Self-Imposed Read-a-Thon

My husband is out of town for business, and it seemed to me the perfect excuse to buckle down and get some books read.  I even asked my friends and family to sponsor me in a read-a-thon (no takers). Of course, I wasn't taking kiddos into account.

My kiddos all pose for a picture (yep, that's how they pose).  Left to
Right: Andrew (15) hates having his picture taken, Timothy (17) held that
soda up to his mouth for at least 20 seconds to make sure it got in the picture,
Melinda (13) is all about those awkward moments - like when our food is
delivered and the number must be retrieved from the top of her head, and
Audrey (9) is just ready to smile and be a part of whatever is going on.

On Saturday, I got to watch a 7-month-old-sweetie-pie. (I'm actually not a "baby person" but this is the little girl of a long-time friend. Plus she is super adorable, so we had fun.)  Also, we watched the entire Back to the Future trilogy (it was time—my 13yo had never seen them).  To top it off, we had YogurtLand for dinner (yum-o) (and yes, for dinner, not for dessert.  I'm a believer in breaking the dinner rules every now and again) and before I knew it, I was falling asleep at midnight something and hadn't read a single page.

My 17yo son had decided to spend the weekend relaxing at home with the family instead of filling his time (to the point of craziness) with surfing and friends, so that was a treat I couldn't pass up.  (Well, he did hang out with friends Friday night, and took my 13yo to work on Saturday morning to catch up on some paperwork, but he was home much more than usual and that's a treat these days.)

On Sunday, my 13yo had friends over, so that was a bit crazy.  My 15yo stayed in his room during most of that time, trying to avoid the chaos. My 9yo thoroughly enjoyed it. :)  Finally, at about 5pm, the house had reached a level of relative quietness that allowed me to pick up my book in earnest.

My goal was to finish reading Sense and Sensibility.  At around 9pm I had a solid 150 pages left.  Melinda (13yo) told me, "I'm sorry mom, but it's not going happen."  Which, of course, brought out the stubborn rebellion in me and was probably one of the biggest reasons that I DID finish it. (yay me!)  It took some major discipline to keep myself focused and not switch activities, but it paid off in the end.

My husband doesn't get back until tomorrow night.  My hope was to get at least two books read (finish S&S, read The Rosie Project) and I'm still holding out hope.  After all, I managed to complete the first half of that goal, right?

Splurge: New Bookish Self-Gifties

I splurged over the weekend and let myself do some shopping.  I really strive to keep a proper balance between buying books and reading books because it is so incredibly easy to overbuy and end up with shelves full of books I don't have time for and risk losing interest in.

I didn't have plans to buy any specific book when I walked into my local book shop, but since I'd finally finished the last two hardcover books I'd purchased there, I felt a little open-ended shopping was in order.

The first book I noticed when I walked in happened to be my current book club book: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.  For some reason I'd assumed by the title that this was going to be a light&fluffy but it doesn't really look that way! Have you read it?

I bought The Rosie Project because of Emily @ As the Crowe Flies and Reads.  I don't really know anything about it, because I'd rather go into it without any preconceived notions, but she read it multiple times last year so I know that it's worth my time.

We Need New Names caught my eye, partially because of the author's intriguing name, and partially because of the interesting title and the airplane on the front (my husband is a private pilot so flight catches my attention).  The synopsis wasn't what ended up selling me on the book, (children from Zimbabwe try to escape to America,) it was actually the author bio on the back flap that made me decide to take a chance on something unknown to me. Born in Zimbabwe and living in America with an MFA from Cornell, I think it is safe to say that the author knows her topic.

In other shopping, I stopped in a local boutique that has a lovely array of handpicked items. When I was Christmas shopping in December, I had a really hard time not buying things for myself, but I was strong and waited until February (when it seems only right that one should buy things for one's self). The main thing I coveted was this gorgeous wooden crate with monthly dividers—the perfect arrangement for a tangible view of the books I've read.  I also snagged a Library candle based on Leo Tolstoy: black plum, persimmon, and oak moss. Mmmm.

