the ramble

“The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” – The Importance of Being Earnest

The first week of January began with How to Remodel a Man, a book I’ve read twice before and still find funny, and then graduated to more serious reading via Exodus by Leon Uris–one of my all-time favorites. I also whipped through The Importance of Being Earnest again during a couple bubble baths mid-week.

During the second week of January, I  finished Loose Girl, which was sad and riveting.

Weeks three and four passed without much reading (due to Massive Work Deadlines and birthdays), and on week five, I finally wrapped up Exodus. Just like last time, I cried my heart out.

.One.
This week was the week of my infamous book party. It’s a party where everyone goes through their bookshelves and comes up with three or more books they no longer want or need. If they don’t have three books they are willing to part with, I ask them to head on over to the local thrift store and pick three books they’ve heard good things about or loved themselves or wanted to read.

Then, everyone comes together and the books are tossed into a huge pile and we all draw numbers. Number one picks the first book, number to the second, and so on and so forth until everyone has sated themselves on new reads. There are usually some leftover books, which I take to the library or the thrift store or something similar.

Since the book party was Saturday, I’m now overflowing with things I want to read–including several books from my existing booklist, like The Help.

.Two.
Speaking of books, I am still reading Exodus by Leon Uris. If you haven’t read it before, I’m going to take this moment to strongly encourage you to read it. Go. Now. Seriously. I’ve read it once before, mostly on trains and beaches and in cafes while I was wandering through Europe. And all I really remember from that first reading is sitting on a speedy train, going over green terrain and crying my eyes out. It’s a beautiful, horrifying, triumphant story.

Stricken items have been read or removed.

Memoir & Travel:

1. Stone Voices: the Search for Scotland
2. In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
3. Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
4. Blankets (Thompson)
5. Lighting Up (Shapiro)
6. Loose Girl
7. Smashed
8. Slave Hunter
9. Cleopatra: A Life
10. The Glass Castle
11. Hippie Boy
12. Ruined by Reading
13. A Bed of Red Flowers
14. Beyond the Broken Gate
15. Black Virgin Mountain
16. The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion
17. Breaking the Limit: One Woman’s Motorcycle Journey Through North America
18. Cycling the Sacred Mountain
19. Traveling Mercies (Lamont)
20. The Tender Bar
21. Speaking with Strangers
22. The Color of Water
23. Drinking: A Love Story
24. Autobiography of a Face
25. The Liars Club
26. Cherry
27. A Girl Named Zippy
28. Dry
29. Lois on the Loose
30. Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World
31. Necessary Sins: A Memoir
32. Somebody’s Heart is Burning
33. Steep Passages: A World Wide Eco Adventure Unlocks Nature’s Spiritual Truths
34. How to Be Lovely
35. Every Secret Thing
36. The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade
37. Let’s Pretend this Never Happened
38. Fairy Tale Interrupted
39. The New Jim Crow
40. The Journal of Best Practices

Content & Business:

1. Killer Web Content
2. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Fantasy, Science Fiction & the Like:

1. Soulless
2. Job: A Comedy of Justice (Heinlein)
3. King Solomon’s Mines
4. Island
5. Lancelot (Percy)
6. Stranger in a Strange Land
7. Invention of a Morel
8. Monster: Blood Tatoo
9. The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
10. Valis
11. Patrick (Lawhead)
12. Otherland
13. The Telling (Le Guin)
14. The Lost Hero
15. Spell of the Highlander
16. The Queen’s Own
17. Daughter of the Forest
18. Poison Study
19. Neuromancer
20. The Unexpected Dragon
21. Rhapsody
22. Game of Thrones
23. Anansi Boys

Crime & Mystery:

1. City of Lost Girls
2. If I am Missing or Dead
3. The Devil in the White City
4. The Pig Did It
5. Along Came a Spider
6. 1st to Die
7. What the Night Knows
8. The ABC Murders
9. The Secret Lovers
10. And Only to Deceive
11. Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death
12. The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern
13. The Cat Who Turned On and Off
14. Shadow Baby
15. The Big Sleep
16. The Anniversary Man
17. Gone
18. Started Early, Took My Dog

Other Novels:

1. Nothing (Henry Green)
2. Forgotten Garden
3. Never Let Me Go
4. Kite Runner
5. Dance to the Music of Time
6. Bel Canto
7. The Help
8. I am Half-Sick of Shadows
9. Death Comes to Pemberly
10. The Snow Child

Geekery:

