Good Books, Tough Decisions

About 99.5% of the time, I have a book that I am reading and an audiobook that I am listening to on my iPod and in my car. Usually, I can definitely pick one that I prefer to read/listen to over the other, so if I get a break, I know which to read. The last few days, these decisions have been extremely difficult. I've been listening to the Gemma Doyle trilogy. I've finished A Great and Terrible Beauty and am most of the way through the second book, Rebel Angels. I've just started reading Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games. OMG Both are so good; it's hard to choose. I love the story of Catching Fire more, but I've spent so many hours with Gemma and her horrible friends that I want to know more. Oh both Katniss and Gemma bring me such worry! Very strong females whose weaknesses are those they love and the suppression of their societies. Whoever I choose at any time, I'll enjoy it.

Julie & Julia

I went into this thinking, "Okay, a movie where real life parallels a historical person." It really wasn't that.

Instead, we have two distinct stories. Yes, there are a few similarities, but I think they're much better seen separately. One about a modern woman who feels lost and unsatisfied. She has a wonderful husband, a crummy apartment, and an emotionally stressful going-nowhere job. She then becomes completely obsessed with Julia Child, cooking her way through her French cookbook. Meryl Streep was fantastic as Julia Child; I loved how she could see other people's disapproval at times and rise above it. That is more impressive than not caring. Amy Adams was a sad Julie Powell, searching for happiness in her day-to-day existence.

Moments were sweet and inspiring. I knew little about Julia Child before the movie and greatly enjoyed learning more. Julie Powell was an every-woman; we all feel monotony at times. This was definitely a charming story but there were many times I felt it lagging. At 123 minutes, it felt a lot longer. But at the end, I did feel like it just... stopped. Especially with Julia/Julie. But I guess the major parallel of writing was complete, so the story ended. I would recommend this to others looking for a good, semi-realistic story. But I would suggest the matinee.

BBC Book List

A friend tagged me for this on Facebook. Let me preface this by saying that I don't agree with a lot of these books. I am anti-staugy classic. Sorry BBC. So the list...


The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

Total: 4

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 1

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 1

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 1

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 1

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 0

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 1

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 0

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 1

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 3

My GRAND TOTAL, proving the BBC wrong: 13


As a follow-up, the following are on my to-read list (with hundreds of other books, so well see how that goes). And yes, I realize there are many other good books on this list and they're not all staugy classics... but these are the ones that interest me. These still bring me to 21 of 100. I think I'll live.

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Dracula - Bram Stoker

Barry Lyga

*Insert obligitory I'm-such-a-bad-blogger-sorry-for-not-updating comment here.*


Moving on.

Barry Lyga is pretty awesome. I've read his books as they've come out, so it has been spread over a few years. So far, all of his books take place in the same town (Brookdale). Except for two, they are not really a series. But he does drop in characters here and there that appear and multiple books. Characters do pop in and you can think, "Ooooh, I know more about that guy!" or whatever. It's nice feeling In-the-Know. Someday I might go back and re-read these all together to get the full effect. But these titles definitely stand on their own. Plus, they're not chronological, so it doesn't matter which you read when.

I have loved these books. The characters are well developed. Good and bad things happen to them. They are usually fairly smart people, but they still say stupid things and don't listen to their own common sense.

I recently finished his newest book, Goth Girl Rising, which is the sequel to The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl. Overall, it definitely stood up with the others. I had slight hesitation because this was the first one where the narrator was female. I applaud for Lyga holding his own and even writing about *gasp* boobs and periods. There were many, many times I wanted to smack Kyra upside of the head and be like "Stop being so stupid." But we real people are stupid too, so I usually forgave her. This was a great follow-up to Fanboy and Goth Girl but I feel the audience may be different. Shifting narrators from Fanboy to Goth Girl may alienate male readers. This book is very girl-centric. Seriously. Periods. Enough said. Still a wonderful read!