Life Seen Backwards (a.k.a. first thoughts on Middlesex)

I started reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides for a read-along at Unputdownables (this is the first week, so I'm only about 60 pages in).  Now, my experience with Eugenides thus far (why does reading Eugenides always seem to need to come with a prior-experience disclaimer?) has been only with The Marriage Plot, which I read when it came out simply because it was sent to me by Powell's in my Indiespensable shipment (back when I was doing so good at keeping up with them).  It thought it was...okay.  Mostly I just really didn't connect with it—the characters, the plot, the theme, and even the writing itself.  However, people ADORE Middlesex.  The Pulitzer Board loved Middlesex.  Right?  So I've got to read it at some point and it may as well be now.

All that to say that I began reading it with some hesitation.  The first chapter wasn't great.  And then the second chapter had me [first] highly irritated and [second] entranced.  And I'm thinking.  Perhaps this is Eugenides? Or maybe only Eugenides to me, but this quality of being simultaneously impressed and disdainful has settled over me during both of his books so far.  Is that a reflection of the author's feelings/personality or something he's hoping to evoke? Or is it just me being a little bit snotty?  I don't know. But interesting thought.

What left me entranced was the description of the grandmother's, erm, relationship, when she was young.  I really enjoyed how it was written, I could picture the characters and setting, and I was planted in the fictional dream.  If you've read it, you know of what I speak.  If you have not read it, well, I don't want to spoil it, but suffice to say that it is related to tough times in a small town.  Maybe.  Anyhow, (when the narrator kept his nose out of it at least,) the whole thing was captivating.

The great irritation stemmed from the point of view it was written in (first person semi-omniscient or something like that) that kept jolting me out of the story being told.  The high point of aggravation was the part where he rewinds time back to when his grandmother was young.  How those sentences were written simply didn't hold up to Pulitzer status.  In my opinion, of course.  They were highly conspicuous to me because it was impossible to not compare it to a similar type of scene in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  And really, there is simply no comparison because Vonnegut composed one of the most amazing things ever in that scene. Anything else would necessarily pale in comparison. I actually had to put Middlesex down for a few seconds because I was annoyed about the whole Pulitzer thing.  (See?  That disgust that is so ready to rear its ugly head?  I'm not usually like that.  What's the deal? Who really compares authors like that? As if nobody is ever allowed to rewind the story ever again? Ugh.)  But because my subconscious won't leave me alone unless I actually compare them for realz, even though I feel like that makes me a little bit of a terrible human being, here they are.

[from Middlesex, 2002 by Jeffrey Eugenides]

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that the pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs.  She gets really fat again.  Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land.  There's a shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931.  Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning...

[from Slaughterhouse Five: or the Children's Crusade, 1969 by Kurt Vonnegut]

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. 

Actually, typing it out made me realize that I was probably mostly just offended that a pregnant woman is described (by a man) as "really fat".  I'm not an easily-offended sort of person but THAT gets my ire up.  After continuing on to read the third chapter my irritation was mostly diffused—I still don't care for the narrator/narration style very much, but I'm quite interested to see where the story leads.  (Still, that Vonnegut passage is the bees knees.)

This Week

I've been reading in bits and pieces this week - I've been listening to The Dog Stars (which has been much easier to become interested in through audio somehow...probably due to a good narrator making a topic more interesting than it would have been otherwise) and barely started Middlesex for a read-along at Unputdownables.  I'm also making my way through Sense and Sensibility.  It has been seven years since I've read S&S, and I'm getting so much more out of it this time.  What a good book.  Although I must say that the edition I'm reading is not exactly reading-in-bed-friendly.

That's me trying the sideways pose...the lying-on-my-back pose made me
look like I had alien thumbs.  (Thanks to my 9yo for help taking the photo!)

In other news, I'm apparently I'm an eclectic reader.  I didn't realize that my reading selections were oddly mixed until I saw this on GoodReads:

And...I discovered that knitting blankets—even baby sized blankets—is way more tedious than knitting sweaters.  But I did finish it in time to ship it over to Qatar, where my new nephew will be arriving in April. (Yay!)  After finishing this I immediately began two different sweaters to make up for it.  I have 3 more babies to knit for within the next few months, though, so I need to amp myself back up for knitting large rectangles.

