Chelsey Cosh's Blog: From Mind to Mouth - Posts Tagged "j-k-rowling"
I Guess We Know The Score.
It's the most wonderful time of the year: the end of the Popsugar Reading Challenge. Man, was that a brutal goal or what?
It's difficult to fit reading seven books -- seven! -- in along with the usual holiday hustle-and-bustle. So difficult in fact that this is what happened:
Book #35: A political memoir
I wasn't too sure if Jimmy Carter's book A Call to Action actually qualified as a political memoir, seeing as it didn't do the typical biographical slant the way other memoirs do. However, since most of Jimmy Carter's post-presidential career (and pre-presidential, to some degree) dealt with his actions in trying to improve human rights, then I suppose it is a memoir, after all, detailing his life outside of the Oval Office. It still remains political, though, dealing with international efforts to improve women's rights on many fronts. He talks at length about how sex-selective abortions performed extensively in China and India to ensure that they have only sons and no daughters is, while a problem in and of itself, the trigger for sexual and physical abuse on women through child marriages, human trafficking, and prostitution, seeing as the disproportionately great number of males born in these environments demand women that just aren't there. The line of causation is easily drawn, but not so easily altered to improve conditions.
He talks about his life growing up in Georgia and how, although he works extensively with his wife through the Carter Center to improve women's lives around the world, his home is just as guilty of injustice towards women as Atlanta is "one of the preeminent human trafficking centers in the United States." He discusses the Bible and the Koran and how they support the idea of women's rights. He covers a wide range of topics, including "honour" killings, sexual assault, rape, spousal abuse, war, slavery, human trafficking, child marriage, dowry deaths, genital mutilation, maternal health, the pay gap, and political participation. Some of what he has observed in his life, we already know, but some of his findings surprised me, such as the great steps made forward in Morocco for women's rights.
The book is a bit saddening to read all in one sitting, which is what I was trying to do, because we -- and I mean, we, the people, all of humanity, population planet Earth, that we -- have so much further to go. That being said, Jimmy and his wife Rosalyn have made a difference by allowing people far and wide to empower themselves. In many countries, it is best to allow the community to do the work, as they are not seen as outsiders trying to foist their ideology upon others. It also gives them transferable skills that they can use in their many endeavours. It's the "teach a woman to fish" approach.
While it was not easy to digest some of the atrocities occurring miles away and equally right next door, it was easy to understand. The former president writes with eloquence and style and, as a skilled orator and the author of twenty-plus books, I expected nothing less from the 39th POTUS. I can understand from the overseas work he writes about (and surely, all the work he doesn't mention, too) why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. He truly cares about women, considering it a human and civil rights struggle worth the fight. Ultimately, I feel that he believes that, by making us equal and together, the world can, will, and should be better.
No question, I can get behind that.
Book #36: A book and its prequel
I'll be honest. This was not my first choice.
I recall, a long time ago, reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe at eight years old and being totally bored. I don't remember anything I read. I only remember snippets from the movie that was released. So I don't know what possessed me to delve into the Chronicles of Narnia full-force, signing on to read not one but two instalments in the series.
I originally wanted to read Wide Sargasso Sea , by Jean Rhys, which is a prequel to the classic Brontë novel, Jane Eyre . Alas it was not to be. I knew I would never get through Jane in time, rendering Sargasso a no-go, too. (I vow to read them both one day. I'm fairly sure I'll enjoy them.)
So, here we are.
I started with Prince Caspian . I can't remember exactly why I picked this book as the starting point. It's been such a toil reading it that I couldn't recall when I first broke the spine. I faintly remember doing some light research on books and their prequels; I believe the pairing of two Narnia books was listed. I figured, it's children's literature; if nothing else it will be a fast read.
As anyone who has read Heart of Darkness will know, the page count does not determine how quickly you will finish the book. Your own enthuasiasm is the only factor that matters. And I was tepid about the Narnians and the Telmarines, let me tell you. It took me an eternity to get to that final battle between Prince Caspian (or, as it was, High King Peter acting on Prince Caspian's behalf, which I found oddly coward-like of Caspian, the young man who we as readers should be cheering on to be king choosing to not fight the foe himself, but oh, well, I didn't write the damn thing) and the usurper King Miraz. Not much else happened. I feel it was what we were building to in the end. However, the most interesting part of the book for me came early. I was drawn in by the Dwarf's retelling of Caspian's childhood, growing up in a castle as an orphaned son, his father killed by his uncle, the new King Miraz -- a total Hamlet scenario, if I ever saw one. The community has been mostly eradicated of Narnian magic, like the dwarves, the dryads, the centaurs, the giants, the talking animals, and so on and so forth. King Miraz disapproves of them so much that he hopes his nephew, Caspian, never learns of them, dismissing anyone who brings word of it into the castle, especially if it goes to the boy's ears. Still, Caspian will be king one day. That is, until King Miraz has a son of his own, an heir to his stolen throne, which means only one thing: Caspian must go. Not go, as in on a sojourn to the Alps where he happily lives the rest of his days as a sheep herder. No, he means go, as in on a permanant vacation, never coming back again, one-way ticket to corpseville.
