I read ALL OF THE BOOKS!
I read 50 books this year! It's something I wanted to do because I never had any free time to read in college. I was too busy...reading. So I wanted to read 50 novels, a nice round number mostly chosen because it seemed reasonable. Below is all 50 and some brief, spoiler-free thoughts. If you follow me on lj and have already seen most of this or just don't want to read through all 50, you can jump to my general thoughts about the project by clicking this link.
1. The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory 672
This was good! I'd had it recommended to me a lot, but I'd never gotten around to reading it because it's pretty hefty. I wasn't super familiar with Mary Boleyn so that was cool. I really enjoyed Anne's descent into crazypants.
2. Mort by Terry Prachett 243
I've been making my way through Discworld :D I really liked this one! I enjoy any of the story lines that deal with Death, he's pretty delightful.
3. Going Postal by Terry Prachett 409
O hay moar Discworld! This is probably my favorite of the Discworld books I've read this far. Well, maybe second behind Monstrous Regiment, but I'm a terrible sucker for crossdressing as a literary plot point. I loved how eerie it was while at the same time keeping the delightful parody of fantasy literature going. So awesome.
4. Paper Towns by John Green 320
I've recently started watching the vlogbrothers on Youtube, so I thought I'd give John's novels a try! This was some great young adult literature right here, which is something I find is difficult to manage, so that's saying something. It was a little creepy at parts, though.
5. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle 152
...how had I never read this book? It's amazing. Short, sweet, and so beautiful. His imagery is just so lovely. Definitely the best book I've read thus far this year.
6. The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien 304
Continuing with a theme of "classic fantasy Megan's never read wtf." I tried to read this in the fifth grade and gave up after maybe a chapter. I really enjoyed it this time around though! To tell the truth, I'm not super fond of Lord of the Rings. The stories are excellent, but Tolkien spends to much time rambling about things that don't matter. He was a lot better about that in The Hobbit, so I enjoyed it a lot more.
7. Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor 384
Ugh. First bad book of the year. I had read the first of the series, The Looking Glass Wars, last year and wasn't very impressed with it but I thought I might try the sequel to see if it got better. Yeaaaah, that didn't happen. He basically takes everything that was
awesome about Alice in Wonderland and makes it reasonable and boring, which is painful to read. Plus, the main character "Alyss" (god that stupid spelling...) is supposed to be 20 but reads like maaaaybe 14. It's obnoxious. Needless to say, not finishing out this series.
8. The Clockwork Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami 624
CRAZYPANTS. I love Murakami, his plot lines are so tangled and crazy and his characters are so strange. It was really good though. There were some pretty disturbing parts (skinning people alive is not fun to read before bed time D:) but overall it was great.
9.Looking for Alaska by John Green 256
Second book by him this year, and this one is even better than Paper Towns. There's a crazy twist in the middle, and it's obvious from the beginning of the book there is one, but what it was totally caught me off-guard.
10.The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 384
I'd heard some really good things about this series, it's gotten pretty popular recently, so I gave it a shot. This was really good, very addicting and easy to read.
11.Braniac by Ken Jennings 288
The Jeopardy guy wrote a book haha. I had read his answers to user-asked questions on reddit and he was really funny, so I thought I'd give his book a shot. It was a nice combination of his personal experiences with trivia and being on Jeopardy and the history of trivia and different trivia-based games. He also tossed in about a dozen trivia questions every chapter, which were a nice touch.
12. An Abundance of Katherines by John Green 272
This, like the previous John Green novels was good. I would say it's my least favorite thus far though. The narrator is kind of frustrating at times, which was purposeful, but isn't easy to read.
13.Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman 365
I love Neil Gaiman, but his endings kind of suck sometimes. He's getting better, like Anansi Boys had a fairly reasonable if not kind of generic ending, and Neverwhere was okay. American Gods's ending was just all over the place. BUT I DIGRESS. He's much, much better at ending short stories. I don't think there was a single story in here that I didn't like. Some were creepier than I was comfortable with whilst reading late at night, but they were all really good.
14.The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly 470
I actually saw this recommended on Tumblr of all places then I happened upon a half-priced copy at Borders so I grabbed it for my NY trip. DAMN this was crazy. It was really good though. But definitely creepy, and definitely crazy. It's based on fairy tales and lore, and it had a nice little list in the back of the original stories and where they come from and why they were used in the way they were which I thought was a really cool touch.
15.The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 311
I knew this would be good because I love dystopia and I've heard good things, but damn, I got through this in like a day. I really couldn't put it down. I loved the ending and the epilogue of sorts especially.
16. The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. 206
I enjoyed this overall, but man can Wilde be tedious when he's not being witty. There were entire chapters where he rambled on about things Dorian liked to learn about. I really did not need a paragraph on carpets. Not at all. The plot was good though, and the characters were really charming. Although I did have some misconceptions before reading it about the terms of Dorian's painting relationship.
17. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. 288
I'm not entirely sure whether or not I read any of these in my childhood, but having read them I will probably read them to my future children. Small animals in waistcoats! Driving cars! Having picnics! Tiny caroling mice! What is not to love?
18. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 400
This is the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy and I read it in like two days. Really addicting. To me the second book in trilogies is most often the most boring because the first is a buildup of interest and the last is the big conclusion but the middle books tend to drag. Totally not the case for this one though.
19. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 123
Well first of all, I needed to read this. Because it's super Sci-Fi Important. But it was also really good! The first chapter with the Morlocks actually freaked me out enough that I had to go read something else for a while before bed. His descriptions are really good, but sometimes a little too eerie for me.
20.Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 400
A nice little finish to the Hunger Games trilogy. Although I must say, I didn't think this was as good as the first two. It did package things up nicely and some of it was really upsetting though. There were some things about the ending I would have liked more information or closure on, but altogether a good book.
21. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle 393
This was a really nice little collection of Robin Hood stories. Some I'd heard in various versions before, and some were new to me. Mostly I just read this because I like Robin Hood lore, and it definitely satisfied that craving.
22. Empress Shan Sa 319
This was...weird. I originally picked it up cause it was pretty haha. I read the back cover and figured I'd give it a shot. It wasn't bad, but it was pretty confusing. It wasn't a hard read, but I wouldn't really recommend it either.
23. Slaughter House 5 Kurt Vonnegut 215
It's stupid that I'd never read this! I really loved it. All the crazy story lines and symbolism were really interesting and it's just so damn short, I finished it in a night.
24. This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald 320
I loved The Great Gatsby even after having to read it twice for school, including once with a terrible professor, so I figured I'd give Fitzgerald's other novels a shot. This was pretty good. I wouldn't say it's as deep as Gatsby, and his opinions on women are horrible (as usual) but it was a pretty entertaining read. It was pretty easy to relate to, the feeling of nostalgia on college campuses is something pretty recent for me and a big theme in the novel.
25. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 560
I'd heard this book talked-up for a long time, and some of it was really good, but a lot of it was just kind of meh. I really liked the actual time-traveling and situations around it, but most of the book really dealt with marital troubles and babies, and not in a very interesting or relatable way.
26. The Rapture of Caanan by Sheri Reynolds 336
Ahahaha this was a fluke read basically, I ran out of things to read at the condo in Breckenridge and my brother's girlfriend Jenn and I were discussing how crazy it sounded so I thought I'd give it a try. I breezed through it in like a day. It was basically CRAZY CHRISTIAN CULT PEOPLE DO CRAZY CHRISTIAN CULT PEOPLE THINGS. It was all pretty ridiculous. Definitely wouldn't recommend it, but it was pretty entertaining to tell Jenn about while I was reading.
27. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan 352
This was pretty good! I liked the ways that the daughter and mother's stories parallel each other, the awkwardness between generations and the feeling of disconnection from ancestry. Pretty neat.
28. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami 399
Well this was awesome. Probably my new favorite Murakami novel. It has dual storylines that come together spectacularly at the end, and the characters are so interesting without even having names. There's unicorns and swamp things and librarians and all sorts of cool stuff. I
really enjoyed it!
29. Dragon Soul by Danielle Bennet and Jaida Jones 438
This was good, but I honestly enjoyed the first two books of the series a lot more. I love Rook and Thom, but I really missed Hal and Royston. I also got a little bit tired of desert-y things.
30. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 550
This was really good! It's a story about Nazi Germany told from the point of view of Death. Really sad, obviously, but enjoyable to read. I've had good luck thus far with YA literature.
31. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 185
This was tough. Really rewarding, but so tough to get through. It took me like two weeks to read, and especially the really intense description of Hell somewhere near the middle was particuarly rough. But I related to quite a bit of it, and it was worth the read.
32. Of Bees and Mist by Erick Setiawan 404
This was WEIRD. I expected some like...magical realism interesting fairy tale-ish stuff and instead got MY MOTHER-IN-LAW IS THE BIGGEST BITCH IN THE WORLD. So the first couple of chapters were awesome, and the rest of the book was bitchy mother-in-laws and having babies. Not great.
33. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink 218
I really liked this! This post-WWII time period in Germany is really interesting to read about. The storyline wasn't overly crazy, but every now and then it was like "OH HAY, YOU'RE NOT DONE BEING SURPRISED YET. HERE IS A PLOT TWIST. ENJOY."
34.Life of Pi by Yann Martel 319
...what. the. hell. I knew it would be weird, because the summary alone was pretty strange. Kid stuck on life boat with tiger. Okay. But then it got reaaaaaally creepy at the end. It was well written though, but I did not sleep well after finishing it D:
35.The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris 310
This had a really interesting premise, that the protagonist would have random bouts of walking where he couldn't stop. But the book it self was just kind of...okay. It reminded me of The Time Traveler's Wife, but was decidedly less about sex and babies, which was nice. But I just did not care about the characters at all. The protagonist is kind of conceited and boring, his wife wants to leave him which I totally would have been fine with, and the only one I liked was the daughter because her parents were crazy and she was fairly normal and liked Buffy.
