Cory Day’s
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(group member since Aug 18, 2012)
Cory Day’s
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from the Reading with Style group.
Showing 1,061-1,080 of 1,205
20.8 Baseball TeamThe Fire Lord's Lover by Kathryne Kennedy
+20 Task (POV alternates between Dominic and Cassandra, >9 named characters)
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 85
20.1 Play Ball!Double Play by Jill Shalvis
+20 Task (shelved 15 times as baseball)
+5 Combo (20.8 – narrated by both Holly and Pace, and >9 named characters)
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 65
20.6 MLB 32 TeamsLooking for Alaska by John Green (930 Lexile)
+20 Task (231 pg)
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 40
20.10 World SeriesSticky Fingers by Nancy Martin
+20 Task (set entirely in Pittsburgh)
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 20
David Foster Wallace? His Goodreads page does mention journalism, and he worked for various publications, including following McCain's 2000 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, but he wasn't a beat reporter or anything like that...
Camille wrote: "Cory (Bigler) '00-'05 wrote: "20.6 Northanger AbbeyThe Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Review: This book basically befuddled me. I think I’m missing something – either a more intimate knowledge of cl..."
So glad I'm not alone, Camille!
10.6 MurderIn the Woods by Tana French
Review: This was a thoroughly engrossing but utterly FRUSTRATING book to read. Tana French’s first novel has vivid characterization, the right amount of suspense and creepiness, a clearly drawn setting, and an intriguing plot. She made me care about the narrator, Rob Ryan, and his partner Cassie with a desperation that felt devastating at times, and was not helped by the ending. There are two mysteries – one that happened during Ryan’s childhood and one that may or may not be linked, happening in the present. Thing is, at page 167 (I went back and looked once I knew I was right) I figured out the resolution that took over 200 pages to get to in the story, making the ending more than a little frustrating. Now I’ll just have to go back for more, and probably continue to have pieces of my heart torn out…
+10 Task (shelved as murder 29 times and not shelved as mystery)
+5 Combo (10.4)
+10 Review
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 1045
20th Century - Chronologician15.9 – Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture by Witold Rybczynski (pub 1992)
+15 Task
+10 Bonus
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 1020
10.10 Group ReadsCode Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (Lexile 1020)
Review: Whew. Well, this is no sappy YA romance – it’s basically the best bits of a book about a best friendship combined with a WWII spy thriller. The two protagonists each tell a piece of the story – one in the first half of the book, and the other in a mostly overlapping fashion in the second half of the book. I wish I could know more about these girls and their friendship and their lives in England, before their worlds were torn apart during Operation Verity in German occupied France. This was basically a heart-wrenching book – it’s quite hard to tell where it’s going to end up, and with war comes sacrifice – but it was also quite fun reading about the exploits of two young women finding their way in a world that wasn’t quite set up for them.
+10 Task
+10 Review
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 995
20.6 Northanger AbbeyThe Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Review: This book basically befuddled me. I think I’m missing something – either a more intimate knowledge of classic spy novels or a better understanding of English (or just Laurie’s) comedy – probably both. I read the entire story feeling like I was just barely missing something. A few things made me smirk, but in general I was just lost. The premise seems to be a play on classic tropes of spy thrillers – a man is approached to be a hit man and refuses, but then ends up in a conspiracy that spans nations (although really the Americans are the bad guys), but then foils the plans and diverts catastrophe. A lot of it was funny, but I felt like had I been watching it as a movie in a theater I would have been the person not laughing when everyone else was, and then guffawing while everyone else stayed silent.
+20 Task (Laurie is on the list of satirists)
+10 Review
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 975
20.7 PersuasionSanditon by Jane Austen
Review: I had never heard of Sanditon until the makers of “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” announced their new project, “Welcome to Sanditon.” This is an unfinished novel, written just months before Austen’s death, and I found myself sad to know she never finished it. This was obviously a work in progress, and one written while Austen was sick and dying, but it hints of a turn to something slightly new and more widely drawn than most of her other novels. It promised to focus less on a family and its intimate acquaintances than on an entire town, which could have been so interesting. Sadly, it is barely started before it ends – I sensed we hadn’t even met all the main characters, so we’ll never know where it – and Austen’s career – would have ended up.
+20 Task (not published until 1925 - http://www.janeausten.co.uk/oxfords-n...)
+5 Combo (20.3)
+10 Oldies (published 1925)
+10 Review
Task Total: 45
Grand Total: 945
10.7 NursesMaisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
Review: I heartily enjoyed this first novel in the Maisie Dobbs series, although if I did not know I had access to a number of sequels I think I would have felt unsatisfied. The plot takes place both in Maisie’s present day, 1929, and her past, before and during World War I. The flashbacks to her past were comprehensive enough to explain what was happening in her current day, mostly as relevant to the case she is investigating, but I do wonder if it would have been more successful as two separate novels – one exploring her childhood and the war itself and another exploring the case and the aftermath of the war. I expect to go on to read more of these, and will likely feel as though many of the holes get filled in as I read the sequels.