So Caspian flees and bands together all the Narnians in hiding that King Miraz doesn't wish to talk about to take down his nefarious uncle.
And that is, in essence, the story. Yet so much of it is tied up in long-winded descriptions of the lake scum floating on the water and the cliffs conveniently located on your left. None of it matters and, in my opinion, doesn't provide atmospheric qualities so much as it bogs down the flow of the narrative and inflates the word count unnecessarily.
But I'm not done yet. After all, the prompt calls for a book and its prequel.
And that prequel is The Magician's Nephew . Now, based on having read Prince Caspian at this point, I assumed that somehow the uncle-nephew relationship between Miraz and Caspian would reemerge in this book, but I'm not quite sure about the magician part. Miraz was not a big fan of the ol' bibbity-bobbity-boo, but this story is a prequel, so maybe he did say his fair share of shazams back in the day. Who knows, right? It's Narnia. Anything can occur.
And yet nothing occurred. I picked it up. And I read about a quarter of it. And then I asked myself what I was doing with my life.
As much as I found Prince Caspian to be a bit of the dull side, I found that The Magician's Nephew was a sleeping aid. Reading should not pain you. It's recreational, not a root canal. I was reminded why, as a child, I never dove into the Chronicles of Narnia like so many had before. It's just not for me. And I couldn't read any more of it. I tried -- oh, how I tried -- but alas, no prequel was read.
Book #37: A book recommended by someone you just met
I put far too much time and thought into this prompt. First, I started to read a Noam Chomsky book, since a colleague mentioned how much he loved him. Even though it was a slim volume, I didn't care much for the subject matter.
Moving on, a client mentioned reading Maeve Binchy, specifically Chestnut Street . I think I would have enjoyed reading it. I like accounts of small-town life, what with my childhood growing up in a particularly small one. Frankly, it made Stars Hollow look like a bustling metropolis. However, I couldn't read Binchy's book because I had waited too long and there was a mountain of holds for it at the library. I wouldn't get to read it until next year.
Alas, I started to scrounge though time and recalled a book recommended to me by a librarian I am well acquainted with now but, at the time of the recommendation, I had only just met her. I figured that kind of fits, and I was all geared up to start reading In Cold Blood , by Truman Capote. I liked Breakfast at Tiffany's , so I figured I wouldn't mind reading another Capote book, especially one that is so iconic in the literary world.
And then another client mentioned The Couple Next Door , which sounded all right. It didn't register with me the way reading In Cold Blood did, but I felt it was more true to the prompt.
But finally, another client -- the customer base includes a heck of a lot of readers, clearly -- she mentioned reading The Girl On The Train . I was already chomping at the bit to read this book and her recommendation was just an excuse to do now what I was going to do anyway.
I devoured that book. The snow fell and I just ate up every word. I think it took me three days, in between working, to finish it. My bookmark was a transient, that's for sure, never quite finding a home at the end of this chapter or that.
I loved the suspense, the thrills, the twists, and the ambiguity. Even if I saw some of it coming, it was still fun to get there.
And I know the film has already come and gone out of the theatres. And I have to assume that the lithe and gorgeous Emily Blunt is probably playing Rachel -- at a guess, I haven't actually seen it yet -- and that should have sat in my head as a physical qualifier as I was reading, but no, I don't picture her at all. The writing is so vivid that I was able to concoct and preserve my own mental image of each character, the pointy cheekbones on Megan's face, the turned-up nose on Anna's. I saw Kamal in my mind's eye looking something like Naz from The Night Of, only a little taller, a little older.
It's really quite remarkable that my brain was able to transcend the Hollywood casting because trailers and ads often gets rammed down your throat so much that the actor is the character, in all sense of the world. The book cover changes to the film poster and the work is supposedly done for you, but you lose a little something in the process. Julia Roberts was never Elizabeth Gilbert to me when I read the book a year earlier, but after watching the same ad on TV ad nauseum, she was. I never pictured Cameron Diaz as Sara Fitzgerald, the mother of the girls from My Sister's Keeper , but after a mighty marketing campaign, they were one and the same. I'll never be able to reread that book and it not be Natalie from Charlie's Angels. Emilia Clarke stopped being the Khaleesi and was irreparably Lou from Me Before You. And Kristen Stewart is in a bit of a pickle, in love with a vampire and a werewolf, don't you think? (To be fair, I never read any of the Twilight books, but still, I can't imagine anyone reading them afterwards and picturing anyone but her.)
