Brida

Yesterday evening I finsihed Brida by Paulo Coelho. I've read a number of his books and Brida didn't disappoint me. The story is about an Irish girl, Brida, who is learning about the world of being a witch. It's difficult to write the word "witch" without imagining ugly green women in black robes and point hats, or people being turned into other creatures with magic potions. This was not that kind of witch. Throughout the book, Brida learns about the world and magic as it has passed down from generations of spirituality. The strong tie to Christianity was very interesting as well.
In every one of Coelho's books there is a passage or two that really striked home with me. This was that passage:
"...the age of miracles was returning, and no one could remain indifferent to the changes the world was beginning to experience. Within a few years, the power of the Tradition of the Sun would reveal itself in all its brilliance. Anyone not already followiung their own path would begin to feel dissatisfied with themselves and be forced to make a choice: they would either have to accept an existence beset with disappointment and pain or else come to realize that everyone was born to be happy. Having made their choice, they would have no option but to change..."
It reminded me of my latest motto: "I would rather be happy". Given any number of choices, whenever possible, I will choose to be happy.
Coelho is a beautiful storyteller and his books are multidimentional. One of the things I like best about them is that if I feel like really contemplating them, he gives plenty to work with, but at the same time his stories can be taken simply as stories.

I saw the bandwagon, it circled my block a couple of times while I toyed with the idea of hopping on, but finally let it pass.

I read the Twilight Saga. It took me two and a half weeks. In all fairness, the first three books took me a week, and the final one was the last week and a half.
I'll break it down a wee bit:
Twilight: so-so. Lots of brooding, lots of whining, lots of swooning. Some story. Definitely an easy read. By the end though, I was interested and wanted to keep going to book two.
New Moon: also lots of brooding, quite a lot of whining, and some swooning. Mostly I just found myself tearing through it to get to the end and the exciting bits. I like Jacob.
Eclipse: Not so much whining. Lots of brooding though. Jacob changed quite a lot...can't say as I liked him much anymore. This was definitely my favorite of the series though.
Breaking Dawn: ...just plain weird. I didn't like it. The characters seemed to have a totally different voice and like all of a sudden Stephanie Meyer didn't have to hold on to any shred of realism anymore and just went hog wild with mystical powers and bizarre events. I'm really not sure how they'll make it into a movie without it being totally grotesque and creepy.

All of that being said, I liked the Twilight movie, and I really enjoyed New Moon the movie (I'm fairly sure I'm branding myself as some sort of creepy perv by saying that Jacob is daaaaaaamn fine! He-llo!).
For your reading enjoyment, check out this blog entry I found online: "Reasons Why Twilight the Movie May Be Better Than The Book".
Points 3, 5, 11, 22, and 27 really hit home for me.

But, as my dear friend Mare said when we were discussing the first two books "Imagine if we'd been reading these ten or fifteen years ago! I'd have my bedroom plastered with Twilight posters!" And I concur.

Moving Right Along...

Oh so much time has passed since I bought An Echo in the Bone. I took my sweet time with it, not sitting down to read unless I knew I could get through a chapter uninterupted. Well, those moments are few and far between, so I didn't finish it until my plane was landing in Halifax at the end of October. This is the 7th book in the Outlander series, and anyone who has read a book series beyond three or four installations can understand just how involved the plot can get. Diana Gabaldon, being an expert story teller, did not let me down. The beginning was a little slow to get going and started with a lot of storyline on a relatively new character who I'm not totally sold on yet. That's not to say he's not a really solid, well developed character with believable ideas, background, etc. I just mean I don't know if I like the guy. Ha! For the first quarter I was starting to wonder whether it would turn back to Claire and Jamie and really focus on them (which, let's face it, is the whole reason for the books). And, being the amazing writer that she is, Gabaldon continued to lead me down the road and everything came together and I understood why she had written the way she did. (Not that I had any doubt). The end was so encompassing that I actually decided to forgo some of my naps on the plane in favor of finishing Echo. I can say there definitely will be at least one more book in the series as she left one plot line in a total cliffhanger. I almost didn't realize it until I closed the book and breathed a contented sigh while reflecting over the various story lines. Then it hit me - "wait, what about----??? AHH!!" There's something terribly unfair about knowing you have to wait 3-4 years to find out what happens.
While in Halifax, Maureen and I did a lot of touring around the city, but on the first day when we turned the corner from her house, we walked right past a used book store that she said she'd never been in. I dragged her in and we started looking over the stacks and stacks of books. I was looking for something easy, something simple, but something still interesting. I finally picked up a paperback called Trick of the Eye by Jane Stanton Hitchcock. The cover made it sound like a murder mystery. I suppose it was. It was certainly an easy read, but not very gripping, and not very engaging. And the "twist" at the end...well, I suppose it was unexpected, but I didn't really care by the time I got there.
Now I've started a book that Norma lent to me: Hung Jury by Rankin Davis. Interesting point though, the copy she has says it's an unedited book proof, so it has many typos and spelling mistakes. There have also been a few sentences that see a bit clumsy and I'm sure would be re-worked before a final print. Interesting, though. (and it appeals to the part of me that has always thought it would be neat to be a book editor).

