2025 Reading Challenge discussion

I'm planning on reading at least 180 books next year, which sounds like a lot, but considering I'm on track to read 300 this year it seems ludicrously pessimistic in a way :D But no, I'm going to stick to 180 for now, and if I go past that I can always increase it. :) It's not like I plan on running out of books or anything.

My corner: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

OK, I don't actually know how to do one of these threads and I feel kinda weird about skimming through other people's threads to better mine, so I think I'll just improvise.

January
The Martian (January group read) (5/1/16)
Men at Arms (Mark Reads) (14/1/16)
All the Light We Cannot See (Group Reads QC, Christmas purchase) (6/1/16)
A Brief History of Seven Killings (Christmas purchase, Around the World) (16/1/16)
A Little Life (Christmas purchase) (25/1/16)
The Kite Runner (Around the world, lead-in to Group Reads QC) (8/1/16)
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Group Reads QC) (28/1/16)

Weekend wonders:
1 Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2/1/16) / Marvelous Land of Oz (2/1/16) + The Woggle-Bug Book (2/1/16)
2 Ozma of Oz (9/1/16)
3 Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (15/1/16) / The Man Who Would Be King (16/1/16) + The Raven (16/1/16) + Poems of William Blake (17/1/16)
4 The Road to Oz (24/1/16)
5 The Emerald City of Oz (29/2/16) / Tide of Shadows and Other Stories (30/1/16) + Through the Looking-Glass (30/1/16)

February/March
Games Wizards Play (It's coming out on the 2nd, I have it preordered, and I am excited.) (5/2/16)
Some rogues from here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... (February reread MC)
The Nightingale (Not the February group read, but I'm going to try to read it in February regardless, or in Q1 at the very least) (24/3/16)
I Am Malala (March Group Read) (15/3/16)
The Silver Linings Playbook (Group Reads QC) (24/2/16)
The Golem and the Jinni (Group Reads QC) (1/3/16)
Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (Group Reads QC) (4/3/16)
A Discovery of Witches (Group Reads QC) (11/3/16)
The Night Circus (Group Reads QC) (16/3/16)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Group Reads QC) (17/3/16)
The Color Purple (Group Reads QC) (20/3/16)
Soul Music (Mark Reads Discworld) (10/3/16)

Weekend wonders:
1 The Patchwork Girl of Oz (6/2/16)
2 Little Wizard Stories of Oz (12/2/16) + Tik Tok of Oz (13/2/16)
3 The Scarecrow of Oz (20/2/16) / Rinkitink in Oz (21/2/16)
4 Lost Princess of Oz (27/2/16)
5 Tin Woodman of Oz (5/3/16)
6 Magic of Oz (11/3/16) / Glinda of Oz (12/3/16)
7 Lady Susan (18/3/16) + The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (21/3/16) + The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (20/3/16)
8 A Doll's House (31/3/16) / Five Children and It (30/3/16)

April
So You Want to Be a Wizard (Mark Reads Young Wizards)
Interesting Times (Mark Reads Discworld)
Stars Above (3/4/16)
Shakespeare on Toast (9/4/16)
1916: Portraits and Lives (7/4/16)
Vicious (14/4/16)

Weekend wonders:
1 Engraved on the Eye / Heart of Darkness
2 The Turn of the Screw / The Canterville Ghost
3 Ethan Frome / The Time Machine
4 The Giver (10/4/16)
5 The Railway Children / Number the Stars (16/4/16)

May
Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale (?)

Weekend wonders:
1 Fortunately the Milk
2 Notes from the Underground
3 The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
4 Freak the Mighty (2/4/16)

June
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (19 years later...) (26/6/16)
to be continued until I finish, to be followed up with Mark Reads Harry Potter and The Shoebox Project

Weekend wonders:
1 Persuasion
2 Cocaine Blues
3 The Diary of a Nobody
4 The Prisoner of Zenda

July

Weekend wonders:
1 A Bear Called Paddington
2 The Man Who Knew Too Much
3 The Secret of Platform 13
4 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
5 The Phantom of the Opera

August

Weekend wonders:
1 Mary Poppins
2 The Phoenix and the Carpet
3 The Story of the Amulet
4 Cirque du Freak

September

Weekend wonders:
1 Game Changer
2 Annihilation
3 Therese Raquin
4 The Enchanted Castle

October
Uptown Local and Other Interventions (Mark Reads Young Wizards)
Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (ditto)

Weekend wonders:
1 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
2 Journey to the Centre of the Earth
3 Snakehead
4 The Owl Service
5 The Picture of Dorian Gray

November

Weekend wonders:
1 This Is How You Lose Her
2 The Thirty-Nine Steps
3 Madame Bovary
4 A Morbid Taste for Bones

December
Up and Coming (epic year-long project)

Weekend wonders:
1 Heidi
2 The Book of Three
3 Pride and Prejudice + Z Minus 1
4 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
5 Cider with Rosie

(subject to change)

Other series I want to read next year (may not happen)
Harry Potter (reread):
Philosopher's Stone
Chamber of Secrets
Prisoner of Azkaban
Goblet of Fire
Order of the Phoenix
Half-Blood Prince
Deathly Hallows

Mark Reads Harry Potter:
MRPS
MRCS
MRPA
MRGF
MROOTP
MRHBP
MRDH

Switchers:
Switchers (reread)
Midnight's Choice (reread)
Wild Blood

The Inheritance Trilogy plus extras:
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Broken Kingdoms
The Kingdoms of Gods
The Awakened Kingdom
Shades in Shadow (?)

Lord of the Rings: (reread)
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King

1Q84:
1Q84 Books 1 and 2 (reread)
1Q84 Books 3
Kafka on the Shore (reread) (not actually part of the thing, but if I end up disliking 1Q84 again I reckon I'm going to need it.)

The New Policeman Trilogy
The New Policeman (reread)
Last of the White Kings
The White Horse Trick

to be continued (?)

Further books pulled from the shelves of years (Books I actually own physically that I think are up for reappraisal/revisiting, apart from those already mentioned)

Macbeth
Hamlet
Watchmen
The Sisters Brothers
Looking for Alaska
Alex Rider?
Power of Five?
The Kite Runner (8/1/16)
A Thousand Splendid Suns (28/1/16)
The Remains of the Day
The Hour I First Believed
Good Omens
The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness?
My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories
The White Tiger
Ulysses?
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Of Mice and Men
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Tom's Midnight Garden

Good luck Paul. That's one impressive list. I hope you achieve what you're aiming for. By the way, how can you read so many books in a year? I'm jealous.

Zara wrote: "By the way, how can you read so many books in a year? I'm jealous."

This.

300 is very impressive. There is no way I could read nearly a book a day, every day, for an entire year.

Zara wrote: "Good luck Paul. That's one impressive list. I hope you achieve what you're aiming for. By the way, how can you read so many books in a year? I'm jealous."

Thank you Zara. That list isn't even the half of it though. I'm not sure it's even the third of it. I do have a lot of books hanging around me that I need to read, and a lot of challenges I could apply them to.

As for how do I read so much, well... the 300 number I feel is kind of a cheat, even though it really isn't. Some of those aren't really books, they were isolated short stories or essays instead. At the same time a lot of the books I read this year seem to have been fairly short, and even when they weren't short a lot of them were what I'll happily admit Not Quite Made for Adults, so you could argue that there's actually less in them than their page count signifies. Not all the time of course, but maybe sometimes.

Apart from that, it's an adding up of a lot of things. I started bringing my Kindle to college last year (as well as being actually able to buy books for it), and so I get to read that on the way in and out on the bus, as well as during downtimes waiting for buses and college days to start. As well as that I generally always make sure to make time for reading at the end of the day too, and tend to read at least two, if not three, books at once. Never feeling like I have to reach very far for books helps too.

Plus I seem to be a fairly fast reader as well - not like a super quick reader, not really by design, I just sort of end up doing it like that. Admittedly I could do with slowing down because sometimes I get confused and forget things (although books are usually good at reminding me of these things unobtrusively), but I'm not sure if that's really something I can do. Like, by the end of the night it's looking like I'll be set for almost 83,000 pages and 295 books, so what's that? *checks*

Almost 240 pages per day, apparently? (280 pages per book?) Seems wrong, seems too high, but that's what the numbers work out to so it must be true. So while I'm not sure if any of that helps (or if it was supposed to), that's really as best as I can explain it.

Wow, Paul, that's amazing! Congratulations!

I really like your explanation on how you manage to read so much -- I guess I should follow your example and take the habit of reading during dead times. I work at home, so this doesn't help me, as I don't have any commute time, however short it may be.

Thank you Marina! I'm afraid I don't think I can help with the reading while working at home part, mind, like you've admittedly kind of said already. Maybe little and often might work? I'm not really sure though.

Paul, I noticed you have Murakami's 1Q84 on your list this year. Have you read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? The two books are connected. And it's just a wonderful book. I read Orwell's 1984 while I read 1Q84 and feel like I got a lot more out of Murakami's book.