But not this time. The Girl On The Train was all mine. No studio bigwig was able to compromise it, which was a nice change.
And what a book it was. To me, it read like Gillian Flynn. And everybody already knows how I feel about Gillian Flynn. Yes, undoubtedly, The Girl On The Train has moments that scream Gone Girl, dark and twisted and incomplete tales with an unreliable narrator. To be fair, Gone Girl left me in the lurch much longer, trying to predict the moves before they occur. Still, while I figured out the whodunnit mystery in The Girl On The Train a touch too early, it's not so much about who did it, but why and how.
Books like these only crop up once a year, maybe twice if you're lucky, and often much less frequently than that. Like Gone Girl and The Millennium Trilogy, The Girl On The Train earns a top place on my bookshelf for encouraging me to gnaw my fingernails off and having the audacity to push me to the edge of my seat. And then shove me onto the tracks. She's just that kind of lady.
Book #38: A book you haven't read since high school
I never realized how many books I read in high school. And worse, I never realized how many I re-read. And that became a problem.
You see, the books I read in high school that I chose to read again at some other point were good reads. I liked them. That's why I read them again. One of my favourites was The Perks of Being A Wallflower , a book I hold near and dear to my heart. I also liked The Lovely Bones . There's some Shakespeare in there, like Othello , The Tempest , and Romeo and Juliet . I read The Poisonwood Bible , a massive and wonderful story of a missionary family in Africa that spans over decades. (If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. As Ferris Bueller says, it is "so choice.") I have re-read these books since high school, so they don't count for the challenge. I own all of these books for a reason.
There are a few I haven't re-read, but these are the ones I didn't like in the first place. For example, I wasn't a fan of Frankenstein . I absolutely hated Heart of Darkness ; reading it felt like a trek through a shitty racist jungle that ended off with a whole lot of pointless death, so I guess it accomplished its goal (?). Needless to say, I wasn't picking that up again.
After much debate, I decided to go with something unconventional. In twelfth grade, I had to do a comparative essay, in which I looked at the common themes in Perks (because, as aforementioned, I loved that book already) and Ghost World . You see, my English teacher at the time was big on graphic novels. He believed they were the next art form or the future of literature, something to that effect. So, to appease him, I picked -- gasp! -- a graphic novel. Since that time, I've read quite a few graphic novels and found some of them to be particularly great. Of course, there's Watchmen , which is wonderful, but I also liked the Scott Pilgrim series, especially with its Canadian roots. In fact, I even read a few graphic novels for this challenge. So maybe my teacher had a lasting impact after all.
Now all I can recall from Ghost World is that it was a bit angsty. But upon re-reading, I realized that it tells the story of the hipster movement and the psychology of those who subscribe to it. I didn't know that back in twelfth grade, but hey, hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Ghost World is a melancholy coming-of-age tale, one very different to The Body, which, as you may recall, I read last month. Too cool to genuinely like anything, best friends Enid and Becky live their life with frowns upon their face interrupted with the occasional sarcastic smirk, their existences rife with ironic detachment. Ultimately, they're betrayed by the fact that they feel lost, alone, and scared by the big bad world; they are children acting like adults or what they think adults act like, while they delay the inevitable experience of growing up. In many ways, it is very sad because they want love and acceptance, but lean the other way just because it seems cooler in that light.
There's a natural flow to the conversation, and that casual, borderline stream-of-consciousness style makes the dialogue between Enid and Becky memorable, a remarkable quality that shines through despite the ambling plot. Although there isn't very much by way of story, you almost want to cry at the concealed emotions and the Peter-Pan-esque reluctance to accept that we can't stay children forever. Forced to leave behind those childhood playthings and happy-go-lucky records, Enid and Becky put their best foot forward and enter the real world, however frightening it may be.
I know that what I got out of Ghost World may not be what you will, but that's what makes it interesting. Just because I'm not fanatical about it doesn't mean it's not a good piece of literature. In fact, considering its brevity, I'd recommend everyone try it at least once.
Book #39: A romance set in the future
Someone told me that Ready Player One was a romance set in the future. So, I believed them.
What I got instead was a book so full and rich and whole, a completely different world within our own, which happened to also have a romance in it. I started raving about this book when I was only a third of the way through it. My sister bought it based upon my recommendation. My husband said it might just be his favourite book of all time. When I find something awesome, I want to share it with everyone.
There was bubble of hype enveloping Ready Player One, which gave those often unattainably sky-high expectations. This book could never be the book I anticipated. It just couldn't. It was an impossibility. And yet it did. In fact, it surpassed all of the bars I set. To say I liked the book is to put it mildly.