Excitement!!

Today is the day I've been waiting for!! It is the official release date for An Echo in the Bone, the 7th book in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. FYI, you won't hear from me for a solid week while I tear through this volume.
I've already told Brad that I don't want to be disturbed unless the house is on fire...even then, just let me know if there's structural damage, otherwise I'm sure the firefighters can deal with it; I'll be busy.

The Honeymoon Reading

I didn't quite get as much reading in as I had hoped on the honeymoon, but I did tear through two chick-lits.
The first was Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. This book by Laurie Viera Rigley follows a girl who has recently had her heart broken by her *scumbag* fiance and wakes up in Jane Austen's era/settings in the body of another woman. It's fluff, for sure, and sometimes the main character, Courtney/Jane, was irritating, but for the most part it was a decent read that left me neither fulfilled, nor let down by the end.
I quickly moved on to Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner. The sequel to Good in Bed which I read last summer was not as fulfilling either. The novel is divided between Cannie and her daughter Joy as they plan Joy's bat mitzvah. Joy reads the book that Cannie wrote and sort of falls apart after learning her mom was not interested in having a baby in the first place and that her dad is a loser. It was alright and I, again, tore through it in about two days. I was a little disappointed just because the first one had been so good.
Then again, it's hard to expect much more than fluff from chick-lit, and fluff was what I got.
I'm not reading anything right now because I'm counting the days to the release of Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, the 7th book in the Outlander series. I've been waiting for FOUR years for this one to come out, and I'm going to be waiting at the door of Coles on the 22nd! EEEEEEEEEEeeeeeee!

A major accomplishment!

Well, an accomplishment in my eyes anyway. A few months ago I set out to read all of the books that people had lent to me. I wanted to return the three that Mum had sent me home with first so that I could bring them back to her when we head to Smithers for the wedding, and then I wanted to read the other daunting books that friends had lent me before I started any of the many many books I've recently purchased for myself.
I started with Gap Creek by Robert Morgan. The cover said "The Story of a Marriage" and it seemed like a good place to start. It's one of Oprah's Book Club books which really doesn't mean much to me. It was reasonably short, but took a little while to get through. The story was good, but it was one of those books where the characters encounter hardship after hardship and things just keep getting worse with no reprieve. By the time I was halfway through I was almost anxious each time the author introduced a new character coming to the door of the little cabin. The end was not terribly uplifting either, but the main character, Julie, had so much strength it kept me going.
After that I read the Birth House by Ami McKay. While the characters faced huge hardships in this story too, it was filled with hope and the underlying feeling that good would triumph and the antagonists would get what was coming to them. I loved the characters and burned through the story in just over a week.
The last book that Mum lent me was Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. It was made into a move which I haven't seen but would like to. The story is about a girl who's loser boyfriend abandons her at a WalMart in Oklahoma. I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. The characters were endearing and charming and seemed very real. I tried to rent the movie over the weekend but couldn't find it.
Once those three were done, I moved on to the books that friends had lent me, starting with the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. Bev had sent me home with this book almost a year ago and it sat on my shelf, but I finally decided to take a crack at it. It's written in the form of a legitimate reference for the event of a zombie uprising. The author never breaks from the tone that it is all very real and plausible. I have known a lot of people who would have really enjoyed it (and some who may have taken it fairly literally), but I found it to be a little tedious. Maybe it's just that I'm not really interested in zombies...I'm not sure. Not my cup of tea, but then again, I'm always game to try a new kind of book.
Finally, the last book that was lent to me was World Without End by Ken Follett. This one is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth which I read last year. It was certainly the most daunting of the books I've read lately coming in at 1014 pages in hardcover (I'm not really a big fan of hardcover as they're so cumbersome to read). Much like Pillars, the characters were really well written and relateable, but also very distinctly good or bad. There wasn't a lot of grey area. Some started as neutral but became corrupted, whereas others just further developed their evil natures. I found Pillars a little harder to read...it seemd the characters faced one terrible hardship after another and just when things were starting to look up their hopes would be dashed. World Without End definitely had a lot of that, but they seemed to triumph more often, or maybe they were just stronger. It was a really good read though, and I absolutely would recommend it to someone with a lot of time on their hands.
I plan to take three or four books with me on our honeymoon. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get some more reading in. Now that I'm on to the books that I've bought for myself, I can enjoy them without feeling like I should be reading something else.

