read 25 books in 2006

Did not happen….:(

entertainment.

well, 2006 is over….let’s try again!

I admit it, I failed miserably.

I’ll try to make 2007 a better year in reading.

Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart

Finished with less than 10 minutes to spare. Yes I realise that’s a sad way to spend New Year, but I’m not really bothered about New Year, I make a fuss at Christmas instead.

Enjoyable and an easy read. I’ll be looking up the sequals.

I did a year-end wrap-up for movies; figured I might as well do the same for books. As with that one, this is a revisit of books I read this year, with no regard to when they were actually written/published/whatever.

The best book I read this year, and quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read, was The Prisoner’s Wife. Absolutely stunning, and still resonates with me almost a year later. I should also mention the one other 5-star book from the year, actually the first book I finished in 2006, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. One other book that has really stuck with me, a 4.5-star one, was The Children’s Blizzard. I almost rated it 5 stars, and in retrospect perhaps I should have.

Worst book of the year is easy—the only one to which I awarded just one star—Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. The worst book that I have ever bothered finishing, and I hope I can always say that.

The surprise of the year was probably Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. Namely, I’m surprised I finished it. It’s a pretty long novel, and I started it during a period when I simply could not finish a work of fiction. It’s also bordering on magic realism, which isn’t a genre I’m really drawn to (somewhat ironically, since I am absolutely drawn to the underlying worldview). But I did finish it, and loved it. It turned me around in several ways, and any other fiction I read during the year was directly attributable to my experience of reading this one.

It’s hard to pick a disappointment of the year, mostly because I don’t hold a lot of expectations for books, but I guess the biggest one would be the second book I read, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank. It was just such a great idea, and it seems like a good writer could have done so much with it. I really wanted it to be much better than it was. In a totally different way, and to a lesser extent, Moyers on America was also a bit disappointing.

The genre of the year for me seems to have been the memoir. If you count Anne Frank’s Diary, I read six of them (not counting Memoirs of a Geisha, of course). And all of them got ratings of at least 3.5.

Discovery of the year was Charles Chesnutt. I really enjoyed The Marrow of Tradition (I’d call it my novel of the year), and I hope to read another from him—The House Behind the Cedars—in 2007.

Gaping absence of the year was A Rumor of War. I’ve been wanting to read that book for some time, and I had it on my TBR list the entire year. Never got to it; hopefully I will in 2007.

I actually read the last chapter of this on Jan. 1 2007, but I’m counting it for 2006. Sorry this post is so late in coming, but I was without power for a couple of days there (actually finished this book by candlelight).

25. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Received this as a BookCrossing book from SallyKitt, and I’m pretty sure that I never would have read it otherwise. It turned out to be pretty good, though.

I’m not wild about storytelling frames, and I went back and forth on this one. For most of the book it was bothering me, but as she enters the upheavals of WWII, there was something a little reassuring about it. Then again, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Aside from the frame, there were some things I really liked and others I really didn’t. It’s a deeply anti-feminist book, in a way. Namely: It seems to me to be a book about how cruel women can be to each other, and how far above it all men are. You might say that that’s inherent in the content, but I don’t necessarily think that it is. There aren’t any real bonds among the girls/women in this book, other than the one counterexample of the protagonist and Mameha. Every other female-female relationship is based on greed, suspicion, revenge, desperation, or outright cruelty. The relationship between men and women, on the other hand, was probably dictated by content. Though it would have been nice to see expectations overturned at least a little bit. The protagonist spends her whole life waiting for a man to save her. Save her from what? Mostly, it seems, from having to live her own life.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the book: Does Chiyo/Sayuri ever actually do anything proactive to further her own cause? I can only think of one thing, and she completely bungles that in a way that any second-grader would have known to avoid. Other than that, she spends the length of the novel as a leaf on the wind, while everyone around her—geisha and non-geisha alike—is working to create some kind of life for him or herself. Part of what bothered me about the frame was that I knew she was going to come out all right in the end, and frankly I didn’t see why she should. I kept waiting for her to do something, and kept getting disappointed.

OK, so enough about what I didn’t like. I did enjoy the book, believe it or not. Mameha was interesting, as were several other minor characters. But mostly, Golden is quite a writer. There are a couple of spots in the book where the protagonist remembers back to other times in her life, and at those spots I became really aware of just how well the author had described those other times. I could really see and hear everything, both large and small details. That takes some real talent, I think, and some real work. He did a hell of a job.

So all in all, I did like the book. Not a bad one to finish the year out on, I suppose. Thanks again to Sally for sending it to me. I’ll pass it along, BookCrossing style, though (as with any book I’ve read) it’s a bit the worse for wear.

Ratings
Interest: 2.5/3
Significance: 2.5/3
Recommendation: 2.5/3
Overall: 4.5/5

It was a well written book, and for that reason I found myself compelled to keep reading. There were a couple of times, though, when I was so fed up with the protagonist that I just about quit. I do think there was quite a bit of substance to the book. That I had a problem with that substance doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t worth delving into. I feel like I learned a lot from this book, and I don’t mean that I learned about the culture of Japanese geisha districts prior to WWII, or anything that narrow. I did a lot of thinking, because of my problems with the book. I would recommend it pretty widely, I think, though I’m not sure how strongly.

Next up here at home, to start off the new year, is a book about North Platte, Nebraska called Once Upon a Town. I’m actually about 2/3 through it already. Want to read more books about this region this year, so this will be the start of that.

I was close – so close! I actually had several books going at once, which I still intend to finish, but when the holidays got rolling I just didn’t have enough time set aside for reading. I’ll make it 30 books for 2007, and put the ones I started in 2006 on that list.

I started reading this book on 30th December. I finished on 1st Jan, but decided I shall record it as the last book I read for 2006.

It’s hard to describe what I thought of this book. But I shall try nonetheless.

The first half of the book was about grief postponed. The author included many medical terms while trying to figure out if there was something, anything she or even her late husband could have done. She finally concluded that John was already living on borrowed time, after the pacemaker was installed. She did less of this while describing the harrowing account involving Quintana, their only daughter who was hospitalized due to an infection that morphed into sepsis shock. John died while Quintana was in a coma. As Joan noted, Quintana held on, but John let go and she couldn’t help but feel angry at John in the course of her mourning.

The last half of the book the author talked about how she froze her own life the first year after her husband’s death. Her sense of timing was based on the calendar year before her husband’s death. What they did the same time last year, who they met, where they had dinner, the last few hours of his life when he remarked his life was essentially worthless (or something to that effect, I am not quoting ad verbatim).

The last half of the book made me cry. Her loss and longing were things I could immediately relate to. All in all, this book was not an easy read. But one thing Joan Didion achieved particularly well, was how never once did I think she was carrying on out of self-pity. Her account was an honest portrayal of grief, how the living make peace with the dead and the loved one now departed. Definitely a fitting finale to all the works I’ve read throughout the year.

Here’s to 2007!