Foxen's books in 2009

I have no idea how many books I usually read in a year, so this year I'm going to find out! I'm going to post a mini-review of all the books I read, and hopefully there will be a lot of them? Haven't decided on the particulars yet- I'll probably note re-reads (to be decided if they'll count towards the total, since I tend to read the same few books repeatedly, in the manner of comfort food) but not review them unless I've forgotten what they were like the first time through. Comments are quite welcome if you think anything I say is interesting in the least!

For now this is mostly a mental place-holder until 2009 actually starts. I'll start the thread for real with the books I get for Christmas (I already have a pretty good idea what they'll be.).

ETA: realized it's useful to have a list going of the books I've read, so here's the list (no touchstones, sorry, far too aggravating):
1. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.
2. The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.
3. Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire.
4. Krakatoa: the day the world exploded by Simon Winchester.
5. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.
6. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner.
7) Holes by Louis Sachar.
8) A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire.
9) The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.
10) Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker.
11) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
12) If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.
13) Stiff by Mary Roach.
14) The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
15) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
16) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.
17) Pastwatch: the redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card.
18) Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins.
19) Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
20) Jeeves in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse.
21) The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.
22) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer.
23)Watership Down by Richard Adams.
24) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.
25) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
26) Milk, Eggs, Vodka by Bill Keaggy.
27) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
28) The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson.
29) Crocus by Roger Duvoisin.
30) Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli.
31) Being Dead by Jim Crace.
32) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling.
33) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling.
34) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling.
35) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling.
36) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling.
37) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.
38) The Plague by Albert Camus.
39) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.
40) Matilda by Roald Dahl.
41) The Great Influenza by John Barry.
42) Enchantment by Orson Scott Card.
43) The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
44) Earthman's Burden by Poul Anderson.
45) A Bear Called Paddington by
46) Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker.
47) Pearls of Lutra by Brian Jacques.
48) The Long Patrol by Brian Jacques.
49) A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela's Prison Archive by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
50) Mattimeo by Brian Jacques.
51) The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.
52) Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.
53) Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barbasi.
54) Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine Borgman.
55) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
56) Digitial Copyright by Jessica Litman.
57) Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.
58) Remix by Lawrence Lessig.
59) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling.
60) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling.
61) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
62) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
63) The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales by various authors.
64) Tolkien and the Invention of Myth by Jane Chance.
65) Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis.
66) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis.
67) The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis.
68) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
69) Animal Farm by George Orwell.
70) The Actual by Saul Bellow.
71) The BFG by Roald Dahl.
72) Preservation: Issues and Planning by Paul Banks.
73) The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis.
74) The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.
75) The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis.

Oh, I am so impatient! Here is a ticker, at least:




Why a turtle and a treasure chest? The world may never know?

Who are we to question? Welcome to the group!

Thank you!

1. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. This is a fun little book that I got for Christmas (and got for my mom and my mother-in-law, too- I guess we have similar tastes!). It's about an island where the residents are banned from using specific letters as they fall off of a statue of Neville Nollop, the (fictional?) author of the sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.' It's entertainingly written; the epistolary islanders are pleasingly inventive in their compliance with the new rules, and the conclusion is very linguistically satisfying. I didn't realize (although really I should have) that it would be so much about censorship when I picked it up, and that's usually a topic that I find there isn't much to say about, but the premise here was so silly that I found it was actually very effective in talking about it. Overall a very good book (I rated it 4 1/2 stars). Very short though- I finished it entirely on the plane, which means it took less than four hours to read.

#5--This sounds terrific! It's on my list. Thanks!

terri

It's made its way onto my TRB list too - thanks for the lovely summary/review!

Sounds like fun! Thanks for the review.

Sounds very good, its gone onto my tbr/wishlist. Thanks for reviewing it!!

#5: It's been on Continent TBR for a while now. Looks like I need to move it up. Thanks for the review and recommendation.

#6-10 Wow! Thanks everybody for reading my thread! I hope you like the book too!

>5 Foxen: Not a book I'd ever heard of before - but it's gone on the wishlist. Sounds great.

>5 Foxen: foxen, it sounds like an intriguing concept. It reminds me of a book where the author eliminated all the E's, I think it was. Cant remember the book , or author because I never read it!

Nice review.

- TT

#13 - I feel like I've heard of that, or something like it. Wish I knew how to search for it, it sounds interesting.

Gadsby, A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E" by Ernest Vincent Wright. (touchstone not working)

#5 : I had never heard of this book either, but now I added it to my TBR list! It made me very curious about it!

#15 : OMG! Thank you! I've been seraching for this book's title for years, and although many people told me "Ah yes, I've heard about that book", none could actually tell me the title. Thank you!

#15 - Thanks! That's going on my list now.

A Void by Georges Perec is the novel I was thinking of that lacks the letter E.

>18 kidzdoc::

I didn't realize there was a second one. That looks interesting; I'll have to hunt it down.

The things the internet can tell you. I just did a wikipedia search, and the articles on constrained writing and lipograms have some pretty good lists of examples. With this kind of thing, though, I'm wondering how interesting a lot of the books would be to actually read. It seems like something that might be interesting to actually write, but then result in prose that was either stilted beyond readability or so amazingly un-stilted that you wouldn't really appriciate it. Any thoughts, those of you who've read some of these?

Edited because I don't remember html.

Edited again, because neither does LT.

I thought Gadsby was interesting, though you're right that it seemed a bit stilted at time.

If you want to try it, there's a transcription on the Web here. For some reason, actual copies of the book are very expensive.

I got a copy of Eunoia late last year - beautiful object, haven't yet got round to reading it, shall report back when I do!

Ella Minnow Pea is another of my recent charity shop acquisitions. Sometimes I really wish I could read several books actually simultaneously.

#21 - Thanks for the link!

2. The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Another Christmas book. I'm not quite sure what to say about this one- it was good, but I still found it difficult to get through. It's about the relationship between the editor of the OED for most of its compilation and one of his most prolific volunteer contributors, a U.S. army surgeon who was a convicted murderer and spent most of his life in an insane asylum. It's an interesting premise, and Winchester does a good job presenting it; it's well researched, and he uses it as a platform to talk about the history of dictionary-making in general, but I guess it just came across a bit thin. Essentially the premise is interesting, but not quite enough to sustain a whole book, and I'm not sure it succeeded in making any larger statements about... humanity? the nature of genius? whatever you might expect such a book to make statements about. It was still entertaining and informative, but just lacked the momentum to keep me wanting to keep on with it. Rated 3 1/2 ~ 4 stars.

I thought Ella Minnow Pea was so entertaining! Very clever and a breeze because of the premise. Glad you enjoyed it.

Sorry to hear that you did not care so much for The Professor and the Madman. It's been on my wishlist forever and I was planning to actually go ahead and buy it this year. Guess I'll wait a bit longer.

#26 :( I guess it's a sad part of a challenge like this that you can discourage people as well as suggest new things that they'll like. I wouldn't totally discount The Professor, though- I think a lot of my opinion was based on genre; nonfiction has to be pretty gripping for me to be enthusiastic about it even if it is really good. I think it could have been a bit broader in its scope, but if nonfiction is more your thing you could still really like it. Hope that helps!

Ella Minnow Pea just jumped to the top of Mount TBR; thanks for the review!

#26-27: I'll chime in on The Professor and the Madman - I thought it was pretty good, actually, but I am one of those people who does like nonfiction. I thought the descriptions of the process gone through to compile the OED very interesting.

Count me in on The Professor and the Madman as well. Winchester can be extremely dry reading, but if you like to read about words and, if you're a secret dictionary reader (oh well), this is the ideal read. It is very meticulous, which is probably what drives a lot of readers away, but I loved the detail. On the other hand, I'm okay with battle descriptions in histories that aren't so detailed....

3. Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire (author touchstone not working). This is the sequel to Wicked written (I believe) ten years later, and the first of what is apparently being called "The Wicked Years" series. The premise is (roughly) to take the world from the Wizard of Oz and present it as a more realistic, though magical, place, instead of a fairyland, and more specifically, from the Wicked Witch's point of view. I quite liked Wicked, with some reservations. Here are the comments I wrote on it, for context:

At first I thought that this book (rather like the Wizard of Oz) was trying a bit too hard on the allegory front, but I quite came around to the story and the character, and ended up revising my opinion entirely. It's a brilliant world, and I love the way nothing quite adds up. The mysterious dwarf standing on the edge of reality pulling the strings is never explained, kind of thing. By the end I was enthralled, but I also thought that the story had grown beyond the Wizard of Oz story sufficiently by the end that it was kind of forced the way it fit together. I also expected the Witch's life to be more monumental in some way- and I suppose that's part of the point (she's not supposed to transform into evil, because the nature of evil itself is so ambiguous)- still, I kept waiting for her to do something prominent to attract the attention of the Wizard. Through most of the second half of the book I still expected Fiyero to be an early incident, rather than the driving force of her later personality. So, I suppose I found it a bit uncoordinated at the end- it was still great though.
New thought: The coming of Dorothy should have had more overtones of the coming of Lurline- it was set up that way (although I just noticed it, now) but it didn't really click with the narrative.

Son of a Witch is about Elphaba (the Witch)'s probable son, Liir- who is, I think, a problematic character. The book was an enjoyable foray back into Maguire's Oz, and elaborated on some of the themes and questions left unanswered in Wicked, but didn't really add much, IMO. If you liked Wicked, Son of a Witch is about what you should expect from a sequel set after Elphaba's death: the world is emptier without her, and that's part of the point. I'm still not really sure what I thought of Son of a Witch, but I did enjoy it, and I think I plan on reading the next one, so I guess that passes for a recommendation.

Foxen, would you recommend reading Wicked before Son of a Witch, or can it stand alone? The reason why I ask is my library has the audiobook version of Son of a Witch and I'd like to listen to it, but I haven't read Wicked yet... Not sure when I'll get around to that one. I suppose I could request it via ILL from another library if it's best to read Wicked first.

Missylc, I think you'd definitely need to read Wicked first. Son of a Witch wouldn't make much sense or be very good without it. I do highly recommend Wicked, though! Hope you like it!

Thanks, Foxen! Glad I asked!

>31 Foxen: What a nice review -- I appreciated following along with how your views changed about the book as you read

Woohoo! Two books!

4. Krakatoa: the day the world exploded by Simon Winchester. Another book by Winchester that I got for Christmas, this one more in his area of expertise (I believe he's a geologist). The book is about the eruption in 1883 of the volcano Krakatoa just off the islands of Java and Sumatra. It takes a kind of "butterfly effect" approach, exploring just about everything that affected the outcome of the eruption and just about everything that the eruption affected- Winchester's point being that this one event had tremendous consequences in places and fields far removed from Indonesia and vulcanology. It's an interesting book, although I found it dragged in sections where he explored effects or causes that I, personally, was not interested in. His description of the eruption itself, though, which is what drew me to the book in the first place, was riveting. I'd recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in volcanos, geology, natural history, or the history of natural history- it's a good, wide-ranging exploration of these topics in relation to one interesting event.

5. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (why aren't my authors touchstoning?!). I picked this book up in the thrift store because I recently read Peony in Love, also by See, and couldn't really decide if I liked it or not. Having now read both books, on similar topics, with similar protagonists, I've concluded that I do, in fact, like Peony in Love, but that Snow Flower is not really that great. See's approach as an author seems to be to take some actual, little known historical thing and then to base a novel on it. Snow Flower is about nu shu, a form of "secret" writing used only by women, and Peony is about the play, 'The Peony Pavillion.' Both books take this one idea and then examine how they affect the lives of their protagonists- intended to be relatively typical Chinese women as they progress through their highly structured lives. It's an interesting idea, but if you're going to read one book, read Peony in Love. Peony actually said something (I'm still not sure what) about the conditions of life, and she did break out of her restraints and then come to appreciate them. Lily, the protagonist of Snow Flower, came to understand her mistakes, but not much else- and I think the fault is just that nu shu, the secret writing, was not a strong enough historical premise. Still, it was a fun read- I'd give it about 3 stars.

#6 - The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. This was an interesting book that should interest people who like reading about reading and the OED. The authors are current editors of the OED, which Tolkien spent two years working on in its first edition, which makes for an interesting perspective. The basic idea is to look at Tolkien as a philologist and to examine how he used and created words and how those words played a role in creating Middle-Earth. The most canonical example is that of Ents: Tolkien first knew the word as an Old English word for 'giant' and then created Ents and that whole corner of his world to fit the word. The book also interestingly points out the many new layers of meaning that Tolkien gave to the elements of his world through the linguistic resonances of the words he "invented" from ancient, dis-used roots. There is a whole level of subtle puns and linguistic meaning that informs Lord of the Rings that goes largely unnoticed to those unfamiliar with the ancient languages that Tolkien lived and breathed.

This was a good book, although it had its flaws, too. It read more like a long journal article than a book, and the first section- on the work Tolkien actually did for the dictionary- was relatively uninformative. The final section is a collection of word studies of the origins of Tolkien's words that was very interesting. Overall I'd give it 4 stars, or perhaps a bit less, since the writing style was not very engaging.

On an unrelated note, I was just accepted to both of the MLS programs I applied to! I'm going to be a librarian!

Neat! The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary sounds excellent!

Congratulations on your acceptances! Have you picked one?

Woohoo! Congratulations :) Very exciting.

Congratulations foxen!

Thanks guys!

Muddy, I will most likely be going to UNC.

The Tolkien/OED book sounds right up my alley... onto the TBR list it goes! And congrats about your program acceptance :)

Thanks!

#7 - Holes by Louis Sachar. This is a re-read, but I'm going to count it toward my total because I didn't remember it very well. It's a fun book, and very well written. A plot summary wouldn't really do it justice without giving it away, so I'll just say that it's about fate (or something like it) working in improbable ways. The way it all comes together is very pleasing. Overall 5 stars, definitely.

I loved Louis Sachar as a kid. Holes is a great book, and so are Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and its sequel.

I loved Holes too, sadly no other books of Louis Sacher have been translated yet :-(
When I read it last year, I immediately did re-read it, just because I did not want the book to end.

Holes is the only Sachar book I've read. I'll keep an eye out for Sideways Stories, though. Thanks for the recommendation!

Sideways Stories is definitely worth a read!!! Along with the 2 others that come after it... I don't know if he wrote more than that, but I remember reading 3 Wayside School books when I was in grade school (and frequently having nightmares about that one story *SPOILER* with the kid who turns out to be a mouse. Oh man. Seriously. Nightmare central. Though, come to think of it, there were far worse things in there than that, but for some reason that's the story that's stuck with me the most... LOL.

I bought Holes earlier this year but have not read it yet. Looks like I better get to it. I also added Sideways Stories to the Continent.

Holes is a good read. Bump it up a few pegs.

Whew! I have been moving house for the past week and the internet has not been connected in my new living quarters, so I haven't been able to post! I have been reading, though! Numbers 8 - 10 are:

A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
and
Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker.

Reviews will follow (possibly tonight, if I have more time than I think)!

Hope the move went well!

Well not having the internet for two weeks certainly boosted the amount of reading I've done! Numbers 11 and 12 are Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut and If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. But first! the reviews!

8) A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire. This is the third in the Wicked Years series and follows the lives of Brrr, the Cowardly Lion, and Yackle, a mysterious crone lurking in the shadows, emerging only to nudge events into the line of fate in the previous books. I liked this one much more than Son of a Witch. The Lion offers Maguire more of an opportunity to explore the socio-political world he has created; the Animal rights stuff was some of the most interesting in Wicked, and is explored in more detail here. I especially liked, however, (and was completely surprised by) getting to know Yackle more. If asked ahead of time, I would have thought knowing more about her would kind of ruin her effect, based as it is on her mysteriousness. That Maguire can give us her entire story and just make her more of a mystery is impressive and demonstrates his excellent story-telling. It's not the best book I've every read, but any faith I lost in Maguire based on Son of a Witch has been definitely regained, and then some. 4 1/2 stars, recommended.

I am giving up on Wicked - tried to read it last summer, and tried to listen to in on audio...both times got about 1/2 through it. I just can't get interested, and I have too many things I really want to read.

9) The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. I ordered this one from amazon based on the LT buzz, and I wasn't disappointed. I won't summarize the premise, since I've at least been bumping into it constantly of LT, but I will say that the book surprised me by not having a plot so much as an idea. There are kind of stories, character trajectories, but once you know the main premise (it's not hard to find, either, the book starts out with an anthropological quote basically explaining it) it is essentially a book-length thought experiment. Which isn't a bad thing. It was just as entertaining as a more plot-driven work, it just surprised me a bit. Anyway, it was a very interesting and thoughtful exploration of human memory and mortality and the relationship between the two. I particularly liked when one character was trying to enumerate all of the people he could remember- it inevitably got me trying to do the same, and it is remarkable how many there could be. I also liked the main character, Laura - she was well characterized and seemed very much like she could be a real person. Overall an interesting foray into a surprisingly realistic seeming memory scenario. 4 stars.

Ick, sorry for my goopy prose - this lolcat can explain.

#55- That's too bad, I really liked it! I can see how it could be a bit particular though, particularly at the beginning. Better luck with the rest of your reads!

10) Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker. Ordered this one based on someone's (drneutron's? I should keep better track of this) review here in the challenge. The summary: Jakob hears a scrap of news from outside the world of the ghetto and manages to live to tell about it. When no one believes him, he invents a ficticious (sp?) radio to authenticate his report. This one lie grows as the ghetto residents demand more news, and Jakob falls into the role of inventing hope for the doomed population. This was an excellent book. I really liked the story-telling. I'm not a big reader of Holocaust books, but I felt like this one really conveyed the ... everyday-ness, the triviality of the horrors of the ghetto- the way that it becomes understood both the horrors occurring and their inevitability, and the worn-down quality that produces. Without, also, being completely depressing. An extremely well-written book, recommended if you're interested in that kind of thing, or just if you like good literary fiction.

Jakob the Liar sounds like a good read. I'm adding it to my TBR pile--thanks for the recommendation.

11) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. This is a re-read, technically, but I didn't remember much of it from the first time through. I don't think I could possibly summarize Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim was a rather hapless soldier in WWII, but the particulars aren't really the point. I'm not sure there is a point, or what it would be- just that things happen, and so it goes. It's a great book, just don't ask me to explain it. I do like how the key to the whole story (don't worry, I'm not really giving it away, it's mentioned in the first chapter, which is external to the story) is the fire-bombing of Dresden, but the approach to it is so circuitous it isn't even mentioned for the first 2/3 of the novel. I'm not sure what that says.

All right, that's got to be the most useless review ever! Let me try again: Slaughterhouse-Five is the most canonical and exemplary Vonnegut, imo; if you like existential, surreal fiction (or maybe sci fi?) about real things, then give it a try.

12) If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Another re-read; I think I'm going to be re-reading a lot of things that I wished I remembered better this year. If on a winter's night a traveler is an interesting book. It alternates the story of the second person Reader, and the Other Reader with whom a reading experience can perhaps be shared, with the text (kinda) of the books they are trying to read. It's kind of a reader's nightmare, actually, since all of the books are somehow discontinued after the first chapter, and the reader (you) and the Reader are subjected to multiple stories that you just get into before they are cut off, never to be retrieved. The world in Traveler is beset with mystifications of the publishing sort and is awash in philisophical speculation on the nature of reading, what it can mean and do. I've thought of this book as where Calvino meets Jorge Luis Borges, with Borges' penchant for entirely apocryphal textual histories and mystifications.

I actually didn't like this book as much this time as I did when I first read it. It's a bit too postmodern for me now, I think. Also, by it's very nature and design (alternating stories, beginning about 12 stories with the intention of leaving you hanging) it's a bit of a choppy read. Nonetheless, a good book, certainly interesting, and certainly shows off Calvino's ability to write in a variety of styles. I probably won't be rereading it again, however.

#59- You're welcome! I hope you like it!

#61 Foxen: I tried reading If On a Winter's Night last year and just could not get through it. I may give it a go again later this year, but I think perhaps Calvino's style is just not for me. However, I try and give books at least 2 shots, and now that I am a little better prepared for what to expect, maybe I will enjoy it more.

#63- I'm not sure If on a Winter's Night is a great example of Calvino's style. I love Calvino, and partially what makes this book so difficult is that the style is very different. Good luck with your second try, but if you don't like it, just write off this book, not Calvino!

OK, I will look to see what else I can find of his before attempting If On a Winter's Night a Traveler again. I know my local library has a book of Italian Folktales by him that sounds up my alley.

I've read Italian Folktales, it's pretty good. Hope you like it!

OK, I will check that one out in the near future. Thanks, Foxen.

13) Stiff by Mary Roach. This is a nonfiction book about cadavers, and the various things that can happen to your body after you die, and it mainly focuses on bodies willed to science. It's an interesting look at what most people prefer not to think about, it's well written, and it presents some new ideas in a surprisingly entertaining way. For the most part I enjoyed it, although it's certainly not for the squeamish, except that the somewhat snarky (but never disrespectful) tone kind of wore on me after a while. Not a great book, but certainly a good one, very readable, and certainly memorable!