Bella wrote: "Paul, I noticed you have Murakami's 1Q84 on your list this year. Have you read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? The two books are connected. And it's just a wonderful book. I read Orwell's ..."

I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sometime last year - I'm not entirely sure when, but I had definitely already read 1Q84 Books 1 and 2 and Kafka on the Shore at that point. Norwegian Wood may have been before it or after it, I think it was after it though. I, um, actually didn't think much of it? But that was more because I wasn't sure what to think of it, I found it some sort of bizarre, unsettling, and overly weird more than everything else. I've had it at the back of my mind for a while (I think) that it was due re-evaluation, and I was going to commit to doing something about that now, except that it turns out it's not in my library anymore :/ Then again it might show up at some point in the future, but I really don't know if I'll be able to get around to it next year. I'll see though. :)

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to find that all of Murakami's books are connected. :D There are a fair few recurring elements though, even I'll admit that. And I know that the 1984 to 1Q84 connections were talked up a bit around the time 1Q84 came out; now that I've actually read both, I do sort of see where people were coming from in hindsight.

I haven't ready any of Murakami's books before. I have started to get really into books by Japanense authors. As an American, I find I'm learning a lot about Japan and Japanese culture, even if those aren't key in those books.

Where would you recommend I start with reading Murakami?

Jackie B. wrote: "I haven't ready any of Murakami's books before. I have started to get really into books by Japanense authors. As an American, I find I'm learning a lot about Japan and Japanese culture, even if tho..."

This is a tricky question, one that I'm not entirely sure how to answer. So what follows is probably just going to be a lot of rambling as I try to approach an answer, for which I apologise in advance if it all ends up going horribly wrong. I'm also not 100% positive that there is actually one answer that I can give. There'll probably be several.

I've taken the liberty of checking your to-read list Jackie (which I hope is all right, if it's not I understand and apologise) I see you have After Dark, 1Q84, Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I'm going to start with those five because I've read all of them to various degrees, and then move on out from there to others of his that I've read as well. I haven't read everything he's written, mind, and I'm not even sure I plan to, and I'll only be talking about what I've read of his as I feel it wouldn't make sense to talk about them otherwise, even as a general "I've heard this is/isn't good" type of thing.

I started with 1Q84. I would not recommend starting with 1Q84. Admittedly this to a large extent is because I didn't like it. I gave up two-thirds of the way through. In general what I found about it is that it was way too repetitive and drawn-out and overly mysterious and strangely ... artificial? That could be a good word for it, to the extent that when I got to the end of Books 1 and 2 I realised I didn't care any more and figured that it wasn't going to mean much if I didn't read Book 3. Now though I'm feeling that it might be ripe for re-evaluation and I want to give it that next year. It could be that I simply needed to read more of Murakami's work, or it could be that it really just wasn't that good and going back to it might just make its flaws stand out in an even larger way.

Then I moved on to Kafka on the Shore some time later. Kafka on the Shore is brilliant. I love Kafka on the Shore. However, not everybody does. Which is fine. Again, Kafka on the Shore could be described as being overly mysterious. It doesn't really give much of itself away at all, although if you let yourself think about it more it does start approaching more and more of a sense of "that makes sense". And I'm not saying that in a "oh, you clearly aren't intelligent enough for this book if you don't understand it" way, it's more of a "Kafka on the Shore for a large part wilfully refuses to be ambiguous and almost demands that you come up with your own interpretations" kind of way. I'd find it difficult to say that it actually has much in the way of character development or plot, and it also delves somewhat heavily into ambiguous incest, so if that's something that you'd rather avoid, then I can understand it. Nevertheless, I love it. It's hilarious and baffling and strange, yes, but it's also about enjoyable, sympathetic characters in their own way throwing the shackles that society's fixed on them off and finding their own path for themselves. So it's a good place to start, but I don't know whether it's the best.

Norwegian Wood is an interesting one, in the sense that it might not be that interesting. It's definitely one of his best-known and more reasonably acclaimed books, but it's also not quite like anything else he's ever written. Essentially boiling it down to the fundamentals, Murakami's work is pretty much about the mysterious-mystical and the real, and the way both of those bounce off each other and feed into each other, the ways in which one is kind of a part of the other if you look at it closely enough. Norwegian Wood is entirely real in that sense. It's a fairly standard (at least in my view) obsessive, slightly damaged young love story. It's like one day Murakami decided to write a John Green book (which is impossible in this case, but regardless), but was both too good at it and not good enough. For me, there simply wasn't enough going on in the book for me, it was just a bit too cold and emotionless. Although this is going on not having read it in a long time. Not that I ever want to read it again, mind. It's not exactly bad, but I don't like it very much, and I'd think I'd recommend you get a sense of what Murakami is best known for before picking this one up.

After Dark I think is generally considered one of his lesser works, but personally I think it's great. This is partially because I get the sense that it's the only Murakami book I completely understand. Admittedly this is because I've been reading way too much postmodern Doctor Who blogging over the past year, so I've sort of absorbed the ideas of eccentric spaces bordering on each other and the strangeness that occurs at their margins, but there you have it. You probably don't need to have read postmodern Doctor Who blogs to enjoy this book, incidentally. As for what After Dark actually is, it's really a handful of people working through their problems in the early hours of one Tokyo morning and eventually occasionally coming to some sort of conclusion, while weird things happen sometimes, with the whole thing being written in a very neat style that I'm sure has been done before but that I haven't seen very often if at all - think a script treatment except that it's a book.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki on the other hand is more of a return to the real like Norwegian Wood was, but it has elements of the weird seeping in from here and there. I definitely found it more involving than Wood, but not maybe that much more involving. It's still good, mind, but probably one of his lesser works. At the same time there is something oddly pleasant in hindsight about its reflective, contemplative, still-water feel. I just wish I had more to say about it.

There are only two (thank goodness, you say) other Murakami books that I've read that you don't have in your to-read list, and I'd say that they're actually fairly big omissions. Those would be Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I say they're fairly big not (just) because I like them (as it happens I like Hard-Boiled quite a lot, Wind-Up not so much), but because Hard-Boiled seems to have established his reputation, and Wind-Up absolutely cemented it. Hard-Boiled is another great blending and fusion of mysterious and real, moving from some sort of protocyberpunk (maybe?) to reflections in a mysterious walled up town and back before the whole thing ends up being all connected and drifts towards an oddly contemplative and ambiguous end. I'm not making it sound as good as it is, because it was very good. As a bonus, it's also the only book of his I've read that as far as I can recall doesn't have any or much weird/disturbing sex whatsoever, which might make it the best and only show in town depending on whether you feel that's something you'd be able to work it or not.

All I feel I can really say on Wind-Up right now is there in my reply to Bella's comment, though it is definitely a very acclaimed book so far as I know.

Where that leaves me? I'm not sure. I don't have one answer so much as I have several answers that probably end up adding up to no answer at all. To summarise:

1. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (this is what my head says) / Kafka on the Shore (this is what my heart says)
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (this is what my head says) / After Dark (this is what my heart says)
5. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
6. Norwegian Wood
7. 1Q84

and even then I'm not sure that's good enough. I do like to think that if you pick out of the first four/five though you probably shouldn't go too far wrong. Hopefully this helps. :)

good luck with your goal! I added some of your books to my to read list i hope you dont mind

Blagica wrote: "good luck with your goal! I added some of your books to my to read list i hope you dont mind"

Thank you Blagica! And no, that's no problem. In fact I more or less encourage it. ;) Enjoy! Hopefully. :)

Good luck.

Paul, it's worth noting that most members are generally fine with others looking through their personal challenge and member corner threads for ideas. You're definitely free to look through mine (personal challenge and member corner from 2015).

That said, it's also fine to make things up as you go along, and organize things however makes sense to you - it looks like you're on your way to doing that. :)

Good luck with your reading!

Cassandra wrote: "Paul, it's worth noting that most members are generally fine with others looking through their personal challenge and member corner threads for ideas. You're definitely free to look through mine (p..."

Thank you for the advice and well wishes Cassandra, and sorry for not replying sooner. I've just been trying to work out what to say and how to put it. I'll admit to having borrowed your statistics tallies quite some time ago (I always made sure to credit you for them though), and you're probably right that I found my own ways to do things, though I'm fairly sure I've seen things like those on other people's threads. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to lay out my reviews for next year (if ever I do them, which I'm not sure I'll be able to - I still have around 60 left over to do from this year), and I've definitely seen formats around that I think would suit me, which I might end up tweaking a bit here or there. I'll see. :)

Wow! That's quite a series of reviews you provided for me, Paul. I greatly appreciate it. It's nice to see you've taken this so seriously.

