ends up returning home penniless. He doesn't get the girl, but learns the value of hard work... I guess...
72. Ann Hood - The Obituary Writer
Review to come.
73. Maya Angelou - The Complete Collected Poems
This was interesting to read. Her style changed a lot throughout and much of it was kinda sing-songy, which makes sense with her actor background.
74. Rick Riordan - Sea of Monsters
Oh, this was such a fast read. Enjoyable, but I definitely wanted to smack the characters because of how dumb they were being, and then smack the writer because of how inconsistent he was. This book would probably appeal to kids who find out that they have half-siblings and realize that their parents aren't as faithful to each other as they initially thought. It's also about how much family matters despite how angry you get with them.
75. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
I was so close to smacking my head against the steering wheel, window, or computer desk because of this thing. The poem itself doesn't take long, maybe an hour and a half in a nine-hour audiobook. The rest of the story is told through the "notes" and "footnotes" in the poem by the fictional autobiographer. It's all about his relationship with the fictional author, the fictional author's death, and a lot about drama surrounding the royal family. I was so glad when this finished.
76. Cassandra Clare - City of Bones - The Mortal Instruments Book 1
I did not like this book at all. The concept was intriguing and complex and well-integrated, sure, but the writing itself was atrocious. From what I can see in other reviews, it is almost word for word from Draco Dormiens, the Harry Potter fanfiction that this girl became known for back when I was in high school. She writes the same way, too, which is why I couldn't stand it. So many issues...
77. Katie MacAlister - You Slay Me
I thought this going to be your typical horrible romance novel with a fantasy spin and agreed to read it because a friend recommended it a while ago. Turns out, it's brilliant. It was so much fun to listen to. It's a murder mystery and definitely an introduction to that particular magical society, but the main character is great and the sex scenes are rather tame. She's a bit of a Mary-Sue (some great Guardian that can do things no normal Guardian can, a dragon's mate, etc.) who needs to be taught everything at first, but that's forgivable.