Miela's Reading Madness

Well, I've been reading this board for the last few days, and it looks like the kind of place that interests me.

I'm still a student, so my non-academic reading kind of comes in spurts. I will have to wait to review my first couple of books until later. (I guess I should actually attend class, rather than sitting around and reviewing books, although I rather do the latter!)

Welcome to Club Read 2009 Miela. Whence do you hail?

And what do you study? :)

Ah dear Miss Price, always there with apt inquiry.

Thank you for your interest in me.

I'm originally from Omaha, but I'm studying at Grinnell, in Iowa. At the moment, I'm still a first-year student, so I haven't decided what I want to study, but I think I will probably end up majoring in French; ever since I started studying it in middle school, it's been one of my favorite subjects.

Book 1- All Souls by Christine Schutt (Touchstone comes up with a different work.)

Overall, I enjoyed this work, a collection of linked short stories about the lives of the senior class at a private girls' school, including a classmate who is hospitalized with cancer. For the most part, it deals with the girls' (and three of their teachers') everyday and emotional lives.

This was one of those multi-character works where I initially had trouble keeping track of the various characters, but it went away as I continued reading.(4.25/5)

>5 Miela:, Nice! I'm a midwesterner myself who also went to a small midwestern liberal arts school for undergrad - that was more years ago than I'd like to admit though! Grinnell has good language programs, right? When I was in high school, I went to summer language immersion camp for Russian and a number of my teachers were Russian profs from Grinnell.

we loved visiting Grinnell; we hoped that our son would pick it, but the sounds of the city called and he ended up in St Paul*. Grinnell was SUCH a pleasure to visit; one of the nicest campuses. Hope you enjoy your time there. The admissions office was so charming, i had them send me their newsletter for the next 5 yrs trying to convince other progeny of friends to go there. I think a kid from adam's hschool DID end up there a couple yrs later.

*which was fine.

In which our heroine stalls after beginning the year promisingly....

So far this year, I have read:

Geography of Bliss - Eric Weiner

All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well
- Tod Wodicka

An Experiment in Love - Hilary Mantel

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

#9 Miela - Very interesting list. I hope you post some thoughts on those, particularly on Geography of Bliss.

Miela,

I hope you enjoyed Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I found it quite funny. Additionally several sections of prose were beautifully written as well. I also found one item I did not expect to find: as an American, I tend to classify all British Christians as Anglican (high or low) or Catholic. I was surprised to find out that the United States is not the only country with right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Of course, I knew historically that many Christian splinter groups developed in Great Britain. As a young reader, which I was at the time, I simply assumed all the splinter groups migrated to the US to torment us here.

Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

I would consider this book to be part of what I call the "project" genre of memoir/nonfiction -- the kind where the author has engaged on some kind of personal project and written a book about their experiences. In this case, the author, a journalist for NPR and self-proclaimed "grouch", visits countries from Moldova to Thailand to Qatar to figure out what makes happiness.

Overall, I found it to be an interesting work combining research on happiness, cultural insights (well, at least for me), and humor.

4/5

Hello again!

I suppose that since I've read a number of books since I last posted here, it might be time for me to update my list. (I'm sure that there are others, but I can't seem to remember any right now.)
I hope to review all of these once I have my thoughts together.

Anglo Files by Sarah Lyall
When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale
Unstrange Minds by Roy Grinker
Dating Jesus by Susan Campbell
Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman
Obedience by Will Lavender
Schuyler's Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson

If you're wondering how a college student would have so much time to read -- I'm currently not a college student; I had to take a medical leave. On the plus side, this has meant that I've had a great deal more time to spend on my reading (in fact, at times I almost grow tired of it -- who knew that that could happen?)

Obedience by Will Lavender

THE PLOT -- (I'm not yelling, but I'm not technologically advanced enough on the LT system to know how to boldface words)
When the students at a fictional university show up for the first day of their Logic and Reasoning course, instead of being greeted with the usual syllabus and list of texts, they are called on to prevent a hypothetical murder. The novel focuses on three of the students in the class, who are obsessed with solving the case.

I really looked forward to reading this book when I picked it up at the library, but now I'm just glad that I didn't waste fourteen dollars on it. Although I read the first three-fourths of the work wanting to know what had really happened, the denouement was disappointing. Not only that, once I had learned the actual solution, I found myself identifying a number of plot holes, but I don't want to supply any details in case anyone still wishes to read the novel. I also wanted to know whether the other students in the class were at all concerned with solving the case, as their reactions seemed to be so minimal as to be background.
What makes this novel worse is that I learned through the Amazon reviews that the author is a professor of creative writing -- one would believe that he could write a better novel than this. (2.5/5)

I'll be interested to know what you thought of The Anglo Files. That one's sitting on my To-Read Pile.

The Anglo Files by Sarah Lyall

First of all, I'd like to say that I've read the reviews of this book -- both here and on Amazon -- and I don't exactly agree with the somewhat low majority opinion on this work. My favorite chapters was the one on newspapers; it made me laugh on more than one occasion.

Overall, I found this book to be a light, enjoyable, and humorous read. (4/5)

When We were Romans by Mathew Kneale

I read this work on the basis of (I believe) the recommendation of someone in this group, who praised it highly. Although I found it to be enjoyable overall, I became tired of reading one of a couple of repetitive themes:
"my mum's mood" (Granted, I suppose a kid who feels the responsibility to "be the man" of his family would be extremely concerned with his mother's emotional state, but it got old after a while) ,
"My little sister gets on my nerves at every possible opportunity.", and "Here is my opinion of yet another of Mum's friends from Rome."

Despite the recommendation mentioning the ending being a surprise, I wasn't really all that surprised by it. (3.5/5)

You do bold with html codes. For bold the code is <b> followed by whatever you want to be bold, then ending with </b>