A to Z Challenge

Right, so, we've already established that I'm a masochist, yes? Good. Then you won't be surprised to hear that I'm going to take on the equally ridiculous A to Z Challenge, in which I will read not 1, not 2, not 26, but 52 books throughout 2010. Oh boy.

The official options are these:
Authors -- Read alphabetically by author. Commit to 26 books.
Titles -- Read alphabetically by title. Commit to 26 books.
Authors & Titles -- Commit to reading 52 books.

So... yes. I'm going to need some help from you, dear readers, to let me know what authors are out there whose last (or first, if it gets desperate) names begin with Q or what books you've heard of whose titles start with an X. Because dude, I have trouble finding those on street signs while road-tripping; I don't expect to fare better at the library. :)

And... the list of completed books! (Or, you know, there'll be some here starting in January.)

Authors (23/26):
A — The Pox Party, by M.T. Anderson (Review)
B — First Lord's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)
C — Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (Review)
D — Makers, by Cory Doctorow (Review)
E — One For the Money, by Janet Evanovich (Review)
F — Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
G — The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Review)
H — Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn (Review)
I — Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Review)
J — The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (Review)
K — The Secret of the Old Clock, by Carolyn Keene (Review)
L — How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer (Review)
M — Cat Breaking Free, by Shirley Rousseau Murphy (Review)
N — The Night Bookmobile, by Audrey Niffenegger (Review)
O — Death Note, by Tsugumi Ohba (Review)
P — This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Review)
Q — Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey (Review)
R — The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan (Review)
S — The Miserable Mill, by Lemony Snicket (Review)
T —
U —
V — The Game On! Diet, by Krista Vernoff (Review)
W — The Secret Hour, by Scott Westerfeld (Review)
X —
Y — Cake Wrecks, by Jen Yates (Review)
Z — The Caretaker of Lorne Field, by Dave Zeltserman (Review)

Titles (23/26):
A — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (Review)
B — The Bungalow Mystery, by Carolyn Keene (Review)
C — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl (Review)
D — Déjà Dead, by Kathy Reichs (Review)
E — The Ersatz Elevator, by Lemony Snicket (Review)
F — Faithful Place, by Tana French (Review)
G — Going Bovine, by Libba Bray (Review)
H — The Hidden Staircase, by Carolyn Keene (Review)
I — If I Stay, by Gayle Forman (Review)
J — Janes in Love, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg (Review)
K — The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness (Review)
L — Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (Review)
M — The Mystery at Lilac Inn, by Carolyn Keene (Review)
N — Nancy's Mysterious Letter, by Carolyn Keene (Review)
O — Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, by Kira Henehan (Review)
P — The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg (Review)
Q — The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds (Review)
R —
S — Schrödinger's Ball, by Adam Felber (Review)
T — Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan (Review)
U — The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist (Review)
V — The Vile Village, by Lemony Snicket (Review)
W — The Wide Window, by Lemony Snicket (Review)
X —
Y — Y: The Last Man Book 1, by Brian K. Vaughan (Review)
Z —

The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (8 November — 14 November)

I have really got to stop watching movies based on books before I read the books themselves. Because really, the books are usually way better, and even so I still spend too much time comparing the book to what I remember of the movie.

Such is the case with The Golden Compass, the movie version of which I really don't remember much from. But many times in the book I felt like something was "wrong" compared to the movie, and then I had to be all, "Self. Shut up and read." So it took a while to get through.

But it was pretty good. The story is of Lyra Belacqua, an orphan in the care of Jordan College in Oxford. Of course, her Oxford is much different than ours, seeing as it's in a whole other universe altogether, where people have daemons in animal form that follow them around and act as sorts of guardians of their humans. Lyra is getting along well at Jordan College until one day her uncle shows up and peeves off a bunch of Scholars, and then next thing Lyra knows she's off to be personal assistant to someone who is kidnapping children. Fun? Lyra, of course, escapes, and then she finds out lots of truths (some from people, some from her "golden compass" that tells you the answer to anything you want to know) that she doesn't really like, and then ADVENTURES happen. There are bears, and hot-air balloons, and witches, and oh my, it's pretty darn exciting.

This is a banned book, because it paints the Church out to be pretty awful (which, in this other world, at least, it kinda is), but from all of the talk I thought it would be more anti-Church than it is... maybe it gets worse in the rest of the trilogy?

Nonetheless, I liked the world that Pullman put together (though I am so over prophecies these days, which is not his fault), and I thought that Lyra was true to a 12-year-old, which doesn't happen often in books like these. She was kind of stupid sometimes, and kind of genius sometimes, and was generally willing to believe anything she heard (which is a little of both). I liked her. :) But the story itself... eh. It was exciting and adventurous, as I've said, but I'm not itching to go out and find the next book. We'll see, I guess.

Rating: 7/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge)

See also:
Just One More Page...
books i done read
Blogging for a Good Book
Back to Books

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Booking Through Thursday (12 November)

Today's Booking Through Thursday is something I deal with a lot!

"Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation.

That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading.

Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?"

I don't often put aside books; if I've gotten enough pages into one I feel like I have trundle on even if it makes me a little angry. (See: Castle) Of course, since I generally try to read only books that interest me, that sort of thing doesn't happen too often (thank goodness). And I will set aside books that just completely don't interest me or novels that don't have a strong narrative; it's really when I'm looking at books that I'm reading in an otherwise reading-material-less space (at the beach, on an airplane, in the car on a roadtrip) that I find myself continuing to read books that I don't care for.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman (1 November — 7 November)

I have to admit that I wasn't actually planning to read another Neil Gaiman for a while. I mean, I liked the books of his that I'd read, but I wasn't super-excited about them... whatever, you know? But then I got roped into (not really, it was kind of exciting!) being in a podcast all about Neil Gaiman, and even though I say like ten words in it, it was fun. And before we started, Beth was going on and on about Anansi Boys and how great it is and how the audiobook is the most greatest thing ever and I was like, okay. I guess I could check it out.

