Karen's Revised List

So here's the thing: I've been on this project for a year and a half and I've made diddly progress. And I keep buying books. Why do I keep buying books when I have a list of a hundred books to read, all of which I could find at the library? That's a good question. I'll answer it after I get my next paycheck.

Currently, I have TWENTY SIX unread books on my shelf. So I'm changing my list, because I consider not having read Mathilda Savitch a more pressing gap than not having read Predictably Irrational. Blogs exist to save me from having to read non-fiction.

In the past year, my interests have shifted, and it has become more important to me to read certain types of books and less important to me to read other kinds of books. FORGET MARK TWAIN.

My 19 additions.
1. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski. (Read it, refuse to review it, as I spent too much time on it already.)
2. The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian
3. Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
4. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermanski
5. Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat
6. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, Julie Stuart
7. Mathilda Savitch, Victor Lodato
8. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
9. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
10. Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout
11. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
12. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
13. Outfoxed (Foxhunting Mysteries), Rita Mae Brown
14. Thoroughbred Tales: An Anthology of Fiction
15. Some Horses: Essays, Thomas McGuane
16. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman
17. Losing Charlotte, Heather Clay
18. Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, Gail Carson Levine (shut up)
19. Southern Vampire Mysteries Boxed Set, Charlaine Harris



The Original 100:
Bolded books are currently being read or are finished. Books italicized with the word SPLAT after it are books that I have decided not to care about.

1. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion. SPLAT
2. A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain, Abandoned
4. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolfe
5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
6. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Forget Mark Twain except for where it concerns my boyfriend, Tom Sawyer)
8. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
9. Animal Farm, George Orwell. SPLAT. Read 1984.
10. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. SPLAT. Read Fountainhead.
11. Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen (ABANDONED)
12. Baudolino, Umberto Eco
13. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
14. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. SPLAT. Was only on the list because I was trying to come up with 100.
15. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
16. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
17. Changing Places, David Lodge. SPLAT.
18. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner. SPLAT.
19. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann. SPLAT.
20. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
21. Dune, Frank Herbert
22. Eve’s Diary, Mark Twain. SPLAT. FORGET MARK TWAIN.
23. Faust (Goethe)
24. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
25. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
26. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
27. Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons
28. Ilium, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
29. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
30. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
31. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn. SPLAT. This books is falling way out of favor, huh?
32. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott. SPLAT.
33. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
34. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H Lawrence
35. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
36. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
37. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis. SPLAT.
38. Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
39. Middlemarch, George Eliot (ABANDONED)
40. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
41. My Antonia, Willa Cather. SPLAT.
42. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
43. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
44. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
45. Olympos, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
46. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
47. Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman
48. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
49. Orlando, Virginia Woolfe
50. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
51. Out Stealing Horses, Per Patterson
52. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious. SPLAT.
53. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
54. Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely. SPLAT.
55. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
56. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
57. Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
58. Revolutionary Road, Robert Yates
59. She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
60. Sophie's Choice, William Styron. SPLAT.
61. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
62. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
63. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
64. The Best Day of Somebody Else’s Life, Kerry Reichs
65. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
66. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
67. The Call of the Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft
68. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
69. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier
70. The Coast of Good Intentions, Michael Byers
71. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
72. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery (Read it, didn't review it, didn't like it.)
73. The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope. SPLAT.
74. The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates. (Read it, think I didn't review it, didn't like it.)
75. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
76. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
77. The Irrational Season, Madeleine L’Engle
78. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco
79. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
80. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway
81. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
82. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
83. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follet
84. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
85. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
86. The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
87. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
88. The Summer of the Great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle
89. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
90. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
91. The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike
92. The World According to Garp, John Irving
93. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
94. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
95. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
96. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, Madeleine L’Engle
97. Ulysses, James Joyce
98. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
99. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. (Read it, didn't review it, LOVED IT.)
100. Watership Down, Richard Adams

Richard Adams/WATERSHIP DOWN

A "fantasy classic," first published in 1972, about a group of rabbits who set out against all odds to start a new warren. The main character, Hazel, finds himself leader of the group against all odds, and is guided in his decisions by his brother, Fiver, who has a supernatural ability to dream the future.

Watership Down made my Gaps list for a couple reasons--first, it had made a lot of "best of the 20th century" kinds of lists, second, because my mother, who has a very low tolerance for literary nonsense, expressed great surprise and sadness when she found out I hadn't read it. "It's very good," she promised. My baby sister, when she saw I was reading the book, shouted "Hazel-rah!" at which point I learned she had read it in fifth grade (while I had somehow missed it).

I sat down to lunch with a literary agent whom I was meeting for the first time, and when she saw the book in my hands, she said, "Silflay hraka!" I hadn't gotten to that part yet, so she explained, "That means 'eat s**t' in rabbit! When we read it in elementary school, we thought it was so cool we could swear in rabbit, since the teachers couldn't punish us." At this point I realized I had missed out on an entire piece of our English language cultural fabric by not having read it, and became very glad I was getting around to it now.

I spent a week reading this one--it inspired savoring--and was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Like, blind enjoyment--it wasn't any work to read at all, despite the many bettering and literary themes. It required suspending disbelief--when I first encountered "lapine," the rabbit language, my thought was, "Seriously? Rabbits don't talk!"--but it is satisfyingly easy to get over these humps. And while this book is, I guess, "fantasy" literature, Adams is also gruelingly observant of rabbit biology, natural phenomena, and the world of the downs in which they live. It's really ... real, and very easy to get lost in.

