Review: The Spring Cleaning Murders by Dorothy Cannell

The Spring Cleaning Murders

by Dorothy Cannell

2 stars

Ellie Haskell is cleaning house. It’s time for her annual spring cleaning, and she’s having a grand time of it – until one of the members of the C.F.C.W.A. (the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association) dies unexpectedly. Soon Ellie is “swept into”, nuk nuk, the mystery.

Cozy mysteries are a strange beast. The author has to insert murder into mundane lives, lighten it up with humor without being flippant, and be sweet without being saccharine. I’ve read many, and although there is much gloss, there are gems which deliver a clever little mystery with well-rounded characters and a peek into another place. I’d say this one misses the mark on all counts. The plot line is stretched, to say the least, especially if you stick it to the end and find out the solution. Funny? Sure, if you enjoy 200 pages of puns about cleaning. Location? Timing? It’s Generic Hall in the town of Unincorporated, in the year Nineteen-Something-or-Other. This is England, yes, it says so on the cover and everyone says things like “Mummy” and drinks tea and all that rot. Take away the token actions and I’d be hard pressed to tell you where things were going on. Same with the timing. It’s an awkward mash-up of 1950′s English cozy and modern chick-lit, leaving you with a strange collection of female characters who like to keep the house nice for their husbands and wonder at that woman who is going after her career instead of a family.

<i>The Spring Cleaning Murders</i> is simply grating.  From the ridiculous plot to the obnoxious dialogue, this book got on my nerves. It began well, but it built up a collection of small annoyances until I was ready to chuck it out the window. Such as…

The children. I’ve seen quite a few children grow up, yet none reached adulthood so quickly as Ellie’s unbelievably precocious three-year-old twins. They speak in full sentences, occasionally lapsing into twee malapropisms. “Jonas, I don’t want you to go to that place where the dead people live…’Least not till you’re two hundred. You’ve got to show me more stuff that Mummy and even Daddy don’t know. Like how to put the wheels back on my train when it gets broke,” says the little boy. If a three-year old kid spit out that mouthful to me, I’d buy him some ice cream. Not only that, but they’re quite independent little tykes – one of them even manages to walk most of the way home from a stranger’s house. What a gift for direction!

Strange little jabs at women. It’s not that the book is overtly sexist – contrary to some modes of thought, a woman who stays home to be a homemaker isn’t by definition repressed. Yet some statements are just confusing in what gets assigned to women versus men. For example,

I tried to strike the right note between sympathy and an attempt at raising her spirits. “You’ve both been through a lot, haven’t you?”

“My sister is tremendously strong. Of course she’s gone through the change and they say the male hormones kick in at that time. But she’s always been a rock.” Madrid started to heave herself up, thought better of the idea, and sank back against her cushions.

Granted, this is an older woman, so perhaps Cannell was trying to create a character who was still stuck in the 1950′s. It’s still an odd phrasing to have in a book which apparently takes place in modern times.

Strange little jabs at vegetarians. Apparently they are hypocritical individuals who will picket just about anything. It’s really quite alarming. They’re even trying to shut down a small, locally-owned restaurant because they serve meat there.

While not being a terrible book by any standards, it certainly isn’t one to rush out and buy.

If you’re looking for a good cozy, why not try the Aunt Dimity series by Laurie Atherton?

What have I done?!

I went to Powell’s, that’s what I did. It’s a glorious store, and if I was in there any longer, I would have spent my entire paycheck.

I’m always torn when it comes to buying books. For one thing, working at a library for 3 years makes me feel weird about spending money on books I haven’t read yet. In fact, I passed over several books, just because I know my library’s collection well enough off the top of my head that I know I can get it from there. However, these are all used, ones I can’t get immediately from my library, and relatively cheap. Today’s splurges…

1. Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box A horror novel that has been on my TBR for over a year since it was recommended to me by an online friend.

2. Roy Winsor’s The Corpse that Walked. Cheesy art, traditional murder mystery fare that was evidently only good enough to get one review, which is quoted on the front and back cover. Also it was only $1. Sold!