Finally!

I've actually had some time to read lately! Whooooooeee, it's been nice. I polished off Fool, Sundays at Tiffany's, and I'm about halfway into Bloodsucking Fiends.

So let's see...Fool, by Christopher Moore. One of my favorite authors, Moore has a truly twisted sense of humour which I absolutely adore. Fool is his attempt to make Shakespeare roll over in his grave. The book is loosely based on King Lear, told from the jester's perspective. Moore willingly admits that he hasn't really tried to stick to the story and has incorporated bits and pieces from other works (the three witches of Macbeth). I was hugely entertained by the novel and the wild liberties Moore takes. I've read all but one of his books, and despite knowing how extremely crude (and occasionally disgusting) he can be, I was still a little surprised to read some of the scenes and see the lines he crossed. Fun though, for sure. Quite literally though, the part that made me laugh the hardest was long after the story ended and Moore was explaining how he came to the decision to write the story and talks about how in his research, after watching countless Lears rage at the storm at the peak of their insanity, he was about ready to leap onstage and kill the guy himself.

After finishing off Fool, I switched gears to Sundays at Tiffany's. I don't know about this one. It was definitely what I was looking for: pure fluff, and had sweet characters. They were very one dimentional though. Very very flat. Often the sentence structure reminded me of things I had written in elementary school. Twice, chapters started with "Here's what happened next". Seriously? Is that necessary? I assume that the following paragraphs would state what came next since I'm still reading the same book. I think the author was trying to be cute and relateable but came across as trite and redundant. All in all, I will never re-read it, but it was a good filler for a while.

Now into Bloodsucking Fiends, another from Christopher Moore and the last one that I need to read. So far so good. Typical Moore...twisted, amusing, fantastic characters, fun plot. All in all, enjoying it!

I know I've raved a few times about Moore, but here's an experpt from his website that I enjoyed as an intro to the schedule of his book tour destinations:

"You know I think the world of you and would like to make peanut butter toast for each and every one of you (unless you have a peanut allergy, in which case, I’d like to make you toast and stab you in the leg with an epi pen.)"

The Big Read

In 2003, the BBC released their list of the top books according to readers in Great Britain. I gave it a look over and have read 15 of the 100. Not bad I guess, but I'd like to give it a fair go and see how many I can actually get through. There are a lot of books here that I've always wanted to read (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Hitchhikers Guide, etc), and I figure in conjunction with my new years resolution (which isn't going so well), I'm going to look to this list for inspiration. The 'X' means I've read it. Hopefully I can add a few more 'X's by the end of the year...though I imagine reading Lord of the Rings might have to be it's own New Years Resolution.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne X
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger X
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott X
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres X
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien X
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett X
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson X
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert40. Emma, Jane Austen X
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens X
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett X
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell X
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding X
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac X
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel X
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho X
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez X
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

The Hour I First Believed

Being sick is definitely no fun, but the upside to it is more time to read. I'm somewhere around page 200 of The Hour I First Believed.

The first hundred pages were a little slow going and I wasn't sure if I could get past a general dislike of the main character. I guess he's fairly typical and a fairly average person, there are just a lot of traits that I just don't like and have a hard time relating to.

The book has picked up though and I had a really hard time putting it down last night. It's hard to take too. I know that it shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but it's trying on my nerves and emotions.

Here's a quick look at a paragraph from the write up on Chapters:

"When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. "

I Don't know why I thought it would be anything but hard to take, but so far in the past 50 pages or so I've been in tears a number of times.

Anyway, that's where I'm at with it for now. I expect it to get harder and harder to take.

A New Year

Last year it was my personal goal to read 52 books. One book each week. I was doing really well for the first few months of the year, but things started to trickle off (as they often do) and life caught up with me, demanding my time and leaving much less for one of my favorite passtimes. I did, however, manage to soak up 26 books, so that's not too bad.
This year I'm going to set a more achievable goal for myself. I want to try to read 30 books if I can. That's where this blog comes in. I will be chronicling the books I read as I go.
To start off 2009: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.