Thanks for checking my TBR list! I appreciate the initiative, and it means that you can also get a good idea of what I read to help a bit. :) One of the reasons I've had so many Murakami books on my TBR, but I've never started any, is because they are daunting. There is a lot in these books and they are very non-traditional literature. I've heard a lot of recommendations, but no one has so clearly articulated to me why these books should be read before.

After reading, and re-reading your comments, I'm going to check Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World out from the library first. I struggle a lot with ambiguity in life, and I have little passion for it in literature, therefore I won' t start with Kafka on the Shore. However, if I find even a sliver of the passion you have for Murakami's literature, I'm sure reading that won't be far behind.

I look forward to picking your brain more as we travel through our challenges together in 2016!

Jackie B. wrote: "Wow! That's quite a series of reviews you provided for me, Paul. I greatly appreciate it. It's nice to see you've taken this so seriously.

Thanks for checking my TBR list! I appreciate the initia..."

No problem Jackie, glad I could be of help. :) I don't think I could ever call anything I write clear or articulate, but saying that I'm not exactly going to disagree with you about it or anything. ;)

(I should probably mention that I didn't look through your entire to-read shelf, I just searched for "haruki murakami" to see what sort of ideas you'd had beforehand and went from there. If I'd done otherwise I might have been able to work things out a bit further, but as it is it seems like I don't actually need to do that, heh. ;))

Yeah, now that I know a bit more about your tastes and the like Hard-Boiled Wonderland would definitely be a great place to start - probably the best, at least in my experience. As far as I can remember (although it's been quite a while) it's reasonably on the smaller scale when it comes to ambiguity, whereas Kafka would certainly be on the other end of that. It's not that Hard-Boiled doesn't have ambiguity, but it's the kind of ambiguity that I don't think should cause too many problems when it comes down to it. Hopefully. (And I've probably said something like this already, but Norwegian Wood and Colorless would be right there with Hard-Boiled on the smaller scale [to an even greater extent I'd say], Wind-Up and 1Q84 would be out by Kafka, and After Dark is arguably in the middle somewhere. So I wouldn't advocate going for Kafka right after Hard-Boiled, it's something that I'd kick down the road a bit in favour of others of his that aren't nearly as ambiguous.)

I welcome and look forward to the brain picking; bring it on. ;) You'll have to let me know how you get on with Hard-Boiled, for one. :)

I feel like we need an ambiguity infographic chart for these books now. The image in my mind is beautiful and lovely. :)

(P.S. I had no idea there were postmodern Doctor Who blogs. But, that makes sense. Wibbly wobbly and all that.)

Three things I'm just going to put here for musing's sake.

First, I shuffled my reading lists for next year last night, so it's pretty much official now. :) I didn't really look at what I got because I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I'm still excited. Reserving the right to skip over things I'm not quite interested in reading right then for later though. ;) EDIT: I'm going back to the drawing board for one of them, because I keep finding interesting Irish books in the library. There are worse problems admittedly ;)

Second, what I'm reckoning is that I'm going to try to put down to every book I read when I mention it here is the types of challenges it might work well for. No idea if this is sustainable, mind, but I feel it's worth doing in case someone who needs help happens to come wandering in here some day. :)

Finally, that postmodern Doctor Who blog I mentioned if people are interested. Fair warning though: it can get pretty charged and very confusing at times, and it's not always easy to see where it's coming from (or going), so it might not necessarily be for everyone. Nevertheless, it's strange and hilarious and mind-expanding and passionate and joyous, and it might just change your world. http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/a...

Thanks for sharing the blog, Paul!

As far as point two is concerned, it's a worthy challenge. I try to keep up with my reading here, but I've found that in the end it's easier for me to just have one challenge page than both a challenge page and a corner. I actually use Microsoft OneNote to keep track of everything. That's served me pretty well in the past, and it's easy for me to see if I have everything posted into Goodreads. I also struggle with the mobile version of Goodreads (phone or tablet), so I find OneNote an easier tool.

No matter what you use, people will love to see what you are reading! Keep writing and keep in touch; this is how we learn more and more about the written word.

I think I might have ended up confusing matters - what I meant more was that every time I read something next year, while I'll at the very least leave some sort of comment saying something along the lines of "I read this, it was good/not so good/ great because [maybe] X, Y, Z, how many ever stars I want to give it" even if I'm not able to leave a proper review because of time pressures or whatsoever, but that I also want to mention "oh hey, this is set on an island" or "this involves mental illness" etc. just in case anyone's particularly struggling to fit those categories. Thinking about it again though I have the sense that I don't need to do that, so I probably won't as it'd just be redundant.

This year I just had the one thread, but that was because I didn't really realise how doing threads worked so I put everything into my corner. Next year I figure I'm going to be using this thread far more than I do my corner, which is partly because I don't expect to do much in the way of quarterly or monthly challenges (though I might). What I'll be doing there really is going in every so often and striking things out and updating things when I do it in the challenge threads, whenever I get to be able to do that. Then again once I get down to it it might end up panning out in a completely different way, so I think I might just wait and see until I get there. I still expect my corner's very much going to be the less-used one of the two though.

That all being said, I'm definitely going to keep writing and keep in touch, as you put it. Even if I'm not sure how much I'm actually going to contribute to the further learning of the written word in doing so, that's pretty much a certainty. :)

Book #1
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1) by L. Frank Baum
Finished 2nd January 2016
117 pages

Why I read it: For some reason I thought it would be a really good idea to buy (well, I say buy, but they were free) all the Oz books L. Frank Baum actually wrote and then finally read them all this year. Yes, all of them. Even the not-so-good ones, and the ones where Baum begs for release to no avail.

Rating: 3/5

First thing’s first; it’s not as good as the film. The 1939 one, that is (sorry). Granted, I haven’t seen the film properly in years, but I did manage to catch a glimpse of it this past Christmas and even in that glimpse I could tell. The film has the songs for instance, and it displays its sets and matte paintings (I think?) with a sort of charming unabashedness that gives the whole thing a nice picturebook sort of feel. Plus the Wicked Witch of the West gets more to do in the film and she’s properly menacing too. Nothing like that in the book.

What about the book though? Well, it’s fine I suppose. L. Frank Baum is a perfectly decent writer who doesn’t pick particularly terrible words and generally has a nice sense of pace. Apart from the ending of course where he does admittedly generate a bunch of intriguing ideas (china villages and men with stretchy necks or something, to name two), except that those ideas don’t really get much time to develop themselves so instead they come across more as attempts to make the book longer and succeeding in the process, and it’s a tad dispiriting. No wonder the film cut them out.
But even apart from that nothing much particularly transcends the page, definitely not like it did the first time I read it, never mind like it does in the film. Not the characters, not the actual events. It’s hard to say that there’s really that much of a plot going on here. I mean, sure, there is that idea that that one history teacher came up with that this is all just an analogy for the Gold Standard, and that would certainly make the book more interesting if I could actually believe it. (Although saying this it was a lot of fun this time to see just how much of a butt the Wizard actually is.) It all just sort of bumbles along nicely and pleasantly but just not very excitingly. To be fair, part of this could be down to having read it before – figuring out that our heroes have what they needed with them all the time in the middle of the book (possibly by myself, but it seems like Baum was intending his readers to go ahead and do that?) isn’t fun anymore, it’s just annoying. And even if it’s enjoyable in a sort of morbid way to witness the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman murder some animals really quickly and abruptly, it’s not unexpected anymore. So the thrill is gone.

(That being said, the Tin Woodman reminds me bizarrely of a 60s Cyberman now. So that’s fun.)

To wrap up then, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is reasonably decent, but I can’t say that it’s particularly worth it. Granted, it’s not going to be a massive time sink or anything – I read it in something like 50 minutes. There are better ways to spend those 50 minutes though. Like watching half the film! Or just reading something else.

Categories: Fantasy, novel, short, children's, USA, 1900s, male, white, January, familiar, reread, series, ebook,
Challenges: None as yet, though possibly O for A to Z Character Edition, Popsugar Challenge - book under 150 pages.

Congrats on finishing your first book!

Thank you Megan! :)

Book #2
The Marvelous Land of Oz (Oz, #2) by L. Frank Baum
Finished 2nd January 2016
82 pages

Why I read it: Still Oz.

Rating: 4/5

Now this is much better. Why, though? Well, I’d be the first to admit that I’m never going to be the person who’s going to successfully psychoanalyse an American children’s book author from the 1900s, but if you poke around in the backstory you (I think) can find things about Baum essentially wanting to create the Great American Fairy Tale of His Time and wanting to take some of the horror out of his predecessors’ work. So maybe he was affected by that lofty, serious goal he was setting himself.

Here though, poking around again will find that he wrote this book because so many children wrote in and asked him what happened next, enough that he decided to go ahead and do that. Now that could have led to him maybe not putting a whole lot of work in and figuring that anything would do, but instead it seems to have relieved him, allowed him to lighten up.