14) The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. I read this due to the distinct vacuum of books I wanted to read on my shelves. I realized that my tbr pile, while vast, exists largely in the form of an Amazon wishlist. Looks like it's time to buy more books! :) Anyway, I picked this one mainly to think about in terms of Wicked, and honestly found it pretty vapid. When I read it as a kid I remember thinking that it was much more complicated than the movie, and I remember hearing since then that it was actually some sort of outdated political allegory (anyone know anything about this?); what I found this time was pretty much neither. It was simplistic in the extreme and the best explanation I can come up with is that it was aimed at much younger children than I had thought. I'm perplexed by Baum's introduction, which describes it like this:

"The time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf, and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incidents. Having this in mind, the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartache and nightmares are left out." (Introduction written in 1900)

Modern education includes morality, therefore stories should be all pleasant fluff without any moral weight whatsoever? Is he being facetious? I mean, okay, Brothers Grimm style fairy tales tend to the unnecessarily gruesome, but isn't that a whole different category? It seems like the product and the intention diverged somewhere; the story out-grew the fairy tale scope (or at least later out-grew it) and went from being a non-gruesome fairy tale to an overly small epic. Both a complement and not. My overall impression: maybe I'm just expecting too much, but this story is much better in its later renditions than the original. See the movie.

15) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. This is a re-read because I need something engaging and non-challenging enough to keep me distracted from the real world right now. It's a great book; even on the fifth or so re-read it's keeping me up until 4 am just because I can't put it down.

16) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Excellent book. Historians in the future study the past by visiting it. While one historian is travelling to the middle ages a virus breaks out at the university and the preparations go awry. We get to see the parallel progressions of epidemics in the past and future. One of the strong points of this book is its relative plausibility. The middle ages Willis describes seem very well researched, and the future seems relatively realistic. Willis does a great job conveying the humanity of both settings, and her characters are great. I also liked her version of time travel; the time travel device only allows time travel that won't cause paradoxes or change the course of history, and time progresses normally and irrevocably for time travellers. It's a relatively plausible time travel setup that still addresses the difficulties involved. Very well done.

Foxen, I've read Ender's Game so many times I barely have to read a full sentence per page to know every word priinted on it; it's one of my very favorites :)

I also just picked up Wicked and Son of a Witch in a single volume; I'm hoping a re-read of the former will be more enjoyablethan the first time through, and that I'll be inspired to read the second one...

Hi aglaia! I love Ender's Game. I just picked up Pastwatch, also by Orson Scott Card, and I think I'm liking it mainly because a lot of the characters think like Ender does. :) Have you read Speaker for the Dead? That one is also one of my favorites.

Oh, I think I have Pastwatch but haven't read it yet... Have to check :)

I've read all of the books in the Ender world, including Ender's Exile, First Meetings, and A War of Gifts. The more "sciency" and "politicky" they were, the harder they were for me to get into, but Ender and Bean as the protagonists made it worth trudging through and mining for their bits of brilliance.

If you haven't read Ender's Shadow, I highly recommend it - it has lots of what made the early Ender books so enjoyable. The later ones get more into the science and politics, but are no harder to follow than Xenocide or Children of the Mind.

ETA: Yes, Speaker for the Dead is one of my favorites in the series, too :) The earlier a book is in the chronology, the more I've enjoyed it, in both Ender's series and Bean's.

I haven't read any of the Ender books besides Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, because I was told they dropped off quite a bit in quality (I didn't discover them until college, which still shocks me) after that. I'm beginning to think that even less good Orson Scott Card is probably pretty great, though. I will be on the lookout for more. :)

Speaking of which:
17) Pastwatch: the redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. I have either one word or three to say about this book: Excellent, excellent, excellent! I was put off by the title at first: redeeming Christopher Columbus doesn't sound very fun or very worth while, but the book is truly fantastic. The premise is a lot like that of Doomsday Book (I must have heard about both of them in the same conversation and then forgotten, oops): researchers on the Pastwatch project use machines to view the past, until they realize that some people in the past are aware of their watching them. In a world that is dying from the sins of the previous generations, the researchers make the decision to attempt to change the past to create a better future. They decide that Columbus' discovery of the Americas is the point at which they can effect the greatest change. Soon, however, they discover that similar researchers in a previous future has also changed their past, resulting in the world that they now live in. They must make the decisions to create a better future than either of the previous ones, facing difficult choices and personally reshaping the fate of the world.

The book is very well written, even though you never get personally close to any of the characters. The entire thing is written on the level of the socio-political, ideological, and economic forces involved. It's an intriguing look at the forces that shape the world, while also being a fun and exciting sci-fi tale. One of the most engaging books I've read so far this year. Highly recommended.

Hi Foxen,

Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus sounds really interesting. I've never read anything by Orson Scott Card, but I think I will try this one. Thanks for the review!

Hi Lorie! I hope you like it!

18) Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins. I don't read much poetry, but Billy Collins is undoubtedly my favorite poet. His poems are simple, with an unpretentious purity to them that I really appreciate. They're playful, and don't demand anything more of the reader than that you enjoy them. With most poetry I tend to feel that it's trying too hard and that spoils the, well, the poetry of it, for me at least. Billy Collins' poetry, though, gives the impression of being an effortless reflection of the beauty and mystery of the world, and I like that. A very nice, contemplative, light read.

This particular book is mainly a collection of previously published poems, which makes it a bit superfluous to my mind. I highly recommend Billy Collins, but I'd generally recommend just picking any of his books to start with, if you're interested. My favorite is Picnic, Lightning.

#77: OK, I am willing to admit complete ignorance of Billy Collins, having never heard of him before to my knowledge, but I like simple poetry, so I am going to give him a try. Thanks for the mention, Foxen!

19) Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. This was a very fun book. It had been sitting on my shelf for ages until a conversation in someone's 75 book thread (I forget who's! Sorry!) bumped it up, so thanks for that! This book was a continuous, fast-paced bedtime story full of clever imaginings and funny little half-references to the real world. Haroun is the son of a reknowned story-teller who always claims that his stories come from an invisible story tap installed in the bathroom by a water genie. Haroun assumes that this is just yet another story, but when his father loses his story-telling ability, Haroun is plunged into a bizaare adventure where he meets many previously fictional creatures and must, in the end, save the great Ocean of the Sea of Stories itself. Like I said, the best thing about this book was its continuous inventiveness. It is full of surprising and delightful little details, and gives the impression, much like the story-teller, of simply over-flowing with fairy tale ideas. A very fun, quick read.

#79: Several 75's have read Haroun this year, so there have been multiple recommendations. Glad you enjoyed it.

20) Jeeves in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse. This was certainly a fun read. Zany characters and non-stop wacky goings on. Ridiculous schemes interspersed with droll commentary in the English countryside. Thoroughly enjoyable.

21) The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. A pleasant little novella that provides a lot of food for thought about the nature, purpose, and enjoyableness of reading. What would happen if the Queen were an avid reader. Interesting and entertaining, though probably not as humorous to me as it would be to someone from England. Something like this always makes me wonder whether or not the Queen has read it, how much of an alternate universe it actually is. Good book, interesting idea, well carried out.

22) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. This is an epistolary novel set shortly after the end of WWII that chronicles the occupation of The English channel island of Guernsey by the Germans, and its later effect on the occupants. It delivered more or less what I expected: a touching account of the deprivations and hardships of war coupled with the goings on of a colorful and charming group of characters. It was good, but generally unremarkable in the world of literary fiction. You could certainly pass this one by, but if it's lying around it is a good several hours entertainment. Three 1/2 stars or so.

23)Watership Down by Richard Adams. Another comfort read. One of the best books ever written.

I totally agree about Watership Down, glad to find another fan! AND I also love Billy Collins, but I've only ever read whatever poetry of his I could find online. I've never actually - for who knows what reason? - bought any of his poetry collections. I need to remedy that. Picnic, Lightning you say, huh? Any others you'd like to recommend?

Hi girlunderglass! Watership Down is truly wonderful. I love how real the characters are while being completely un-anthropomorphized, it really shows that the writing is excellent.

Picnic, Lightning is actually the only Billy Collins collection that I've bought. I stumbled across the one I reviewed somewhere, but I'm mainly familiar with him from an English class I took which just printed the poems for us. I know what you mean- poetry isn't really something it occurs to me to look for when I'm buying books. Picnic, Lightning is excellent. The other one that I've been meaning to get based on the poems I know is The Apple that Astonished Paris, which is his earliest book, I think, and that's based on the 6 - 7 of his poems that I know in it. Let me know what you think of whatever you get, this is a situation I need to remedy too!

Two more:

24) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. This is a reread for me, although this time my fiance and I read it out loud together. It works well for that purpose - light, no long boring parts, and in bite-sized pieces that can be read while one of us is cooking dinner, etc. We will probably be reading all of the Hitchhikers' Guide series over the year, so expect to see the rest of them pop up here.

25) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Another reread. Instead of reviewing Romeo and Juliet, which I'm sure no one has escaped who's gone to public school, I'll tell you why I reread it. We got a cat recently and we've been playing with what to call him. He has about twenty names so far, but he doesn't seem to mind. A few days ago I announced that his name was Pfeffa-rah, "King of Cats" in Lapine, the language from Watership Down, which lead to calling him Tybalt, from Romeo and Juliet, whom Mercutio addresses as "King of Cats" (a pun on Capulet) in the fight scene. I played Mercutio in high school, and almost still remember the King of Cats dialogue, and also couldn't really remember what the whole Tybalt conflict was, so I ended up rereading the play. It's pretty good, although there are definitely reasons that it's the preferred Shakespeare for high schoolers to read.

Just placed a big Better World Books order; I can't wait for my next few books to arrive!

>85 Foxen: heh, couldn't have thought of a better reason to read Romeo and Juliet :)
I actually like "Capulet" better than "Tybalt", it has a ring to it. Plus there are some cutsey abbreviations of it like "Lettie" or "Cappie" heh :) Let us know what you decide to call him!

>86 girlunderglass:, lol, Pfeffa-rah doesn't seem to be sticking, it's hard to remember in a hurry, and Tybalt just isn't very catchy. His "official" name is still the name he came with, Gourdon, and the other names that have stuck tend to be the sillier ones: Goron (from the Zelda video games), Kitty Boo (from Paper Mario), Kitteh, and Purrbox (sometimes Sony Purrbox), because he purrs constantly and loudly. Fortunately he seems to respond to any name spoken in his general viscinity (sp?), or he would be very confused!

Whew, it's been a while! I have a couple of absolute tomes going right now (Anna Karenina and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), but in the mean time:

26) Milk, Eggs, Vodka by Bill Keaggy. This book is a collection of shopping lists found by the author left in shopping carts, etc. It's a funny idea, because you really can tell a lot about a person from their shopping list, sometimes to a disturbing degree. The author presents the idea as a window into a private, often poorly spelled, sphere of thought that we don't often see in others. And he's right, a lot of the lists do evoke some sort of story; I was reminded of Hemingway's 6-word story contest. It is both well done and funny; my only criticism is that the two don't necessarily go together well. There is continuous snarky commentary, which is usually funny but sometimes seems mean-spirited since there is this peeking into someone's mind quality to it. It is overall entertaining, but not one of the best things I've ever read. 3 1/2 stars.

>88 Foxen:: I love the sound of this book - the contents of shopping baskets is one of my occasional obsessions, both peeking at what other people put in theirs and wondering what other people are making of mine. There are definitely days when I make it to the till with a heap of carbs, meat and cleaning stuff and want to put a post-it on the belt divider saying, "I have a fridge full of vegetables, honest!." I think I can handle snark - on the list it goes.

