50th book in 2016
Also, continuing with this trend of setting personal records I can't possibly hope to match in the future, I just finished my 50th book of this year - and it's not even the end of May yet! (Last year's 50th book milestone was reached in late August, I see by looking back at my "books"-tagged entries from last year...)
This year's book #50 was "Raymie Nightingale" by Kate Dicamillo, another sweet, charming, by-turns-funny-by-turns-sad childhood tale from Dicamillo set in small-town central Florida. (Like her "Because of Winn-Dixie," which I read last year and loved.) The story told is deceptively simple, but with real-life heart-break swirling just under the surface. Man, there are some really good middle-grade authors out there. Kate Dicamillo and Rebecca Stead, they've both really got me sold on this whole middle grade thing! (I LOVED Rebecca Stead's "Goodbye Stranger.") Both of those books I listened to as audiobooks, which made them extra charming.
Though, it's a bit arbitrary to define which book clocks in as exactly the 50th, because I'm doing that thing again where I accidentally ended up reading 5 books at once (literally). There are just so many books I want to read! And so little time, and I want to squeeze them all in! I keep going to the public library to return books, and then accidentally taking out a bunch more books instead. It's sort of a compulsion... :-P
Currently reading:
• Haruki Murakami's massive (1000 pages!!) "1Q84," for my real life/brickspace book club. I was resistant to this book for a while because it looked so long and self-involvedly dense, but it's actually really not - it's very engaging. But it is indeed long.
• Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," for the online_bookclub. Ah, Ray Bradbury, you're so quirky and charming.
• "A Study in Charlotte" by Brittany Cavallaro - this is the latest in the world's many, many Holmes & Watson updates, and I had no idea what to expect, but my goodness, it's good! I find myself grinning while reading this book, that's how delightful these modern iterations of Holmes ("Charlotte" Holmes) and Watson ("Jamie" Watson) are.
Plus I have this alarmingly large stack of audiobooks out from the library - there's that whole compulsively-checking-books-out thing. And another book by Rebecca Solnit (Iceland AND feminism! she's my perfect storm!) and another Shirley Jackson novel (so brilliant, so brilliant. I've also been reading some of her short stories, augh, so brilliant). And I'm actually leaving the country - for the whole summer - in three weeks, and there's no way I can read all this before I go...
Operation Read All The Books, go!
(I set up a little "what I'm reading" book stand on my desk in the library where I work; the other day a student asked me, "...Do you finish books really fast? Because it seems like what book is here changes every couple days.")
This year's book #50 was "Raymie Nightingale" by Kate Dicamillo, another sweet, charming, by-turns-funny-by-turns-sad childhood tale from Dicamillo set in small-town central Florida. (Like her "Because of Winn-Dixie," which I read last year and loved.) The story told is deceptively simple, but with real-life heart-break swirling just under the surface. Man, there are some really good middle-grade authors out there. Kate Dicamillo and Rebecca Stead, they've both really got me sold on this whole middle grade thing! (I LOVED Rebecca Stead's "Goodbye Stranger.") Both of those books I listened to as audiobooks, which made them extra charming.
Though, it's a bit arbitrary to define which book clocks in as exactly the 50th, because I'm doing that thing again where I accidentally ended up reading 5 books at once (literally). There are just so many books I want to read! And so little time, and I want to squeeze them all in! I keep going to the public library to return books, and then accidentally taking out a bunch more books instead. It's sort of a compulsion... :-P
Currently reading:
• Haruki Murakami's massive (1000 pages!!) "1Q84," for my real life/brickspace book club. I was resistant to this book for a while because it looked so long and self-involvedly dense, but it's actually really not - it's very engaging. But it is indeed long.
• Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," for the online_bookclub. Ah, Ray Bradbury, you're so quirky and charming.
• "A Study in Charlotte" by Brittany Cavallaro - this is the latest in the world's many, many Holmes & Watson updates, and I had no idea what to expect, but my goodness, it's good! I find myself grinning while reading this book, that's how delightful these modern iterations of Holmes ("Charlotte" Holmes) and Watson ("Jamie" Watson) are.
Plus I have this alarmingly large stack of audiobooks out from the library - there's that whole compulsively-checking-books-out thing. And another book by Rebecca Solnit (Iceland AND feminism! she's my perfect storm!) and another Shirley Jackson novel (so brilliant, so brilliant. I've also been reading some of her short stories, augh, so brilliant). And I'm actually leaving the country - for the whole summer - in three weeks, and there's no way I can read all this before I go...
Operation Read All The Books, go!
(I set up a little "what I'm reading" book stand on my desk in the library where I work; the other day a student asked me, "...Do you finish books really fast? Because it seems like what book is here changes every couple days.")