Two final things on Fanboy and Goth Girl and Goth Girl Rising: (1) There are a lot of comic book references. Honestly, I had no idea what a lot of them were in the first book but am more familiar with the Neil Gaiman references in the sequel. For graphic novel readers, this is a way to tie what they read into a novel. For non-gn readers, these are just good books with many references they may not get, but Lyga usually explains. (2) Lyga has some kick butt covers. Goth Girl Rising is gorgeous! But I miss her lip ring. In the text she has a nose stud too, but the lip ring is often discussed in both books.

I have loved meeting these characters and spending time in their lives. All characters are similar in that they have obvious flaws but their life experiences are radically different. I look forward to many more from Lyga.

Spike's Deadliest Warrior

One Saturday night, fiance and I were hanging out with his brother and sister-in-law at their house. We were flipping through the channels and tried out Spike's new show Deadliest Warrior. Little did we know what we would be experiencing on of the best--and by best, I mean worst--shows of all time. The show takes two historical warriors from different time periods and pits them against one another. It's basically 6 guys playing with toys (weapons): two "scientists" and two teams of two more men. Each team are "experts" for a warrior in history. These "researchers" test the various weapons from the warriors and input them into a high-tech program (Excel) that simulates battles. These weapons are tested on various dummies including awesome ballistic gel dummies that contain a skeleton and internal organs. For example, one episode was the Ninja versus the Spartan and another was the Pirate versus the Knight. So the two teams trash talk one another while the "scientists" continually change their minds about who would win. However, the best part about this show is the last few minutes where each of the two warriors (two actors) meet in a random field and fight, because you know samurai and vikings would battle in a random field.

This description does not do this show justice. You must check it out for pure entertainment value.

Neil Gaiman

I feel the need to gush. Gaiman was on the Colbert Report last week and was HILARIOUS. I always appreciate an interviewee holding their own against the always entertaining Colbert. But in my school-girl ways, I have to say that it was awesome to watch him speak. Weird, I know. But after listening to his self-narrated books, and then reading other books and hearing his voice while I read, it was funny to see this man connected to the voice I've spent hours listening to. On a similar note, he is an awesome narrator. I like the thought of authors narrating their own books but many fall flat. I've even considered listening to The Graveyard Book even though I've already read it, just to listen to him narrate (although I probably won't because there is just too much else to read!!!!).

I was, however, a bit creeped out by Colbert's seemingly extensive knowledge of Tolkein. While I haven't read Tolkein myself, it was a bit unsettling just how far he drew out the joke...

Yep. I'm a dork.

Just a fraction of the last month

I often THINK about blogging. But it's usually in the car or at work, so by the time I get to my computer, I've forgotten. So here's what I've been thinking...

Poems in verse are AWESOME for quick reads. I love how you can read the words like prose, but the physical alignment can add to the feeling of the story. I just finished One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones. A quick but sweet read about when Ruby's mom dies, she has to move to the other side of the country to live in LA with her big-time actor father, who she's never met. She has to leave her best friend and boyfriend behind. I loved Sones's use of verse and the references to popular and classic authors and books, like Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak, Hard Love, Charlotte's Web, and more.

I have also thought about my sick love of serial killers. I read Robert Cormier's Tenderness, about an 18 year old serial killer Eric, the old lieutenant who is obsessed with charging him with the murders, and the 15 year old girl Lori from a broken home who falls in love with him (the serial killer). Everyone knows Eric killed his mom and step-dad; everyone thinks he was abused; we, the reader, know he framed them in a calculated plan to be tried as a child so he could be out of jail at the age of 18, free to kill. We know he has killed more; the lieutenant knows; Lori learns. But throughout the story, I do sympathize with Eric. He can't help who he is. He reminds me of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter (and the Showtime show), the loveable monster; also remniscent of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter. I do love me some serial killers.

Speaking of repetition, I read John Green's newest novel, Paper Towns. The main plot: slightly geeky but normal boy wants free-spirited, gorgeous girl, who we think wants him too but she's too caught up in her own drama to know. Soooo much like his Looking for Alaska. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED both, but I look forward to more variety from him.