(skipped, but really really wanted to buy) I didn’t even notice the title, just that the tagline was “His nights never changed, only his women did!”

3. Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck. The history book which set the standard for all history books I’ve read since was Larson’s The Devil in the White City. It was the first I have ever read that caused history to come to life. I am so excited to read another book by this author!

4. Peter Høeg’s The Quiet Girl. Same author as my favorite mystery novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. His writing is dark and intriguing and always makes me think.

What have you purchased lately?

 

Review: How to Lose a Battle by Bill Fawcett

How to Lose a Battle
by Bill Fawcett
2 stars

There is a hierarchy of history books. There are the upper tier books, which grab you and present you with fascinating new worlds to explore. Books like The Devil in the White City, and The Evolution of Useful Things fall in to this category. They’re as gripping as a novel and bring events to life (as dead as that cliche is).

Then there’s the second tier down, full of interesting history, but not written well enough to spur you to action.

Below those books are the dreadfully dull historical novels and textbooks, which curbstomp history and leave it for dead. We’ll ignore those.

How To Lose A Battle , edited and mostly written by Bill Fawcett, falls decidedly in the second tier. This book showed promise – I picked it up on the basis of its title alone. Yet I was certainly not interested in much of the book. This is just a collection of stories of various military blunders.

Some of the essays are very good. I was particularly interested in the essay on the Six-Day War by Edward E Kramer (although why he was chosen as a good person to write this essay I have no idea – he’s better known for founding DragonCon and writing other sci-fi books – assuming I found the correct Kramer.)

Other essays aren’t so great. I hate to name names, but I was really unimpressed by Bill Fawcett’s writing style. All he writes is a narrative. If you’re looking for an analysis of these events, or even a particularly critical examination of them, look elsewhere. It’s hard for the stories to stand on their own – can you really derive entertainment from events that, because of poor leadership led to the deaths of thousands of people? OK, yes, if you’re a horrible person like me, who calls the Darwin Awards a joke book, you can.

This isn’t a funny book though. It’s just stories, depressingly real stories about stupid people and stupid deaths, and the author doesn’t even take the time to give a full picture of the disasters. Either make it interesting by teaching me something, or make it interesting by glazing over it to humor.

• It’s also somewhat annoying to read endings like this.
• It’s the lazy way out of writing a good conclusion, and almost every essay by Bill Fawcett (and there are a hell of a lot of them for your anthology, Mr. Editor!) ends in bullet points.
• Seriously, it’s like reading through a textbook and getting to the Chapter Summary at the end. Snooze.

Challenges: 325 pages, A to Z

Review: The Bridge at Andau by James Michener

4 stars

 ”At one camp near Andau, a Catholic priest visited a group of refugee students and asked, ‘Now that you are free, would you like me to conduct religious services here next Sunday?’
The boys were embarrassed, but finally one said, ‘Father, we thought we’d just sit around and talk.’
The priest understood and laughed: ‘Yes…after so much silence.’”

If the last book I read (Cat’s Cradle) was about the futility of man, this book is about the survival of man. Although much has changed (and much has stayed the same) in the 50 years since this book was written, it remains a powerful work and argument against communism.

Andau's coat of arms. Thank you, Wikipedia!

The bridge at Andau is small – just a few cheap boards over a not-too-big river. Yet it is also a marker of the boundary between Hungary and Austria, and at the height of the Soviet occupation of Hungary, it also became the site of a mass migration of refugees fleeing the Communist regime. Their powerful story is told by Michener, who was an American journalist helping the refugees escape.

This is more than just the refugees story, however. Michener is very careful to place it within its times, explaining the Soviet takeover that led to the Hungarian Revolution. This revolution was a spontaneous resistance to the Soviet occupation by many students and laborers, and culminated in the indiscriminate murder of protestors and civilians by Russian military. In the midst of this, a significant number of people escaped to Austria.