>89 FlossieT:: I had a similar train of thought the other day, when I went to the counter with a can of baked beans, a bottle of ranch dressing, and a bag of cat food.

I'm a terrible grocery shopper.

#89

Lol.......I thought you said you had a heap of 'crabs, meat and cleaning stuff'. I was intrigued by your daily menu!!

>89 FlossieT:, 90: That was exactly why I liked it, in spite of the snark. It's always funny what "the few things I needed at the store" can call to mind, although I probably wouldn't write down the more embarrassing combinations. I hope you like the book!

>91 lunacat:: Luna, the book also has a section of recipes made from other people's shopping lists, but I don't think you could get much from that one!

>91 lunacat:: that really would have been weird. As opposed to just very unhealthy....

>92 Foxen:: sounding better and better all the time :)

My aunt calls Smart Balance, Smarty Pants, and that is how I write it on my grocery lists. I wonder what the author would have made of that?

Woohoo! I have finished Anna Karenina! If I don't make 75 this year, I'm blaming her! I'll review it sometime when I'm less exhausted, but I wanted to announce that I'm done!

Just for fun (not counting towards my total) here are a few kids books I've read this past week for a job I'm doing:

Big Max and the Mystery of the Missing Giraffe by Kin Platt - A fun book with rubber trees and an athletic giraffe
Minnie and Moo: The Night of the Living Bed by Denys Cazet - a fun Halloween story
The Adventures of Snail at School by John Stadler - entertaining little stories
Captain and Matey Set Sail by Daniel Laurence - just good fun.

Congratulations on finishing Anna Karenina!

27) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Wow. Truly a book of epic proportions, that very much deserves its status as a classic. I think this books is generally revered for the breadth of humanity it portrays, and I think that that is generally the best sense in which to understand it. It is basically a social novel in the European style (think Jane Austen, et al.), but generally much much larger. It follows the interconnected lives of a handful of characters through their relatively normal lives. No larger-than-life heroes, just the large-ness of the mundane lives that everyone leads. Regular people making their decisions and living with them, coming to terms with the world around them.

Going into this book I knew nothing about it, except for the fate of the title character (I won't spoil it, but knowing the spoiler probably actually helped keep my interest in the slower sections). Retrospectively, I found Anna the least interesting of the characters. Everyone involved is well-developed and their interconnected stories successfully explore their characters and motivations. On the surface this sounds like a book (an 850 page book, at that) with no particular plot to speak of, that's just kind of "about people" in the most vague way possible, but it really is an insightful look at the human condition, and earns its length, in my opinion. Well worth the effort!

28) The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson. This novel is a well executed take on a traditional Japanese folktale- a fox falls in love with a human and uses fox magic to transform into a woman and win his love in return. It is told from the perspectives of Kitsune, the fox, Yoshifuji, the man she loves, and Shikujo, his human wife. The book started out slowly for me; I felt like the first 2/3s were relatively stiff and didn't really draw me into a world where fox magic was possible. By the end I was hooked, though, and I'm glad I stuck it through. The complexities of happiness, propriety, love, and what makes someone human were well dealt with, and the characters musings on these topics were what gave the book depth. While some of the character development along the way felt a bit stilted, by the end I was impressed with the conclusions they all came to, and particularly appreciated the ambiguity of the ending. I did certainly enjoy this book, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it as it really does only come into its own in the last 80 pages. A good book, but one that definitely could have been better.

And I just have to share this really odd kids book I encountered yesterday:

29) Crocus by Roger Duvoisin (no touchstones). I found this book in an elementary school's discard pile and it so bucked my expectations that I'm not sure what to think of it. Crocus the crocodile lives on a farm where he is respected, feared, and kind of sucked-up to by the other animals because of his huge teeth. When he eats too many sweets and all his teeth are pulled, however, he loses his self-esteem and the respect of the others. He thinks he is worthless without his teeth. So far a kind of strange set-up, but a pretty typical children's book dilemma- one expects that at this point Crocus will come to terms with his new state, learn that he doesn't need intimidation to be popular, and there will maybe be a moral about dentistry thrown in. Instead, the problem is resolved when Crocus gets dentures. The farmer sees that Crocus is sad, and has the dentist make fake teeth for him, which he is very proud of, and wins back the regard of the farm animals. The conclusion is "everyone needs something that makes them special". Um, what? So Crocus was in fact worthless without his teeth? What about kids who don't feel they have something to make them special? It's not like all the other animals had some notable special thing. Furthermore, Crocus is perhaps the most passive protagonist ever- it's not as though he decided to fix the situation and got new teeth for himself, they were given back to him just as they were taken away, entirely out of his control. On the one hand, I don't really have a problem with stories not following the moral script of most children's books, but on the other hand, this is just kind of strange. I don't know, should I think this is a bad story because it promotes an atypical moral? I can think of ways to justify it, but I guess it was on the discard pile. Very strange, anyway- not something that would be published these days, I think.

#99...makes you think that's probably why it was on the discard pile.

I suppose so. Hard to believe it was even published, though!

30) Harry, a History by Melissa Anelli. This book is a history of the Harry Potter phenomenon, or movement, or fandom, or whatever you want to call it; it's about how and why the Harry Potter books inspired millions of people not just to read them, but to dress up for them, go to parties for them, create rock bands about them, and just generally maintain a ridiculous level of enthusiasm for years on end. It was a great book, but definitely an insider's book. Don't try and read it if you haven't read Harry Potter, definitely. Melissa Anelli was the webmistress for a popular fan website, and gives you the inside view of the whirlwind. My one criticism is that it's pretty heavily autobiographical, and in the early chapters, that dragged a little. I think it was necessary, however, since the true glory of the book is its ability to capture the highly personal excitement both of first reading the books and, most importantly, of the build-up to the release of book 7. I had tears in my eyes for large portions of the book, because it almost, almost, almost recaptured the feeling of being about to finally read Deathly Hallows. The chapter describing the release was very well done. This was a very good book, a chronicle of a movement (although I felt that that was a bit muddled in with the autobiography in places), and a description of a personal journey. It does however, assume some previous familiarity with the Harry Potter scene, I think, so be prepared for that. Overall, I'd highly recommend it for people who remember and are interested in the Harry Potter fervor.

>102 Foxen: sounds fun! I only ever went to one Potter party (for Deathly Hallows) but enjoyed those few months of Pottermania immensely - this sounds like a good summer read.

>102 Foxen:: A friend of mine consistently recommends this to me, and I keep forgetting to track it down. Thanks for the reminder! It's one I'd love to read, and I'm sure it'll get me dreaming about the Potter theme park that's supposed to open next year (or at least that's what I've heard).

>102 Foxen:: I hope you like it!

>103 FlossieT:: Ooh, is the theme park opening that soon? I've heard that it's supposed to be really good. Right now I'm excited about the sixth movie.

31) Being Dead by Jim Crace. A haunting little novel about a murdered couple. It explores the circuitous causes and meanings of their deaths, meandering through the past that brought them to that place at that time, while also following their decomposition before the bodies are found, and their daughter's search for them when they don't show up at work. It really tries to convey the banality of death, the commonplace and biological, to cut past the sentimental and romanticized ways in which we avoid really thinking about it, and yet show that it has meaning through its reality. It's a good novel, though admittedly morbid. I personally did not find it as heavy as some other reviewers have, perhaps because I'd already read Stiff by Mary Roach, and was somewhat desensitized to the idea of dead bodies. I also know that some people found the characters kind of stiff and unappealing, but I didn't find them particularly objectionable. Overall, a good read.

#106: I will give that one a shot. One to the Continent it goes!

Foxen, last I heard that was when it was opening! Though... it's entirely possible they're not on schedule anymore, as I haven't seen any promos or heard anything more about it for quite some time. Hmm... perhaps it's time to Google... :D

Hm, yes. Sometime between January and June 2010 was the most specific thing my internet searches picked up. :)

32) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling. Reread.

33) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling. Reread.

You skipped Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - any reason? Not that I blame you, as I think that it is the weakest of the series by far.

Not particularly. I just didn't feel like it. I might agree with you about it being the weakest. It's a good book, but it's early enough that it's still in a more juvenile style while not having the fun of seeing everything for the first time.

34) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling. The last few chapters of this book, starting with "Veritaserum", are really excellent. This is where the voice and vision of the later books really starts. Not that the rest of the book is bad, in fact it's great, but this time through I've found myself a bit impatient with the early books; I keep thinking, "come on, get to the really important stuff already!" The end of this book is the first time the enormity of Voldemort's return to power really comes through.

>112 Cait86: & >113 Foxen:, golly, Chamber of Secrets was the one that kept me up until 3am (in a hotel room in Bath)! Although I think that was because the things my imagination was conjuring up for the sinister voice in the walls turned out to be a LOT scarier than .... avoiding spoiler..... what it turned out to be. Though that's still pretty scary.

35) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling.

Flossie, don't get me wrong! I really like Chamber of Secrets! I think I'm just really impatient to get to the later books right now. Which now I've gotten to, yay!

I'm curious, though, what were you imagining?

Definitely something invisible and/or well camouflaged. And more intelligent. And with a lot more spiky, toothy bits. I don't know that I had a clear picture in my head - just that it was something basically invincible!

This is where the voice and vision of the later books really starts. Not that the rest of the book is bad, in fact it's great, but this timeI've found myself a bit impatient with the early books; I keep thinking, "come on, get to the really important stuff already!" The end of this book is the first time the enormity of Voldemort's return to power really comes through.

Couldn't agree more! With that whole paragragh. The 4th book for me is kind of like the bridge between the first three books (lighter, merely hinting at the really important stuff, more childlike because of Harry&co's age) and the last three books (which are much deeper and deal with the real issues IMHO). Although of course I love the whole series. :D

>117 FlossieT:: Yeah, it's a little hard to recapture, but I do remember the voice in the walls being rather more ominous and sinister when I didn't know what it was. I guess that's kind of a classic pitfall with unknown monsters. Yours does sound pretty creepy!

>118 girlunderglass:: I completely agree with your agreement! :)

#118

Absolutely agree. I reread from 5 onwards cos I find them the most satisfying. Very rarely reread 1,2,3 and sometimes read 4 again. I will occasionally do the whole series but not very often.

I think I'm unusual in that OOTP is my favourite, closely followed by DH. I just love the adult depths to them.

I have only read DH twice (can you believe it?) because it's the last one...so I'm still hesitant to place it together with my favourites (OOTP is my fave too) but I did really really love it because we got too see the trio at their most mature out of all the books.

Ditto, Eliza. And the re-read was immediately following the first one for me, too, so it's a long way back now. For some reason I had the Sunday after the book was released at home by myself with my daughter, who, being the sweet-natured little person she is, was quite content to trundle up and down on the patio while mum furiously riffled pages... except occasionally:

http://i406.photobucket.com/albums/pp143/FlossieT/LibraryThing%20misc%20shares/d...