Because this? This is fricking ridiculous, but in the best possible way. There’s a bit of culture shock (maybe, and if there is there isn’t actually that much) at the start when landed with a completely different person in a seemingly different place, and yes it’s always kind of weird that Jack Pumpkinhead keeps referring to Tip as his father, but apart from that it’s just this rip-roaring bizarre almost anarchic adventure as Tip and his strange collection of friends (some new, some old, some he finds along the way and some he takes with him) tear back and forth across Oz as Tip essentially tries to find himself. And what this allows Baum to do is to crack some monumentally awful puns that still manage to be legitimately funny and entertaining, so maybe they’re not actually that bad, plus throw out some perfectly pleasant bon mots and koans, all while he’s getting his characters to McGyver flying creatures out of random palatial instruments and bicker with each other about how intelligent they are and how they might die any minute. (Bonus points too for the Woggle-Bug, who becomes intelligent through deciding to live under a school and then grows in size by being magnified by the teacher so that the students can see him in a pleasingly alchemical plot turn.)

There is, admittedly, a rather odd turn halfway through the book where the ruler of the Emerald City gets overthrown by the women of the city and it’s never quite sure whether Baum is satirising feminism or not. Then again the man was apparently a legitimate suffragist in real life and there is this brilliant line in there too where a man is complaining about how hard housework is and he’s essentially faced with the question that it surely must have been hard on his wife too. It’s sort of buried there as a squib that never really goes off though, so I’m not sure.

In any case that one point doesn’t actually damage the book that much, it just drags it down a bit. Besides, I can’t hate the book when it has the Tin Woodman semi-inexplicably deciding to call himself Nick Chopper now, and then the book acts like he was called Nick Chopper the whole time. Er, no he wasn’t. So, all in all, an absolute cracking time (you could even call it marvelous) – so much so that if you were sufficiently interested in reading the entire Oz series like I kind of am, I’d recommend you just skip the first book, watch the film instead, then read this and just figure that all the fiddly bits that don’t join up exactly don’t really matter. I have no idea if this would actually work though.

Categories: Fantasy, novel, short, children's, USA, 1900s, male, white, January, familiar, series, ebook.
Challenges: ?

Book #3
The Woggle-Bug Book (Oz, #2.5) by L. Frank Baum
Finished 2nd January 2016
28 pages

Why I read it: More Oz, even though I could probably have skipped this one without missing anything.

Rating: 2/5

There’s not much to really say about this book, which makes sense because there’s not actually a whole lot to this book. It is a tiny bit odd at the start when the Woggle-Bug is inexplicably in America now, though apparently when I looked into it more this all made sense at the time as this is technically a spinoff to a bunch of comic strips that I never read and never thought to find, wherein a bunch of Oz characters go to America for a bit. The upshot of this is that this book can be safely skipped without really missing anything, though you do get over that aspect eventually. Or at least I did. Then I started overly thinking about “America”, and trying to rewrite the lyrics so that they’d make sense as sung by the Oz characters (““Ozma, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping”? Chopper wouldn’t work because I don’t think he sleeps, plus they wouldn’t call him Chopper anyway. Yes, I went down that rabbit hole way too far) and wondering whether the Woggle-Bug would prefer the Simon and Garfunkel version over the Yes version or not. I feel he’d like both at different times. Like me really.

Anyway! There’s really not much to this book, like I said. The Woggle-Bug becomes semi-inexplicably obsessed with a dress and chases it across town, seemingly unable to differentiate it from its owner and getting in to all sorts of “hilarious” hijinks along the way. I say “hilarious” because Baum dabbles in what Wikipedia semi-euphemistically calls ethnic humour, which was supposedly really big back in the day. Now it’s just kind of awkward at best to have the Woggle-Bug bump into angry black women and murderous Chinamen, with their dialects “faithfully” transcribed and all. Baum even takes mild potshots at the Swedish for some reason, though I’m sure there must have been one. (As in, the same way all of these kinds of things have a reason, even if it doesn’t make for a good justification or something.)

It’s a small shame really because the Woggle-Bug wasn’t that annoying in The Marvelous Land of Oz, although I was always a bit uneasy with him because I was under the impression that he was the racist caricature and then it turned out he wasn’t. Plus that he’s not as interesting here as he was there, and even there he wasn’t all that interesting. Not to mention that Baum does crack some more of those awful yet entertaining puns here too.

You know what this book reminds me of, actually? Eric. It reminds me of Eric. And frankly that’s not the best of things, even though I don’t even hate Eric or anything and acknowledge that I might like it less than it deserves. In any case I don’t recommend Eric, or The Woggle-Bug Book, though I don’t advocate like banning them or anything. It may not be the 1900s anymore (or is it), but at the very least it’s interesting to look back at these things and go “huh, so that’s kind of what the world was like back then”. Or something. Frankly I’d rather just talk about “America” instead. (I prefer the Simon and Garfunkel version, for what it’s worth. The Yes version’s just too long even if it’s got a bunch of nice passages and Jon Anderson didn’t forget how to sing for it. Maybe the single edit is better though....)

Categories: Fantasy, novel, short, children's, USA, 1900s, male, white, January, familiar, series, ebook.
Challenges: ?

Wow! You are just crushing these Oz books. Do you plan on reading all of them no matter what? I've found that sometimes when I embark on a crazy scheme like this I tend to read all the good books first and then give up once I realize all the good ones are gone. Oops.

I wish you success! That's a lot of L. Frank Baum. :)

Jackie B. wrote: "Wow! You are just crushing these Oz books. Do you plan on reading all of them no matter what? I've found that sometimes when I embark on a crazy scheme like this I tend to read all the good books f..."

Thank you! :)

Well, to be fair, it could be a whole lot worse. When I said all the ones he actually wrote I did mean the ones he actually wrote. Seriously, there are like at least twenty thirty more that other people wrote after he died because apparently people liked Oz that much. But it feels oddly right to drop out of the series when Baum did, and besides they stop being in the public domain soon afterwards, so that helps too.

As to whether I can do it? Probably. Maybe? It's not like these are the only books I'm reading, and it's not like it's taking me all that much time to do so. I knocked both Wonderful and Marvelous out in under an hour each, and one of my ideas for the year is to use the weekends when I'm theoretically freer to slice through some of the shorter books I have lying around. Then again I'm going back to college next week so I'll not sure how that'll affect things. But we'll see. :) (Plus, if some of them aren't all that good, they're hardly the only not all that good books I've ever read. ;))

Also I'm reading The Martian and All the Light We Cannot See, and when I finish them within the week I'll be moving on to The Shape of Water and A Brief History of Seven Killings respectively, and I'm still intermittently reading Men at Arms, and I started rereading The Kite Runner this morning partly to lead into A Thousand Splendid Suns . . . so like I said I really do have more going on than just Oz. ;)

Wow. That's a lot of books to have going all at once. I typically have three (Audiobook, ebook, physical book), and even I find that a bit overwhelming sometimes. But, it's good to know you aren't drowning in Baum.

My general way of doing things (which I'll more than likely be continuing with this year, then again I only really picked it up last year) seems to be more two-and-a-half than anything else. One ebook, one library book, and something else that I'll have going on intermittently as well. I also read something short every Saturday too, and like I've said I plan on doing that this year as well. Whenever I do something on top of that it's really only because I have enough free time to feel it's doable. In any case, I'm definitely not going to be drowning in Baum any time soon, as you put it.

Book #4
The Martian by Andy Weir
Finished 5th January 2016
369 pages

Why I read it: When people I know and more or less trust talked this up as the great new wacky hard science-fiction book of our time, I took note.

Rating: 4/5

I do like this book, though probably not as much as a lot of people do. It’s generally never not reasonably entertaining at least, and while there is a lot of science in there, it’s pretty much nearly all explained fairly comprehensibly and comprehensively while it’s been done. Frankly, the biggest problem with it is probably me – it would all make sense at the time, then a few sentences later it would just sort of slip off me and I’d be thinking “hmm...”. Then the other biggest problem is that sometimes the science becomes too overwhelming, but not in an “argh, I don’t understand!” way. More in an “ergh, there’s too much science concentrated into this small neighbourhood of words, and the whole thing’s become pretty procedural and “I did this, then I did this, then etc.” and I don’t know whether I like that” way. With all that said, for the most part there is something genuinely interesting and riveting about its meticulous methodical way of doing things and how it functions as much as an intellectual exercise as anything else, although Weir does like I’ve said manage for the most part to keep it involving. You can tell the man’s done his work for this, and while that doesn’t inherently make the book better or anything, it made it better for me.