I can honestly say when I started this book I was not anticipating being so moved. This is a powerful, thought-provoking book. Although this occurred over half a century ago, the same issues are alive today. I am so grateful for my intellectual freedom, for the ability to live without fear.

Just a couple parts that stood out to me – and I could go for so much longer! The only reason I chose these quotes above the others are that they are a reasonable size for a short review.

“Most of the names in this book are fictitious for the reason that the people involved are still terrified that the AVO will track down their friends and relatives and torture them endlessly … But when I finished talking with this particular woman she said boldly, “Go ahead and use my name. It’s Mrs. Maria Marothy. I suffered so much at the hands of these beasts that this can be my only revenge. Let them know that in freedom I hold them in contempt.”

If anything, the only critique I could offer to this book is that so much is written filled with emotion – not the best way of presenting an unbiased perspective on history. But when you read this and learn of the things that happened, suddenly it seems a bit impossible to avoid being angry at the terror and injustices that were pushed upon these people.

Challenges: 271 pages for Paging All Bookworms, A to Z for M author, and Mixing it Up, History category

Review: The Double Agent by H T Teilhet

2 stars

Probably it was because she was an excellent swimmer and had the trim construction that seems to help excellent swimmers with short curly hair get their pictures in newspapers more often than girls who are ordinary swimmers and somehow look it.

Hoo boy. When that is on the front page, you know you’re in for a treat. The entire book is written like that. It is awkward to the point where I was having trouble figuring out just what was going on.

Teilhet had a good thing going here. You’ve got spies, Nazis, a chase through the French countryside. You would think it’d be hard to mess this up, but baby, you’d be wrong. How do you do that?

Step one is to write in such a horridly stilted fashion. Awkward parsing, far too much attention on unimportant details (I cite a paragraph-long description of the fact that a man was adjusting his rear-view mirror) and ignoring important details (the characters could teleport, apparently, if the connecting sentences were any indication). I tried to keep a list of poorly written sections but honestly, just open the book anywhere.

Step two is to make the main character so aggravatingly sexist. I will grant you this book was written in 1945. But Hoot (the double agent) ditched his wife, Cally, after three days of marriage. He shows up five years later and whines that “she abandoned him” because she tried to move on with her life. Not the most sympathetic of characters. Couple that with the wife – who has a doctorate – only being referred to as “girl” or “little one”.

Step 3, and I feel silly bothering with a spoiler because you’re not going to read the book but anyway SPOILER ALERT the reason Hoot and Cally are chased through France, being shot at, mobbed, and generally terrorized, is because their dear ol’ government thought it’d be a good way to flush out who were Nazis and who weren’t…somehow? It’s explained in this way: “He’d brought Hoot and Cally up to date.” There’s no real conclusion, and certainly no logical explanation for the charade. END SPOILER

Why isn’t this a 1-star review? Because that makes me feel like a mean person. At least this book gave me the pleasure of having something to rip into. Okay, maybe I am a meaner person than I thought. 1 star for you, Mrs Teilhet!

Challenges: 220 pp for Paging All Bookworms

Review: Kurt Vonnegut

So far this is the year of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as I’ve read two since the beginning of the year (that’s .5 books/week). I am amazed. The most eloquent arguments against war pale in comparison to his bleak novels. Other writings can help me explain why I am against war; his novels help me feel why I am against it.

Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle, written in 1963, holds a lot of similarities to the movie Dr. Strangelove. It is account of what happens when immeasurable power is held by a few, perhaps unworthy, people. The scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker has invented Ice-9, a type of water which acts as a seed crystal, causing regular water to freeze at room temperature. When he accidentally kills himself with it, his children split the Ice-9 he created among themselves. The narrator meets these children while he is in the process of writing a biography of Dr. Hoenikker, and begins to learn about the strange manipulations they’ve made to gain power in their lives.

The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokonist warning is this: Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it.

