December Wrap-up

Wow, another month gone! And another year at the same time! My year-end review will be up tomorrow to start the year off right, so let's look at the lovely month of December today. I finished up my second semester of grad school, maintained an awesome 4.0, and still managed to read 11 books. Basically, I'm awesome, is what I'm saying (and modest?).

It wasn't an especially delightful month of reading; I felt pretty lukewarm about most of the books I picked up, even the ones I was excited about. Oddly, my favorite, Shutter Island, almost went back to the library unread because I didn't have high hopes for it. That should teach me, right? Maybe.

My greatest personal reading accomplishment this month was finishing off all of my challenges — it was looking a little iffy there for a while, but I did manage to defeat Sir Arthur Conan Doyle yesterday, finally, to close up the Case of the Baker Street Challenge. With any luck, next year's challenges will go as well.

Now to the numbers...

Days spent reading: 29
Books read: 11
...in fiction: 11
...in mystery: 3
...in fantasy: 1
...in classics: 1
...in short stories: 1
...in young adult: 5
...in children's: 1

Series reads: Unfortunate Events

Favorite book: Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (Review) 9/10

Challenges
My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge: +3 books for 12/12 Completed!
The Baker Street Challenge: +1 books for 3/3 Completed!
Back to School Challenge: +3 books for 4/4 Completed!
Critical Monkey Challenge: +0 books for 1/6
Countdown Challenge: +7 books for 27/55

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (? — 30 December)

I'm finished! Woohoo! I started reading this book shortly after I bought it in 2007, and then left off for two years, and then finally picked it up again... sometime earlier this year, and then ignored it again... goodness. But I have been making my way through the bulk of it over the last two weeks, and I can now say that I sort of know what this Sherlock Holmes fellow is about. Sweet.

I had read A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four in my mysteries course senior year, and The Hound of the Baskervilles a few months back, and found them delightful, but I wasn't really prepared for these short stories. In both the novels and the stories, Holmes gets called on a case, checks out the scene, makes some deductions, and solves the matter in a rather quick fashion, but in the stories, that's it. There's not a narrative to go along with the detecting; Holmes just does his thing and Watson reports it.

That's not to say I didn't like the stories. I just had to get used to them. :) And... I don't have much else to say about them! If you want a quick little reminder of how incredibly stupid you are, I recommend finding a Holmes story or two online and enjoying.

Rating: 7/10
(Baker Street Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (23 December — 24 December)

I'm starting to think that there's a curse on all of the books I read for my book club. The first one was okay, the second and third were terrible (to me, not to everyone else), and now this one, the fourth, is just okay again. But maybe that means the next one will be awesome? I'm going to trust in the math. :)

The conceit of this novel is that it's told from the point of view of a murdered girl. That's pretty cool, right? The girl, called Susie, is all dead and stuff, but she's looking down on her family and friends and even the guy who murdered her, watching them deal with the aftermath of her death. Her parents grow apart, her siblings try to deal with going to the same schools Susie went to and being "that dead girl's little siblings," which isn't easy, of course.

When the book starts out, it seems like it's going to revolve around the living people figuring out who killed Susie, but the murderer is pretty savvy and the trail grows cold pretty quickly for the police, if not for Susie's dad. Once that happens, the story's more about how people deal with death, and it's actually rather interesting to see how Susie's friends grow up and how her parents start to drift apart. But then... then. There's a part toward the end where Sebold gets all supernatural and briefly brings Susie back in her friend's body while her friend goes and hangs out in heaven for a while, and it just completely ruined the book for me. I was okay with Susie's friend being able (or thinking she's able) to see spirits after Susie's death; I am not okay with her being able to go muck about in heaven without being dead. And this whole development is really not important to the story at all except for maybe giving a couple of people closure and providing a sex scene for the novel. No, really. I have no idea.

So. I give Sebold props for writing a convincing portrait of a family after a brutal death, but I would like her to never write such a creepy sex scene ever again, kthx.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002)

Happy Christmas!

This is my Christmas tree this year... Scott and I made it together! Last year I made our tree myself out of construction paper, but this year we wanted to take it to the next dimension! This was actually the third or fourth design that we attempted for the tree — do you know how difficult it is to make a pipe-cleaner tree look halfway decent? I mean, unless you're Martha Stewart. Then it's easy. Whatever, ours was made with love.

I'm not really big on Christmas, but I will enjoy spending today with my dear parents and brothers and tomorrow with whatever family members stick around at Scott's house (they are a very come-and-go bunch, which is odd to me). I will also enjoy watching this video probably, oh, five hundred times in a row. I am such a sucker for Muppets.

Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (22 December — 23 December)

I had seen a commercial or twelve for the movie adaptation of this book a while ago, but I decided I'd rather read the book instead, though I can't remember why I decided that. So I got the book from the library, and then it languished on my shelf for three months, and then I decided the library would probably like me to stop checking books out for months on end and so I read it. Good job again, self.

The premise of this novel is that there's a US Marshal called Teddy (short for Edward) Daniels who hops a ferry to Shutter Island with another Marshal to look into the disappearance of an inmate at the hospital/mental ward/jail-type institution on the island. The woman, called Rachel Solando, managed to escape from a teeny-tiny cell and past several guards without anyone noticing, so Daniels and Aule (the partner) think it was probably an inside job. As they're looking into this case, Daniels is also looking into some retribution — he's heard that the guy who set the fire that killed Daniels's wife is locked up on Shutter Island, and he'd like to give him a little what-for. But neither investigation is proving easy, what with how everyone on the island is being a little secretive about just what exactly goes on there, and how there's a convenient hurricane keeping Daniels and Aule stuck on this island for maybe a little longer than they thought...