On to Mark. Mark’s complicated, although in a sense he’s not all that complicated at all. I’ll admit that it took me a while to properly get to grips to him and for him to properly work for me. For the start of the book up to a certain point my feeling on him was that he was kind of an ass. An entertaining ass, admittedly, and hardly a particularly poorly-written character, but still an ass. To the extent that when you hear later on that he was chosen partly because he made the crew gel better and he’s always have a quip or a gag on hand I found it actively difficult to believe. He did grow on me in a sense even if he never really changes, which to be fair I understand. His “yay”’s never quite work, not even in a “he should be more serious” thinking, more in a “yay doesn’t fit with the rest of his style of speaking” thinking, but apart from that it’s not that difficult to interpret his personality as a coping mechanism, that he’s staving off negative thoughts and fears of disaster by putting up with it and getting through it and fending it off with humour and complaining about disco and pondering the ineffable mysteries of Aquaman. Not to mention that when things do turn bad, he generally tones down the humour, properly freaks out and worries at times, and then manages to bring himself down and figure out just what he’s going to do.

With all that in mind, the switches to different perspectives do come as a nice break. I’m not sure whether the sense of hurry and worry is properly conveyed enough throughout for my liking (same with the characterisation of everyone that isn’t Mark), and sometimes the regular injections of disaster do get a bit frustrating, but while it’s initially jarring and in cases never really stops being jarring (there’s the occasional third person past section focussing on Mark for some reason I could never quite understand) it does feel like it all necessarily justifies its existence. If nothing else it conveys the sense even more that Andy Weir does know what he’s doing and put in the work to make this all sufficiently credible. And you know what? Sometimes it was pretty fun and clenching to see the way everything intersected and how it all works out when Mark/NASA know something and the other group doesn’t.

All in all, though, it works. It really works. The book starts out good and for the most part it genuinely gets better as it goes along. The characters sort of impress themselves more and more on your mind – Mark, his Aries crew, and NASA a whole – as you go, and somehow they make it so that you care. Or at least I cared. I genuinely cared. When (view spoiler)[Lewis and the crew decide to take the illegal manoeuvre to save Mark (and Lewis transcends her guilt in a sense), it comes across as emerging from who they are and not just from authorial fiat. Same with Johanssen to an extent worrying about being the last one left alive. And when the rescue comes off and Beck doesn’t have to overly risk himself that much (though he does) and the book ends albeit a tad abruptly with Mark saying that while he’s all sweaty and smelly and he’s got a long wait to go until he gets back to Earth that it’s still the happiest day of his life, it works. It feels warranted, like it’s a genuine victory. Because for me it was. (hide spoiler)] So, yes, while I would certainly quibble with certain aspects of this book here and there, I am definitely happy I read this. You go Andy Weir, you (view spoiler)[steely-eyed missile man (hide spoiler)].

Categories: Science/speculative fiction, medium, novel, adults, 2010s, January, male, white, USA, standalone, ebook, new.
Challenges: Group Reads, A to Z character (K), recommended by reading challengers.

Paul wrote: "

Book #4
The Martian by Andy Weir
Finished 5th January 2016
369 pages

Why I read it: When people I know and more or less trust talked this up as the great new wack..."

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Have you seen the movie yet? If not, I definitely recommend it!

Megan said: I'm glad you enjoyed it. Have you seen the movie yet? If not, I definitely recommend it!

I haven't seen it, but that's less out of a sense of "I have to read the book first", and more out of a sense of I don't get to see films very often at all, so for the most part I barely even think about them. I've heard very good things about it though!

Book #5
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Finished 6th January 2016
531 pages

Why I read it: It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which for the most part was reason enough.

Rating: 4/5

This is a difficult book for me to properly think about. It’s very good, yes, but for a while I wasn’t sure it was going to be that way. This book switches between its two main characters Marie-Laure and Werner fairly regularly for the most part, adding in other characters’ viewpoints here and there as well, but it also switches back and forth in time as well, occasionally checking in on the presumably climactic invasion of St Malo but mostly dealing with the characters’ lives leading up to that event. The thing is, the invasion chapters kind of threw me at the beginning because they really don’t allow much in the way of context, and I’m not sure whether this was me or an active problem with the book, but I never felt particularly suspenseful or enlightened I suppose is a good word for it with them either, and that was a feeling that mostly continued with those types of chapters. It was occasionally intriguing to see signs of it all coming together here and there, though not as intriguing as presumably intended.

It’s also a fairly chilly-seeming, distant book, at least for a time, and I wasn’t sure I liked that. Marie-Laure and Werner don’t initially come across as the most empathetic receiving or even really characterised that much, and Doerr’s general style bears that out to an extent as well. It does get better though. Even though I’m not sure that was me or the book or both, I did manage to get progressively more acclimatised and accustomed to it. It might be like the waves Werner and Marie-Laure (in their own way – that is a thing I did like, though maybe not as much as I would have liked to, though I could arguably have paid more attention to it, that there were that many similarities in personality between them, even though they were ostensibly and in actuality on opposite sides of the war) are both obsessed with it. That even if your search for character bounces off the characters, you can still tell things from how it bounces. Perhaps what happened during reading this book was that I had to train myself to properly read this book, to let the book inhabit me and me inhabit it, and though I’m still not sure I did it sufficiently, I was in fact able to eventually properly reach into those hearts and minds.

It helps that it’s gorgeously written too though. Granted, I feel like Doerr could have stood to pare down some of his sentences (seriously, ten years’ writing and you maybe couldn’t have spared time for another draft or another edit check? Then again I’m not even an author, never mind a Pulitzer Prize winning, bestselling author) because they were a tad long at times and it disrupted the flow of the words. Other than that it was all glorious glittering and swirling metaphors and brief barks of phrases and the like, I think it worked well. And though I’m not blind and don’t know anyone who is blind, I get the sense that Doerr did a fantastic job of writing Marie-Laure’s internal thought process as she walks through the world forced to rely on her four remaining senses. It was kind of brilliantly subtle too, the kind of thing that you don’t realise until it sneaks up on you and you realise that, yes, there’s noticeably more attention being paid to sounds and smells here. It worked wonders, is what I’m saying. (I should also point out here that while there is some whimsy and coincidence going on here, there isn’t that much. It’s thankfully nowhere near as pronounced as it could have been, and Doerr somehow finds a way to make it work. Possibly part of it’s down to that sort of thing being part and parcel of narrative regardless, but so it goes.)

I find myself not talking about Werner very much, and I’m not sure why. His half worked well too, but I get the sense that everything I could really say about it I’m either going to say below, or say up above. It does feel oddly right to compare this book to The Goldfinch though, even if they only really match up superficially. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, long (possibly too long, though I wouldn’t agree), teenage protagonists, took ten years to write (and you can imagine those ten years too, full of research and agonising and deliberating over the right sentence, the right word, the right detail), they arguably don’t reveal their point until the end, but so forth. But frankly, kind of unlike The Goldfinch, All the Light We Cannot See technically has its point threaded in all the way through the book. It may come across as just pure blurby puff, but this book really is about all the ways people try to be good to each other. Parents to children, friends to friends, colleagues to colleagues, superiors to underlings, neighbours to each other. It’s about the banality of war, done in a way that could have been more subtle but is still reasonably good about it. (There are some reasonable Nazis, but a lot of them ... aren’t. Then again, how reasonable were the Nazis anyway?) How it lures people into ideologies and how it turns them into people you don’t recognise any more. How it takes people away from each other but gives then new ones in return. How it denies and grants opportunities and lets you do what you’ve always wanted to do, but did you really want to do it like this. About the joys to be found in the midst of tragedy, and the ways we try to stem the tides. I don’t know, I’m just sort of tossing around sentence fragments here. I’ve never fought in a war, admittedly. But I don’t want to. Surely that’s a perfectly acceptable position too, no? (OK, to be fair, none of this exactly makes the book inherently better, but I think Doerr does well enough with them that it does do that.)

In any case, All the Light We Cannot See is good. It’s more than good. Maybe even great. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m open to getting there. I may just have to give it another opportunity to bed in. Perhaps one day.

Categories: Historical, large, novel, male, white, USA, 2010s, January, new, physical, standalone, adults.
Challenges: A to Z Character (W), Recommended by Reading Challengers, Group Reads.

Book #6
The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1) by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli)
Finished 7th January 2016
244p

Why I read it: Montalbano had sort of been flashing through and back my mind thanks to Kindle deals and curiosity about TV shows, so when the first six or so showed up as a Kindle Daily Deal once I decided to bite and get two of them.

Rating: 3/5

I don't think I really have much to say about this one (for a change). It's a perfectly reasonable slice of Sicilian detect-em-up that is fairly nicely paced and has a collection of characters you do feel like will go on to bigger and better things eventually, but as of right now they don't really hop off the page. Not even Montalbano really. Montalbano's odd, I'm not sure what to make of him. Although part of me does like his meticulous doggedness and the way he has leftist newscasters for friends.