+10 Task
+5 Combo (20.5)
+10 Review
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 900
10.4 IrelandBrown Lord of the Mountain by Walter Macken
Review: This felt like it should have been the best sort of atmospheric novel – a book focused on character and setting but with a plot to keep things moving. In the end, I felt like all three pieces ended up lacking rather than enhancing each other. The basic plot centers around a man who has been gone from his small Irish hometown since right before World War II, when he ran away on his wedding day right after saying his vows. He feels trapped by the small village, goes and sees the world, and then for a reason that is never fully explained comes back and ends up quickly, by all appearances, fitting right in. A tragic incident crushes his world once again, and his reaction is not unlike the one he had nearly twenty years before, making the reader question whether or not he really learned a thing. All in all, I would have preferred more focus on any one thing, because it never felt quite epic or intimate to be truly successful.
+10 Task (Macken was born in Galway)
+5 Oldies (published 1967)
+10 Review
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 875
10.1 Square PegCold Days by Jim Butcher
Review: I held off on reading this last season because it didn’t fit anywhere, and then that happened again! I’d been looking forward to this latest Harry Dresden novel, and I ended up sadly being disappointed. Certain things happened that I had been waiting a long time for, but they were oddly anticlimactic, and most of this installation felt like a placeholder. By the fourteenth book in the series though, I expect more. Basically, it feels a lot like a second or third novel (partially because of what happened in the last two), but in the worst way possible, since you really have to have read most of the last thirteen to understand anything that’s going on. Here’s hoping for a satisfying fifteenth next year!
+10 Task
+5 Jumbo
+10 Review
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 850 (*includes the added 10 I missed in post 833 and 5 Jumbo missed in post 815)
20th Century - Chronologician15.8 – Masques (Sianim, #1) by Patricia Briggs (pub 1993)
+15 Task
+10 Bonus
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 810
10.2 Memoir/BiographyThe War by Marguerite Duras
Review: This is a short but powerful book, put together from a collection of writings French author Marguerite Duras wrote during and after WWII but discovered and published much later. France’s relationship with the war and the Holocaust has always struck me as incredibly complicated, with some members of the country cooperating with the occupying Germans and others members of the Resistance movement. Perhaps this leads to there being not as much published about the French experience as the German or Polish one, or perhaps I’ve just missed it, but despite reading many books about this era I’d never read one from this perspective.
Duras does not forgive or excuse anyone in the vignettes she tells. She explicitly states that the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans are not a German problem – they are a human problem. After the war ends, she places herself in a room interrogating a German sympathizer as he is tortured, and while she herself never throws a punch she counts herself as one of the torturers. Her thoughts veer widely from one extreme to another, and is thus probably the most honest portrayals of an occupied nation and what happens when the occupiers lose that is available.
+10 Task (shelved as biography)
+10 Combo (10.3; 20.5 – Duras’s memoir about herself during and after WWII)
+5 Oldies (published 1985)
+10 Review
Task Total: 35
Grand Total: 785
20.8 TrumanThe Dream: A Memoir by Harry Bernstein
Review: This is the follow-up to Bernstein’s first memoir, The Invisible Wall, which told the story of his youth spent growing up in a poor section of a mill town in England, on a street divided between Christians on one side and Jews on the other. The Dream tells the story of Harry’s family’s move to the United States in a search for a better life – a life that is not so easy to grasp as the dreams his mother spins for her children.
Bernstein’s life was a challenge, both in England and in the United States. His mother did everything she could to provide the dream life for her family, but circumstance and his father caused her to never have in reality what she envisioned. This book is in many ways a tribute to her and to the other woman he loved, his wife Ruby, whom he meets and marries toward the end. Harry managed to grow up and have a wonderful life. His mother’s story was more tragic, but she managed to instill a lasting ability to continue dreaming – and that skill was probably what led Bernstein to finally, at age 96, to become a published author, even after losing the love of his life.
+20 Task
+10 Combo (10.2, 10.3)
+10 Review
Task Total: 30
Grand Total: 750
20th Century - Chronologician15.7 – The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King (pub 1994)
+15 Task
+10 Bonus
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 720
20th Century - Chronologician15.6 – To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ (pub 1995)
+15 Task
+10 Bonus
Task Total: 25
Grand Total: 695
10.9 DinnerGarden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
Review: What a breath of fresh air after the heaviness of reading Les Miserables! This debut novel by Sarah Addison Allen is part magical realism and part small town tale. Claire lives in Bascom, North Carolina, born to a family that has ‘gifts’, and whose garden produces special food. She caters most events in her town, putting together dishes that can make people feel certain ways, but she’s not able to emotionally connect with anyone else. Her family has always been a little odd, with their gifts being both used and made fun of by the community, and when her sister comes back to town she has to confront that tension. The Waverleys may not be the only family with special gifts, though, and peeking into the lives of other town members was fun. This book was for me the best blend of light and fun with serious and meaningful, fantasy with reality, and finding oneself with finding love.
+10 Task (#7 on Nouvelle Cuisine list)
+10 Review
Task Total: 20
Grand Total: 670