Last, I'm thinking that maybe I'll give the Classics Club Spin another shot.  It was great motivation the first time, but completely ineffectual the second time.  And then I was so blog-absent that I didn't even realize they had a third and fourth time.  Now they're on Spin #5.  I really want to get some of my novellas read, so I've listed all those here, in addition to a few others to make up 20 books.

1. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
2. The Sufferings of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
4. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather
5. The Enchanted Wanderer, Nikolai Leskov
6. The Duel, Alexander Kuprin
7. My Life, Anton Chekhov
8. *Freya of the Seven Isles, Joseph Conrad
9. *The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling
10. *The Distracted Preacher, Thomas Hardy
11. *The Lemoine Affair, Marcel Proust
12. *The Alienist, Machado De Assis
13. Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance, Sholem Aleichem
14. The Duel, Anton Chekhov
15. *Fanfarlo, Charles Baudelaire
16. *May Day, F.Scott Fitzgerald
17. Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
18. Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
19. *The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, Italo Svevo
20. The Touchstone, Edith Wharton (edited to add: #20 it is!)

* These novellas are pretty tiny.  If one of these numbers is selected, I'll choose another to pair with it.  Two for the price of one!

For the Record: January 2014

How is it that the first month of the year is over already?  Being that this is the year we finally finish our house renovation, I've got a gazillion things to decide.  But I'm starting to really look forward to unpacking all my books...I seriously daydream about how I'll organize them (sad but true).

After lowering my goal on GoodReads (for number of books to read in 2014) I'm less stressed, but I'm still struggling a bit to keep on track.  Ugh.  I wish I didn't care.  I'm trying to not care.  But still.

5 Books Read in January: (5 year-to-date)

2 Classics:
  - Free Air, Sinclair Lewis (4) Okay, so this Sinclair is delightful.  This was a wonderful look at a road trip in 1919.  Who knew Americans were all over the great road trip adventure way back in '19? I loved the social humor and the peek at so many different kinds of society at the time.  I've heard this is in no way his best—which is quite intriguing for this fan.  I bought this book because of the lovely cover in conjunction with the author's name.  See?  Judging a book by its cover paid off.
  - Oil!, Upton Sinclair (3) And THIS Sinclair was a bit of a drag.  Even though the title has an exclamation mark which should mean the book is exciting.  It isn't.  Well, more precisely, the first third is engaging, and then it devolves into a political rant about socialism being better than capitalism.  Even that is interesting, in light of current sentiments...and the fact that we have seen the socialist ideal fail in practice...but still a little so-so overall.  I haven't watched There Will Be Blood (which is supposedly based on the first third of the book) but I think I'll do it soon.

1 for Book Club:
  - Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler (3.5) I adored Tyler's new book, The Beginner's Goodbye, which I picked up on a whim at the airport a few months back, so I decided that her Pulitzer Prize winner would be a good choice for our next book club read.  There were many funny parts, and a lot of depth into what drives people, but it was sad too (in that life-doesn't-always-turn-out-how-you-expect sort of way).  One thing the two books did have in common was the extraordinary way she writes of ordinary people.  Her characters are so real.

2 Others:
  - The Lighthouse Road, Peter Geye (5) I loved this book.  Probably even more than I did his first book, Safe From the Sea.  There is something about the way he writes about land, family, and history that appeals to me so much.  If you are ever in the mood to read a little historical fiction—something that reads quickly but has depth and substance—pick this!
  - Mrs. Queen Takes the Train, William Kuhn (3.5) This lovely lighthearted book was an impulse buy at my local book shop.  Although it began with a cast of characters in disarray, it soon pulled together and tidied up.  Kuhn's portrait of the Queen was very kind and sweet, and the book ended up being a nice happy read.  Recommended if you're in the mood for something simple and happy.