As well as that, I can't help feeling that more could have been done with the setting. Again, probably setup as well for bigger and better times (and part of me does like that it's just not the Big Case that's going on in The Shape of Water, that Montalbano and his crew have other concerns as well - although this is most certainly a preserve of the genre in general, I remember reading A Is for Alibi last year and that was more of an A case, B case formula. Here it's more like the one case and smaller hints of everyday police work dotted in here and there, although admittedly Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator and Montalbano ... isn't. I feel like it was the same with Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series though), but it felt like there were hints of satirical potential dropped in around the place that never felt like anything more than hints. So while there is some texture, I'd have preferred more. The ending also kind of peters out too, though I'll happily admit that there were layers that I didn't manage to pick up on (view spoiler)[(Montalbano left the gun lying around for Giorgio to get revenge on his uncle. I think) (hide spoiler)]. Ultimately I'm somewhat nonplussed on continuing this series, though I realise it's not best practice to necessarily judge on one book. Plus I still have The Terracotta Dog on hand, and I'll probably read that some time soon. At the same time while there are other Montalbano books at my library I'm not going to be inclined to pick them up for quite a while yet, if ever. (I should really also mention at this point that I used to be far more into detect-em-up books than I am now, but it's been a few years since then.)

Categories: Mystery/thriller, small, novel, male, white, Italy/France, 1990s, January, new, ebook, series, adults.
Challenges: Around the World, Every Year

Book #7
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Finished 8th January 2016
324p

Why I read it: I felt it was time to give it a reappraisal.

Rating: 3/5

I find myself somewhat down on this book in hindsight, although that’s admittedly being kind of harsh. It’s written perfectly well, if maybe a little too unadornedly for my liking. The pacing is fine, the characterisation is generally decent (Hosseini I like to think for the most part does an extremely good job of making his almost entirely Afghan cast come across as being actual characters and people, bridging the gap and breaking the divide between “us” and “them” without them seeing like mere talking points and worthy sketches), and you can palpably sense his passion, the feeling that this was a labour of love for him, almost a crusade. And I still like it, I would still recommend it, although I don’t like it quite as much as I used to and I still believe A Thousand Splendid Suns is the better book.

The problem is Amir, mostly. And the thing is, to an extent I feel like it’s a deliberate problem, one that Hosseini set out to plant in the reader’s mind. The thing is, Amir is complicated. He was always looking for love from his father, he did a terrible thing that he never took back and (view spoiler)[can never really get the chance to take back now Hassan’s dead (hide spoiler)], he mistreated his best friend (and seemingly one of the only friends he ever had), and he is wracked with guilt over it, and he’s not always that great a guy. He’s complicated. It’s just that he’s not always complicated in a way that’s particularly enjoyable to read about. He more than occasionally comes across as self-important in his remonstrations (it’s not all about you, man, what about Hassan? Is what I say to him). I’m still not entirely sure why he married his wife or why she married him, although to be fair they do seem to get on wonderfully. And maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong sites and letting them overly effect my thinking, Hassan does come across a tad too wonderfully and magical in hindsight and even straight up sight, falling into an awkward trope or two, although to be fair this is extremely understandable considering the book’s narrated by his old friend who hasn’t seen him in years and realises that he didn’t know what he had while he had it. It’s just a bit strange, is all.

Other than that? I felt more at a remove from Kabul than I should have once Amir returned, but Hosseini does do a properly good job of evoking it as Amir sees it after the Taliban came in, especially when you think back to how Kabul was when Amir grew up there (then again, as is mentioned, you do wonder as to what extent Amir properly lived there or whether he really was a tourist after all), and considering how it’s revealed that Afghanistan generally seemed to genuinely welcome the Taliban. It also allows Hosseini to further develop Afghanistan as being populated by actual people as opposed to ... I suppose extras in news broadcasts is a good way of putting it. Maybe.

In the end, though, Amir does manage to turn it around. Not going to spoiler much, but he does return to Kabul. He does face his demons, and with a little (symbolic) help, he exorcises them. He does the right thing, arguably does what he couldn’t and didn’t do so long ago. He learns more about his past, and he’s able to contextualise it. He really does redeem himself, and opens himself up for more redemption, becoming properly sympathetic. On the whole, the book works. It really does work. It just doesn’t quite work as well for me now as it used to, albeit for reasons that mean it might work perfectly fine for people who aren’t me.

Categories: General/historical/coming of age, medium, novel, male, POC, Afghanistan/USA, 2000s, January, reread, familiar, physical, standalone, adults.
Challenges: Around the World, A to Z Character Edition (H)

I look forward to hearing if and how your opinion changed on The Kite Runner after a re-read.

Jackie B. wrote: "I look forward to hearing if and how your opinion changed on The Kite Runner after a re-read."

I feel like I did, though it's hard to say how considering it's been so long since I read it last. Like I mentioned in another thread, my hope is to be able to start writing reviews for 2016 in the next few days. Life's just been getting in the way, plus I've had tons of reviews for 2015 to push through as well. Should probably be done with those by tomorrow though.

Book #8
Ozma of Oz (Oz, #3) by L. Frank Baum
Finished 9th January 2016
225p

Why I read it: Even more Oz.

Rating: 3/5

You see, one problem with this book is that Ozma isn’t really in it that much. And when she is, she’s not particularly that interesting, and she’s definitely not the main character. Oh well. (Part of me likes that she just bumps into Dorothy while doing something else though. Part of me thinks it's just a tad too contrived. Hmmm.)

On the plus side, Dorothy’s back! And so is the Cowardly Lion! And they brought along new, mildly interesting friends. Billina works fairly well even though I don’t know how I really feel about Dorothy changing her name from Bill (then again it was the 1900s), the Hungry Tiger is just sort of there and odd, and the fact that I forgot entirely about Tick-Tock should tell me something, but I’ve no idea what that is.

In any case, this is sadly a return to the tone of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and not The Marvelous Land of Oz, which is to say it’s pretty dry and perfectly pleasantly intent on just going where it’s going to go. We’re not in Oz this time, we’re in a different country entirely. Which is interesting. Unfortunately Ev itself isn’t that interesting, though now that I remember Princess Langwidere the bizarrely familiar many-headed disinterested ruler it’s not that uninteresting. I suppose the Nome King does mostly work at a notch or two above generic villain, although the man has got to stop having the most blatantly expository conversations with his subordinates where hens can hear him. (Is this where Terry Pratchett got the Nomes from though? That is fairly interesting admittedly.) There’s also a bunch of weird satire thrown in here about the inefficiencies and ludicrousness of armies apparently. Some of it was funny, more of it was just strange.

Then there were the Wheelers and their food trees. To be honest they were a bridge too far in strangeness for me. That the Nomes are utterly horrified by eggs more or less makes up for that though. Shame that the ending’s so abrupt I genuinely wondered if there was something missing in my copy, plus that the back half’s generally a bit dull and all about our heroes repetitively playing the Nome King’s unfair games. Eh, there really isn’t a whole lot more I can say about this honestly. It’s grand, and I don’t exactly regret reading it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Categories: Fantasy, short, novel, male, white, USA, 1900s, January, familiar, ebook, series, children.
Challenges: A to Z Character Edition (O)

Book #9
Bunreacht na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland by a load of civil servants and politicians
Finished 9th January 2016
235p

Why I read it: It had been at the back of my mind for years that I should actually read our Constitution some day, but I never got around to it and it slid out of my head. Until recently when I figured that its being the 100th anniversary year of the Easter Rising meant it was the perfect time to do it. Thankfully the Government has it free to download off one of their websites so there was no problem there.

Rating: 4/5

Even if it feels more than slightly ridiculous to review any Constitution, never mind my own (being that I’m not a lawyer, a law student, or someone who has ever properly read legal documents at all before), I still reckon that this is worth doing.

So. The Constitution of Ireland. I’ll admit I’m biased, but I feel like it’s a fairly good constitution. It works, for the most part. Any failings associated I’d be willing to put my neck out and say they emerge out of its interpretation and implementation more than anything else. I’m going to assume that most of what’s necessary is in there. The name, the flag, the languages, enshrining equal rights for all citizens, how the Government and the President work, all those things. Plus I’m not going to complain about how it’s free in its most recent edition on a Government website in both Irish and English, even if I didn’t read the Irish part because my Irish isn’t all that great. (The edition I read is an improvement over the one or so before that, frankly.)

Are there problems? Yes. Are they big problems? It’s hard to be sure. It’s a fairly ... religious Constitution, even if it’s less religious than it used to be. It is still a tad odd that it seemingly enshrines religious freedom not because the people who made it were decent people (although they supposedly were in their own way), but instead because God is apparently just that awesome. Thankfully the whole interpretation thing is reasonably flexible now and people don’t have to swear oaths if they really don’t want to or think there’s no point. I think, I’m not certain. To be honest, it’s oddly comforting in a way, because, yes, we really were (and to an extent are) that religious and suffused in Catholicism, for better and worse. Definitely for better and worse. Then there’s that whole Eighth Amendment, which when I saw it properly written down does come across as properly awkward and hand-washing. Hmmm.