It's arguably science fiction, but as someone who isn't a fan of the genre, it never feels quite like that. Ernest Cline managed to paint a vivid world, starting from the Stacks and moving into the OASIS and beyond, a world that bonded with its readers through a bounty of relatable references and allusions to beloved works that ignite the genuine fandom in all of us. It's a world so richly detailed and defined that you believe it's real. It's a world that seems possible. In a way, it's its own kind of oasis for us readers.
It would be impossible to replicate a book of this magnitude. Sure, it is reminiscent of the scavenger-hunt-style plotlines in other books, such as the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but that world is a fabricated world of fantasy. Ready Player One taps into reality and shows us something uniquely possible in our world, the one we live in catapulted forward a handful of decades. And Cline found a way to give meaning to the predominantly seventies- and eighties-set nostalgia reel that ties everything together in a beautiful bow.
I don't think I can go on and on about the book because I may let something slip. To describe this novel too intricately would betray readers, robbing them of a chance to indulge themselves in what has to be one of my favourite books of all time. I couldn't recommend it more.
Thank you, Ernest, for letting us play with you.
Book #40: A book that's more than 600 pages
I wanted to read Anna Karenina , but I had started that before January 2016. So, instead, I went with the first of the long-ass volumes of the Harry Potter series: the fifth instalment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince .
This was a bad idea. I recall finding the Harry Potter series riveting as a child. I tore through the first four, especially adoring the fourth and its Tri-Wizard Tournament. But when the fifth book came out and I got about two to three chapters in, the magic was gone. I found it too slow, not matching in pace, mood, or tone of the others. Something was missing. And I learned that I wasn't the only one to feel this way. My husband -- same thing. Friends of mine -- same deal. We all dropped off at the fifth book. Now, I know that's not true for everyone, that they demolished that book in a day and loved it just as dearly as all that came before it, but I just wasn't one of them.
So, why would I try to speed-read this mountain of a book in a short period of time, knowing I didn't like it the first time? Because I am an idiot.
After trying again and feeling the need for some No-Doze, I tumbled upon this blog, courtesy of Hilary Goldstein. She said: "[B]asing a book on its length is about the dumbest thing you can do. If I read 40 great 200-page novels this year, that's better than reading one stinker just because it's 600+ pages."
Hilary's attitude toward reading a book purely because of its page count is spot-on. The prompt is ridiculous. Why read a book just because it's long? What can be gained from that? You're not being pushed into something varied, something you wouldn't normally read. You'd just pick up the longest book that you think you could get through in time. You know, like what I was trying to do. Sure, I didn't get through it, proof that I didn't really evaluate all that well, but that's beside the point.
Then I did some thinking and a little math. If a page count is all you want, I've got that in spades. I read, outside of the challenge, Think Like A Freak at 288 pages, Bad Feminist at 320 pages, The Sense of Style at 368 pages, X vs. Y: A Culture War, A Love Story at 192 pages, The Beast from the East at 144 pages, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad at 195 pages. That's more than 1500 pages of reading. And that's just a small selection from the massive number of times I went astray during this challenge, wandering away from the prompts to simply read for the sake of reading. I would say I have more than accumulated six hundred pages' worth of additional reading, wouldn't you? I feel like this prompt was fulfilled, regardless of the fact that I did it across many books, rather than one. I'm going to audaciously say I deserve a checkmark on that elusive Book #40 (and probably #41, too).
Because, in the end, isn't the point of this challenge to get you to read a lot, especially things you wouldn't normally read? I think I have had quite the diverse year of reading. I've read about American presidents, mermaids, rich dads, poor dads, the joys of farming, the dangers of sugar consumption, the global scope of women's rights, the generation gap and overlap between those born in the mid-seventies and those born in the late-eighties, casual home decor, care-free home organization, tech-heavy dating scenes, Indian weddings, Cuban fishermen, Canadian schoolgirls, teen cancer patients, teen Lotharios, teen actors, suicidal princes on interplanetary travels, brave princes in magical battles, animals running farms, reporters running home, and reporters avoiding home. I read books where an unemployed drunk, a gang of twelve-year-olds, and a tight-knit group of twelfth graders each solved their own missing persons case. I read how you can have it all, just not all at once. I read about two different Indian comedians (one born in America) who are successful TV comedians and how they still miss their parents. Those moments stuck with me. Those are the moments that allow you to learn about how we, human beings, are all universally connected in some ways.
Sure, some would say that's cheating. (Well, burn me at the stake.) I believe most would say I failed the PopSugar Reading Challenge. (More like a success struck down in its prime.) But let's consider that, purely in the name of this challenge, I managed to read thirty-nine books in one year -- and that's not counting all those books not included under some prompt on this list or even the dozens that I started but put down for one reason or another. For me, that is a win.