This book gives me a lot to mull over. On the one hand, the apocalyptic novel is depressing and bleak. On the other hand, it is so surreal that it is hard to let it get you down. I feel bad to be stealing a quote I found on Wikipedia of all places, but I think it really sums it up. Theodore Sturgeon wrote in his review, “this is an annoying book and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don’t you’ll go off weeping and shoot yourself.” Vonnegut did a great job convincing me that when you look closely enough, the world is an incredibly broken place.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, is the quirky story of Billy Pilgrim, World War II veteran and POW who had been captured by aliens and now spends his life flashing from one point of his life to another. It is a fragmented novel, circling around the firebombing of Dresden. Less sci-fi than philosophy and satire, it focuses on themes of the existence of free will and the banality of evil. “Worst” of all, the entirety of the book illustrates how Americans – the ‘good guys’ of the war – had performed the same senseless acts of violence as the Germans did. Because of this and other explicit sections of the book, this has been banned and challenged in many arenas. It is an uncomfortable read – but it needs to be.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

I didn’t realize until I was reading up on the background to this book that this was an early public acknowledgement of the fact that homosexuals were targeted during the Holocaust. Vonnegut was very heavily censored for this, as is always the case. It is amazing to me when I discover things I thought were public knowledge were actually matters of debate in previous times. This website has some moving personal testimony.

Review: Death of an Expert Witness

Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James (1977)

4 out of 5 stars

“It was not, thought Dalgliesh, that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.”

Dr. Lorrimer was a top-notch forensic scientist, but miserable at maintaining good relationships with others. His abrasive personality made many of the other people in his lab breathe a small sigh of relief when he is murdered with the very mallet he is examining. Commander Adam Dalgliesh of the New Scotland Yard, London, must discover the murderer among Dr Lorrimer’s coworkers – all who have motive, opportunity, and the expertise to eliminate the evidence they’ve left behind. Unfortunately, the unlikability of the murdered man means people aren’t particularly interested in finding the murderer…and I found that I wasn’t exactly interested either.

It isn’t that this is a bad book. On the contrary, it is a very, very good book. P.D. James well deserves her reputation as a master at developing her characters and setting. The location is a little out-dated now – a book written on forensic science in 1977 feels archaic in comparison to the police dramas of today – but is detailed, and does make an interesting look into vintage forensic techniques.  Her characters are as alive as you would expect from her novels, and it features a clever little twist. However, I just wasn’t drawn into this novel like I was into some of her other books, and I can’t identify why.

In short, if you’re looking for a good introduction to P.D. James, I preferred A Taste for Death. If you already like her writing, then you’ll like this one too.

As an aside: I highly appreciate that she, unlike other authors I’ve read, describes the process of gel electrophoresis accurately (I read a book recently – and can’t remember the title! – where the characters were laughably in awe of this “electrophoresis” system. It was obviously the author latching onto a science-y sounding word to make his book sound better). Kudos for her doing her research!

 

Photo of the 1st edition cover from Wikipedia.

My Challenges for 2012

Day 3 of 2012 and I’ve already gotten completely challenge-mad. Here is the “definitive” list of what challenges I’m doing, with links and updates.

Paging All Bookworms
Goal: Read 30,000 pages in 2012
Read to Date: 4,300/30,000 = 14%

Classic Crimes
Goal: A Little Drop of Poison = 10+ books
Read to date: 0/10

A to Z/New Author Challenge
Goal: 26 new authors
Read to date: 3/26 & 2/26
New Authors: A  B  C  D   E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z
Titles: A  B  C  D   E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

Banned/Challenged Books
Goal: 12 books
Read to date: 2/12

Bucket List Challenge
Goal: 4 books
Read to date: 0/4

Mount TBR/crossposted in the Trim That TBR on the Play Book Tag thread, shelfari.com
Goal: “Pike’s Peak” = 12 books
Read to date: 0/12