36.The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman 200
Well. Uh. This was...not what I expected. I expected delightful boyhood pranks at a southern Catholic school. Instead it was very very serious and heavy. Not bad, but definitely surprising.
37. Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson 480
This was really delightful! It's basically kind of prequel to Peter Pan, with a little more realism thrown in for funsies. It's definitely not the most difficult read, but it was very enjoyable.
38.The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells 161
Another H.G. Wells book. This time, I'm learning my lesson. He's just a bit too creepy for me. It was good, but very suspenseful and eerie so I had a hard time getting through it. It's like 160 pages and it took me a good two weeks to get through because it was pretty creepy D:
39. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 483
This was pretty delightful! I've been reading about/watching stuff about WWI-era lately, so this coupled nicely with my Downton Abbey watching haha. I really liked Francis as a character and her disappointment with how things worked in her head vs how things were in reality.
40.Anthem by Ayn Rand 123
One of those books that I should have read by now but haven't. It was really good. I love me some good dystopia and this was just that.
41.When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka 144
This was really good. Short, precise, and interesting. The only thing I really didn't like was that I didn't flip through my copy at the store and it was totally covered in highlighting and really bad underlining. Good book, bad copy :C
42.Stardust by Neil Gaiman 248
You know, this was the one book of his I hadn't read because so many people I talked to either didn't like it or thought it was his worst, but I really really enjoyed it. It had an ending that makes logical sense (always my gauge of goodness for Gaiman novels, I love the man but he does have trouble wrapping things up) and I like all the characters and it was generally really good.
43.Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block 109
I've heard a lot about this book, but I absolutely hated it. It reads like a 14 year old's list of what's "cool" in LA, which is just atrocious. Pretty much a hundred pages of me not believing what I was reading an actual published book. Maybe if I had read this as a teenager I would have enjoyed it more but at 23 it was just obnoxious.
44.Light Boxes by Shane Jones 145
This was interesting. It was kind of a conceptual novel, which isn't the sort of thing I usually read, but there were dudes in plague masks and top hats with hot air balloons on the cover, so I couldn't say no. It wasn't bad, but it was pretty odd, and I'm still not quite sure what the author was trying to convey. On the bright side, there were in fact dudes with plague masks and hot air balloons, which is what I wanted out of it.
45.The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 167
Randomly picked up because there were about 20 copies at EdMcKay's haha. It was pretty good though, it reminded me a lot of a 1001 Arabian Nights-based YA novel I read years ago, so the whole thing felt really nostalgic to me even though I hadn't read it before.
46.The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Ablom194
Another best-seller I figured I might as well try. It was alright, kind of predictable and not the most interesting, but not bad.
47.The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo 268
I had heard a lot about this book when the movie came out, and I was familiar with the title, but I hadn't really sought it out until now. It was really cute, it had a definite eerie/adorable feel like a lot of longer kid's books do.
48.The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 131
I hadn't been required to read this for any class, so it wasn't something I went around looking for. I did feel like I should read it though. It was...as expected? Not horrendous but definitely not my cup of tea. It was one of those books that I had a really hard time focusing on. I would read a paragraph and not remember a word of what I'd just read.
49.A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. LeGuin 198
This was really good! I got through it pretty quickly. I'm normally not that big of a high fantasy fan but I really enjoyed this. I'll probably pick up more of the Earthsea books.
50.Brave New World Aldous Huxley 259
I enjoyed this a lot! Which is good considering it was my last book of the year haha. It was a bit more beliveable than a lot of distopias I've read previously.
Overall, this was a fun project. I did a lot of reading, enjoyed almost all of it, and I feel a bit more well read. I don't think I'll do it again in 2012, if only because I think I'll be much more busy this year and I don't need the extra stress. But it was definitely worthwhile.
Total pages: 15240 Average: 305-ish a book
This was actually higher than I expected it to be, considering how many short books I ended up reading at the end of the year, but I guess the bigger books at the beginning ended up balancing things out. The page count was mostly just for fun, obviously the length of books had nothing to do with how good they are or how difficult they were to read or how prolific they are as works of fiction.
Favorites (in order of reading):
1.Going Postal
2.The Last Unicorn
3.Looking for Alaska
4.The Hunger Games (all of them, obv.)
5.The Book of Lost Things
6.The Handmaid's Tale
7.Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
8.The Book Thief
9.Stardust
10.A Wizard of Earthsea
Although I'd have to say that The Last Unicorn was my favorite over all. It's really beautiful.
Part of the reason I did this was to read some books I felt like I should have read already but hadn't gotten around to for one reason or another. Getting through with my English degree didn't exactly make me feel very well-read, only very good at analyzing literature. Out of these 50, about 14 of them were things I felt I should read. So that's a pretty good count! That's also not really including best-sellers like The Hunger Games or Life of Pi, just the more prolific things like The Hobbit and The Picture of Dorian Grey.
Well I guess that's it! I hope this was even remotely interesting.