Read a book for each week for the rest of the year.

Finishing this goal makes me feel good!

It’s important to keep up a regular pace for reading, even when life gets kindof hectic. I liked being able to sit back and relax with a book and feel justified about it, even when life was whirling around and everything felt out of control.

I would definately recommend this to anyone. I love reading! Keeping such a demand for books up exposed me to more books and different types of books than I’ve seen for quite some time. It was great to expand my horizons!

Between Research Reports and Final Exams, I still managed to read an aweful lot!
I read Marriage: A History, and What is Marriage For? for my English research paper. Both were incredibly educational, but also incredibly depressing.
Besides those, I read a book called May Contain Nuts, about a british uber-mom who suddenly realizes the error of her ways. I can only hope things don’t get that bad before I figure out I’ve gotten off-track.
A wonderful collection of short stories, Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat was also in there, too.
Not to mention Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (way confusing! Nothing like contemporary Japanese literature to have you chasing the plot out into left field!), Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (another of the 1001), then the incredibly quick (but still satisfying) Brokeback mountain. After exams I settled into reading my ring books that are so backlogged, and finished Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s co-operative effort Good Omens (and loved it!), Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (she’s one of my new favourite authors!), and the Weedon bros Diary of a Nobody (also a 1001).

Ergo, here I am on New Year’s Eve to say, Hurrah! Books for each week, read! This is a good pace (though difficult to keep up during school!) and I’ll probably try to keep it up come the new year.

(Sorry for the no-photos. I’ve been having trouble uploading entries with pics, so I just gave up.)

I had an assignment to do for my NOST class, so I picked up two collections of Eskimo myths. I read the entirety of both books (including the introductions and prefaces!) One was called Tales from the Igloo, and the other Tales from Esikmo Alaska. They were quite the introduction to an indigenous culture I know nothing about. Having been raised on the Cowichan stories of Raven, who turns out to be a good guy, I was shocked at how dastardly the Eskimo Raven was. While I was in Japan, I’d read the complete collected works of the Brothers Grimm and learned that talking animals, when they give you advice, are generally to be heeded, but not so for the Eskimos! To heed the advice of a talking animal (in animal OR human form) would generally get one killed.

I would need more context and more information before I could even attempt to understand the culture from which these tales spring.

The week before last I digressed a bit from my bookring books and read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. He raised some interesting points, but spent too much time insulting his readership for me to really care about them. Instead, Blair and I ended up laughing at a running joke about the holcaust of scratching one’s nose. I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone, really… in fact, I’d discourage one reading it. Though, from a cursory browse of Chris Hitchenson’s God is Not Great (which I didn’t read all the way, so it doesn’t count) I would definately recommend it. I may end up buying another copy of that one (the first copy I bought I sent away as a birthday gift for veganmedusa, a fellow bookcrosser.)
I also read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—man, do I ever love those apocalyptic classics! It was a book that was on VeganMedusa’s wishlist, so I picked it up for her, but couldn’t resist reading it, too. Great, rather depressing, thought provoking… A book I’d gladly own full-time.
Last week I read a collection of short stories about Haitians by Edwidge Danticat (isn’t that a cool name?) It was called Krik? Krak!, and was a quick read, and even quite pleasant, even though lots of people die in rather horrible ways during the course of the telling of the stories.

I read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I forgot to journal it here. I also forgot to journal that I’d finished it back on Friday when I did. Not only that, but I forgot to journal finishing Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue. I thoroughly enjoyed the Bill Bryson one! I learned a lot, and it sparked plenty of “well fancy that!” conversations between Blair and I… I even used it as a resource in my first English essay this semester! Wise Blood I didn’t particularly enjoy. Everyone was so angry and, well, crazy. I didn’t understand it, and I don’t feel particularly enriched for having read it… but I did read it!

So, today I finished reading my second of Christopher Moore’s books: Island of the Sequined Love Nun. (The first was Blood Sucking Fiends.) I will now, of course, have to make time to read Practical Demonkeeping (which I have,) and track down Fluke, Dirty Job, Stupidest Angel, Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, and Lamb. That’s a lot of books, but I anticipate them being well worth the reading, as I’m quite enjoying Moore’s irrverent and quirky sense of humour.

Next up is something much more serious.

(ps… sorry there’s no pic, but I can only seem to save my entry so long as there isn’t a picture attached to it. Some sort of bug. Hopefully it’ll be over by the time I finish the next book.)

Today (seriously, just today) I read both Norma Hawkins’ novel Chokecherry (well, I listened to it, it was a CBC Podcast, but it counts!) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. One was incredibly lighthearted and had me laughing out loud, and the other one literally made me cry. Both were well worth reading. Obasan was actually assigned as a text for my women’s studies course, so I had to read it. I do not regret it in the slightest!

The Unadulterated Cat, by Terry Pratchett, with cartoons by Gray Jolliffe. It was an entertaining (drew several chortles from me, honest!) little read that I managed to get through in one day, depspite the fact that today I actually did many things that weren’t reading, including updating my livejournal, talking on the phone with my mother, playing WoW, sleeping most of the afternoon, cooking a turkey, and registering for my university classes. I finished it, though! Before midnight, if that matters, although it’s after midnight as I’m typing this. Oh well.

It was entertaining smiles

Martin Hyatt’s debut novel The Scarecrow’s Bible. This was an interesting read. The second-person narrative was odd (it’s a really difficult device to use! I’m not that brave!)... perhaps it would have struck closer to home for a man to read? I don’t know. Hyatt is lyrical, yes, but I really did get tired of his sentence fragments! I enjoyed the depth to which he exposed his main characters, though. I’m glad to have read this, because I really don’t think I’d have picked it up on my own in a bookstore, or even a library, so it’s a real bookcrossing.com discovery! I found it interesting, the way he drew the reader around in a pair of lives that’s more common than any of us cares to think; a perscription junkie, a street drug junkie, the people in their lives just watching them kill themselves slowly and not knowing how to stop it. This is a good read, if you find a copy and you don’t mind gay love.

I finished #4 in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series “Lunatic Cafe” on Friday night. I had a hard time getting into this one, and almost gave up on it, but ended up sticking through it, anyways. They’re so easy to read, these books, with their short, snappy chapters. They’re pretty smooth, conversational reading, too, kindof of the same ilk as Stephen King, though I must admit I like reading King better. This one bored me a bit, because it seemed to go on and on and on about Anita’s relationship issues with Richard (and I was so certain, as soon as he proposed, that he’d die!) and I was really irritated at the beginning by the fact that her relationship with Jean Claude was still so static. Events at the end of the book lead me to hope that maybe in the NEXT novel, it will finally start evolving. I guess I’ll keep reading these. It was a good brain-break from heavier hitting books like In The Forest, etc. I’ve enjoyed the others, so I won’t give up on the whole series just because one was kinda boring. All the “setting up” in this one probably means more action and change in the next!