Funnily enough, I think OOTP is my favourite as well, even though I definitely didn't like it best when I read it - I thought it was too long, with way too much non-Hogwarts action, and Harry's adolescent shoutery really got on my nerves. But I have grown to love it :)

36) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling.

If I'm weighing in on favorites, mine is HBP. Finally Harry is being given real responsibility, and he does wonderfully with it. I just can't get enough of Harry and Dumbledore's interactions. And felix felicis. This book has a brutal momentum to it. You can feel the wheels of destiny grinding into motion. I feel like I can't really convey the sense of triumphant purpose that this book has. Everything in it says "this is it, the real thing is at hand." This is where Harry is given the chance to show what a remarkable person he is.

I like OOTP, but Harry trammeled in teenage angst has nothing on Harry allowed to be himself, and with his new sense of fatal purpose.

>122 FlossieT:: That is an adorable picture!

37) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.

38) The Plague by Albert Camus. I'm going to count this even though I trailed off with about 1/5 the book remaining, because I've read it before and it's not quite a book you have to follow to the end. I picked this up because all the swine flu talk last month made me want to read Doomsday Book again, but I knew it was too soon after reading it the first time. The Plague chronicles a (fictional) outbreak of the plague in a seaport town in Algeria, the subsequent quarantine of the town, and the horrific reality of day to day life in that setting. It's quite thorough; it describes everything you could possibly want to know about disrupted life under a quarantine, where half the population is dying and contagious. It describes how the funerals evolved as the plague wore on, from solitary interment to prevent contagion to reusing coffins to mass graves. Mostly, it describes in great detail the psychology of the residents. It's an interesting study, but it is more of a study than a novel. The pace is slow and there are no gripping narratives. It reads like it could be nonfiction except that it isn't, if that makes sense. If that kind of narrative appeals to you, it's an interesting topic and an interesting treatment of it, just don't expect much action.

39) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I took a break from The Great Influenza to read this while on vacation, and I'm a bit conflicted. I really wanted to like this book. Somehow I missed it as a kid, but I've heard great things about it and probably got myself expecting too much. It's a fun story, and it brought up a lot of ideas that I think I would have found really interesting as a kid. As an adult, though, it didn't really have a coherent enough plot and the interesting concepts seemed mostly overstated. I won't say more than that because I suspect that if I'd read the book as a 10 year old I'd love it. It just doesn't translate well to an adult audience.

40) Matilda by Roald Dahl. What a delightful story! Matilda is a precocious, appealing child in a world dominated by nastily grumpish adults whom she defeats with fairy-tale justice at its best. I suspect that Harry Potter's situation with the Dursley's is based not a little bit on Matilda, or at least her particular manifestation of the Cinderella scenario. That makes it sound unoriginal, but it's not. The word I keep coming back to is 'delightful'. It is a charming story full of charming characters. Even the nasty characters are nasty in an exaggerated big bad wolf sort of way that makes them very entertaining (and makes their come-uppance quite satisfying). Read it. It's marvelous.

41) The Great Influenza by John Barry. The book that's been slowing me down for the past few weeks. This was a very good book, nonfiction, about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, one of the worst epidemics in written history. The influenza pandemic has been strangely lost in public consciousness but it bears thinking about - it's the same virus (H1N1) that caused the Swine Flu break out a few months ago.

This book presents the science and the sociology of the pandemic in conjunction with the history of medical advancement leading up to it. The primary approach is that of the history of medical science; the influenza outbreak occurred shortly after American medicine had established itself in something like its current form and presented it with a severe test. The cast of characters is largely made up of important scientists, and discusses the advances they made before, during, and because of the disease.

Other aspects of the pandemic are also included. The parts that I found most interesting concerned the sociology of why and how the pandemic spread. The outbreak occurred just after the US had entered World War I, and troop movements, the lack of civilian doctors and nurses, war-time propaganda campaigns, and, of course, the pig-headedness of the officials in charge all played enormous rolls in the course of the disease.

Overall I found the book very good. The descriptions of the actual disease and conditions during the pandemic were suitably horrifying, and the discussion of causes and effects I found very interesting. I have a few academic quibbles with the author's representation, however. There were a few places where I felt he made rather serious and unsubstantiated claims seemingly to enhance the significance of the pandemic, and he had the annoying habit of comparing statistics that didn't match (deaths per week compared to deaths per day, that kind of thing), I think towards that same end. All of that derives from the author's intention to tell a coherent story (as opposed to representing a scholarly debate), but be aware of that if you read the book. Overall enjoyable, but definitely not a light read. 4 stars.

Great review Foxen. I really like to read books about pandemics and The Great Influenza is my all time favorite. I think the discrepancies in death rates may come from the actual records of the time. There were just too many people ill and too many people dying and not enough people to care for them and keep accurate records. My biggest fear, as a nurse, is that one day I'll have to work through a pandemic. Although a class I took estimated that in the next pandemic 50% of all healthcare workers will die. So maybe I won't have to work through a pandemic.

I almost started to read The Great Influenza when the swine flu outbreak first started, but then decided to save it for another time.

#128: I read The Great Influenza several years ago and thought it very good. My favorite part of the book was the same as yours - how the pandemic initially spread.

Random question that maybe one of you will be able to answer........what is the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic? I've been wondering that ever since the swine flu 'panic' started........

>132 lunacat:: A pandemic is an epidemic over a large area...entire country, continent, world, space colonies, etc.

Ahh..........I see. Going to the moon to get away from swine flu won't work then. Time to go to plan b.

#134: Time to go to plan b.

Which is what?

Goodness, so many responses! Clearly I shouldn't leave town right after posting my reviews! I'm glad so many other people enjoyed The Great Influenza (... hm, that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean...). Hopefully the swine flu will not be nearly as notable.

On to a more fun and whimsical topic:
42) Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. I liked this book a lot. Orson Scott Card is simply brilliant at portraying cultural conflict. He shows you how two people or groups can come to the table with different assumptions, how different people can have utterly dissimilar worldviews. This seems like it should be easy to do, but it's not, because no one does it as well as Orson Scott Card.

That said, this book isn't actually the best sample of that in his work, but it was still what caught me most about it. This is the story of if fairy tales were true. Kind of. I've tried summarizing the plot to several people and it invariably sounds kind of stupid out of context, so I won't try here. Essentially, a Ukrainian Jewish folklore scholar gets immersed in his folklore, and it's not as "happily ever after" as one would be lead to believe. It's a great exploration of cultural identity, and great fun if you're familiar with Russian folklore (or folklore in general, but the Russian/ Ukrainian specifics are what gives it life). I was very nearly a folklore grad student, so I really loved it.

A few caveats. This wasn't Card's best work. Fun, but the plot had inherent weaknesses. The action at the end was a bit weak. Also, if you're not familiar with Russian folklore (Baba Yaga, etc.) some things just wouldn't make sense. It's pretty key to already know that Baba Yaga is supposed to have a house that walks on chicken legs, for example, which is not something you'd know just from Disney fairy tale knowledge. Still, if you're even a little familiar, it's great. The strength is in Card's ability to portray the cultural oddity of even one's own cultural identity. Very good, even if it can be a bit silly.

43) The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. A reread for me. A wonderful book. Well written, in the sense that every word of it is conscientiously well crafted. I first read this book in an English class, using it basically as a textbook of literary devices. There are several things to think about with every line, and it's always very conscious of being in a written medium, and plays with that. I like it, but it could definitely come across as heavy handed, too. It's a great story about a family, and the different things the family members bring to and take away from it. It's a better story about Africa. The best book about Africa not written by an African writer, in my opinion.

Hi Foxen
I just found your incredible thread. I'm sorry to have missed it, but I have you starred now.

Thank you! I've had you starred for a while now, but I'm generally more of a lurker than a contributor.

Thanks for stopping by!

Hey Foxen! Glad you liked Enchantment... it's one of my favorite books, mostly because of the Russian folklore that Card incorporates, but you're right - if you didn't know much about Russian folklore to begin with, it's easy to get a bit lost here and there. But... I still love it...!

I have The Poisonwood Bible on loan from my sister, sitting here waiting... I've heard it's an excellent example of using multiple POVs, so I'm very much looking forward to the writing, though not necessarily the story itself... lol.

Hi Phoenix! I really enjoyed the Russian folklore in Enchantment. I love Russian folklore in general- it's kind of like German folklore, but more dark and twisted (which is saying something!). I hope you like The Poisonwood Bible. The writing is excellent (I really like multiple POVs, too), and I like the story a lot too, so I hope you can get into it.

This is to remind myself to review Earthman's Burden when I get more time. I'm in the middle of moving to Pittsburgh for my MLS! We'll see how much more packing and cleaning I can do before I scream. Tomorrow is Uhaul loading day, then Friday is driving day! My boyfriend gets to drive the uhaul towing one car, I get the other car, full of unhappy kitty.

I'll be back after the weekend, probably!

Foxen
Moving is never easy. Good luck with all that!

Stopping by to reaffirm my continued existence. Been busy with post-moving, pre-school-starting beauro-fliff, but I am in fact still here, and have been (somewhat) keeping up with other people's threads, if not my own. Book 44, which needs reviewing, was Earthman's Burden, and book 45 was A Bear Called Paddington, which I probably won't review except to say that it was adorable and fun to read out loud.

I'll reappear more after I get established at school next week.

Glad to know you are still with us, Foxen!

Foxen
Good luck to you as the semester begins anew.

I have just finished the Order Of the Phoenix in the Harry Potter series. I have moved on to the half blood prince. I have seen the movie so it isn't as entertaining but I am still reading.

#147: I hope you enjoy the book, PendragonGrl.

Thanks for the well wishes, everyone!

PendragonGrl, I hope you like Half-Blood Prince! It is probably my favorite of the series, and it's really quite different in the movie version, so hopefully there will be a few surprises left!

44) Earthman's Burden by Poul Anderson. This was a fun little book that I heard about through someone's thread (Whisper's? lunacat's?). It's about a curious race of creatures called Hokas, who have very strong imaginations and arrange their lives to match whatever fanciful fictional settings they come across. The book is arranged very episodically, with each chapter being a new narrative that they've undertaken (Sherlock Holmes, Don Giovanni, the Wild West, etc.), and the story of their hapless human companion as he blunders through the rules of the worlds they've created in an amusingly slapstick comedy of misdirections. I particularly liked the sections on Don Giovanni, Sherlock Holmes, and pirates. Very fun, silly, light reading. I enjoyed it a lot.

#149

Might have been through mine as I have read it this year but I don't know if Whisper has as well.

Glad you enjoyed it, I thought it was good fun as well.

I think it was you, Luna. Thanks for the rec!

46) Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker. I had to read this book for the orientation session of my library science program, so my thoughts about it are kind of confused with what the "official" message was. Here goes, though. Nicholson Baker is a novelist and essayist who cares about books. In the course of researching an article, he discovers some troubling information on how and why libraries sometimes discard their books. Double Fold is his "expose" of the library profession, which has been destroying (in his opinion perfectly sound and usable) original copies of old newspapers and books in order to preserve them on sometimes faulty new technology such as microfilm. His conclusion, through his investigative journalism, is that there was a cabal of futurist, gadget-oriented, cold war era librarians that invented the idea of paper "turning to dust" over time in order to push their pet preservation projects and procure additional funding and shelf space for their libraries.

Ok. So. This book was assigned because it was highly controversial. The opinion among actual archivists seems to mainly be that Baker has radically misrepresented the motives of the field, doesn't understand certain basic premises of the way libraries and archives actually work, and generally could have been nicer about it, while still having a few good points. I more or less agree with that: there's no need to introduce a conspiracy theory into the mix, and Baker really doesn't consider the problems of archival appraisal (basically, we can't save everything - we could never store it or make use of it - so we have to choose what to keep and what to toss). He may very well have stirred up a lot of ill will towards a profession that works for the common good of our societal memory in a largely thankless capacity.

On the other hand, I am much more sympathetic to many of his arguments than my professors seemed to want me to be. I would like to see a good empirical study of how long paper actually lasts, and find it somewhat troubling that there really isn't one out there currently (that I know of). Also, microfilm is pretty bad. If you're losing such significant amounts of information with your new technology - well, maybe don't jump into it so far. I'm interested in how the debate applies to digitization - I'll be interested to learn what the stumbling blocks of that will be, and I hope the field will be suitably cautious about it.

So, overall, it was an interesting book. It took a long time to read because I kept having to stop to think through how and why I agreed or disagreed with it. It's a very provocative book. Read it if you're interested in archives and the controversy over original sources, but it should probably be read with an accompanying rebuttal (any online review by someone with a PhD in Library Science will probably do), and taken with a grain of salt. If you took out the accusatory tone the book would have some good points, then again, it wouldn't be a very interesting book without its tone. 4 stars for thought-provoking-ness?

Phew, that was a lot of ramble about library stuff! Sorry if it was hideously boring.

My classes finally actually start tomorrow (I just paid ~$500 for my books for this semester, eep!), so expect a lot more library tomes to pile up in here. I probably won't ramble at length about all of them, though.

47) Pearls of Lutra by Brian Jacques. Read this because I developed a nasty cold on our last day of orientation and needed something non-challenging. I read the Redwall books a lot when I was a kid, and this was one that I didn't remember as well. It was good. All the typical Redwall things that you'd want: a quest, riddles, feasts, etc., but not anything very special. Solid Redwall that has not yet jumped the shark. There you go.

#151: I read that one about 5 years or so ago. I may have to give it a re-read. Thanks for the reminder.

This isn't so much a review as a ramble. I was really into the Redwall books when I was younger - read many of them 10+ times, knew everything about them, compiled lists of corrections, could make a comprehensive map - yeah, it was an obsession. I have *ahem* gotten older and wiser since then, and I recognize many of their (glaring, really) flaws (the biggest: all of the "bad guys" are denoted by species - never trust a ferret - it has problematic racial implications and conveys a deterministic view of personality and ability - if you're not born to be the Redwall warrior, trying will do you no good. Also the later you go in the series (by publication date, different from chronologically), the more formulaic the books become. I read a quote somewhere that Jacques said he would keep writing the books as long as people wanted to read them, and that has clearly devolved into a process of churning out more of the same.)

Anyway, some background on Redwall and my recommendations for how to read the series, if you're interested. Redwall Abbey is a big red sandstone building in Mossflower country that is a run by an order of vaguely monastic mice and other woodlanders. It is a haven of peace and security in times of trouble, which emerges fairly often in the form of roving bands of vermin (rats, ferrets, weasels and foxes, mostly) or conquering warlords who see the abbey as a good place to set up headquarters. In these times, the peaceful abbeydwellers must band together, and usually an abbey hero emerges, endowed with the spirit and the sword of Martin the Warrior, the founding hero of Redwall. These are kind of the common elements, along with inevitable massive quantities of delicious, well-described food, usually some sort of quest undertaken in order for the hero to fulfill his or her heroic stature, and something hidden around the abbey, which several other creatures must find by deciphering cryptic riddles. It's all good fun.

The first three or four books (by publication) are really quite inspired. Redwall is excellent and classic; as the first book it is quite worthy of the acclaim it's recieved, and if you like children's lit I'd recommend picking it up. Mossflower is, I think, the best of all of them - everything is really well developed and well thought out, Martin the Warrior is one of my favorite characters ever, and Tsarmina, the antagonist, is a really well developed villain, something that is usually lacking in the series. Mariel of Redwall kind of sets up the formula for the rest, but is really well executed, and Mattimeo is also pretty good. Beyond those the long slow slog downward begins, but, if you like the stories there's nothing wrong with them, they're just not as fresh (not that they don't have their fresh moments, of course). Redwall is great. I really enjoyed it as a kid. As an adult, they're not particularly thought provoking (although I do, apparently, go in for all this in-house analysis ;), but they're fun, cozy reads.

Now for my specific review of the one I just read. I felt I had to go into so much detail above, because the review I was writing was very in-genre. Ok...

48) The Long Patrol by Brian Jacques. Another vaguely remembered comfort read from Redwall. This one was much more bittersweet than I remembered, and that was somewhat necessary since the characters weren't as gripping. Clearly of a later vintage in the series. Still pretty good - it's on formula, and the hares are kind of fun. One perplexing thing was that many of the side issues were utterly irrelevant to the plot (Oh look, lets go down this hole now! A riddle! It's completely unnecessary!). I think it's more a product of authorial drift than intention, but I like the implication of change over time in Mossflower in this one (almost all Redwall books could be written at any time in the timeline even though it spans probably 20 generations) - the Salamandastron hares have gone from numbering 10 in Mossflower to literally 1000, and have gotten much more military. I like imagining that the militarism has bloomed out of control with the population, and the outcome of this book is to re-establish balance. This is also effectively the end of the timeline for me - I think he's written some further on, and I may have even read one or two, but this seems to bring it full circle vaguely, Mossflower seems to be changing subtly, and the reappearance of Kotir, if briefly, seems to signal to me that this is a good place to stop. Anyway, it was pleasant to revisit Redwall over the last few days. Now, I suppose, I have to get back to school.

#154: It's your thread, ramble all you want, Foxen. Especially since I have never read the Redwall books and appreciate the input!

I loved the Redwall books as a child, and had a lot of the series before I started noticing that they were repeatative. I often think that maybe I should try one or two again.

Your ramblings brought back some very fond memories of childhood reading. They truly are very good :)

156: I bought Redwall when it came out...the blurb looked interesting...and Brian Jacques was autographing them. I enjoyed it. I ended up reading maybe a half dozen after that, but then they became somewhat boring.

155: Thanks, Stasia, I need the encouragement. :)

156: You should try rereading one of them if you have the time. I was quite surprised at how pleasant and fun they still were when I picked them up this week.

157: Ooh, an autographed copy! Is it the one with the tapestry-looking cover (divided into sections, calligraphy....)? I don't know if the hard-cover had the same illustration, but I always liked the one on my paperback version.

>151 Foxen: I picked up a copy of Double Fold years ago after an extract appeared in the New Yorker, but have somehow never read it - thanks very much for your considered comments on how best to read it.

159: No problem! I'll be interested to hear what you think of it - it's a book most people seem to have a strong reaction to.

>158 Foxen:: No, it was this one:

49) A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela's Prison Archive by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. This was a book for one of my archives classes, and it was actually really good. It's about the process of finding and opening the documents in the archive of Nelson Mandela's time in prison: the official documents, of which many were destroyed during the transfer of power, and the personal documents, correspondence, etc., that are scattered among various sources. South Africa is kind of the prime global example of how archives and the control of the record of the past convey power, and this book is a good explication of those processes. It uses the prison archive as a forum for "untangling the archival threads," as they put it, and really go into the issues that, I think, make archives interesting. So, a good book. Not necessarily an exciting book, but a pretty good introduction to what makes archives important. Also, I read the illustrated edition, which was cool because it was full of pictures of the actual correspondence, etc. and it made the impression of browsing through the archive really come to life. Recommended.

50) Mattimeo by Brian Jacques. Another Redwall book. Yay.

You're really making me want to go back and try the Redwall books again. Unfortunately they are packed up in a box and under a whole room of furniture. Guess they will have to wait!

Aw. I hope you get a chance to dig them out some time. I feel the same way- most of mine are in my parent's house, and the ones I have around I've hit the re-reading saturation point (tm) with. Sigh. It's probably good, actually- I have about a zillion things I need to be reading for school instead.

>162 Foxen: this does sound really fascinating - I toured South Africa with my choir when I was at university, not very long after the Truth and Reconciliation Committee had "finished" its work; and I'm reading Henning Mankell's The White Lioness at the moment, which is all about a plot to assassinate Mandela. Very intriguing and not one I would have spotted otherwise...

Hi Flossie! I find the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (I think they're commissions, not committees, but I'm not really sure now I think about it) really fascinating, I think they're a really interesting way of trying to deal with public memory and healing.

The White Lioness looks interesting, although that's not a genre I usually dip into. I'll keep an eye out for it if I feel like branching out.

Absolutely right on Commission. Sorry, it was late...

51) The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. A book for class, and this one wasn't that great. The central thesis is that information cannot be looked at separately from the social context it exists in. There is a tendency among "technology people" to look at information in isolation, and often even to redefine the world in info-centric ways that trivialize the social networks that support it. An example is tech support in offices: everything only runs smoothly because when the new program crashes your computer, Ted three cubicles down had that happen to him last week, and can help you with it. Overall it's a good point and an interesting look at what I'm going to call the "sociology of technology."

The book didn't grab me, though, and might have worked better as an article. Also (and this isn't really the author's fault, but it did majorly contribute to my opinion) the book was written in 2000 and it's about technology. Most of the points it makes are still relevant, but almost all of its examples were out of kilter with the way things actually work these days. Assumptions about what was going to "stick" that didn't, and so on. It's unfortunate, I guess, since the book was on an interesting subject and didn't really rely on totally up-to-date technology, but tech books just date really quickly and none of the examples seemed quite relevant anymore.

Oh well. If you can get past the dating, I'd say this book was 4 stars. If not, maybe 2 1/2 or 3?

I'm currently reading (also for class) Everything is Miscellaneous, which is on a similar subject and is actually very good (page-turning good, even) (and written in 2007 - ah, using amazon and itunes as examples!), so hopefully a review of that will follow soon.

Also, I am happy for the following silly reason: I just bought new sandals (the hole in the middle of the heal of my old ones convinced me it was time) on Amazon, and to make it up to supersaver shipping I had to pick out a book! So now I'm getting new sandals and The Book Thief for less money than the sandals + shipping from the manufacturer! Now if only I had time to read it... why did I start school again?

52) Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

53) Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barbasi.