        


4 Current Reads:
  - Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.  I'm reading the annotated version for this re-read and it's wonderful so far!
  - Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides.  I'm joining Wallace at Unputdownables for a read-along of this.  I haven't begun yet (I need to start!) but it's not scheduled for completion until the end of March so I'm feeling like I've got all the time in the world.
  - The Best of McSweeney's.  Still reading this, story by story.  There's been so much to love that I'm not in a huge hurry for it to end.
  - The Dog Stars, Peter Heller.  My new audiobook.  So far the writing is spare, which matches the post-apocalyptic landscape.  Listening to it instead of reading it myself (which I tried a while back) is helping me to go at a slower pace and appreciate the syntax.

      

On My Nightstand:
I really don't have much in the queue right now, although I have a couple of vague goals.  First, to catch up on an Indiespensable book or two (I did a terrible job at keeping up with them last year) starting with the newest shipment: Orfeo by Richard Powers.  Second, to read my next Willa Cather book and/or knock back a couple of my classic novellas.  We'll see how it goes after I'm done with Sense and Sensibility.

  - The Big Burn, Timothy Egan.  One of my goals this year is to read more nonfiction, so I thought it might help to have it staring me in the face.  I really enjoyed Egan's The Worst Hard Time (about the Dust Bowl) and am looking forward to this one about Teddy Roosevelt and our National Parks and Forest Service.

    

Vintage "Authors" Card Game

I had the best bookish surprise this week.  It felt like Christmas all over again!  I was giggling (fan-girl-style) and my kiddos were telling me to calm down.  But what a wonderful treat!  My dad sent me a small gift—something he'd stumbled across on eBay and decided to get for me instead of just telling me about it (like I probably would have done).

It's a tiny set of cards (less than 2"x3") that was made in 1935 and featuring twelve different authors.  Each author has four different books listed, and the game is played like Go Fish.  One of the things I love most is the viewpoint from the 30s.  I know most of the authors, but some I don't.  Interesting to see what is renowned at different points in time (assuming that was the reason these authors were picked).  I have to say that it made me add some new old books to my list!  This will be the perfect little treat to add to my bookshelves once our renovation is complete!

1. Oliver W. Holmes (Over the Teacups, The Guardian Angel, Songs in Many Keys, Elsie Venner)
2. R.L. Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, Merry Men, Kidnapped)
3. Joseph Conrad (Youth, Typhoon, Chance, Almayer's Folly)
4. Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, The Light that Failed, Just-So Stories, Soldiers Three)
5. Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist)
6. H.W. Longfellow (The Golden Legend, Tales of a Wayside Inn, Evangeline, Hiawatha)
7. Louisa M. Alcott (Little Women, Little Men, Eight Cousins, An Oldfashioned Girl)
8. Sir J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan, Peter and Wendy, The Little Minister, A Window in Thrums)
9. H.H. Jackson (Glimpses of California, Nelly's Silver Mine, Letters from a Cat, Ramona)
10. T.W. Burgess (Lightfoot the Deer, Old Mother West Wind, Adventures of Reddy Fox, Mrs. Peter Rabbit)
11. Cornelia Meigs (The Trade Winds, Rain on the Roof, Clearing Weather, The Crooked Apple Tree)
12. Booth Tarkington (The Conquest of Canaan, Gentleman from Indiana, Monsieur Beaucaire, Penrod)

Revising My Goals

At the first of the new year, being full of grand hopes and resolutions, I was tempted to join challenges, publicly declare lofty goals, and was quick to renew my aim for reading 100 books in 2014.  I know myself well enough by now, however, to do myself the favor of forcing myself to let some time pass before jumping into too many things.  I'm glad I did!  I was able to really think through what I want this year to look like. Here's how I've decided to focus my reading life this year:

