and she reads

I've been reading some incredibly silly romance. They are the book equivalent of cotton candy - enjoyable, fluffy, but you wouldn't want to read too many in a row. (Couldn't quite get that metaphor to work - also lots of people are anti-cotton candy which is just crazy - oh! but also goes along with the romance novel thing.)

I just finished Every Day by Dan Levithan. It was a teen book about a person who wakes up in a different body every day and how the person fell in love with a girl. It was not a very satisfying book but it really couldn't be without somehow "solving" the problem of the body changing thing. I liked it tho, and read through it very quickly.

I should be getting some interesting non-fiction in soon - How Music Works which is kind of a scientific look at music and The Signal and the Noise which is about statistics and predictions - something that interests me. I don't always read books about it tho because I end up hearing the same things over and over. This one is by Nate Silver who was very popular during the last election with his complex predictions.

I'm at 77 books this year. Or maybe a little more by now.

Also, going to try this amazon widget thing for books I mention and see how that goes.

Pre-apocalyptic books and movies have been haunting me lately. Those of the a-meteor-is-going-to-hit-Earth variety seem especially prominent. Is 4 a trend? Melancholia and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World for movies and The Age of Miracles and The Last Policeman for books. 

Should I see if I enjoy writing again? I go through journaling/writing spurts in my life it seems. How odd that I wrote frequently on a blog from 17 to about 19. How sad that it has since disappeared. I would have liked to check myself out. It wasn't that long ago in a lot of ways but in other ways it was forever. I graduated high school, started college. Moved to a different city (one of only 2 such moves in my lifetime) and met my husband. No wonder I wrote frequently - life was busy.

Lets see if I can remember everything I read recently. I've been zooming through books again lately.

This was so good. I've been neglecting non-fiction for awhile and thought it might be time to try something to get back in. I feel like I learned a lot about the war in Iraq but at the same time the whole book was so anecdotal that I didn't feel as though it was just a ton of information spewed at me. It was so sad though. He even tried to give it a nicer ending but it still just feels so hopeless there.

What's this? More Neil Gaiman? Can't believe I hadn't read these before. They seem like something my dad would have given me. This one is about the super boring son of a god, who finds out his father was a god just after his father dies. He also finds out he has a brother, who happened to get the god genes. Hijinx ensue. And I have another Neil Gaiman on my bookshelf...

My children's book for this post. Another historical fiction novel. This one is about a Japanese girl in California who gets sent to an internment camp. Apparently some of the camps during WWII were on Indian Reservations. There is some interaction between the two groups and the fact that they are both discriminated against lends interest to the story.

Almost forgot this one. This was a short, almost sensual story about a cooking class. Each character takes a chapter and it's neat to see how the lives entwine. Plus, sometimes I just love reading about food. And the author clearly loves food.

Well, I'm sick today and called in to work so I'm hiding in bed with a laptop and books. Here's some of what I've read recently.

I know Nick Hornby is "lad lit" or whatever you want to call it but I tend to really enjoy his writing and his books. Granted, they may not be literary masterpieces but you don't really want to read a literary masterpiece every single day. He's very talented at making people and relationships feel real. I don't know if its because of his own new experience with kids but the 6 year old in the book felt authentic as well - somewhat annoying and crazy but you like him anyway.

Another fun book to read. Explores the idea of all the different cultures bringing their gods to a new place and how the gods survive.... but it's funnier than that sounds. For a thick book it kept me entertained the entire time.


I have to admit that my knowledge of history is very lacking sometimes. I know that there is some animosity between Japan and Korea and I had a vague idea that Japan had controlled Korea at some point but I had no idea of the specifics. Its interesting what you can learn from childrens' historical fiction. The narration was split between Sun-Hee and her older brother Tae-Yul. It covered the last few years of WWII before Japan surrendered.

I had tried and failed in the past to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Since then I've read some books of his essays and really enjoyed his writing. So, I thought, why not give it another try. It's a huge book (1104 pages total), really very very large, but I thought, hey, I've read big books before. I love big books. This will be a challenge but I am "a reader" and I will read this book.

But.... I failed. I mean, I could have persevered for the next month that it would have taken me to get through it but I really read for enjoyment and I was spending more time trying to figure out if I even like the book than I was reading the book. I found myself not reading anything because I would have to read this book. Around pg. 100 I started getting interested but around pg. 200 I realized I was not interested enough. Sad.

On the other hand, I loved this book and zoomed through it in a weekend. Granted, it was a very lazy weekend. Yay, for post-apocalyptic novels. I just love that genre for some reason. Anyway, this was quite good. Its sequel of sorts to her earlier novel Oryx and Crake which I wish I had reread first. I love her inventiveness about what the future will bring. Very dystopian.

So, why is Margaret Atwood not labeled sci-fi? Or only sometimes? In my library's catalog, Oryx and Crake is her only book labeled sci-fi and then only 2 of 3 copies are. One is in regular fiction. So why is this sequel not sci-fi and why isn't Handmaid's Tale or the Blind Assassin? I think it's because she is "literary". Sci-fi just can not be classy. I wonder if it has to do with gender as well. Women don't read sci-fi/fantasy. Women do read Margaret Atwood. Therefore Margaret Atwood can not be sci-fi?

Combining my children's books for this post, I also recently read The Graveyard Book. Loved it. I thought it was interesting how sophisticated the concepts and vocabulary were in this novel. I understand why it is shelved mainly in our teen section even tho I read it for my children's materials class. Basically it was the story of a boy growing up in a graveyard while the man who killed his family hunts him down. Needs to have a sequel and needs to be a movie. But please, no 3D, I am so tired of 3D.

Let's see if I can remember everything I've read in the last few days.

No, I did not read the one with the movie cover. This was a very desolate, sad book. I read it in just a few hours. It is missing a lot of exposition about the story - how the characters came to be where they are. The reader has to fill in the blanks a lot. It will be interesting to see what the movie is like.

This one was pretty cool. It was obviously riffing off of Harry Potter and Narnia and maybe even Oz to an extent but the main character is a unfulfilled young adult who has the same problems any other sullen young adult might have despite the fact that he is a magician. Generally pretty dreary but fun to read something that's magical without being sparkly.

Technically the next two are for my children's class. Fractured fairy tales this week.



I liked both of these, the Fairest is a retelling of the Snow White story. Ella Enchanted is Cinderella. I liked Ella's character much better. The Fairest protagonist was only concerned with being pretty and the story kind of snuck in a moral about not being concerned with pretty but... it was too little, too late after she obsessed about it the whole story. I love that they are both characters with more than one dimension. It really added a lot to the fairy tale idea.

I think I'm missing something but I'm not sure what... This is why I'm writing these things down now.