And... I'm still not that excited. Again, it was a good book, like his others, and it was completely different from his other books that I've read, and it was interesting, but I'm just not that excited about having read it. I'm not sure why.¹

Anyway. In this story we find ourselves following along in the life of Fat Charlie Nancy, who, despite all attempts to remove that first word from his name, cannot get rid of the nickname that his father gave him as a kid. His dad's just got a way with words like that. But then Fat Charlie's dad dies! Oh no! Fat Charlie goes back to his childhood home in Florida (from his adulthood home in London) to pay his respects and his told by his old and possibly a bit batty neighbor that he has a brother. And that if he wants to meet up with this dude what went away so long ago that Fat Charlie can't remember, he should just talk to a spider. No big deal. Also, Fat Charlie's dad was a god. The god Anansi, in particular.

Fat Charlie, not really believing any of this, nonetheless tells a spider to go find his brother. The spider does, the brother (who conveniently calls himself Spider) shows up all demigod-like, havoc is wreaked, Fat Charlie tries to get him to go away, adventures ensue!

It was a good time, for sure, and once the adventures started happening, I was hooked. I also liked all of the references to the Caribbean god stories, though they got a bit heavy-handed in the end (like all such stories do, I suppose). I think part of my problem with the book is that there's a person in it who dies and comes back as a ghost, and after the disappointment that was Her Fearful Symmetry I was just not amused. Ah, well. I will say that if I could have a house inside my spare room, that'd be just brilliant. Can we work on that?

¹ An aside — Neil Gaiman is kind of like the Johnny Depp of novel-writing, isn't he? It's like, in general, everything he writes is pretty good and totally worth reading, just like almost everything Depp acts in (with some very notable exceptions) is pretty good and totally worth seeing. Clearly the two of them should get together. [A quick search of the internets tells me that this almost happened; maybe the universe is preventing it somehow?]

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005)

See also:
things mean a lot
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker (6 May — 6 November)

Wow... I spent six months reading this book! That's gotta be a record. I mean, I'm not like Slowpants McGee over here; see, the book was written as a series of dated letters, so some crazy blogger put up the entries as though they were just posted this year. It was a pretty neat concept, and it was kind of fun to read it in "real time", as it were, but unfortunately I couldn't tell you much about how the book goes because, well, see the first sentence up there. And the fact that I read it in my Google Reader, so the shorter entries didn't stay in my brain much longer than my Dinosaur Comics, which I love and adore but could not repeat to you except in general terms. Sigh.

So. Um. I think I'm going to skip out on reviewing the book proper; but I'll say that I enjoyed reading it and you should, you know, check it out. It's a classic for a reason.

Rating: 7/10

See also:
book-a-rama

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays (9 November)

Today's Musing Mondays question: "Does your house have a communal bookshelf? If not, is your bookshelf centrally located so everyone has access to it?"

We've got three communal bookshelves in our house! Granted, they're not very large or anything so it's not really all that many books, but they exist. The main bookshelf is in our "fun room", where the computers and video games are, and it holds Scott's giant fantasy novels as well as my non-fiction collection and a few books that are awesome or at least look awesome. :) Then we have two other bookshelves in the spare room that stay kind of hidden; they contain my TBR piles as well as the books I don't care much for and also the rest of Scott's books and some old textbooks.

The non-communal bookshelf hides under my desk in the form of a green box; it holds all of the library books I have checked out (at least, all the ones that fit) so that I can't lose them as easily.

Story on that: I once lost a library book for something like six months. The last thing I remembered doing with it was taking it to work (on my last day!) and back; we cleaned the house but could not find it anywhere. We checked the cars, the basement, the spare room, under every bit of furniture, nothing. I figured I must have somehow left it at work even after cleaning out my space and gave the library their money. Then, one day, Scott's sister came over to our house and wanted to "borrow" (read: take and never return) some books of Scott's that she had found in a box. Guess what was at the bottom of that box? The book! I hadn't liked it that much, so I gave it back to the library. :)

Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher (2 November — 5 November)

Well, I finished up that book I was talking about yesterday and it did not disappoint. Scott even listened to it with me and enjoyed the stories even out of context. Good times.

Wishful Drinking is Carrie Fisher's memoir about... lots of things. Growing up with Debbie Reynolds, being Princess Leia, enjoying drugs and alcohol a titch too much, having a friend die in her bed (no, really, and jeez, that sucks). The stories are a little bit all over the place and I got confused a couple of time while listening to it when I missed her reading a new chapter title. :) Oops!

Listening to the book was fun, though. The first few chapters/tracks/whatever are a little stilted, kind of like listening to a graduation speech, but soon Fisher relaxes and starts getting into her narrative and, um, she's really good at swearing so you probably don't want to pick up this book if you're sensitive to that (though I think they were all fairly appropriate uses of cussing, if there is such a thing). Her "uggghs" and pointed pauses really made her stories that much more hilarious.

Unfortunately, as a completely terrible auditory learner, I can't really remember many of the stories Fisher told, but I can promise they were all at least moderately entertaining. Oh, and the one about what she did when a fan at a show told her to go [bagpipes] herself is pretty much the weirdest story I've ever heard. Actually, I'm not sure you want to have that image stuck in your head. Maybe you can skip it.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

See also:
The Outlaw Culture Group
Books 'N Border Collies

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.