It’s also somewhat essentialist, what with that whole use of “he” everywhere and not really specifically mentioning women that much apart from that special position in the home sort of thing, and you kind of hope that can be changed someday to reflect that it’s not just women who stay at home anymore but that even if they do and don’t want to work then that is in its way admirable too. I don’t know, I just like the idea of people being able to decide that they want to do something and that being a reasonable possibility, gender stereotypes be darned. None of this probably makes sense, and I really wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully though the interpretation is (again) flexible enough that women are actually allowed to hold positions of power in this country. Not to mention that if we wanted to do something about it we’d have to hold a referendum for what’s essentially housekeeping, and that would allow butts and somewhat annoying moderates to surface and moan about things. That’s just not something I’m interested in, be as it may. m interested in, be as it may. (I'll also happily admit though that that one seemingly dismissive thing I saw on TVTropes once is true and that that special position part really does seem to enshrine child benefit. So if that could be kept in that'd be nice as well.)

The other thing about this is it’s not that easy to read either. I’m aware that it’s the most important legal document to our country, and that it’s vital that it be rigorous and as unambiguous as possible, but if the Constitution is really for the people you’d think that that would mean the vast majority would be able to understand it. Then again all that really happens is that the occasional paragraph gets convoluted and you have to read it a few times to figure out what’s going on and then it’s still not clear. Or that some of the words are fairly archaic. Or – the best part – is when it uses certain phrases without telling you what they are, meaning you have to wait until later on to find out what’s actually going on because the only references to where things are is at the back of the book.

If nothing else, it’s a Constitution that works for the most part, for a country that more or less works. That could work a heck of a lot worse, but it could also work a whole lot better. Still though, even if it’s nearly 80 years old that doesn’t mean all of it is. There’s always a hope of redemption, a hope of making things better. Just like we had last year. (Yes, I went there.) Material social progress, I suppose you could call it. But that would just be weird.

(Admittedly it’s still pretty awkward in hindsight when the country votes no to a referendum, then it gets put to us again and we say yes. Not to mention how long it took to get divorce in and the death penalty out. Even if that last one was seemingly symbolic as much as anything else.)

Categories: Other nonfiction, short, nonfiction, male (presumably), white (definitely), Ireland, 1930s, January, new, ebook, standalone, adults.
Challenges: Non-fiction I own, Léamh go Brách.

I'm impressed by your thread, you must be disciplined to organise your reads months in advance. I like your idea of weekend wonders too.

Good luck with your challenge!

Kiwi wrote: "I'm impressed by your thread, you must be disciplined to organise your reads months in advance. I like your idea of weekend wonders too.

Good luck with your challenge!"

Thank you Kiwi! Good luck to you as well! :)

Ha, I don't know if I'd call it discipline myself, if anything it's discipline born out of indiscipline ;) All I really did for the most part was look through my to-read-own shelf by ascending page number and go "hmmm" a lot, figuring that seeing as I'll theoretically have more free time at weekends than normal I can use that to put away shorter books I've been neglecting. Everything else is really just challenges that I happen to have suitable books lying around for, or things that I expect will be happening around that time. It's really not that organised, is what I'm saying ;)

Good luck getting to writing your reviews! That's something I tend to struggle with sometimes. I have to set aside time to do that on a regular basis to get anything written. But I am so happy when I'm done!

Jackie B. wrote: "Good luck getting to writing your reviews! That's something I tend to struggle with sometimes. I have to set aside time to do that on a regular basis to get anything written. But I am so happy when..."

Thank you! It helps that I've got sentence fragments and drafts drifting through my head already, but yeah, it's all about time and a bit of willpower really. That being said I'm pretty sure I won't have to go into college until late tomorrow and Thursday, so I may be able to start then. :)

Book #10
The Girl Who Would Be King by Kelly Thompson
Finished 13th January 2016
368p

Why I read it: Mark Oshiro is supposedly going to read it at some point, and it sounded sufficiently interesting.

Rating: 3/5

[this review contains significant spoilers for The Girl Who Would Be King, especially for the ending.]

Harshing on this book feels kind of like being mean to a puppy, but yet I feel it has to be done. To an extent. I mean, it’s not like I hate this book, and even if I liked it less I feel like I’d still find a lot to admire about it. A first-time novelist writing about women and superpowers and women with superpowers and shopping her young adult novel around and being constantly being rejected because publishers don’t know how to market it so she had to self-publish it, apparently meeting with a fair amount of success? That’s like the definition of a feel-good story! At least, for me it is.

The problem is now I can’t help but wonder that publishers rejected it not just because they didn’t know how to market it, but also because it’s not actually that good. To be fair, it’s not a complete disaster. It’s not even that much of a disaster. Hence the 3. For the most part, when you strip the superhero trappings (which is pretty easy to do, oddly), this is a tale of two young, confused, women who have fallen out of the world and that are simply trying to find their place in it, with various degrees of failure and means of going about it. Granted, this isn’t automatic gold, and neither is it particularly original, but I like to think that side of things was etched out fairly well in this book. I also can’t say that I had very many problems with the characterisation, either, even if I know that’s a problem people had with this. OK, yes, maybe the insta-love was a bit too insta, although it generally worked for me. Yes, maybe we could have done with more characterisation overall, but for me I feel like we got enough to work with (although that could be overreaching and pulling out that “two young, confused women trying to find their place in the world” thread I just talked about). Sometimes supporting characters would disappear for several dozens of pages though, which is understandable, but it’s still weird. The characters, though? For the most part, I enjoyed reading about them, reading about Lola’s and Bonnie’s first experiences with common pieces of life that we more or less simply seem to take for granted, watching them progress onwards and finding love, making friends, finding their own families, and trying to understand themselves. (This feeds into a small, silly problem I had with the book which probably isn’t the book fault, but I found myself oddly disappointed that Bonnie always seemed to be on the cusp of being straight up bisexual, but that the book was content instead on merely leaving her interactions with Liesl and Bryce be merely great platonic demonstrations, albeit that they could be immensely charged at times.) About how the divine can be wicked, and the wicked divine. How it’s hard to be good, and good to be hard. Emphasis on “for the most part”.

((view spoiler)[This all being said, though, I’m not sure I was ever quite able to believe Lola’s breakdown and spiral. I realise this makes me kind of a terrible person, and I definitely understand it, what with the crappy home life and being bound to destiny and being lost and confused, but somehow it never felt quite earned or true for me. Not to mention that her entire relationship with Liz Grant was a tad peculiar. This did somewhat undermine the ending for me, although Lola’s giving up and giving in does work better for me in hindsight. The rest of the ending though... yeah. (hide spoiler)])

The problems, though? The problems in a sense are always there, and in another sense they kind of creep in. For one, the writing style is... odd. Peculiar. Straight-up strange. The kind of thing you feel like could definitely have done with another edit or two. A fair part of me is willing to attribute this to the book being self-published, except I don’t think that’s good enough. Yes, fair point, you’re not going through the traditional channels, which means you lose a fair amount of the support you’d presumably get there, but on the other hand it means that you get to go out on your own. Still though, get your friends to read through this. Get your friends of friends. Get the Kickstarter backers to beta read through it. I mean, they paid to see this book laid down on pieces of paper and properly transcribed to bits and bytes of electronic data and e-ink whizzing around the world. I’m sure some of them would have happily paid more to get the book early, shepherd it more so through its journey to the masses, taken a close look at it and say “hey, I think this word is spelled wrong, that’s not how you spell Cheerios”, or “wait, where did that one other mook go?” Then again, maybe they did. And then again, those are only small things, although they’re not the only small things. It’s actually more interesting than that.

The best way I can think of describing the writing style (at least once past the 50% mark – which is weird, but I honestly didn’t have as many problems with the first half as I did the second half) is idiosyncratic. Like what’s actually going on here is that Thompson is trying to depict and craft her own peculiar way of speech and thinking, replete with commas in slightly odd places and peculiar sayings and turns of phrase that you just sort of stare at sometimes in mild confusion, that this book doesn’t take place in our world (then again, could it? Does it?) but instead in one of those worlds slightly sideways where there are people who have superpowers, that eat Cherrios, and when they speak almost occasionally come across as they previously spoke in another language and got rendered into English by a mildly incompetent translator. Maybe that’s what’s going on. It’s tempting to tie this back to Buffy Speak, if only because Thompson dedicates the book to Joss Whedon and certainly wears, if not her heart, then at least one of its chambers on her sleeve throughout this book (though that’s harsh admittedly – the only real evidence I can think of, apart for one big thing that I’ll mention in spoilers down below that constitutes one of my other complaints, is Bonnie breaking out some Buffy-style banter at one point, and a two-word phrase repeated a few times that I couldn’t take seriously because it reminded me of that one episode from Season 1 [which was a pretty great episode tbf, it’s just not an episode that if you evoke it that I feel you could particularly get away with it]. Say it with me Fritz:



Thank you, Fritz. Now go away. (To be fair though, that one scene you had in the middle was properly harrowing, it was just ruined slightly by the repetition of The Phrase. And your episode is good! Properly good! I have no idea who decided it’d be a good idea to combine Buffy with some sort of strange approximation of cyberpunk, complete with a gloriously incongruous Robo-Moloch, but it somehow worked. Plus we got Jenny Calendar out of it. I can’t hate that.) [Also please pretend that picture is a GIF, because I couldn't find a GIF of it and I wanted to, and I don't know how to make them. :(]

Ahem. Huh, this sure was a long parenthetical. But it’s over now!). Is Thompson paying tribute to the mutant enemy (even if he didn’t invent it) by bringing about her own take on the concept? Perhaps. I don’t think it works though.