• Since I've spent the last couple of years feeling like I haven't read enough nonfiction or classics, I decided to set myself a personal goal of reading 15 of each this year.  That's a few more than last year, but not a super crazy number. 
• Related to the above, in order to ease off the pressure and encourage myself to read deeper, longer books, I've adjusted my GoodReads 2014 goal to 80 books instead of 100.  I hate seeing "You're 2 books behind" every time I finish a book...I get all anxious, which is pure silliness.  Who cares if I break 100?  Quality above quantity is the idea this year.
• In keeping with my hope to get back into blogging, my goal is to post once a week.  So far, so good!  By going more informal, the pressure is off.  This is my time.
• Since I've got a goal to read fifteen classics this year anyhow, I've decided to join in the Back to the Classics Challenge.  Go to Books and Chocolate to sign up before March 1st. At this point, I'm not planning on anything for the optional categories, but should have no problem with the others. Here's the scoop:
• A 20th Century Classic -Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
• A 19th Century Classic -Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen
• A Classic by a Woman Author -Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• A Classic in Translation -Les Miserables by Victory Hugo
• A Classic About War -undecided
• A Classic by an Author Who is New to You -Oil by Upton Sinclair
• An American Classic [optional]
• A Classic Mystery, Suspense, or Thriller [optional]
• A Classic that has been adapted into a TV series or movie [optional]
• A review of the above movie or TV series [optional]

A Classic About War...any suggestions?  Nothing is tickling my fancy for that one.  Maybe I'll re-read War and Peace. ;)

Un-Multitask-Able

What really set the mood for last week was the death of my espresso machine.  We got back from Christmas break and found that someone had turned it on (possibly my eldest son but most probably the lady who came to clean house) and left it that way without any water in the boiler.  And now the boiler won't boil.  Hopefully it will be able to be repaired, but in the meantime, I need coffee.  I pulled a small coffeemaker out of my garage (I come with multiple back-up plans as far as coffee is concerned) and have proceeded to attempt to perfect drip coffee.  I think I've finally arrived, but it took me until the weekend.  It was a rough week!

I had a plan for the weekend, and it was a simple plan: finish reading my book on Saturday, blog about it on Sunday, and finish knitting a baby sweater in-between.  What actually happened was more like this: start catching up on blog posts about the renovation on Saturday, have a three-hour meeting about the electrical in the house on Sunday, and work on design decisions in-between.  Sigh.  I'm definitely ready to have the house done so I can have time to do other things.  While we have most of the decisions made, there is still a lot to do.  And I'm a slow decision maker (although I'm getting so much faster with all this practice) because I like to know all my options and really think things through.  Anyhow, the house absorbed all my lovely, cozy plans for the weekend.  The house will not be multi-tasked.

So I'm not done with The Lighthouse Road like I had hoped I would be.  It feels just as wonderful as his first (Safe From the Sea) which adds an element of I Don't Want It To Be Over Yet.  If you like historical fiction, but find that much of it feels contrived; if you like books with evocative settings, but don't want it to be overly poetic; if you don't mind a book that is happy/sad or a bit bleak; if you have connections to the Great Lakes or Norwegian immigrants; if any of these, then you may want to look into this book.  I love how simple and straightforward Geye's writing is—he is an author that simultaneously inspires me to write and makes me feel I'll never come close to good enough.  (As a sideline, if you are wondering how to pronounce his name, I found this entertaining interview that's well worth spending half a minute reading!)

Other Book-ish things this week?  I saw Catching Fire, which almost made me wish I'd read past the first book in the trilogy (sooo hard for me to do, generally speaking) since I enjoyed the movie so much.  And I saw the preview for Divergent, which I haven't read but do own.  I've been trying to convince my kiddos to read it with no luck.  (Oh! Last week I finally watched The Great Gatsby which I thought well done but for the fact that I was really hoping that the music would play a larger role in it than it did.)

There was something else I was going to mention but it completely slipped my mind.  :/  Maybe it'll pop back in by next weekend.  Until then, have a great reading week!

Short Stories and Retro Reads

I'm sitting by a fire in cozy socks, drinking Mexican hot chocolate in a hand-painted mug from Mexico (little things like that make me happy) and trying not to thinking about the fact that this coziness is all part of an elaborate attempt to recreate the effect of seasons in season-less land.  The truth of the matter is that earlier today I was barefoot with a tank-top on, complaining about the heat. SoCal is hard on a girl whose favorite season is winter!

Today I finished reading my first book of the year: Free Air by Sinclair Lewis.  Written in 1919, this was a novel about adventuring via automobiles—already an established American pasttime‐as well as a humorous look at the different social classes before the World Wars.  In some ways, it was a bizarre mash-up of F.Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather where socialites meet farmers.  I love how the literature of this era reflects the times, teaching so much about daily aggravations and expectations.  Driving back then, by the way, was a chore.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, for all that it is apparently one of his lesser appreciated novels.  I liked his humor and his talent for highlighting human foibles.