I need to review these two, but don't have the time at the moment. In the midst of massive school-related stress....

Thanks for the note on my thread. I've never seen you lurking in the corners! Glad you broke your silence so that I could come over here and check out your thread. And thank you also on the nice comments for my review.

You're welcome! Thanks for coming over!

52) Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This was a fun book. Its central idea is that digital information can be organized in fundamentally different ways than previous information formats. Basically- before, with what Weinberger calls 1st and 2nd order organization, everything in an organizational structure can only exist in one place, a book can only have one Dewey Decimal Number, an animal can have only one place in a taxonomy. This is a limitation of physical media - a book might be about five different things, but you can only put it on the shelf in one place. With the digital medium, however, information can be categorized much more messily, comprehensively, and on the fly. Tagging is the best example of this: you can "categorize" something an indefinite number of times just by affixing tags to it that others can search for. The searching process calls up everything within a category without it having to be stored in category order.

This book said a lot of the things I've been wanting to hear in library science. There is a lot of potential in this type of thinking that has not really been explored. Moreover, it was a fun read- very entertainingly written, with examples made from most of the interesting websites I could think of. And, hey, LibraryThing gets a mention, although just for the barcode scanners. A fun an interesting look at digital organization, or, if you want to look at it that way, and interesting tour through the more innovative corners of the internet. Four stars.

53) Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means by Albert-Laszlo Barbasi. Another interesting book, this time on network theory. The author nicely takes you through the evolutions of thought around the ways networks are organized, building up to the current theory of complex networks that relatively accurately models things like the internet. Complex networks are arranged with links between nodes. If we're thinking about the internet, then each node is a website and the links are the, well, links between them. Different nodes have different levels of fitness (mathematically defined as the likelyhood that it will be linked to, but practically just how good is the website), resulting in certain nodes (ex. Google, Amazon, Wikipedia) becoming hubs in the network, doing much of the work of interconnectivity for the entire thing.

The book lays out this theoretical framework very well, and it does seem accurate. The most interesting thing about the book to me, though, was its discussion of some of the implications of this. The existence of hubs means that the connectivity of a network is inordinately maintained by certain nodes and that means that those nodes are critical if you want to either protect or destroy the network. This means, for example, that some banks could be "too big to fail," because if their connectivity were lost the entire system would go out. Even more problematic, I thought, was Barbasi's discussion of the AIDS virus - HIV spreads through a network of sexual connectivity that follows this network pattern. To stop the spread of the disease you would want to interrupt this network. If there is limited treatment available (as there is in many parts of Africa, for example) network theory requires that the most promiscuous nodes have priority for treatment. Logical, but ethically weird to me.

Anyway, overall this was a very good book. It explained its topic well and gave me plenty to think about. Also four stars.

54) Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine Borgman. The third of the books for the paper I have to write this week. This one was rather dull. It is about the changing nature of scholarly connectivity in "the digital age," the challenges facing digital archives and libraries, and the obscurities of ownership and distribution of digital materials. The book is to the point and well cited, but I found it repetitive in places, and, as many such works do, it raised a lot of issues without really proposing solutions. Useful but dull, 2 1/2 stars.

(apologies that my thread is filling up with school reading, at least some of it is generally interesting, though, I hope)

#53 looks like it might be interesting enough to fill a 303 slot on my Dewey Decimal challenge. You did a great job reviewing it. I look forward to checking it out.

174: Now I'm curious what 303 is.... Hope you enjoy it!

Well, I haven't gotten much reading in recently, but I thought I'd post this here:

I made a sporcle quiz of the 100 most common LT books (i. e., books with the most copies, from the zeitgeist page). It's kind of interesting to see if you can guess them all. You can try it out here:

100 Most Common LibraryThing Books

And I made another one:

Watership Down Characters

Someone else (Marcia/allthesedarnbooks, maybe?) read Everything is Miscellaneous earlier and it did sound good - now you've made me really want to read it! Lots of relevancy to work stuff so it's great to hear it's actually a good read too.

Fun quiz - I love that site!

>177 FlossieT:: I hope you like it, Flossie, I definitely found it both relevant and enjoyable.

>178 Cait86:: Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! It was fun to make. Apparently the "real" ~97th most common book on LT is the "book" that results when people just add a blank space for a title- no info and a zillion different authors! I just skipped that one for the quiz. ;)

I have finally finished another book! I've been doing a lot of school reading, and I usually maddeningly read just shy of my cut-off line for having "read the whole thing" such that I can put it up here. Anyway...

55) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. A lot has been said about this book on LT, so I'm not going to write a proper review. I'm not sure what I thought about it anyway. It was a good book: I liked the characters, they were well developed, the narrative style (which I know some people didn't like) didn't bother me, it had good imagery, I even cried at the end. Somehow I didn't feel, though, that the book quite earned its conceit, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is unfair, but I generally hold Holocaust/Germany-during-WWII books to a higher storytelling standard than others, and this is my reason: with that topic the emotion is already there, the story would be emotional however you told it, so it seems like a cheap storytelling option. You just have to earn it more. Some books really do. Jakob the Liar, that I read earlier in the year, really really did- that was an amazing book, and Gunter Grass also generally does an amazing job of describing Germans' reactions to the war (I'm thinking particularly of Dog Years, which has absolutely haunted me ever since I read it years ago). But, I feel like books on this topic really do have to be amazing for me to like them. Again, this is just me, and maybe I'm completely off base. The Book Thief is a good book, but not quite a great book. It would be really good for a young audience, and I did like it, so I gave it 4 stars.

#179: I preferred I Am the Messenger by Zusak to The Book Thief, but I am in the minority here on LT. You might want to give it a look, though.

Jacob the Liar sounds really interesting (just read your review of it and some other external ones) - thanks, I'd never heard of it before!

I absolutely agree with you that Holocaust novels have to be something special in order for me to consider them amazing.

The same applies with all these 'angst' books and memoirs that have materialised. Yes, its terrible the things that happen, but it isn't enough to just churn it out. I fear that books regarding 9/11 will start to do the same thing soon. Especially for the generation of us now, we will always be more emotionally touched by any book dealing with the events because we saw it happen. Even if we had no personal connection, it felt personal to every single person. I don't think I've ever spoken to someone who doesn't remember where they were when they saw the pictures or heard the news, and that gives any author writing about such events an automatic 'in' to our emotions and our hearts.

What stands out for me is when an author can do something truly remarkable with something ordinary. Or when it is a truly convincing tale and setting of something awful that touches me on a level beyond even the normal shock or horror felt.

>180 alcottacre:: I was looking at reviews of that one after I finished The Book Thief, and I was kind of on the fence about it. I think you've just tipped the scales, though. To the wishlist pile it goes, although not right to the top of it.

>181 girlunderglass:: I found Jacob the Liar really impressive; it's definitely one of the best books I've read all year. I hope you like it!

>182 lunacat:: I'm glad I'm not alone with that feeling- it seemed kind of harsh when I was writing it, but it's always affected my perception of 'hot-button' book topics. Thank you for describing so clearly! I completely agree that what's really impressive is to create a great book out of ordinary moments.

That said, I think an interesting book would be one that collected all those ordinary moments that we remember just before we found out about 9/11. I think that's why we remember where we were- the juxtaposition of our normal lives with something that monstrous, and then nothing is normal again for a long time.

Foxen

Jacob The Liar is already on the tbr list, but I'm moving it up some notches after your comments.

#183: I will be interested in your thoughts on it once you have a chance to read it.

I've been looking for Jakob the Liar in the used book stores for quite some time, so I'm glad to hear that you were really impressed with it. It might be time to order it new!

56) Digitial Copyright by Jessica Litman. This book was quite good. It explains current copyright law regarding digital materials, and how the law got that way. It's a book that really got me angry, actually- the current copyright laws are terrible, and yet with the current system they could hardly have turned out differently. There is something very, very wrong with what the content owners have done to intellectual property rights- the internet was used as an excuse to give publishers, etc. completely unprecedented control over copyrighted works. Fortunately, most of it has turned out to be relatively unenforceable. Intellectual property law has a huge, if largely invisible, effect on the production of culture, and the way it is currently created is unacceptable. Read this book if you want a good, readable overview of digital copyright legislation, that clearly shows why it is bad for the public.

Edited unsuccessfully for touchstones.

Numbers 57 and 58 are Free Culture and Remix by Lawrence Lessig, two great books about copyright issues in the digital world. I might review them when I get some more time/if people are interested, but for now, they're both great and entertaining if you want to know about the cultural impact of the current state of copyright laws (and that last part isn't to make it sound bad, it's actually really interesting!).

I doubt I'm going to make it to 75 this year... silly schoolwork getting in the way of my reading!

>188 Foxen: I'm definitely interested but don't put yourself out just on my account if you're already so busy you're losing reading time!!

Katie

58 books is a lot! Congratulations! There was an article in my Sunday newspaper about local libraries and it contained an interview with an "avid" reader. She noted she reads ten - fifteen books in a year.

I would say that 58 books in one year does indeed make you an avid reader!

Good look with your school work.

Thanks guys!

Flossie, I will try and post a review of those books soon- I'm writing a paper about them right now, so after I get that done I should have my thoughts about them better organized and have more time!

Thanks for the support, Whisper! I'm definitely not disappointed with 58 books (and hopefully a few more, yet), it's just frustrating that there are so many books I want to read (and growing by the minute thanks to this group) that I don't have time for now. Ah well, that is what Christmas break is for, I suppose. Happy reading!

Oh, and as a bit of public interest: I made another LT Sporcle quiz while procrastinating today. The 50 Most Reviewed Books at LibraryThing- it's an interesting mix of classics and recent releases. Kind of interesting to think about.

I am back! The semester is over, so I finally have time to read again! I celebrated by reading #59: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I skipped over the summer. It was exactly what I needed, completely relaxing and non-challenging. Hopefully I'll add at least one more book before the end of the year, and catch up on everyone else's threads, too.

Welcome back to the thread!

Glad to see you back!

Thanks guys!

60) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling. I know I already read this once this year, but this time I read it aloud to my fiance, who likes Harry Potter but isn't really a re-reading sort of person. I submit that reading it aloud is different from reading it to myself, and that therefore this counts. : P Really, though, it was interesting to read it aloud and to discuss it as we went.

Even if you had not read it aloud, I would think you should still count it!

61) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. This is a reread of one of my favorite books. The protagonist has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, a genetic mutation where the effect is a type of hermaphroditism such that he appears female until puberty, when he essentially switches to becoming male. The story follows the protagonist's understanding of himself and of gender in general. He starts with his grandparents, who emigrated from Turkey and set the genetic stage by marrying even though they were brother and sister. It follows through his parents and then his own life, sexuality, and self-discovery, and is interwoven throughout with mythology (he's Greek, so there's a lot of classicism incorporated) and the transformations that society is going through as he is growing up (and transforming himself) (the family settles in Detroit, and there's lots of discussion of race and the dynamics of immigrant and racial populations, as well as a great scene in the Detroit riots).

