books #48-82 (2008)

48. How to work the competition into the ground and have fun doing it : a proven program to raise your personal productivity by John T. Molloy ***. I read this because of this article about brainwashing yourself to be productive. It had some useful advice about training yourself to concentrate and focus longer. The author's style was pretty annoying, though, since he was constantly talking himself up.

49. Amy Unbounded: Belondweg Blossoming by Rachel Hartman ****. This was fun.

50. Lottery by Patricia Wood (audiobook) ***. I don't think this was a good choice for an audiobook. The main character is one IQ point over being retarded, so the narrator is reading with a slow, Forrest Gump-ish voice. The book is also full of annoying definitions of the kind that are meant to show how he sees through most people's artifices. It's not a terrible story, so I've still given it 3 stars, but I'm not enjoying it a huge amount. If I didn't need something to listen to while knitting/walking, I'm not sure I'd finish it. Now the main character is beating people at Scrabble, because he's spent years reading the dictionary... This is such a Mary-Sue book. How did it get nominated for the Orange prize?

51. The Year of Endless Sorrows by Adam Rapp ***. I didn't love this book. The blurb compared it to Douglas Coupland and Nick Hornby's work so I thought it would be at least slightly funny, but it was just depressing. The main character lived a pretty pitiful life on the bottom rungs of New York publishing, barely making ends meet, which was miserable enough, and then the book turned tragic.

52. Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo ****. This was kind of a slow moving story about a man reflecting on his life spent in a small town. It was interesting, but the major theme, that people don't ever change, was kind of depressing.

53. The Contract With God Trilogy by Will Eisner ***. Apparently this was the first graphic novel ever.

54. Wishcraft: How to get what you really want by Barbara Sher

55. Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower edited by Cynthia Robbins-Roth

56. Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf ****. This was a pretty interesting book about how various parts of the brain that evolved for other tasks are used to learn to read. The most interesting part was about how different written languages use different parts of the brain, so people who are dyslexic in one language might not be in another.

56.5 The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. I think this was an Amazon suggestion based on my looking at reviews of the previous book. It had a potentially interesting premise - that the development of written language was responsible for the rise of the patriarchy and loss of goddess worship (Anastasia, I thought of you while reading it). I only made it through half a chapter before being irritated with all the evolutionary psychology, though.

57. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ***.

58. The Outcast by Sadie Jones ****. Now this one deserves to be on the Orange shortlist.

59. After Dark by Haruki Murakami ***. Perhaps it's the translation, but I wasn't all that impressed by Murakami's writing, despite all the wonderful things I've heard about it. Then again, I don't know anyone who's read it in Japanese, so maybe it's just me, or maybe this isn't his best work.

60. Grace by Elizabeth Nunez ****. I usually pick books to listen to that I don't think I'll really love, because I'd rather read than listen (it's hard to find the right balance between something I think I'll wish I'd read and something that isn't good enough to keep my interest). This one was surprisingly good, though. It did spoil Beloved for me, though.

61. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow ****. I got a free review copy of this. It's definitely a page turner. I almost missed my bus stop at least 3 times while reading it. There are a lot of technical descriptions of things like encryption, but they don't disrupt the story too much. It felt somewhat like a recruiting manual to get teenagers to care about civil liberties, but that's probably a good thing. I was going to quote the Neil Gaiman blurb on the cover, but I may as well link his whole review, which I think is a pretty accurate one. You can download the whole book for free under a creative commons licence.

62. The Folded World by Amity Gaige ***1/2.

63. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman ***.

64. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely ***1/2. This was interesting. Read the NY Times review here.

65. I Could Do Anything if Only I Knew What it Was by Barbara Sher

66. Career Renewal: Tools for Scientists and Technical Professionals by Stephen Rosen and Celia Paul

67. I Don't Know What I Want but I Know It's Not This by Julie Jansen

68. Schuyler's Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson ***. I already knew most of the content of this book because the author's blog was one of the first I started reading, but it was still an engaging story about a father dealing with a "broken" daughter.

69. The Solitary Vice: Against Reading by Mikita Brottman *. This was a frustrating book. The subtitle was tacked on by the publisher, apparently, so it's not really an argument against reading. The problem is that it's not really an argument for anything. The author just rambles about celebrity gossip, her childhood, author's private lives etc.

70. Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall ***.

71. The Theory of Clouds by Stéphane Audeguy **.

72. Beloved by Toni Morrison ***. I felt like a bad person for not loving this more. It was sad and moving and all, but I didn't really get why it's such a great book.

73. Leftovers by Laura Weiss ***.

74. Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar ***1/2. This was longer than it needed to be, and the ending left me suspicious that there would be a sequel, but how could you not love a book about an anxious, depressed, anorexic werewolf?

75. McSweeney's 25 ***

76. Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way

77. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah ***. Another book I felt like a bad person for not loving. Sure, it's an important topic and tragic, but as a book, it wasn't so great. The part that I really thought was missing was the process of rehabilitation, but one minute he was attacking the rehab centre staff and the next he was giving speeches about the plight of child soldiers.

78. McSweeney's 26

79 McSweeney's 24 (Can you tell I haven't been to the library in far too long and am finally getting around to reading books I own?)

80. Rhubarb by Craig Silvey (audiobook) **. I might've enjoyed this more if I'd been reading, rather than listening to it. There were large segments that were all sentence fragments that were hard to follow and I didn't really get how the main character went blind. The writing seemed a bit too full of adjectives, too. There were way too many references to rhubarb, too. You don't need every single major (or minor) event in the book to involve something for it to be an overarching symbol, you know? And I'm not even sure what its significance was supposed to be.

81. Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman (audiobook) ***.

82. Children Playing Before A Statue Of Hercules Edited by David Sedaris **1/2. I was disappointed when I noticed the "edited" in there. I only really liked one of the stories, another 2 were okay and one I didn't like much at all (although the author's voice was kind of monotonous, which probably didn't help).