As far as work goes, I'm still loving my job. It has its ups and downs, but so does every job. Some days it does feel like work, but others, I relish in doing what I enjoy. This spring I'm doing:
-Assimilating the Book (our quarterly reading promotion; read sci-tech books and enter a raffle for your own copies of Little Brother, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and a 1 GB flash drive)
-SAT/ACT Math Review
-Podcasting
-Art contest
-CD crafts
---hover crafts (glue a closed sports cap to the top of a cd, then blow up a balloon and put it over the sports cap; when you open the cap, the force from the balloon makes a hover craft)
---small disco balls from cut up cds
-Smash Bros. Brawl Tourney
-Magazine crafts

I might start posting program plans on here, just to have them. I dunno.

E. Lockhart's Girls

So I don't know what to make of it. Author E. Lockhart writes books about teen girls who need to grow backbones. Some are strong and become stronger, others slowly develop self esteem. Now, it's been a while since I've read Fly on the Wall and The Boyfriend List, but I remember enough to know that neither main character (both narrators, I believe) were strong females. However, through experience with other people, they grow stronger and gain confidence in themselves. The same goes for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

On one hand, these characters frustrate me. They rely on others to determine their worth. For all three, girls rely heavily on guys, while other girls do play a role. For Fly and Boyfriend, the girls weren't that strong to begin with, while Frankie had some confidence in herself. Lockhart's use of peers to strengthen these girls makes me want to yell at the characters to focus on themselves.

On the other hand, we do use society to judge our own worth, especially as teenagers. While our self perception is important, perception itself can be the product of our environment.


So let's hope that Lockhart's readers live vicariously through these characters and use the characters' experiences to build their own confidence and realize their own value.

2008 awesomeness and 2009 motivation to be awesome

So I've been whining about not reading as much as I'd like. Besides fun and work, I was looking for more motivation. Well, more like passively waiting for it. So then another teen librarian suggested we compete...

Woohoo! Motivation! http://www.swonlibraries.org/viewevent?id=1594

A reading contest between, well, anyone who wants to participate. Sweet. It's like 4th grade all over again. I WILL RULE WITH MY READING LOG.

So what am I reading now? The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman. After listening to his audiobooks (which he beautifully narrates), I can actually hear him in my head. Kinda creepy and cool at the same time. I've been working on it awhile. It's really, really good, and I think all ages will appreciate it. I've just been lazy and not reading outside of work breaks.

Otherwise, my 2008 reading is going well. I've gotten through:
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Identical by Ellen Hopkins
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (and the rest of the saga, at that!)
Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott
Impossible by Nancy Werlin
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

I'm currently listening to:
Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

I have possession of:
Paper Towns by John Green
Hero Type by Barry Lyga

And the only thing left I don't have and haven't read is:
What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

I'm sure there are more, and I've tried to read books previously published (sometimes my only options for listening!). But it's still nice to, hopefully, already have some award winners read when they're announced later this month. Besides, there are only 312 books on my goodreads to-read shelf... I'll never catch up.

Work wise, I'm doing a book discussion on 2008 books. I have a sinking feeling it will turn into a we-love-Breaking-Dawn group, but hey, it's 2008. Our next big reading promotion is for award winners. Luckily, I've already gotten many of them read because of school, but there are always more!!!

Do you listen?

I've been a bad reader. Meaning, I haven't really read a lot lately. I love books. I do. It's just outside of lunch breaks at work, I haven't picked up books often recently.

But I HAVE constantly been listening to audiobooks. I love, love, love audiobooks. No, it's not the same as reading, but it can be an incredibly enjoyable experience in itself. I make use of my commute (30 minutes each way) and even a little time walking to and from my car (thanks ipod). As much as I love reading, I love listening as well. There's something nice about someone reading you a story. And some of these narrators are phenomenal.

I would never discount an audiobook. The fundamentals of reading are still there: using your imagination in creating another world and living vicarously through these characters. Go listen.