Then there’s the ending. Now, I didn’t have a whole lot of patience for the mythology in this book. I found it generally strange, portentous, annoying and ignorable. And it persisted, so I sort of lived with it. And then it got weirdly worse. (view spoiler)[Essentially, the idea behind Bonnie and Lola is that they’re descended from a long line of women heroes and villains who have been pitting themselves against each other in a good and evil mirror match for generations without success or managing to break the cycle. And that’s fine. In a sense. It’s not particularly original (shades of Buffy meets Hancock, which is a brilliant description that I wish I’d come up with. I only noticed the Buffy part myself though), but I get it. It’s appealing. There’s something enticing about the idea of reverberations throughout history, and great women advancing their causes, and vicious circles and feedback loops and trying to make things better and being bound to the past. It’s not terrible. It’s just not something I’m really interested in. It dispirits me. A tad. I wish I could say why, but I can’t. Unfortunately.

The thing is, the ending makes it seem like things are getting better. The two meet for their big fight, they pummel each other, Bonnie convinces Lola to find a better way (Bonnie uses the word “duality” in her inner monologue, incidentally, in case it seems like I’m thinking too much about this. Though I still could be), Lola agrees, dies, and Bonnie takes on her essence and is now free to step into the world not as a totemic figure of good, but instead a person, who is good, probably, and still has to battle the constituent fragments of opposition of her soul, but who can probably decide what to do for herself.

Then the epilogue comes. And it turns out Bonnie has twins. And it looks like the cycle’s starting all over again.

Huh.

Yeah.

...Frankly, this annoys me. It does a bit more than annoy me, actually; it kind of infuriates me. It kills the book for me. After all this, it really does seem like the book is just content to wallow in tired clichéd black and white duality mirroring stuff and the impossibility of material social progress. [Why yes, I really have been reading way too much TARDIS Eruditorum.] To be fair, I’m probably disproportionately unleashing on this book (it’s hardly the only guilty party in this game), and it really does seem like Thompson is as unhappy about this as I am. At the same time, it feels both like she’s just throwing her hands up in the air and saying “Welp, can’t be helped!”, while simultaneously promising me a delicious meal and allowing me to see it and smell it, before whisking it away and replacing it away with something that’s... not good. I can’t accept this. I won’t accept this. I do not accept this. If the epilogue wasn’t here, I feel like this book might actually have had a chance at a 4. As it is, it’s very much a 3. (hide spoiler)]

It’s a crying shame, really, because like I said, this is a very admirable book. Kelly Thompson is the kind of writer I want to see succeed, that I want to see do well. And OK, admittedly, I’m probably way going overboard, and she probably improves in later books, but based on this I find myself not wanting to see if that’s how it is. (To be honest, it doesn’t help that her next book Storykiller seems to be Buffy meets Fables, complete with a very Scooby-esque trio.) Not to mention that she bagged herself the task of writing Jem and the Holograms comics, which at the very least proves she’s got range (not least because The Girl Who Would Be King gets absurdly violent at times. Like, absurdly so. So much so that it could and would actively turn people off of it.) As it is, I’m glad I read it, and I could easily be tempted to pick it up again if/when Mark Oshiro gets around to it, but as of right now? I can’t reasonably say I was that massively enthused by it. Unfortunately.

(At least the cover's nice and a Lola thing reminded me of Worm. Would still prefer Worm though, even if it's too long.)

Categories: Fantasy (maybe), medium, novel, female, white, USA, 2010s, January, new, borrowed, standalone, young adult.
Challenges: I Spy Book Titles, Every Year (2012)

Book #11
Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; Watch #2) by Terry Pratchett
Finished 14th January 2016
352p

Why I read it: Mark Oshiro was reading it.

Rating: 4/5

I’m not so sure I have a lot to say on this book (thank goodness, I hear you all cry), because it’s generally always difficult to properly figure out what I think of Discworld books. Seeing as I’m reading them in the way that I am and life is always closing in and pressing in with all its manifold distractions and obligations, I usually just end up reading them in giant sections every week or so, and sometimes not even that. So sometimes I just forget or I’m not so clear what actually happened previously or the pacing finds itself all warped and stretched and not quite accurate to reality.

That being said, I like this book. Definitely. I’d say it’s one of the good ones, but considering there’ve been so many good ones recently that that assessment of it seems ludicrously lacking. Even if I were to upgrade it without upgrading it and called it one of the better ones, there’s still something missing there. In any case, it worked for me, and a lot of the time worked wonderfully. Admittedly, yes, it’s slightly flawed, as is probably inevitable, though a lot of that might be my fault, and it’s hard for me to say whether this is better than Guards! Guards! or not. Then again, Guards! Guards! is really the archetypal “book that I had to read in giant sections roughly every week leading to warped pacing and forgetfulness”, I’m never going to be the best judge on that until sometime in a potential future, and I’m not really sure it matters.

So! Men at Arms! Men at Arms is of course another runaround with our old friends from the Watch (and some new ones, who are great, more on that later), who here I feel like are better than they were in G!G!, although that could just be me being wrong. I do get the sense that they’ve all had genuine proper character development here, or at the very least I’m more aware and certain of who these people names Nobbs, Vimes, Carrot, and Colon are and who they’re not, and it’s all very welcome.

This time though, the Watch doesn’t just have to contend with some murders (although there is a weird royalist running around trying to kill people for some reason, the jerk), they also have to face up against... diversity! (*dun dun dun*) Indeed, it seems like the Watch is too full of manly, manly men, leading to some new characters who are very much not manly, manly men. This does lead to some weirdness and odd jokes early on dancing around the subject, though those might actually work fine and it’s just because I’m profoundly strange, but thankfully after a while it all gets worked out, new characters bounce off against old, they all learn from each other and eventually get on spectacularly. Which is good! And strangely heartwarming. It helps that the new characters feel fairly well rounded, dwarf, troll, and woman (view spoiler)[or werewolf (hide spoiler)] alike, although Detritus does have the advantage of having appeared in the series already. Speaking of Moving Pictures, Gaspode’s back! Remember Gaspode, everyone? Gaspode’s here. He generally works well too, though part of me wonders whether he necessarily should have come back. Then later plot developments which I generally really like get me to realise that he needed to be there for those, and so I don’t say squat.

In any case, it’s all a very profoundly good time, full of what you more or less expect of Pratchett by now: humour, some action, a sense of proper humanism and social progress, of making the world better, some awkwardness here and there which is understandable but still kind of awkward, and characters you like doing things you like in familiar locations that get layers added and built on to them while being changed and shifted in the process. (Even if he’s not in this much for example – this is way more Carrot’s book – Vimes’s coming to terms with life after the Watch and his impending wedding to Sybil is most certainly interesting, (view spoiler)[and I’m overjoyed that at the end of the book he gets to have his cake and eat it by being made Commander of the Watch. You can just sense his crackling enthusiasm as he lays it all out and Sybil’s happiness for him, and it all works wonderfully. (hide spoiler)])

Like I said, it could have appealed to me slightly more - (view spoiler)[Pratchett seems to want to say something about gun violence through the gonne, and that’s perfectly fine, except that when the gonne talks and impels people to do things like it’s Nightblood’s cousin the metaphor gets slightly strained. Although I can understand it in the sense that the gonne is just that much of a transgression against the setting and the narrative that of course it’s going to be even weirder in some way. Plus Pratchett redeems it slightly by layering in ideas of police accountability and avoiding brutality just because you’ve got the power, which are somewhat elided over but work well enough (hide spoiler)] - not to mention that Pratchett just goes slightly overboard with all the police movie references. But those are ultimately quite minor things, and this is ultimately still a really quite good book, one that deserves a better review than this. And, frankly, a better kind of reader too.

Categories: Fantasy mystery, medium, novel, male, white, UK, 1990s, January, familiar, borrowed, series, adults.
Challenges: A to Z Character Edition (V)

Huh. I had never heard of Mark Oshiro until now. What a fascinating rise to internet fame.

I'm very relieved I didn't have to explain who he was to be honest; I mean, I was expecting to, and I was getting it together, but at the same time I was feeling pretty awkward about it so I don't know how well it would've gone. So yeah ;)