Challenge: 50 Books discussion

I finished 2009 with 70 books read which is a huge improvement since I started keeping track and setting the 50 book goal for myself. This year I'm going to stick with the 50 for my goal- I've got some potential life changes coming up that could hinder my reading.

#1: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

#2: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

#3: The Girl in the Lighthouse

#4: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Heather,

Two out of the four of your books are on my list for this year. Did you love "On Beauty"? A good friend of mine highly recommended it.

I have not read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time", but hope to get to it. I started the year with "Addition" by Toni Jordan that deals with a woman's mind and her OCD-like behavior, regarding counting, and I just finished "The Housekeeper and the Professor" that involves an exceptional math professor that suffers a head injury/trauma after a car accident and how this has affected his mind, memory, and life. Both involve math obsessions in the characters and were quite good.

Which of the two you read did you prefer and why?

Cathy wrote: "Heather,

Two out of the four of your books are on my list for this year. Did you love "On Beauty"? A good friend of mine highly recommended it.

I have not read "The Curious Incident of the Dog ..."

I actually did not love On Beauty like I thought I would. I felt the story was too dragged out and a little too real for my liking. It was a bit depressing actually to read about this family falling apart.
I'm not much of a math person (in fact, I hate it), but I enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It was another depressing story, but for some reason I was hooked in this case. I felt more compassion for the characters in this story than those in "On Beauty".

#5: Between The Tides

#6: In Cold Blood

#7: The Pieces from Berlin

#8: Dear Diary

#9: The Lightning Thief

#10: Case Histories: A Novel

#11: How to Be Good

#12: Things Fall Apart

#13: Dogrun

#14: The Forest of Hands and Teeth

#15: One for the Money

#16: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

#17: Thirteen Reasons Why

#18: Wake

#19: Fade

#20: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

#21: The Pact

#22: Mr. Darcy, Vampyre

#23: Saving the World by Julia Alvarez

#24: Two for the Dough

#25: The Book of Illusions

#26: Hush, Hush

#27: The Usual Rules: A Novel

#28: Those Who Save Us

#29: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

#30: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

#31: Gone

#32: Tipperary: A Novel

#33: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

#34: The Girl Who Chased the Moon

#35: The Autograph Man

#36: The Keep

#37: Three To Get Deadly

#38: Possible Side Effects

#39: The Eyre Affair

#40: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

#41: Fishbowl

#42: The Thin Place

#43: East of Eden

#44: Hotel Du Lac

#45: Numb

#46: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

#47: My Sister's Keeper

#48: Angela's Ashes

#49: Speak