Mixing It Up
Goal: “All the Trimmings and a Cherry on Top” = 16 books
Read to date: 0/16
Classics  Biography  Cookery, Food, Wine  History Modern Fiction  Graphic Novels/Manga  Crime/Mystery  Horror  Romance  SciFi/Fantasy  Travel  Poetry/Drama  Journalism/Humor  Science/Natural History  Children’s/YA  Social Science/Philosophy

Play Book Tag
Goal: Read a book that matches every monthly tag
Read to date: 0/12
Tags: January (Ireland)  February (Memoir)  March  April  May  June  July  August  September  October  November  December

Support Your Local Library
Goal: Level 4 = 37+ books
Read to date: 0/37

Vintage Mysteries Challenge
Goal: 16 books
Read to date: 0/16

Mixing It Up

The Mixing It Up challenge will be a good way to stretch my reading! I tend to get stuck in a rut when I read – hopefully this will inspire me to branch out over more genres than I normally would.

The rules are pretty simple (and the original link is found here): Read 1 book for each category. I’m ridiculous, so I’m going to try to read one from each category. Thank goodness I’ve got all year! Here’s my list thus far* (and why only some are in color, I have no idea):

Banned/Challenged Books

This challenge is probably going to be hardest for me. As much as I try to be a thoughtful, intellectual reader, he truth is that I read for pleasure. It takes me a very long time to get through a book that makes me think about the world. However, I also want to stretch myself, so this year I am going to try to read several banned books. I’m going for the easy part of the challenge: 12 books by 12/31/12. That’s one book a month – no biggie, right?

Here are the books I want to read (this is doubly good for me, because many of these are books I already own!):

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Read 10 January (review)
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
7. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – Read 15 January (review)
8. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
9. a Goosebumps book (since my mom never wanted me to read them!)
10. The Fighting Ground by Avi
11. Blubber by Judy Blume
12. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz

Bucket List Reading Challenge

Here are a couple books I have been wanting to read, but haven’t (for whatever reason) done it yet. I’m going for the “mini cooper level”, so I’ll be starting with 4 books. The whole challenge can be found here.

1. xkcd volume 0 by Randall Munroe

2. World War Z by Max Brooks

3. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

4. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Vintage Mysteries Challenge

I am so excited for this one! The original challenge can be found here.

Step 1: Choose your theme

1. Colorful Crime: 8 books with colors in the title
2. Murder by the Numbers: 8 books with a number in the title
3. Occupational Hazards: 8 books with a “detective” who is not a P.I.; Police Officer; Official Investigator (Nurse Keate, Father Brown, Miss Marple, etc.)
4. Perilous Policemen: 8 books with a policeman as the primary investigator
5. Lethal Locations: 8 books that are all about place (for instance: country houses, hospitals, schools or even particular cities/countries)
6. Dangerous Beasts: 8 books with an animal in the title (The Bat; The Canary Murder Case; etc.)
7. Deadly Decades: 8 books, one from each time period plus one of your choice (Pre-1900s; 1900-09; 1910-19; 1920-1929; 1930-1939; 1940-1949; 1950-59)
8. Golden Age Girls: 8 books by female authors OR 8 books with female detectives
9. Cherchez le Homme: 8 books by male authors OR 8 books with male detectives
10. Murderous Miscellany: Choose your own theme. Get creative–surprise us! The only stipulation is that the theme cannot be reading books by a single author.

I choose #7 and #10

Step 2: Choose your books – at least 8

A to Z/New Authors Challenges

This challenge should tie in nicely with my other ones

The A to Z Reading Challenge, which shall henceforth be known as AZRC, challenges you to read and review one book starting with every letter of the alphabet. There are three possible challenges you can partake in.

1. Author – A to Z by authors last name, 26 books.
2. Title – A to Z by book title, 26 books.
3. Double Whammy – Do both Challenge 1 and 2 for a total 52 books.

Check it out here: http://www.strawberrysplashreviews.com/2011/11/to-z-reading-challenge-2012.html

I’m shooting for the authors one, and I’ll pay attention to the titles. Let’s see!

