I've
been keeping track of the books I finish in a given year for a couple years
now. Here are the books I read in 2013:
- Undead and Unemployed by MaryJanice Davidson
- The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (translated by Ralph Manheim)
- M or F? by Lisa Papademetriou and Chris Tebbetts
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- In the Stone Circle by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel
- Five Little Peppers Midway by Margaret Sidney
- Selected Poems by Robert Browning, ed. William C. DeVane
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
- Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- The Book of Animal Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
- Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons by Bill Waterson
- North to Thule by John & Harriet Frye
- Friendship Cake by Lynne Hinton
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
- Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
- Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott
- To Be or Not to Be: A Choosable Path Adventure by Ryan North and William Shakespeare
- Poor Yorick by Ryan North
- Changes by Danielle Steel
- An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor
- Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
- Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott
- Swift Rivers by Cornelia Meigs
- The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel
Honestly,
I had hoped to read a few more… (I did get partway through Middlemarch by George Eliot, but about 200 or
300 pages in, I just wasn't invested enough in the characters to continue. I
looked up the plot summary because I was interested in how things worked out, but I just couldn't stomach wading through
another 400 pages to get to those resolutions!) I've been hoping for a while
that I might manage to get to 50 books in one year, but I seem to be stuck
right around 29 or 30. I think if I'm not getting distracted by work or other
obligations, I'm distracted by the internet. It's possible it would help to
only read one book at a time, instead of constantly being in the middle of 3 or
4 books at once, ha.
General
reviews:
Favorites
were, I think (excluding Harry Potter because that's not even fair), The Secret Life of Bees, and the Calvin &
Hobbes collection. The Lovely Bones was
really good, although incredibly creepy and unsettling. Oh, and of course the
choose-your-own-Hamlet was amazing. (Not that I'm biased because I helped fund
its publication or anything…)
I
did not like the Danielle Steel novel at all, which I was a little surprised
by. Not that I'm huge into romance novels, but I like a trashy novel every once
in a while, and I assumed I couldn't really go wrong with something by someone
so successful. Big mistake. I might as well have picked up Twilight. The
characters started out relatable enough, but as the plot progressed it just
lost me. And then I got to the scene where the father character slapped his
oldest son across the face. And I was just done. I don't care that the book was
written in the 80's or whatever, that's not really acceptable to me. And to
have the female protagonist not say a word about it… Ugh. Just… over it. (There
might also be a scene where the same guy hits the female protagonist? Again,
not okay. It just made me want to throw the book across the room.) This was
definitely a book I finished by dint of sheer stubbornness. I was also kind of
disappointed with the conclusion of Black and
Blue, but I guess things can't always end happily if you're trying to
write "realistic" novels.