Until next time, happy reading!
It's difficult to fit reading seven books -- seven! -- in along with the usual holiday hustle-and-bustle. So difficult in fact that this is what happened:
Book #35: A political memoir
I wasn't too sure if Jimmy Carter's book A Call to Action actually qualified as a political memoir, seeing as it didn't do the typical biographical slant the way other memoirs do. However, since most of Jimmy Carter's post-presidential career (and pre-presidential, to some degree) dealt with his actions in trying to improve human rights, then I suppose it is a memoir, after all, detailing his life outside of the Oval Office. It still remains political, though, dealing with international efforts to improve women's rights on many fronts. He talks at length about how sex-selective abortions performed extensively in China and India to ensure that they have only sons and no daughters is, while a problem in and of itself, the trigger for sexual and physical abuse on women through child marriages, human trafficking, and prostitution, seeing as the disproportionately great number of males born in these environments demand women that just aren't there. The line of causation is easily drawn, but not so easily altered to improve conditions.
He talks about his life growing up in Georgia and how, although he works extensively with his wife through the Carter Center to improve women's lives around the world, his home is just as guilty of injustice towards women as Atlanta is "one of the preeminent human trafficking centers in the United States." He discusses the Bible and the Koran and how they support the idea of women's rights. He covers a wide range of topics, including "honour" killings, sexual assault, rape, spousal abuse, war, slavery, human trafficking, child marriage, dowry deaths, genital mutilation, maternal health, the pay gap, and political participation. Some of what he has observed in his life, we already know, but some of his findings surprised me, such as the great steps made forward in Morocco for women's rights.
The book is a bit saddening to read all in one sitting, which is what I was trying to do, because we -- and I mean, we, the people, all of humanity, population planet Earth, that we -- have so much further to go. That being said, Jimmy and his wife Rosalyn have made a difference by allowing people far and wide to empower themselves. In many countries, it is best to allow the community to do the work, as they are not seen as outsiders trying to foist their ideology upon others. It also gives them transferable skills that they can use in their many endeavours. It's the "teach a woman to fish" approach.
While it was not easy to digest some of the atrocities occurring miles away and equally right next door, it was easy to understand. The former president writes with eloquence and style and, as a skilled orator and the author of twenty-plus books, I expected nothing less from the 39th POTUS. I can understand from the overseas work he writes about (and surely, all the work he doesn't mention, too) why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. He truly cares about women, considering it a human and civil rights struggle worth the fight. Ultimately, I feel that he believes that, by making us equal and together, the world can, will, and should be better.
No question, I can get behind that.
Book #36: A book and its prequel
I'll be honest. This was not my first choice.
I recall, a long time ago, reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe at eight years old and being totally bored. I don't remember anything I read. I only remember snippets from the movie that was released. So I don't know what possessed me to delve into the Chronicles of Narnia full-force, signing on to read not one but two instalments in the series.
I originally wanted to read Wide Sargasso Sea , by Jean Rhys, which is a prequel to the classic Brontë novel, Jane Eyre . Alas it was not to be. I knew I would never get through Jane in time, rendering Sargasso a no-go, too. (I vow to read them both one day. I'm fairly sure I'll enjoy them.)
So, here we are.
I started with Prince Caspian . I can't remember exactly why I picked this book as the starting point. It's been such a toil reading it that I couldn't recall when I first broke the spine. I faintly remember doing some light research on books and their prequels; I believe the pairing of two Narnia books was listed. I figured, it's children's literature; if nothing else it will be a fast read.
As anyone who has read Heart of Darkness will know, the page count does not determine how quickly you will finish the book. Your own enthuasiasm is the only factor that matters. And I was tepid about the Narnians and the Telmarines, let me tell you. It took me an eternity to get to that final battle between Prince Caspian (or, as it was, High King Peter acting on Prince Caspian's behalf, which I found oddly coward-like of Caspian, the young man who we as readers should be cheering on to be king choosing to not fight the foe himself, but oh, well, I didn't write the damn thing) and the usurper King Miraz. Not much else happened. I feel it was what we were building to in the end. However, the most interesting part of the book for me came early. I was drawn in by the Dwarf's retelling of Caspian's childhood, growing up in a castle as an orphaned son, his father killed by his uncle, the new King Miraz -- a total Hamlet scenario, if I ever saw one. The community has been mostly eradicated of Narnian magic, like the dwarves, the dryads, the centaurs, the giants, the talking animals, and so on and so forth. King Miraz disapproves of them so much that he hopes his nephew, Caspian, never learns of them, dismissing anyone who brings word of it into the castle, especially if it goes to the boy's ears. Still, Caspian will be king one day. That is, until King Miraz has a son of his own, an heir to his stolen throne, which means only one thing: Caspian must go. Not go, as in on a sojourn to the Alps where he happily lives the rest of his days as a sheep herder. No, he means go, as in on a permanant vacation, never coming back again, one-way ticket to corpseville.
