Book Challenge Update

So it's been a while since I've done this and while I have not been reading books, I have been listening to them. I think this is a completely valid way of consuming books for my book challenge this year. :)

Over the summer I listened to the entire Harry Potter Series on my ipod, so 7 books up!

16) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
17) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (yes, I even listened to my least favorite of them all)
18) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
19) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
20) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
21) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
22) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

There's nothing like doing a series to help get you through your book challenge. I tend to listen to these while driving or cooking dinner. It's a nice way to take in a book while doing something else that I find relaxing.

On another note, I've updated San Serif with a rant on teaching and exploring as a learning technique (or how I'm not really getting to do that second bit, at any rate) here.

Also, I've been posting a bit on wordpress at Make of Myself. Today's post over there is about Pinterest and the little bit of creative work I tried to do this week.

Do you have any audiobooks you love to listen to?

Another day, another book

So, book 17 on my list is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. After hearing what a great book it was since I was in the fourth grade and since I very much enjoy a good YA novel, I decided it was finally time to read it. 

I was surprised. It kinda got Dark Knighted for me - by which I mean the build up for the book was so big that I didn't like it as much as everyone said I would.

Don't get me wrong, though. It was a good book. Tessering was an interesting time travel invention that took the shimmery, centaur-like guardian angel things to a whole new science fiction level with their interplanetary travel. Very interesting idea. I was surprised how obvious the religion was in it. The idea that love conquers evil conclusion made me feel even a little more ripped off by JK Rowling than I already did (for such a crappy epilogue).

For all of the build up, I felt the climax and conclusion were a little obvious and abrupt, but then I keep having to remind myself that this is a YA novel. Perhaps, I just give young adults more credit than I ought to. I was reading Tolkien to some effect by the fourth grade (which is why I skipped things like A Wrinkle in Time in the first place). I have a friend who's  getting into the business of writing YA and I'm fairly excited to see what she brings to the genre. :) 

Another book closer to my goal. 

Did you ever read A Wrinkle in Time? What did you think?

Another book challenge update

And so quickly too!


16) Elisha's Bones (Don Hoesel) 


This book was a not-quite-Dan-Brown, conspiracy theory, archaeological, gun-fighting, kill-or-be-killed book. There were some definite slow points and it was written well after Dan Brown's huge hit (which I never read). I suppose I'm just being a bit snobby about Dan Brown really. I don't think his idea was that original. Well done, but not original. People started freaking out about how Jesus might have had children (which the French have been claiming since Charlemagne or earlier) and that there might be corruption and conspiracy in the Catholic Church (anyone read their history of the middle ages? no? okay, just me then...). This book was kinda fun though. A new twist in the Egyptian connection to South America saga. They also end up in Australia, which is a nice new location. It's mostly political by the time it gets there, but most of the archaeological evidence has been collected by then. The standard secret societies passing antiquities which is all tied up in other secret societies thing. Nice escapist literature - you know the kind. 


What do you think? Should I get off my high horse and read Dan Brown?

Book Challenge Update

After a weekend away (and much neglecting of recording the books I've read), there hasn't been as much writing as reading, so it's time to update the book challenge.


13) Little Men (Louisa May Alcott) - late May


I had never read this one before. I had managed to read Little Women and Jo's Boys, but never Little Men. It was interesting to see Alcott's take on the moral life manual for boys in the way that Little Women was a moral life manual for girls. Of course nothing can be simplified to one intention or purpose, but I can imagine this broadened Alcott's audience.


14) Jo's Boys (Louisa May Alcott) - early June


I love this book. I've read it once before, but I like that Alcott starts to steer away from the starkly episodic moral tales of the boys and starts to really get at their developing personalities as she did with the four sisters in Little Women. The balance of the older students with the younger children evens out the cast for a nice well rounded story. 


15) The Tao of Pooh (Benjamin Hoff) - June 12


As my husband is a scholar of Chinese Philosophy, this popular introduction to Taoism was great for those of us with a little less background. :) I think that Hoff was not as sympathetic nor as generous as he might have been with his descriptions of Confucianism and Buddhism, but I have been told that he mellows by the time he has written The Te of Piglet (which you should expect to see on this list soon). 


Lots of reading - I'm halfway to my goal! I'm currently reading a book I got for free for the Kindle titled Elisha's Bones. It's not quite Dan Brown (whose works I have thus far neglected to read), but it's kinda fun. 