The other thing I've been reading in bits and pieces is the latest Indiespensable selection: The Best of McSweeney's.  I had previously been entirely unaware of McSweeney's (soooo out of the loop in regards to literary journals!) but got pretty excited upon opening the package for a few reasons.  First, the paper quality is divine: a tactile delight!  Second, Powell's had six of the authors sign the inside of the book.  Third, the dust jacket is a poster in disguise.  And ultimately, all the writing has been wonderful thus far.  Most of the 600 pages is comprised of short stories, though there are letters, comics, and other goodies interspersed throughout.  It might take a little while to get through, but it will be worth it.

What are you starting your year out with?  Are you diving into challenges or taking it easy?

2013: Full List and Stats

2013 was a crazy year, mostly due to having a 13yo daughter and being stuck in the middle of a major renovation, and I must admit that 2014 is already looking to be much better (both major items are making major progress).  Even with severe constraints on my time and mental capacity, I somehow managed to read more books than I thought I would.

Biggest success this year?  I read a lot more short stories than I ever have before.  Last year I made an [unsuccessful] attempt to love poetry, this year I focus on short stories and have really come to love them.  Yay!

Biggest goal for 2014? I'd really like to pull back into blogging, both for the social aspect and for how it lets me think through the books I read.  I miss you all—seeing what you are reading and talking about our observations and opinions.  I miss read-alongs.

I felt a lack of nonfiction and classics this year, but it looks like my nonfiction was on par—only my classics count was low.  My other stats are comparable to previous years, looking at the percentages, with one of the most interesting (to me) being the fact that my best reading months center around April, and my worst happen at the end of the year.  Makes sense, now that I think about it.

How many books read in 2013?
79 (16 less than 2012.  My goal is always to break 100, which I haven't done for the last couple of years, but it's still a good number!)

Genres? 
NONFICTION -  14% (11 books)  [15% in 2012, 14% in 2011]
FICTION -  86% (68 books)  [85% in 2012, 86% 2011]

• CLASSICS - 15% (12 books) [18% in 2012, 30% in 2011 (novellas!)]
• JUNIOR / TEEN - 19% (15 books) [21% in 2012, 20% in 2011]
• ADULT FICTION - 52% (41 books) [46% in 2012, 36% 2011]

Male/Female authors?
FEMALE - 52% (41.5 books) [51% in 2012, 48% in 2011]
MALE - 48% (37.5 books) [49% in 2012, 52% in 2011]

Old/New?
OLDEST? Jane Austen's Persuasion, 1817
NEWEST? Guests on Earth by Lee Smith, late 2013
# WRITTEN BEFORE I WAS BORN? 28 [24 in 2012, 51 in 2011]
# WRITTEN THIS YEAR? 8 [9 in 2012, 20 in 2011]

Length?
Longest book read? Ireland by Frank Delaney @ 651pp
Shortest book read? Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl @ 81pp
Number of "chunksters" (450+ pages)? 8 [12 in 2012, 10 in 2011]
Any in translation? 4 (2 modern, 2 classic)


Best/Worst Reading Month?
Best--April and May @ 11 books each [2011: March and April w/13 books each]
Worst--June, November, and December @ 4 books each [2011: September and October w/2 books each]

TOP FIVE of 2012: (I only had four 5-star books, and ten 4.5-star books, so this wasn't very difficult to figure out.  I didn't include Jane Austen's Persuasion, since it isn't new to me...it is an all-time favorite, though, a cherished reread that I highly recommend!)