I am also participating in the New Authors Challenge. To do so, I am combining these two. My goal for this year is to read 26 new authors, one for each letter of the alphabet. Unfortunately, this kind of ruins my plans for my “X” author – I read a book by Qiu Xiaolong last year. Any ideas?

Here is my list for new, A to Z authors 2012:

Classic Crimes Reading Challenge

In 1990 the Crime Writer’s Association published a list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, and the Mystery Writers of America published their own list in 1995. Wikipedia rocks, both lists are on this page. The goal of this challenge is pretty basic: read and review as many of these books as possible. The rankings are as follows:

The Game’s Afoot – 5+ books

A Little Drop of Poison – 10+ books

A Dark and Stormy Night – 25+books

Stop, You’re Killing Me! – 50+ books

A Perfect Murder – 100+ books

A few rules:

• The challenge is from January 1 – Dec 31, 2012
• All books must be reviewed. If you’re not a blogger, post your review on Shelfari, Goodreads, Facebook…whatever social site you want.
• Bonus points if you watch and review a movie made based on these books.
• Cross-overs are just fine – books read for this challenge can also be used for other challenges, and vice versa.
• Sign up in the comments!

Depending on how much activity this generates, I may or may not offer prizes. But we’ll see, it should be fun!

Happy reading!

2012 Support Your Local Library reading challenge

I am shooting for level 4 – reading 37+ books from my library. The rules can be found here

This time last year I worked at my school’s library, and at any given time I usually had about 30-40 (or more…) books checked out. Because I was a student, I had access to the Summit lending program, which let me check out books from libraries all over the Pacific NW. As you might imagine, I used this service heavily. Not only that, but I was easy biking distance from my local library. It was really book heaven.

I moved to Gladstone in September, which took me away from the awesome library. I also graduated, so lost Summit privileges, and got a new job, so am no longer working at a library. All this combines to mean that I haven’t been to a library for a very long time. I miss those days of wandering the stacks, checking out dozens of books “risk-free”. I even love the feel of library books better than books I’ve purchased. I like how worn they are, as they’ve been passed from reader to reader. I am feeling some severe library-withdrawals. This should help!

This page will be updated throughout 2012 as I finish the books.

#1  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (10 January 2012)
#2 The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey (14 January 2012)
#3 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (15 January 2012)

Mount TBR – the Road to Pike’s Peak

This will be a difficult challenge in combination with the 2012 Support Your Local Library challenge – none of the books, by definition, overlap! I am shooting for “Pike’s Peak” – reading at least 12 books from my TBR (to-be-read) pile. Oddly enough, this pile mostly contains books borrowed from friends. I imagine they will appreciate me actually returning their books!

I will keep this page updated, with links to reviews, through 2012.

My plan-to-read list:

1. World War Z by Max Brooks
2. Daydreamer by Janet Quin-Harkin (borrowed from my sister-in-law)
3. (the following are all borrowed from Nick…) The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
4. The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan
5. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
6. Savage Empire by Jean Lorrah
7. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
9. Dead Man’s Chest by Roger L. Johnson
10. Legend of Willow Wood Springs by Terry Ellis
11. The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski
12. Smart Women Finish Rich by David Bach (borrowed from my sister)

New Year

I have a confession to make.

I didn’t finish my reading goals this year.

My goal was to read 30,000 pages this year. I was well on my way to doing so – I hit 26,000 pages in August. And then I stopped. I suppose I got burned out. I was reading about a book a day, and suddenly I didn’t want to anymore. Partly this was due to some significant changes in my life – I’m married now, I have an apartment to keep going, a full-time job, and a very fun knitting addiction. Partly this was due to just not being interested in the books I was reading then.

A couple days ago I went to Powell’s bookstore and felt a little stir of book-love in my cold heart. I picked out a couple novels – The Murder Room by P.D. James and The Japanese Corpse by Janwillem Van De Wetering. I read through the P.D. James while on the bus, and loved it.

Now it’s the beginning of a new year, which is a nice starting point for some new reading goals.