What book are you reading?

Stateside

I am back on US soil - yay! It is so good to be home!

It will probably take me a good week to adjust back to regular sleeping schedules, household patterns and habits as well as writing habits. I plan to come back with some revised and new writing, as well as continue to update my book challenge and hopefully get a few Red Dress Club prompts in here and there. 

Speaking of book challenge, I just finished Little Men yesterday. I had never read it before and I ended up really enjoying it - not the same way as I enjoyed Little Women, but a different kind of enjoyment. I really felt empathy and connection to the stories told in Little Women - the shared and similar experiences touched me. With Little Men it was different. I sometimes empathized with the boys, but found myself living a little vicariously other times and enjoying the romps of boys. 

Book Challenge Update

Yesterday saw the end of Little Women and I have now moved on to Jo's Boys. I had read Little Women before. I love, love, love it. There is always a new lesson to take in and moral to learn and a reminder that some things about people are truly timeless. I think this time I learned more from each of the sisters than I have before. Instead of focusing on the story most like my own with small additions from the others, I found different and more well-rounded traits in each story that felt applicable to my life. It is always nice to have a reminder that we are all pilgrims who bear our burdens, but that there is some hope that those burdens will be lifted and it is within us to lift them. 

I have never read Jo's Boys, but I am enjoying it thus far. It's so different to read about boys in this similar setting, but interesting nonetheless. Little Women gives you boys and men that are exemplar - they are the kind you look to have in your life as a woman. Jo's Boys seems to be giving you all types of boys to see how they turn out. They won't all be Laurie's or Mr. March's or John's or even Mr. Bhaer's. Some might turn out to be more like Ned Moffat or Fred Vaughn. 

12/30 books for 2011. 

Book Challenge Update

I did not get a chance to update my book challenge yet this week. I finished The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 


I must say, I really love this story. It's, of course, a great growing story full of morals and directives about how to be a good person, how to help children be good people and the loveliness and lessons we can learn from gardening. LOVE IT! 


It makes me want even more to start my own greenhouse. It's a pet idea that I've had floating around the back of my mind for a few years. 


Anyways - back to the book. I finished it Tuesday and began reading Little Women for the third time. It's another book I love. Alcott has such interestingly eternal thoughts. Plus, it is hard to pull me away from the transcendentalists (but not as difficult as it is pulling them away from Unitarian thought... hahaha ha ha.... no one gets my literary joke or finds it funny.


Thus, I have completed the twelfth book on my journey to tri-deca-dom. Or something like that. 


12/30 books completed.

Blogging

In trying to use this blog to improve my writing skills, I have finally come to the point where I might start redrafting and reposting a few old works as they get modified. I don't have anything ready quite yet, but it should be along soon.

I have a busy week ahead of me. I'll be traveling almost exactly halfway around the globe - back to the US for me - and so I will be a little out of touch (if you haven't already noticed). Packing and preparing leaves me little time to be able to concentrate on the writing, but hopefully the 17 hour plane ride will give me some time in which I can write and make up for the lack of literary-ness that has been plaguing me recently. 

On the up side and with the lack of writing going on, I have been reading extra and have had plenty of updates for my reading goal. I'm almost done with Little Women, so another book should be under my belt before I fly this week.

How do you find the will to keep going when you're lacking things to write?

Book Challenge Update

Today I finished The Evil Guest by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. What a strange book. It was published in 1851, so it has all of the stilted language and sometimes overt authorship that writing of the 19th century normally brings. 


The problem I had most was the strange secretiveness of the author. He would sometimes endeavor to set up a confession of a character (this was a murder mystery - sorta, but I'll get to that soon), only to hide the revealed information repeatedly from the audience. 


So getting back to that murder mystery part. While there was indeed a murder and an ongoing mystery about that murder, I believe this book could be much more accurately described as a character study of highly depressed, agitated and otherwise guilty (and probably insane) people. Not that it's very psychological - for most writing of this period that I've encountered lacks the psychological attention that modern writers use to entice their audiences. No - there was description of the psychological devastation of a man, but it wasn't really explored in ways that satisfactorily explain his motivations. The reader has to make assumptions of his or her own on some accounts. 


An interesting read, but not one that I'll repeat ad infinitum (or possibly at all). 


 11/30 books completed for 2011. 

Book Challenge Update... Again

Another book down. Today I finished Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I had never read it. I think I've read Through the Looking Glass, but I'm not quite sure. 


