Do the 2008 TBR challenge

If 3 hours sitting around in the hospital laboratory for my glucose tolerance test was not enough to get me to start reading the Fountainhead, nothing will be. I don’t want to read it, and I don’t have to! It’s not like I even own it – I don’t have stacks of unread books lying around, so my TBR books have all been from the library.

I’ve read 11 books that I’ve been meaning to read, and a number of other books in addition. I think that’s good enough.

I finished it last night. I wish this book wasn’t so incredibly long (~1000 pages), because there’s no way I’m going to be able to convince any of my friends to read it. But I’d really like to discuss it with them!

It took a hundred or two hundred pages to get into it, but once I did it was a really compelling story. And I couldn’t put it down for the last 150 pages or so! I was so sad that DH was away on a business trip; this kind of story always makes me all lovey-dovey. Well, it had such a strong effect on me that I’m still all lovey-dovey today and will be very glad to see him when he gets home tonight.

I have the movie from Netflix (also very long: ~4 hours!) and I’ll probably watch it over the weekend.

I’m not sure what everyone sees in this book. Maybe it’s “literary” or something, but I didn’t find it very engaging. Just barely engaging enough (and short enough) to get me to read the whole thing.

I haven’t read any of my TBR books for awhile, but I just placed a library hold on my remaining three books to read:

Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell
Slaughterhouse-Five / Kurt Vonnegut
The Fountainhead / Ayn Rand

I should get them sometime next week, and have time to read them because I’m cutting back my work hours to half-time!

The next book for my book club is a graphic novel called Persepolis and it’s about the (female) author’s childhood in Iran. The book club meeting is in two weeks so I reserved the book from the library. I picked it up yesterday.

Turns out I accidentally requested the Spanish version. D’oh. I don’t really have time to request it again in English and be sure I’ll get it before the book club meeting. Oh, well. I guess this is a good chance to brush up on my Spanish! And if I had to make this mistake, this was a good book to do it with, since it’s fairly short and there are pictures!

I’m about halfway through Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and I’ve decided to give up reading the rest of it. I’ve realized that the thing I really like about Jane Austen’s work is the story/plot, and not so much the imagery or characterization. In fact, I find her writing quite an effort to comprehend when I read since the way she writes (along with others of her era) is so different from modern parlance. Since I already know the main plot (having watched it in May in the form of a BBC miniseries) I don’t really have the driving desire to find out what happens next.

I other news, I just watched the movie version of Sophie’s Choice. I was pleased that it followed the book’s story fairly well, and I thought the acting was fantastic, but (like the book) it just seemed far too drawn-out and, frankly, a little boring. I don’t really think they could have done anything differently, but it was just the sort of movie that I wanted to (and did) get up in the middle to go do other things.

I just finished Sophie’s Choice but I had to skip about 70 pages near the end to be able to finish it since it’s due back at the library today.

I thought it was a fairly interesting read but a bit long, so I didn’t mind skipping some. I’m not sure it was worth all the time it took to read, but it certainly gave me some things to think about.

I am also making some progress on Sense and Sensibility, which I’m reading via DailyLit.

1. Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy (via dailylit ).
2. Snow Crash / Neal Stephenson.
3. The Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver.
4. Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell
5. Starship Troopers / Robert Heinlein.
6. Animal Farm / George Orwell.
7. Slaughterhouse-Five / Kurt Vonnegut
8. Sophie’s Choice / William Styron
9. The Fountainhead / Ayn Rand
10. Sense and Sensibility / Jane Austen
11. Frankenstein / Mary Shelley.
12. The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde.

Uh-oh, I just now realized I have Sense and Sensibility on my list and I already watched a miniseries adaptation about a week ago…spoiler warning! Not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. But, I liked the TV version so that’s a good sign!

But I’ve been reading other stuff, too. So I’m way ahead of the game. Maybe I can convince my book club to pick one of the remaining books on my list for next month.

And Frankenstein? It was ok. Certain parts were gripping, but I thought the end was pretty preachy. I would have been especially glad to read it in literature class in high school, though. Short, with more than one obvious message. Easy to write about.

Yay, I finally finished it after about 3.5 months!

I wrote my opinion on AllConsuming.

Not sure what’s next.