Books I've Read

I'm not sure if I mentioned it in this blog, but one of my goals for 2008 was to read 50 books this year. I'd also had lofty ideas of writing reviews, or at least synopses, of the books too, but that hasn't worked out so far. Perhaps it will with later ones, but for now I just want to get this list in writing:

1. Wally Lamb - She's Come Undone

2. Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma

3. Bill Bryson - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

4. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

I'm ashamed to say that I read the abridged version, but that's only because it was what I received as a gift. This is one of those books, like The Brothers Karamazov (which I started reading last summer), which I thought I would completely over my head, and that I would hate it. I would have sworn that I had tried reading this book before and put it down, so it was with hesitation that I even opened it, but within a few pages I was swept in. It probably helped that I just kept imagining that guy who also played Jesus from the movie version, and the bewitchingly evil Guy Pearce, but I finished this book in no time, and really loved it. I'd even read the unabridged version, if I ever got my hands on it.

5. Jeannette Wells - The Glass Castle

I hated this book. It's not to say that it wasn't well-written, because it mostly was. And it was engaging... I would have read it cover to cover had I had the time. I just... hated it. This is yet another memoir (gross!) about the author's extremely close relationship with her siblings, and extremely strained relationship with her parents, who at the time of her writing, are living homeless on the street. The parents are just awful characters (awful people, I guess, because this is nonfiction). The child abuse and neglect that she describes is enough to turn the stomach, and her refusal to condemn them... her insistence, in fact, on understanding and even accepting some of their ludicrously terrible behavior was enough to make my skin crawl. And it made it all feel like a lie. Maybe I just hate memoirs. I didn't think I did.

The only thing I like about memoirs is how lately it seems that every one that gets celebrated turns out to be a big fraud.

Here's my favorite sentence from that article: "This follows on the case of Misha Defonseca, who fessed up last week not to have been raised by wolves in the forests of Europe during the Holocaust — a story Blake Eskin untangled in Slate here and my colleague Greg Cowles blogged about below." [italics mine]

6. Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This book was amazing, as I expected. I read Foer's last book (Everything is Illuminated) in December of last year, and really really loved it. It was refreshing, devastating, about the Holocaust--everything I was looking for in a novel at that time of my life. I was a little hesitant when I found out this book was about 9/11 (where will you go from here, Foer? Hiroshima?), but it lived up to my expectations completely. There was no heavyhanded grief, although there easily could have been, and the narrator was so loveable that I could barely put it down. (Precocious 14 year olds are my favorite.) The weaving together of the stories of two generations works as well here as it did in EII, if not better. I just loved it.

7. Kim Edwards - The Memory Keeper's Daughter

I'm not going to bother writing a review for this. It was pretty good. Interesting enough to keep me reading and decently written, although at times I found it slow.

8. Wendy McClure - I'm Not the New Me

Okay, I'll tell the truth. I actually read this book a million times last year--I'm sure I even blogged about it, but I re-read it this weekend, and I'm counting it. You can't stop me. I'm behind anyway.

9. Lucy Beale - The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weight Loss

Self-help books count? They do now.

So if I pace myself at about 4 books a month, I've still got three more to read before the end of March. Which would be entirely doable... if I had three books. I really will finish up the short novels book this week, and then I still have Moby Dick to tackle. GROSS.