So Caspian flees and bands together all the Narnians in hiding that King Miraz doesn't wish to talk about to take down his nefarious uncle.
And that is, in essence, the story. Yet so much of it is tied up in long-winded descriptions of the lake scum floating on the water and the cliffs conveniently located on your left. None of it matters and, in my opinion, doesn't provide atmospheric qualities so much as it bogs down the flow of the narrative and inflates the word count unnecessarily.
But I'm not done yet. After all, the prompt calls for a book and its prequel.
And that prequel is The Magician's Nephew . Now, based on having read Prince Caspian at this point, I assumed that somehow the uncle-nephew relationship between Miraz and Caspian would reemerge in this book, but I'm not quite sure about the magician part. Miraz was not a big fan of the ol' bibbity-bobbity-boo, but this story is a prequel, so maybe he did say his fair share of shazams back in the day. Who knows, right? It's Narnia. Anything can occur.
And yet nothing occurred. I picked it up. And I read about a quarter of it. And then I asked myself what I was doing with my life.
As much as I found Prince Caspian to be a bit of the dull side, I found that The Magician's Nephew was a sleeping aid. Reading should not pain you. It's recreational, not a root canal. I was reminded why, as a child, I never dove into the Chronicles of Narnia like so many had before. It's just not for me. And I couldn't read any more of it. I tried -- oh, how I tried -- but alas, no prequel was read.
Book #37: A book recommended by someone you just met
I put far too much time and thought into this prompt. First, I started to read a Noam Chomsky book, since a colleague mentioned how much he loved him. Even though it was a slim volume, I didn't care much for the subject matter.
Moving on, a client mentioned reading Maeve Binchy, specifically Chestnut Street . I think I would have enjoyed reading it. I like accounts of small-town life, what with my childhood growing up in a particularly small one. Frankly, it made Stars Hollow look like a bustling metropolis. However, I couldn't read Binchy's book because I had waited too long and there was a mountain of holds for it at the library. I wouldn't get to read it until next year.
Alas, I started to scrounge though time and recalled a book recommended to me by a librarian I am well acquainted with now but, at the time of the recommendation, I had only just met her. I figured that kind of fits, and I was all geared up to start reading In Cold Blood , by Truman Capote. I liked Breakfast at Tiffany's , so I figured I wouldn't mind reading another Capote book, especially one that is so iconic in the literary world.
And then another client mentioned The Couple Next Door , which sounded all right. It didn't register with me the way reading In Cold Blood did, but I felt it was more true to the prompt.
But finally, another client -- the customer base includes a heck of a lot of readers, clearly -- she mentioned reading The Girl On The Train . I was already chomping at the bit to read this book and her recommendation was just an excuse to do now what I was going to do anyway.
I devoured that book. The snow fell and I just ate up every word. I think it took me three days, in between working, to finish it. My bookmark was a transient, that's for sure, never quite finding a home at the end of this chapter or that.
I loved the suspense, the thrills, the twists, and the ambiguity. Even if I saw some of it coming, it was still fun to get there.
And I know the film has already come and gone out of the theatres. And I have to assume that the lithe and gorgeous Emily Blunt is probably playing Rachel -- at a guess, I haven't actually seen it yet -- and that should have sat in my head as a physical qualifier as I was reading, but no, I don't picture her at all. The writing is so vivid that I was able to concoct and preserve my own mental image of each character, the pointy cheekbones on Megan's face, the turned-up nose on Anna's. I saw Kamal in my mind's eye looking something like Naz from The Night Of, only a little taller, a little older.
It's really quite remarkable that my brain was able to transcend the Hollywood casting because trailers and ads often gets rammed down your throat so much that the actor is the character, in all sense of the world. The book cover changes to the film poster and the work is supposedly done for you, but you lose a little something in the process. Julia Roberts was never Elizabeth Gilbert to me when I read the book a year earlier, but after watching the same ad on TV ad nauseum, she was. I never pictured Cameron Diaz as Sara Fitzgerald, the mother of the girls from My Sister's Keeper , but after a mighty marketing campaign, they were one and the same. I'll never be able to reread that book and it not be Natalie from Charlie's Angels. Emilia Clarke stopped being the Khaleesi and was irreparably Lou from Me Before You. And Kristen Stewart is in a bit of a pickle, in love with a vampire and a werewolf, don't you think? (To be fair, I never read any of the Twilight books, but still, I can't imagine anyone reading them afterwards and picturing anyone but her.)