The writing in this book is excellent. Eugenides has a very fluid style full of subtle allusions and echoes of Greek poets. All of the science and gender research in it is very correct, too. The protagonist's interactions with a particular gender researcher are modeled on an actual case in the gender literature - gender researchers always get very excited when a case shows up that sheds light on the nature vs. nurture debate: the protagonist here (and the real person he's based on) was one such case, being genetically male, but raised as female until puberty. In the famous case the researcher, named John Money if you're interested, believed that the subject proved that nurture (the gender of raising) was the determining factor, claiming that the subject was completely female. Over time, though, the story unraveled and it turned out that aspects of the subject had been concealed, and the subject eventually switched their gender identity to living as a man. The fictionalized version in Middlesex does a very good job exploring all the factors going into this, and is accurate to the real story, as far as I know it.

To summarize, then, Middlesex is a wonderfully written exploration of gender and identity. It is also a great, accurate introduction to most of the common themes you'd encounter in a psychology of gender class. In addition, it's a great story and a compelling family drama. You should read it.

Katie, are you joining us for the 2010 challenge? I hope to see you there! The group is up and running.

Oh, yes, I m joining! I hadn't noticed it was up yet. I've been pretty busy with holiday things, so I haven't been on LT much. I'll head over. :)

I am glad you will be with us again for 2010!

Thanks for letting me know! I'm way behind on my LT threads and my books, but I have a few to add today and all of the holiday craziness is over now (both my parents and my fiance's parents visited us for Christmas), so I'm going to try and catch up and finish up!

I just finished #62, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which I realized I'd never actually read before, despite having seen about a million Christmas special versions of it. It was a pleasant thing to read before Christmas, although I was surprised to find Scrooge more willing to transform than I expected. He seems pretty convinced by the first ghost and the second two just tell him how to change and reinforce the message. Not a bad thing, just a bit different from most adapted versions.

I'm also going to count these two books, since their anthologies and I read most of them (in the vicinity of all but 2-3 stories/essays) over the course of the year:

63) The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales by various authors. This is a really good collection of fairy tales selected based on being specifically written by an author (in the sense of someone sat down and decided to write a fairy tale, instead of collecting or transcribing them from some other source). Most of them play on the genre of the fairy tale, although some of the older ones are also straight-up morality tales. My favorite ones tend to be the ones that play with the gendered nature of fairy tales (princesses in distress, that sort of thing) "The Light Princess" and "The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet" are both very good stories in that regard. The book is arranged chronologically, and the essay at the beginning about the whole idea is also very interesting. Overall this is a great, very well thought out, collection of fairy tales and fairy-tale-like short stories, and also a tolerably good overview of the history of the genre. Highly recommended if you're interested in fairy tales and they way they've been used in society.

64) Tolkien and the Invention of Myth by Jane Chance. This is a really good anthology of scholarly essays about Tolkien edited by one of my college professors. I've been meaning to read it ever since I took her class on mythology, several years ago now, and I'm really glad I finally got around to it. All of the essays are great, and they generally focus on identifying and exploring particular influences to Tolkien's work, which range through just about every ancient European language and culture you can think of. It's really interesting to see how thoroughly "rooted" all of Tolkien's ideas are, and it gives you an impressive sense of the scope of any truly mythic creation. I'd like to go into more detail about some of the specific essays, but I actually read most of them toward the beginning of the year and I don't have the book in front of me right now. This is a must-read if you're interested in scholarly Tolkien research, though, and it's quite accessible even if you're only casually interested. A very informative look at the immense background of the immense background Tolkien created for his stories.

So. Now I've got 11 books to go, 3.5 days with nothing to do but read before the end of the year, and a stack of short books beside me. I have no idea if this will work or not, but i'm going to go for it! Wish me luck!

Good luck!! I envy you your "nothing to do but read" time... although actually I'm doing quite a bit of it thanks to the (shiny new) electronic babysitter <flagellates self with bad-mother guilt>

I'm sure you're a wonderful mother, Flossie, with or without the electronic babysitter! And a bit of extra reading time is almost never a bad thing. Not to say, of course, that there aren't useful things I could be doing, like registering the car... but I'm definitely enjoying taking advantage of the gap between semesters.

Today's accomplishments:

65) Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis. Narnia seemed like a good place to pick up some quick, pleasant rereads, as well as just being nice light holiday-ish reading, and I wasn't disappointed. I'm reading the ones I haven't read recently, but in general Prince Caspian is one of the weaker in the series. Rediscovering Narnia after 1000 years is fun, but most of the action is in relatively trivial journeys, the characters are relatively minimally developed, and the appearance of Bacchus and Silenus at the end has always mystified me (I guess I should find some good commentary on certain other Inklings, like I've been finding for Tolkien, since I'm sure there's some symbolic importance). A fun and pleasant foray into Narnia, but definitely not a book that would stand up on its own.

66) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis. Dawn Treader, on the other hand, is probably my favorite Narnia book, and it's been a long time since I've read it last. Maybe it's something to do with growing up on an island, but I really like the seafaring adventurousness of the whole thing, and the quest to the end of the world is something I can appreciate. Also, this may be odd, but with some books I judge them by the colorfulness of their imagery, and Dawn Treader is one of the best books ever for the sparkling, jewel-like tropical quality of the images.

I'll be starting The Silver Chair next, also one of my favorites.

Go for it! No, go back to your books, don't spend time reading here! It's only 3 days now!

Hehe, thanks Roni! I'm going, I'm going!

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favorite of the Narnia books too.

Getting close to 75! Good luck.

Love Dawn Treader. I second Stasia on it being my favourite of the series.

I am on the same mission you are. I have two to go and little time left. Reading furiously.

More to report, thanks for the support guys!

Blackdogbooks, I don't think I've been over to your thread in a while, I'll head over to cheer you on.

67) The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis. This is another one where I feel like I must be missing the mythological allusions in a lot of places. It is another one of my Narnia favorites, though; I like the underground realm. That said, three books in 24 hours seems to have burned me out on Narnia for a bit. I might come back to The Last Battle if I'm feeling uninspired on Thursday, though.

68) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was a first-time read for me, and I quite liked it. I like the Victorian London setting and the incredulous propriety of the narrator, although the suspense aspect of the horror has probably been irrevocably lost since everyone knows the revelation at the end. Still, worth reading for the setting and the common references, and also quite enjoyable.

69) Animal Farm by George Orwell. A re-read, although I last read it in middle school and barely remembered the plot. It's pretty straightforward allegory about communism: essentially, in any system where everyone starts out equal, differences of ability will emerge and those capable of seizing power, will. And then all the details of how this takes place mimic their human counterparts almost farcically. It's an engaging read, and the type of thing that probably should be read once, but the idea is simplistic enough that I probably won't be reading it again.

Wow!! Speedy progress <waves banners, pompoms, cheers loudly>

I never really got into Animal Farm - I don't think I get on with Orwell...

Thank you! My stance on Orwell has always been that he's about complicated enough to be interesting at the high school level and nothing more. He's not bad, he's just at about precisely the level to make a good SAT essay.*

I seem to have slowed down this morning though. All I've got to add currently is this one:

70) The Actual by Saul Bellow. Saul Bellow and I do not get along, I think. I've tried reading several of his books, and I never get very far because I just can't stand his protagonists, who always seem to be self-absorbed, usually chauvinistic, older businessmen, ill at ease with their empty, loveless lives. The Actual is another in this vein, but since it's a novella it seemed like a good opportunity for me to get to the end of something by Bellow to see if anything finally happens. Well, the answer is: kind of. There was, actually, a somewhat satisfying conclusion to this little story. It surprised me, because it gave the impression that it was going to peter out the way it had petered in, and it was actually kind of touching, and redeemed the protagonist a little bit. It doesn't really save the rest of the book from being nothing but self-absorbed musings, however. So, it was ok, but the best thing I got out of it was the ability to finally put Bellow aside with a good conscience.

ETA: *The SAT is the standardized end-of-high school test in the US.

Still feeling behind today, but here's another one:

71) The BFG by Roald Dahl. This was the first time I'd read this book, and it's great. Go read it. It's fantastically silly, a wonderful story, and has the best language.

Ok, off to read some more.

#213: The BFG is on my 'memorable reads' list for the year. I agree with you - it is great!

You're closing in but the ball is dropping!!! Go, go, go!!!!

214: I'm really glad I finally got to it. Don't know how I missed it as a kid.

215: Thanks BDB!

I remembered another book that I'd meant to count earlier:

72) Preservation: Issues and Planning by Paul Banks. This was the textbook for my preservation class, and I'm pretty sure I read all of it, but out of order and over several months, so I forgot to add it in. It's a pretty good overview of most preservation topics, although it's heavily focused on the management, planning, and administration side of things rather than actual preservation. I'm sure it will be useful to me in the future, though.

73) The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis. I really enjoyed this one this time through.

74) The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. Hooray, Narnia!

One book left!

The BFG is one of my favorites of 2009! It is incredibly funny, witty and touching.

Happy New Year! I look forward to following your thread in 2010.

75) The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis. I like The Last Battle. I like the imagery and mythology at the end. I'm thinking that I would like to find a good commentary on Lewis' mythology, though, because I feel like it's really quite brilliant in parts but never adequately adds up to a whole for me. I notice something new with almost every read, though. This time what struck me was the kind of reverse nativity scene of the end of the world - everything ends by going into a stable. I'm not really sure how that fits in.

Anyway, I made it! Happy new year everyone! See you in 2010!

Congrats!

Congratulations and happy New Year!

YAY! Well done - you made it!! Happy New Year, and here's to more great reading in 2010.

Way to go!

And we both slipped in under the wire. Well done.

Congrats on making it, and Happy New YEar!

Thanks everyone, it was a really great year. This is a really great group and I've really enjoyed all of the good books and conversation over the year, so thank you!

I'm editing my first post to make a list of all my 2009 books, and then I'm going to note some statistics and favorites to tie the thread up:

In 2009 I read:

75 books:
- 57 fiction
- 17 nonfiction
- 1 poetry

-30 rereads

About 2/3 of my reading, and almost all of the books I really liked, was in the first half of the year.

And here are some favorites:

Among the books I read for the first time, I really liked these:
Ella Minnow Pea
Jakob the Liar
Doomsday Book
Pastwatch
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Anna Karenina
Enchantment
Everything is Miscellaneous
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth

And among my rereads:
Holes
Ender's Game
Watership Down
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The Poisonwood Bible
Middlesex

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with my reading this year. I read a lot of wonderful books and only one or two that were truly bad. I'd like to have fewer rereads in the future and I'd like to read more books from my wishlist. Mainly, though, I'm just hoping I'll have time to read at all this year with school - my reading fell off precipitously as soon as last semester started.

I shall be moving over to my thread in the 2010 group now (rummages for a link, here we go: Foxen's Books for 2010!), so I hope to see you all over there! Thanks again for making 2009 such a great year for reading!