The Illusion of Separateness by Simon Van Booy (breathtakingly beautiful and imaginative)
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (wonderful, captivating nonfiction)
Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb (better than Grapes of Wrath for sure)
My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather (real, intimate, honest, and simply complex)
The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler (quirky yet insightful)

    



and a comparison chart just for the fun of it--

Again, the most notable change in my reading in the last 5 years is the shift between Junior/Teen Fiction and Adult Fiction.  This is mostly because I'm homeschooling only one kiddo now.  The other [unfortunate] change is a decrease in classics and nonfiction.  I miss it dreadfully.  One of the side-effects of kiddos growing older is that they stay up later, thus infringing on my quality reading time (boo).  That is compounded by our house renovation that sucks time (and life) out of me.  (The good news is that our house should be complete by summertime.  Yay! THEN, I'll be able to unpack my books into their permanent home.  It'll be fabulous.)

LISTED BY GENRE/RATING:

Nonfiction: 14% (average rating 3.91)  [2012 average: 3.76, 2011 average: 3.56,2010 average: 3.74]
5 stars:
  - The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan
  - Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
4.5 stars:
  - Below Stairs, Margaret Powell
4 stars:
  - The Famine Plot, Pat Coogan
  - The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy
  - Flapper, Joshua Zeitz
  - Fate is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann
3.5 stars:
  - Two Guys Read Jane Austen, Chandler & Hill
  - Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
  - Nelson Mandela: Portrait of an Extraordinary Man, Richard Stengel
2 stars:
  - Wild, Cheryl Strayed

Classics: 15% (average rating 3.96) [2012 average: 3.97, 2011 average: 3.74, 2010 average: 4.04]
5 stars:
  - Persuasion, Jane Austen
4.5 stars:
  - The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  - My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather
  - The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
  - Whose Names are Unknown, Sanora Babb
4 stars:
  - The Professor's House, Willa Cather
  - The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
3.5 stars:
  - Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
  - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  - A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
3 stars:
  - Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  - Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin

Adult Fiction: 52% (average rating 3.64) [2012 average: 3.80, 2011 average: 3.81, 2010 average: 3.38]
5 stars:
  - The Illusion of Separateness, Simon Van Booy
4.5 stars:
  - River of Earth, James Still
  - Benediction, Kent Haruf
  - The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy
  - Mudbound, Hillary Jordan
  - The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler
4 stars:
  - The Death of Bees, Lisa O'Donnell
  - The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
  - Some Tame Gazelle, Barbara Pym
  - The Heretic's Daughter, Kathleen Kent
  - The Last Runaway, Tracy Chevalier
  - Queen of the Big Time, Adriana Trigiani
  - A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
  - State of Wonder, Anne Patchett
  - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Lorrie Moore
  - Heat Lightning, Helen Hull
  - Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
  - Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
3.5 stars:
  - Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron
  - Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
  - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
  - Annie Dunne, Sebastian Barry
  - The Chaperone, Laura Moriarty
  - Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler
  - Bobcat and Other Stories, Rebecca Lee
  - Mary Coin, Marisa Silver
  - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Tom Franklin
  - The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  - Possession, A.S. Byatt
  - The Childhood of Jesus, J.M. Coetzee
3 stars:
  - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
  - New Irish Short Stories, various authors
  - Ireland, Frank Delaney
  - Hikikomori and the Rental Sister, Jeff Backhaus
  - Follow the River, James Alexander Thom
  - An Unfinished Score, Elise Blackwell
  - When She Woke, Hillary Jordan
  - Guests on Earth, Lee Smith
2 stars:
  - Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, Emma Straub
  - The Midwife of Hope River, Patricia Harman

Junior/Teen Fiction: 19% (average rating 3.83) [2012 average: 3.65, 2011: average rating 3.5, 2010: average 3.64]
4.5 stars:
  - The Wheel on the School, Meindert DeJong
  - The Enchanted Wood, Enid Blyton
4 stars:
  - Little Pear, Eleanor Francis Lattimore
  - Toothpaste Millionaire, Jean Merrill
  - Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren
  - The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
  - Coraline, Neil Gaiman
  - The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
  - Pippi Goes on Board, Astrid Lindgren
  - Good Masters, Sweet Ladies, Laura Amy Schlitz
  - The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
3.5 stars:
  - Emily's Runaway Imagination, Beverly Cleary
3 stars:
  - Gib and the Gray Ghost, Zilpha Keatley Snyder
  - The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting
  - Black Horses for the King, Anne McCaffrey