I loved the sense of child-logic and frustrations of having to change one's outlook on the world as one changes. It's such a growing up story, but dressed in such fantastic nonsense that it's just as easily hidden as it is revealed to the reader. It's almost like a fast-forward dream of being a teenager. 


This is book 10/30 read this year. 

Book Challenge Update

Today I finished Sense and Sensibility. I had never read any of Austen before, so it was an interesting experience. I have seen the film, so I had an idea of what to expect, but really enjoyed the read. I think that the motivations and fates make a little more sense when you know the full story. 

This is book 9/30 for the year. 

Book Challenge Update

So I have just finished reading Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know by Hamilton Wright Mabie. It was nice to revisit childhood and bit and hear the old tales. There were many that I had heard (Snow White, Red Riding Hood) but then there were ones that I had not read (The History of Abi Baba, and of the Forty Robbers Killed by One Slave), or had only heard some really degenerate form of (The Story of Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp).


8/30 books read

Book Challenge Update

So I just finished An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon. Another good book. I made my comments about the direction her writing is taking in my first book challenge blog. You can see them there. I must say, I didn't think she would end it so abruptly. Lots of things are hanging in the air at the end of this book. Only the last scene has any kind of conclusive feeling of relief and even that situation leaves lots of questions hovering in the brain. It's kinda frustrating, but I guess that is how book in series get sold. I won't be able to resist the next one. We never found out what happened in the situation with Arch Bug. We never found out how Claire and Jamie were going to manage to work out what had become of their life. We never figured out if Rob was just trying to get rid of Roger to get at Brianna and the children. We never figure out if they're all going to go back in time again.... back back in time... sorta. I'm sorry. I promise - that didn't spoil anything. That's another book down.

6) An Echo in the Bone (Diana Gabaldon)


oh - AND

7) Light of Eidon :Legends of the Guardian Kind, Book 1 (Karen Hancock)

I forgot to add this to my list. I read it after My Antonia. It was okay. Someone read up on their history of the Catholic Church and the Great Schism plus ancient and concurrent beliefs in Egypt (etc) at the time and decided to write a thinly veiled book about it. It wasn't terrible. I was, in fact, much like Gladiator. I'm surprised that there wasn't a lawsuit at some point. At any rate, it was amusing and also a book that I've read.

7/30 complete

2011 Book Challenge

So.... I set myself a book challenge for 2011 on the Goodreads website... but I have to admit that I HATE that website. It seems so convoluted for no apparent reason. I figure, why don't I just keep my tabs on my new literature blog? No reason I shouldn't.

So here it is. I set my goal fairly low at 30 books for the year. It's been so long since I've gotten to really read just for pleasure (thanks to my time at university...) so I started this past Christmas by getting a Kindle before moving to Hong Kong. It's really helped, I must say. There are lots of free books and I've been reading much more frequently. Not that I don't believe in buying paper copies (I love a real book in my hands), but it's more environmentally sound and easier to carry when traveling halfway across the world. No really. When we went to Bangkok for the honeymoon, we loaded maps from the internet as PDFs and used them as we walked around Bangkok. So worth it.

So I'm going to start posting the books that I read on the blog. I'll post them after I read them. I don't know that I'll be reviewing, but I'll try to make it some kind of comment and keep a count. Here's my list for the year thus far:

1) The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
2) The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)
3) The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)

What can I say. It had been a while (since middle school) since I'd read them and I'm writing my own fantasy fiction right now, so I figured reading genre would help.

4) My Antonia (Willa Cather)

It'd never read of any Cather's work before, but I found all of it (or at least most of it) for free for the Kindle, so why not? There is a lot more Cather on my list for this year's reading.

5) A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Diana Gabaldon)

I've been reading this author since I was in high school and fell in love with the Outlander series then. I bought a copy of the book a few years ago, but didn't get to finish it with all of my school work. I've finally finished it and was happy to do so. I've got to say that Gabaldon has started relying on some stock descriptions a bit for her work, but I'm already invested in the characters and the plot, so I've found I can turn a blind eye for that. I'm reading her next book in the series (An Echo in the Bone) right now. I'll post when I finish it.

5 out of 30 down. 25 more to go.

I encourage everyone else to set a reading goal as well. It's helped me to feel less guilty about the time I spend reading and get back into the swing of setting aside time to read.

Happy Reading!