But not this time. The Girl On The Train was all mine. No studio bigwig was able to compromise it, which was a nice change.
And what a book it was. To me, it read like Gillian Flynn. And everybody already knows how I feel about Gillian Flynn. Yes, undoubtedly, The Girl On The Train has moments that scream Gone Girl, dark and twisted and incomplete tales with an unreliable narrator. To be fair, Gone Girl left me in the lurch much longer, trying to predict the moves before they occur. Still, while I figured out the whodunnit mystery in The Girl On The Train a touch too early, it's not so much about who did it, but why and how.
Books like these only crop up once a year, maybe twice if you're lucky, and often much less frequently than that. Like Gone Girl and The Millennium Trilogy, The Girl On The Train earns a top place on my bookshelf for encouraging me to gnaw my fingernails off and having the audacity to push me to the edge of my seat. And then shove me onto the tracks. She's just that kind of lady.
Book #38: A book you haven't read since high school
I never realized how many books I read in high school. And worse, I never realized how many I re-read. And that became a problem.
You see, the books I read in high school that I chose to read again at some other point were good reads. I liked them. That's why I read them again. One of my favourites was The Perks of Being A Wallflower , a book I hold near and dear to my heart. I also liked The Lovely Bones . There's some Shakespeare in there, like Othello , The Tempest , and Romeo and Juliet . I read The Poisonwood Bible , a massive and wonderful story of a missionary family in Africa that spans over decades. (If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. As Ferris Bueller says, it is "so choice.") I have re-read these books since high school, so they don't count for the challenge. I own all of these books for a reason.
There are a few I haven't re-read, but these are the ones I didn't like in the first place. For example, I wasn't a fan of Frankenstein . I absolutely hated Heart of Darkness ; reading it felt like a trek through a shitty racist jungle that ended off with a whole lot of pointless death, so I guess it accomplished its goal (?). Needless to say, I wasn't picking that up again.
After much debate, I decided to go with something unconventional. In twelfth grade, I had to do a comparative essay, in which I looked at the common themes in Perks (because, as aforementioned, I loved that book already) and Ghost World . You see, my English teacher at the time was big on graphic novels. He believed they were the next art form or the future of literature, something to that effect. So, to appease him, I picked -- gasp! -- a graphic novel. Since that time, I've read quite a few graphic novels and found some of them to be particularly great. Of course, there's Watchmen , which is wonderful, but I also liked the Scott Pilgrim series, especially with its Canadian roots. In fact, I even read a few graphic novels for this challenge. So maybe my teacher had a lasting impact after all.
Now all I can recall from Ghost World is that it was a bit angsty. But upon re-reading, I realized that it tells the story of the hipster movement and the psychology of those who subscribe to it. I didn't know that back in twelfth grade, but hey, hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Ghost World is a melancholy coming-of-age tale, one very different to The Body, which, as you may recall, I read last month. Too cool to genuinely like anything, best friends Enid and Becky live their life with frowns upon their face interrupted with the occasional sarcastic smirk, their existences rife with ironic detachment. Ultimately, they're betrayed by the fact that they feel lost, alone, and scared by the big bad world; they are children acting like adults or what they think adults act like, while they delay the inevitable experience of growing up. In many ways, it is very sad because they want love and acceptance, but lean the other way just because it seems cooler in that light.
There's a natural flow to the conversation, and that casual, borderline stream-of-consciousness style makes the dialogue between Enid and Becky memorable, a remarkable quality that shines through despite the ambling plot. Although there isn't very much by way of story, you almost want to cry at the concealed emotions and the Peter-Pan-esque reluctance to accept that we can't stay children forever. Forced to leave behind those childhood playthings and happy-go-lucky records, Enid and Becky put their best foot forward and enter the real world, however frightening it may be.
I know that what I got out of Ghost World may not be what you will, but that's what makes it interesting. Just because I'm not fanatical about it doesn't mean it's not a good piece of literature. In fact, considering its brevity, I'd recommend everyone try it at least once.
Book #39: A romance set in the future
Someone told me that Ready Player One was a romance set in the future. So, I believed them.
What I got instead was a book so full and rich and whole, a completely different world within our own, which happened to also have a romance in it. I started raving about this book when I was only a third of the way through it. My sister bought it based upon my recommendation. My husband said it might just be his favourite book of all time. When I find something awesome, I want to share it with everyone.
There was bubble of hype enveloping Ready Player One, which gave those often unattainably sky-high expectations. This book could never be the book I anticipated. It just couldn't. It was an impossibility. And yet it did. In fact, it surpassed all of the bars I set. To say I liked the book is to put it mildly.