1. A Brief History of Time
2. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland
3. The Ethics of Aristotle
4. The Psychology of Happiness
5. Crime Signals (Givens)
6. The Paradox of Choice
7. Thinking, Fast and Slow
8. The American Way of Death
9. SPEECH-LESS: Tales of a White House Survivor
10. The Ways and Power of Love
11. The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community
12. Murder Most Rare
13. Briefs of Leading Cases in Law Enforcement
14. The Righteous Mind

Re-Reads:

1. The Importance of Being Earnest
2. Exodus
3. To Kill a Mockingbird
4. The Blind Assassin
5. The Lovely Bones
6. How to Remodel a Man
7. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
8. The Last Unicorn
9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
10. When You Are Engulfed In Flames
11. Picture of Dorian Grey

This year I came in with a total of 71 books read and 33 books partially read. Respectable.

If you read all these books along with me, you might have learned that…

A) America is one of the least populated countries on earth. (I’m a Stranger Here Myself)

B) The Bible has a law in it prohibiting people from wearing mixed fibers. (Year of Living Biblically)

C) When someone is happy to see you, often their eyebrows will pop up when you first make eye contact. (What Every BODY is Saying)

D) You’re not supposed to have a latte after dinner. (Cooking for Mr. Latte)

E) Many countries offer retirement visas–visas that let you live abroad as a permanent resident as long as you can prove reliable income. Win. (Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America)

Okay, so without further ado…le list.

2011 books read (favorites in bold):

Fantasy & Science Fiction

1. The Hunger Games [01/14, 07/16, 12/15 (thrice!) - Riveting]
2. Catching Fire [01/16 - Still riveting]
3. Mockingjay [01/17 - What can I say except that I totally should be sleeping, but instead I just finished this book. Also, now I cannot sleep. Wow.]
4. Redwall [02/02 - Cute.]
5. The Stolen Child [05/01]
6. The Enclave [Jan 07 - Kept me on the edge of my seat, but had a strange ending]
7. City of Bones [01/29 - The heroine is kind of a whiner.]
8. City of Ashes [02/10 - Bad things happen. Lots of bad things.]
   
9. City of Glass [02/19]
10. Alanna: The First Adventure [06/20]
11. In the Hand of the Goddess [06/22]
12. The Woman Who Rides Like a Man [06/24]
13. Lioness Rampant [06/26]
14. Darkly Dreaming Dexter [07/02]
15. Dearly Devoted Dexter [07/07]
16. Dexter in the Dark [07/09]
17. Dexter by Design [07/10]

Geekery & Non-Fiction

1. The False Prophet [02/21 - Interesting. Presumptuous.]
2. Mere Christianity [02/26]
3. What Every BODY is Saying [03/26 - Very smart. Loved it.]
4. The Year of Magical Thinking [ 03/19 - beautiful and sad, well-written and fully-felt]
5. The Year of Living Biblically [ 01/12 - interesting]
6. I Know What You’re Thinking [03/13 - Meh]
7. Cooking for Mr. Latte [04/21 - brilliant!]
8. Vagabonding [06/09]
9. The Grown-Up’s Guide to Running Away from Home [06/10]
10. The Cases that Haunt Us [06/12]
11. How to Retire Overseas [06/16]
12. Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America [06/17 - best book of its kind I've seen]
13. Inside the Mind of BTK [07/01 - Yikes]
14. The Great Divorce [07/04]
15. How Did You Get this Number? [07/13]
16. The Unlikely Disciple [07/20 - delightful]
17. Geography of Bliss [07/26]
18. French Women Don’t Get Fat [07/28]
19. The Lost Girls: Three Friends, Four Continents, One Unconventional Detour Around the World [08/04]
20. Obsession: The FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back [08/?]
21. What I Wore [08/20]
22. The Little Black Book of Style [08/23]
23. The One Hundred [08/23]
24. Sex Lives of Cannibals [08/24]
25. The Dark Side of the Supernatural [09/10]
26. River Town: two years on the Yangtze [09/17]
27. Style Yourself [09/30]
28. Neither Here Nor There [10/02 - charming]
29. Notes from a Small Island [10/17]
30. I’m a Stranger Here Myself [10/21 - my favorite of his books so far]
31. French Women for All Seasons [11/02]
32. A Walk in the Woods (again) [11/04]
33. Bossypants [11/08]
34. A New Kind of Christian (again) [11/10]
35. A Stolen Life [11/11 - Yikes. Heartwrenching. Fascinating. Horrible...but not the book, the thing itself.]
36. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years [11/15 - charming]
37. Without Reservations [11/19]
38. Educating Alice [November]
39. Elements of Content Strategy [November]
40. The Story We Find Ourselves In (again) [12/10]
41. The Last Word And The Word After That (again) [12/14]
42. Blue Like Jazz (again) [12/19]
43. What the Dog Saw [05/30]