I hate to admit it, but even though I should have seen the ending of this book coming, I did not. Not at all. And I liked that. I was so drawn in by Lehane's storytelling that I forgot to be looking for all the inconsistencies in the stories told by the characters. So good! And so I don't want to say too much about this book, because I want you to go read it and be surprised as well. Or you might not be surprised, because you're keener than I am, but you should still enjoy the plot twists and turns without my help.

One thing, though, for the people who have read this already... what do you think of the choice of Laeddis for a surname? It's either incredibly uncommon or nonexistant, which made the ending seem a little forced. If it had been the other way around, I would have believed it more.

Rating: 9/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2003)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (21 December — 22 December)

I... didn't get this book. At all. I even did something crazy and went and read the SparkNotes after I was done with it to attempt to figure out what the heck had happened, but I'm still not satisfied. I didn't not like the book, but after reading it I just had absolutely no idea what I was meant to have taken away, and now that I know what I'm meant to have taken away, I'm disappointed.

See, the plot of this book... well, there's not really a plot. But there's a protagonist, so that's good, and he's called Okonkwo and he lives in Africa and he aspires to great things. His father was a loser, so Okonkwo fashioned himself a winner, to good results. But then he kills this kid that was sent to live with him and who called him "father" and who liked living with Okonkwo, and then things seem to start falling apart, as they do.

And I thought that maybe that was the point of the book, because it's pretty emphasized — that Okonkwo did a bad thing by killing a boy he thought of as a son, and now he gets to be punished. And he does get punished, in various ways, including being exiled for seven years for inadvertantly killing some other guy's son. But then Achebe completely ignores all of that and starts in with some missionaries, who come to the villages and start converting people to Christianity, and then things seem to start falling apart, as they do.

Wait, what? Okay, fine, so things are falling apart for a different reason now, that has nothing to do with Okonkwo. But Okonkwo, whose life was already falling apart, doesn't want it to fall apart anymore so he tries to bring an uprising against the missionaries, which totally fails, and [ending alert] then he kills his real son (who's a convert and who is "not his son anymore" and cetera) and then he kills himself. Or is said to have killed himself. And SparkNotes says he did it. But I don't believe that.

Anyway, so I finish reading the book and I'm like, okay, this plotline that I've just outlined makes sense, but I've only included, like, less than half of the scenes in the book and what were those supposed to be for? So I ask SparkNotes, and it tells me that this book is really about showing the Western world that Africa is a real place with real people with real emotions and religions and languages and customs and such and that colonization sort of makes those things fall apart and also the colonial nations are pretty stupid for not realizing that Africa is a real place etc.

And then I go, oh. That makes sense. I get that. I would feel stupid for not seeing that while reading it, except that I was too busy trying to follow the story Achebe was telling, and not the one he was implying, which is unfortunate. I guess if I had known in advance that the written story was merely a vehicle for a bigger statement, I would have liked it better. As it stands, I am just confused and disappointed.

Rating: 5/10
(Back to School Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading
Books 'N Border Collies
Rhinoa's Ramblings

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

Let it Snow, by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle (18 December — 20 December)

I picked this book up both because I like John Green and Maureen Johnson and because it's practically Christmas and I wanted to get some of that proverbial spirit going. Well, I still don't have any Christmas spirit, but I did have a good time reading about people who do. :)

The book is three shorter interconnected stories: Johnson's, the first, tells of a high-school girl called Jubilee who ends up stranded on a train in western North Carolina. Because of the scary cheerleaders who are also stranded with her, she treks away from the train as fast as she can, which is of course not very fast in snow that can strand a train. Jubilee ends up at a Waffle House where she meets a cute guy who offers her his and his mother's hospitality for a few days. I think we all know what a mother's "hospitality" is like. -eyebrow waggle-

Then Green comes in to tell the story of three kids who are friends with the manager at said Waffle House, who, by the time he calls, is looking at a room full of cheerleaders and wants to invite along Tobin, JP, and the Duke to ogle them. Of course, the Duke being a girl, she'd rather ogle maybe one of the other people I've already mentioned, so there's awkwardness there, and oh, did I mention the snowstorm? Because there is some slow-tastic adventuring out in Tobin's mom's SUV just to get to the Waffle House. Current me is like, "Why would you go out in the snow like that???" but high-school me is like, "ADVENTURE!"

Myracle's story is about a girl called Addie who is devastated over her breakup with Jeb, a bit player in the two previous stories (stuck on the train and then stuck in the Waffle House), even though it was all her fault. She's pretty self-absorbed, but when her best friends and her manager and the old lady that comes in to Starbucks all the time all tell her so in the span of a couple days, she starts to take it to heart and tries to make up for all of her mistakes.

I'm always a little wary of teen romantic novels, because they're always a little implausible, but this one is just completely implausible so it worked for me. :) I don't think any girls are going to be looking for romance in a snowstorm at the Waffle House (though, maybe), and after Addie is portrayed as a bad guy for wanting a storybook/movie romance... well, there's a chance for teens yet!

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

See also:
Library Queue
an adventure in reading
Book Nut
Blogging for a Good Book
things mean a lot

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