It's arguably science fiction, but as someone who isn't a fan of the genre, it never feels quite like that. Ernest Cline managed to paint a vivid world, starting from the Stacks and moving into the OASIS and beyond, a world that bonded with its readers through a bounty of relatable references and allusions to beloved works that ignite the genuine fandom in all of us. It's a world so richly detailed and defined that you believe it's real. It's a world that seems possible. In a way, it's its own kind of oasis for us readers.
It would be impossible to replicate a book of this magnitude. Sure, it is reminiscent of the scavenger-hunt-style plotlines in other books, such as the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but that world is a fabricated world of fantasy. Ready Player One taps into reality and shows us something uniquely possible in our world, the one we live in catapulted forward a handful of decades. And Cline found a way to give meaning to the predominantly seventies- and eighties-set nostalgia reel that ties everything together in a beautiful bow.
I don't think I can go on and on about the book because I may let something slip. To describe this novel too intricately would betray readers, robbing them of a chance to indulge themselves in what has to be one of my favourite books of all time. I couldn't recommend it more.
Thank you, Ernest, for letting us play with you.
I wanted to read Anna Karenina , but I had started that before January 2016. So, instead, I went with the first of the long-ass volumes of the Harry Potter series: the fifth instalment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince .
This was a bad idea. I recall finding the Harry Potter series riveting as a child. I tore through the first four, especially adoring the fourth and its Tri-Wizard Tournament. But when the fifth book came out and I got about two to three chapters in, the magic was gone. I found it too slow, not matching in pace, mood, or tone of the others. Something was missing. And I learned that I wasn't the only one to feel this way. My husband -- same thing. Friends of mine -- same deal. We all dropped off at the fifth book. Now, I know that's not true for everyone, that they demolished that book in a day and loved it just as dearly as all that came before it, but I just wasn't one of them.
So, why would I try to speed-read this mountain of a book in a short period of time, knowing I didn't like it the first time? Because I am an idiot.
After trying again and feeling the need for some No-Doze, I tumbled upon this blog, courtesy of Hilary Goldstein. She said: "[B]asing a book on its length is about the dumbest thing you can do. If I read 40 great 200-page novels this year, that's better than reading one stinker just because it's 600+ pages."
Hilary's attitude toward reading a book purely because of its page count is spot-on. The prompt is ridiculous. Why read a book just because it's long? What can be gained from that? You're not being pushed into something varied, something you wouldn't normally read. You'd just pick up the longest book that you think you could get through in time. You know, like what I was trying to do. Sure, I didn't get through it, proof that I didn't really evaluate all that well, but that's beside the point.
Then I did some thinking and a little math. If a page count is all you want, I've got that in spades. I read, outside of the challenge, Think Like A Freak at 288 pages, Bad Feminist at 320 pages, The Sense of Style at 368 pages, X vs. Y: A Culture War, A Love Story at 192 pages, The Beast from the East at 144 pages, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad at 195 pages. That's more than 1500 pages of reading. And that's just a small selection from the massive number of times I went astray during this challenge, wandering away from the prompts to simply read for the sake of reading. I would say I have more than accumulated six hundred pages' worth of additional reading, wouldn't you? I feel like this prompt was fulfilled, regardless of the fact that I did it across many books, rather than one. I'm going to audaciously say I deserve a checkmark on that elusive Book #40 (and probably #41, too).
Because, in the end, isn't the point of this challenge to get you to read a lot, especially things you wouldn't normally read? I think I have had quite the diverse year of reading. I've read about American presidents, mermaids, rich dads, poor dads, the joys of farming, the dangers of sugar consumption, the global scope of women's rights, the generation gap and overlap between those born in the mid-seventies and those born in the late-eighties, casual home decor, care-free home organization, tech-heavy dating scenes, Indian weddings, Cuban fishermen, Canadian schoolgirls, teen cancer patients, teen Lotharios, teen actors, suicidal princes on interplanetary travels, brave princes in magical battles, animals running farms, reporters running home, and reporters avoiding home. I read books where an unemployed drunk, a gang of twelve-year-olds, and a tight-knit group of twelfth graders each solved their own missing persons case. I read how you can have it all, just not all at once. I read about two different Indian comedians (one born in America) who are successful TV comedians and how they still miss their parents. Those moments stuck with me. Those are the moments that allow you to learn about how we, human beings, are all universally connected in some ways.
Sure, some would say that's cheating. (Well, burn me at the stake.) I believe most would say I failed the PopSugar Reading Challenge. (More like a success struck down in its prime.) But let's consider that, purely in the name of this challenge, I managed to read thirty-nine books in one year -- and that's not counting all those books not included under some prompt on this list or even the dozens that I started but put down for one reason or another. For me, that is a win.
Until next time, happy reading!