Like I said, I enjoyed reading it, in a pretty unqualified way. It's a great story. I do think there are a couple barriers to pure enjoyment, and I feel obliged to mention them here, if only in passing: the first is gender roles stereotyping, although one might write this off to faithful animal behavior observation. The other is racial/ethnic stereotyping, which comes in a little bit in the "dialect" rendering of non-rabbit speech throughout the book. I personally think the book would have been a little improved without the dialect inclusions, but in 1972 perhaps this was not as much of a concern.

So, another Gaps goal accomplished! Pip pip.

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

Here's a fun fact: Rebecca was used by German soldiers as a code source during the second World War. Presumeably they didn't include the first chapter as a source though, as I can't imagine German high command had the need to send passionate descriptions of trees to each other.

Rebecca was one book that I'd been meaning to read for a long time, and it didn't disappoint me - but the first chapter just seemed like a gratuitous attempt to beef up the word count (and trust me, I know all about that). It just stood out - it had no real bearing on anything that came after and really irritated me!

Despite that, I did enjoy the book. I can see parallels with Jane Eyre, although I think I prefer Jane to the unnamed narrator here. I absolutely identified with the insecurity and unease of the narrator, and the story sucked me in completely, even if at times it felt a bit melodramatic. But I still prefer Jane Eyre. She has more substance to her.

REVIEW - HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY

"Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger
Product Description(Amazon.com)
Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.
# Paperback: 406 pages
# Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (September 29, 2010)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1439169012
# ISBN-13: 978-1439169018

MY THOUGHTS: This is my book clubs choice for September. I have wanted to read this book and I'm really glad I did. It was a very good book. I really liked all the characters. I really liked Martin a lot. I could feel for him. Does he get to leave his apartment? Does Robert get his Thesis done on Highgate Cemetery? As Julia and Valentina move to London they seem to grow apart. Valentina wants to be separate from Julia. With the help of their Aunt Elspeth's ghost they think of something that seems so impossible. But does it work? Will Valentina get her wish and be separate from Julia? You'll have to read the book to find out the outcome of this very interesting book.

Kira Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

Kira-Kira is one of those books that even though you may already know the ending you keep reading because it has really good voice.  Katie tells the story of her family. A Japanese American family in the 1960s living in Georgia.  She tells of her sister, Lynn, an older sister who shows Katie that everything "glitters", which is the meaning of kira kira. As you read Katie's story you see how Lynn becomes deathly ill and Katie has to take care of her and her brother. You see the hardships and struggles. You see the Japanese culture from her parents and the innocence of a young girl.  But, you also see that young girl mature and begin to see for herself kira kira in everything.  And as she sees the glitter, how she reminds the rest of her family that even though there are sad times, there is something to hope, something that glitters, something kira kira.

I love when I read a book and it causes me to want to research more about a topic. In this case, I wasn't wanting to research child illnesses, but chicken hatcheries in the 1960s. This was intriguing to me for some odd reason. I don't raise chickens (my grandparents did that and I seriously that smell still knocks me out just thinking about it), I have no desire to ever raise chickens (beside the smell factor, my husband would think I was off my rocker since we live in an apartment), but the details given about the hatcheries and the unions at that time made me want to research more.  So, off I go to google-land...

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

I enjoyed The Teahouse Fire. The story follow Aurelia as she travels from France to New York then to Japan. Determined to make her own luck, to change her fate, she finds herself in the Shin household, one of Japan's most famous tea families. The way the family accepts her as different but not a foreigner was truly a gift to her.  I love the contrast later when the Westerns come to Japan. The divide between adapting to the Western ways and keeping with tradition was fascinating to me. I really enjoyed The Teahouse Fire. I'm sad it took me so to read it.

Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher

Ten Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher is a rich historical YA novel. Set before and during the early days of World War II, it follows hot-headed fifteen-year-old Ruby's transformation from innocent Catholic school girl to street-wise taxi dancer.

I love historical novels. The setting in this book was incredible. Even though I sometimes found myself so angry at Ruby I wanted to hurl the book across the room, in hindsight this was part of the book's charm. Ruby has to be the way she is, or she wouldn't have the guts to make the (stupid) decisions that make this story work. Nobody can call Ruby weak. She drops out of school to work the only job she can find -- at a meat packing factory where she has to bloody her knuckles every day jamming pigs' feet into jars. She does this because her widowed mother can't work anymore due to crippling arthritis. Her motivation comes from wanting to give her mother and sister -- and herself -- a better life than what they have in the Chicago tenements.

When Ruby meets bad-boy Paulie, an irresistible wanna-be gangster, he tells her she could earn money taxi-dancing, where men pay ten cents a dance to cha-cha with a pretty girl. Ruby figures out a good lie so her mother will let her be out all night and takes the bait. After that, it's a non-stop roller coaster for Ruby as she negotiates the seedy Chicago night-life. She finds independence, but gets herself in a lot of trouble in the process.

 I thought Fletcher bit off a big chunk with this book -- but she chewed it with aplomb. She successfully portrays a very provocative coming-of-age story and does it all in the context of an era that's rich and intriguing. Win-win, in my opinion.