CarlyM tries again in 2019

I did this challenge for several years but quit when I started to fall way behind on my reading in 2016. This year, I'm trying to get back to a more typical pace--I'm up to 24 as of mid-June, and I'm hopeful that participating will motivate me more! And I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else is reading. I'm also still plugging away at the Dewey Decimal Challenge!

Rating System:

*: Not good; a struggle to finish; probably only finished for the Dewey Decimal Challenge
**: Passable but a little hard to finish; some notable issue
***: Enjoyable and good for the genre; in some way interesting or entertaining; a pleasant read
****: Excellent for the genre; would definitely recommend; couldn't put it down
*****: Super amazing; telling all my friends about it

First 25

1. Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Mehldahl ***
2. Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman by Polly Evans **
3. Shrill by Lindy West ****
4. Does It Fart? by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti ***
5. Lumberjanes: Beware the Kitten Holy by Noelle Stevenson **
6. Train by Tom Zoellner ***
7. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art by the Guerrilla Girls ***
8. Miss Piggy's Treasury of Art Masterpieces by Henry Beard ***
9. A Guide for the Church Usher by Thomas Clark **
10. Berkeley by David Berman ***
11. The Swamp: the Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald ***
12. Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin **
13. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry **
14. Geology Underfoot in Yosemite National Park by Allan Glazner ****
15. Bones: A Forensic Detective's Casebook by Douglas Ubelaker ***
16. Utz by Bruce Chatwin **
17. Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell ***
18. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Stewart ***
19. An Irish Country Wedding by Patrick Taylor ***
20. Farm City by Novella Carpenter **
21. Emily Dickinson is Dead by Jane Langton ****
22. The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell ***
23. Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano ***
24. Letters from the Hive by Stephen Buchmann ***
25. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne ***

26. Clarice Cliff: The Bizarre Affair by Leonard Griffin **
27. Lotta Prints by Lotta Jansdotter ***
28. Best American Comics 2016, ed. Roz Chast ***
29. A French Alphabet Book of 1814 by Charles Plante ***
30. Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice by Catherine Lewis *
31. Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson ***
32. The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger **
33. Dead as a Dodo by Jane Langton ***
34. The Wallflower Wager by Tessa Dare ***
35. Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change by Richard Fisher et al. ****
36. Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna by Mario Giordano ***
37. Ebola: A Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen ***
38. Sappho: A New Translation, Mary Bernard, trans. ****
40. A Naturalist’s Guide to the Galapagos Islands by Steve Rosenberg **
41. Understanding Hieroglyphs: A Complete Introductory Guide by Hilary Wilson ***
42. Brain Briefs by Art Markman and Bob Duke ***
43. By the Book by Julia Sonneborn ***
44. It Devours! by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor **
45. Curiosity's Cats, Bruce Joshua Miller, ed. ****
46. Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora ****
47. Photographer's Guide to the Sony DSC-RX10 IV by Alexander White ****
48. The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner ***
49. Galapagos Wildlife by David Morwell and Pete Oxford ***
50. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory****

Third 25

51. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson ***
52. Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan ***
53. The Duke and I by Julia Quinn ***
54. Well Met by Jen DeLuca *
55. Conan Doyle for the Defense by Margalit Fox ****
56. The Seven and 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton ***
57. Less by Andrew Sean Greer ****
58. Check These Out by Gina Sheridan ***
59. Through the Evil Days by Julia Spencer-Fleming ***
60. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher ****
61. Meet Me in Atlantis by Mark Adams ****
62. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark **
63. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls by Guerrilla Girls ****

Welcome back!

Thanks!

26. Clarice Cliff: The Bizarre Affair by Leonard Griffin. I bought this because I kept hearing about Clarice Cliff on Antiques Roadshow, and I thought "The Bizarre Affair" referred to a literal bizarre affair. I quickly learned that "Bizarre" was the name for most of Cliff's pottery designs; not quite the scandalous tale I had in mind. Most of this book is "Clarice Cliff came up with this design for this shape of pottery, and then she did another design for another shape," but I did learn something about the pottery business.

27. Lotta Prints by Lotta Jansdotter. I like Lotta Jansdotter's prints so was interested to check this out. It has simple instructions for different kinds of block printing, and I expect I'll try some of them. The screen printing instructions were not clear, and I had the impression that this is too complicated a technique to be explained in the style of this book.

Two books for my Dewey Decimal Challenge!

28. The Best American Comics 2016, ed. Roz Chast. I wanted to try out more serious comics and graphic novels, but on the whole, this wasn't for me. The comics are good but not something I particularly enjoyed. Many of them are very dark as well.

29. A French Alphabet Book of 1814 by Charles Plante. This is another Dewey Decimal Challenge book. This is a pretty little reproduction of a hand-drawn word book for a French child, done in 1814. There is a brief introduction explaining some of the wordplay that modern readers wouldn't understand, and the rest is just the illustrations with the words (so a short read for sure). If you don't read French, this would be meaningless, but if you know at least a little French, it's fun.

30. Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice by Catherine Lewis. This was a big zero for me. The concept is that each term is demonstrated by some version, take, or story/illustration from the nursery rhyme The Three Blind Mice. It seems like it is intended to be lighthearted and funny, but the author anthropomorphizes the mice and then, in some examples, provides a backstory about why they are blind--they were used for testing cosmetics in a lab--and goes into some gruesome detail about their tails being chopped off. This thread of animal cruelty is hard to stomach in what is supposed to be a funny book. But, perhaps more importantly, the book does not fulfill its purpose. I'm not sure what a person trying to learn about writing could get from this. The terms are mostly basic; the definitions are superficial; and there is no organization whatsoever (for example, "legend" is by itself, but "fable," "proverb," and "myth" are next to each other).

31. Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson ***

I didn't quite make it to 75, but better than last year! On to 2020!