Other Novels

1. The Sherlockian [04/17]
2. Something Missing [03/09 - Totally charming]
3. Till We Have Faces [Jan 02: mediocre and unlike Lewis' other books]
4. The Divine Comedy [05/04]
5. Bridget Jones’s Diary (again) [10/31]
6. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society [12/23 - delightful]

Children’s Literature

1. The Mysterious Benedict Society [04/08]
2. The Book Thief [05/18 - Haunting, sad and wonderful. I cried. And I loved.]
3. Just So Stories [11/01]
4. The Neverending Story [12/27]

Also, books I couldn’t finish

1. Speak [01/12 - couldn't finish it. One-dimensional, unrealistic.]
2. A Long Way Gone [01/03 - I am incredibly sad to report that I don't think I'm going to be able to finish this book. I'm sure it's a worthwhile read and was looking forward to it, but as you know, I'm an enormous wuss and things like "brains coming out of their noses," I cannot handle... ]
3. Content Rules [ 01/20 - basic, but interesting case studies]
4. The Weight of Glory [02/21 - Quit 3/4 though. Boring.]
5. The Great Typo Hunt [03/11 - Great idea, not a great book]
6. Selling the Invisible [03/11 - Obvious]
7. Sabriel [ 01/24 - got halfway through and couldn't finish - too graphic for me + I wasn't captured enough by the plot to put up with "clotted blood sealed her mouth shut" - uh, gross]
8. Slaughterhouse 5 [03/27 - I just don't like war books. I've tried several of the greats now and I find them utterly boring.]
9. Emotions Revealed [04/17 - skimmed for relevant information, took the test at the end, but ignored things I felt I knew]
10. Telling Lies [04/03 - Laborious and mostly things I feel I already know.]
11. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk [04/05 - his fiction just doesn't entertain the way his truth does.]
12. Hindsights [05/07]
13. The Prodigal God [05/30 - basic.]
14. Slipping into Paradise [06/21 - boring]
15. Stephen Fry in America [06/27]
16. Invisible Man [07/03 - boring. I gave up on the real book and finished the SparkNotes.]
17. A Grief Observed [07/13 - his usual books are intellectually driven. This one is emotionally driven. Not that it's a bad thing, but not what I was looking for from Lewis.]
18. High School Confidential [07/15 - I didn't make it very far on this one...he's just so long-winded.]
19. Saved by Beauty [08/05 - lost me]
20. You Say More Than You Think [08/04 - basic]
21. The Body Language Handbook [08/04 - basic]
22. A Thousand Days in Venice [08/25 - too sexy, a bit slow-moving]
23. One Hand Does Not Catch a Buffalo [09/18 - disappointing]
24. Wanderlust [10/04 - unexpectedly perverse]
25. Julie & Julia [10/09 - disappointing, also unexpectedly perverse]
26. The Expert Expat [10/20 - disappointing. Do we really need a whole book to tell us duh information like "learn the language?"]
27. GenXpat [10/20 - also disappointing. I want real, helpful info...not "to have a long distance relationship, you'll need to communicate." No shit, Sherlock.]
28. Clockwork Orange [03/14- I was so unprepared for the vileness of this.]
29. Straying from the Flock: Travels in New Zealand [11/05 - who knew New Zealand could sound so boring]
30. I am the Messenger [11/26 - couldn't get into it]
31. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet [12/31 - couldn't get into it]
32. Schindler’s List [12/29 - the writing style was a bit strange for me...like journalism mixed with fiction]

These past couple months I’ve worked my way through a bit of Bill Bryson’s work, attempted to read some more travel memoirs and style books (which are now losing my interest, as am a style diva and obviously have no further need of assistance…particularly when said assistance thinks white is a slimming color and pointy-toed shoes make you look taller. No and no.) and finally made my way into the world of I’ve-already-read-that-and-it-was-fabulous (Bridget Jones’s Diary). Here is the skinny…

Charming and recommended
Neither Here Nor There (Bryson)
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
Bridget Jones’s Diary (again)

Okay
The Dark Side of the Supernatural
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
Style Yourself
Notes from a Small Island

Couldn’t Finish
One Hand Does Not Catch Buffalo
Wanderlust
Julie & Julia
The Expert Expat
GenXpat