My Reading Goals, 2012

1) Read 30,000 pages
I may start audio books. If I do, then I will use the page count from the Shelfari book page. Same for ebooks.

2) Read 100 books
I read 97 books last year, mostly between July and August. Reading 3 more shouldn’t be too hard…right?

3) Engage with the books I read.
For me, this means creating a thoughtful review and posting it here. Spend time discussing them with my friends.

4) Sign up for a few reading challenges to keep me going.
The 2012 Support Your Local Library challenge. I’m shooting high – level 4, reading 37+ library books.

The Shelfari Paging All Bookworms monthly challenges (the 30,000 pages is the general challenge). January’s challenge is to read a book on the apocalypse. World War Z coming up!

Mount TBR – I’m shooting for Pike’s Peak, since combining this with the library book challenge will be difficult.

Care to join me?

My Favorite Books 2011

This past year was a great year for reading. I discovered some of my favorite authors, and re-discovered some old ones. I read some books that I’ve been wanting to read for years, and added hundreds more to my TBR pile – whoops. Here are my favorite reads:

11. Blink (Malcolm Gladwell)
I first heard of Gladwell through xkcd. This pop science/psychology author really is fantastic. I had a hard time deciding between this one, or Outliers.

10. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Death is the narrator of this novel set during the Holocaust. Much of this novel is based on the experiences of Zusak’s parents. Amazing book, but hard to read.

9. The Shining by Stephen King
It’s a shocking revelation, I know – Stephen King is a creepy author. This was the first King novel I’ve ever read, and I’ll admit – I understand why he’s so famous. Daaaammmmnnn.

8. Jim and Casper Go to Church by Jim Henderson
A fantastic conversation starter about the role of church in modern America.

7. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xialolong
This mystery takes place in post-Cultural Revolution China. The mystery was excellent, for sure, but better still was the poetic way the author described the setting. It really opened my eyes to the culture and I want to learn more.

6. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
I laughed, I cried…it moved me! This is an incredible book that has earned the distinction of being banned quite often – apparently it’s not politically correct to talk about bad it is for Native Americans on their reservations.

5. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
A true crime novel that functions more as a character sketch of the people of Savannah, Georgia. I was completely engrossed by this book.

4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
This book will stick with me for a long time. It is a chilling account of a senseless murder. I am glad I read in during the warm summer months because otherwise I would have been completely depressed. As it was, I am only somewhat distraught.

3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I am now hopelessly in love with Neil Gaiman. I also read Stardust and the first in his Sandman graphic novel series, Preludes and Nocturnes – creepy and wonderful.

2. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
This book will envelop you like the thick fog surrounding Manderley. The setting and atmosphere are gripping. Don’t let the word “classic” scare you off – this is an amazing book and I have no idea why it took me so long to get to it!

1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
This has the distinction of being both the longest book I read this year, and my favorite. This novel opened my mind to an entirely different way of thinking.

I also started two series which are a lot of fun. The Aimee Leduc series are political intrigue set in France. The Amsterdam Cops series is an understated – yet hilarious – police procedural set in Amsterdam.

Happy reading!

Fate

My sister was perusing the bibliography to the (actually really good book) Stiff by Mary Roach and found this citation. I think this author has found his niche – what do you think?

The article? “Penile Arteries in Humans.” Fascinating!

The author?

S. Droupy.

Bwahahaha!

(Because Stiff is actually a great book, here’s a lovely link where you can get a copy!)

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Enjoy.

Vook?

Just read a fascinating article at the Washington Post about the integration of videos and reading. Here’s one area I hope gets developed immediately: Textvooks. There’s always the multimedia CD-ROM or companion website attached (for a price) to textbooks. However, the ones I’ve used have always been disjointed, created for non-tech savvy professors and budget-constrained students who would prefer to use the textbook only. If for the same price we could get videos that go right along with the text, how much more would we learn? I think the interactive nature of the format would lead to a greater understanding of the subject. After all, you don’t truly know something until you own it in your mind.

What do you think?