thanks for making me fall behind, Santa

Thanks to the library and my fickle reading appetite, I was never really on track for the 100 in 5 years.

But now I got a little Santa setback in my stockings.

In case you're wondering what non-list reading looms (though some are definitely list-worthy):

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (already devoured. so much fun)

John Lanchester, Mr Phillips (ditto, though a little slower. also more thought-provoking)

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, vol. 2

Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang

Joseph von Eichendorff, Gedichte

Rudolf Eberhard, ed., Fritze Bollmann wollte angeln

Happy New Year, everyone!

THE WOMAN WARRIOR, Maxine Hong Kingston

Yay! Squeezed one more in before 2009 ends. My review is here. Anyone else read this one?

Lucky Number 13

The 13th book I finished on my list was a really good one, making me think 13 might just be my lucky number. I finished reading oino sakai's poetry chapbook Ancient Skies this morning.

oino sakai is a pretty big name in a field that is, honestly, fairly small — speculative poetry. It is a pity that there is not a bigger readership of this niche genre, because there are some fine poets writing speculative poems. oino sakai's specialty is scifaiku. His work is always marked by excellence in both parent genres, science fiction and haiku, and I count him one of the poets I am learning from in order to improve my own work. His poetry is truly masterful.

The little volume Ancient Skies is packed with some huge works — not huge in length (of course), but in significance. oino sakai does a wonderful job, over and over again, of capturing that "a-ha moment" that is so central to good haiku. And throughout the range of poems in the collection, he is true to the description on the title page of the book: "A haiku is a captured moment in time. A scifaiku is a captured moment in a possible future." Ancient Skies looks into so many possible futures and draws them near to us, moment by moment.

The first section of the book is filled with haiku, more than 60 in total. In the second section, oino sakai showcases other poetic forms derived from traditional Japanese poetry (such as the tanka and haibun), as well as experimental forms such as the zip, the stellarenga, and the Fib. There are a good number of poems across a wide range of forms, and it makes for very fun reading.

Ancient Skies was published by Sam's Dot Publishing, and is available through the Genre Mall.

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys

I just finished Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, the 12th title I've completed from my Fill in the Gaps list. (Yes, I know... I am very far behind many of the readers here!)

I really enjoyed the book. Gaiman is always good for a fun read (I've got several of his novels on my list — more than any other author, I think). He's funny and he's smart, and that gives his humor a level of depth and his more profound thoughts a rather light touch. Over all, the effect is wonderful.

The story begins with Fat Charlie and his embarrassment over his father. And aren't all of us mortified with embarrassment by our parents? Well, Fat Charlie is just like us in that regard... with the added layer being that his dad is a minor deity, the trickster god of West African and Caribbean traditional folklore.

I love how the folklore weaves into this story. It's Rudyard Kipling without all the trappings of colonialism. It's fun to enter into a tradition other than the one I was brought up in, and yet to have it brought near to the experiences of my own world. That is what Gaiman does so effectively in this novel.

Fat Charlie doesn't start out as a very sympathetic character, for me, but something about the story still managed to suck me in. It is a page turner. For me, I think it is Gaiman's writing (fantastic!) and humor (hilarious!) that kept me turning the pages, even though Fat Charlie didn't immediately strike a chord with me. Anyway, whatever kept me interested, the characters all began to grown on me, the more I read, and made it so I didn't quite want the story to end.




Shelly

Amanda's End of the Year Update

At some point, I lost track of which months I checked in, so I decided to just wait until the end of the year to give a final tally. I doubt there's anything left on my list that I'll be reading in the next 19 days, so I'll just give my stats now.

My full FitG list is here.

So far, I've read 32 of my 100 books, and started to read but abandoned 4. They are as follows (with links to my reviews):

Alexie – The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Asher – Thirteen Reasons Why
Austen – Mansfield Park
Bechdel – Fun Home
Black – Tithe
Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
Burnett – The Secret Garden
Caletti – Wild Roses
Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday
Collins – Woman in White
Forster – A Passage to India
Gaiman – The Graveyard Book
Gaiman – Stardust
Greenberg – I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Hanff – 84, Charing Cross Road
Johnson – Suite Scarlett
Maugham – Liza of Lambeth
McEwan – Atonement
Nabokov – Ada, or Ardor
Paton – Cry, the Beloved Country
Pratchett – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Snyder – The Witches of Worm
Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Steinbeck – East of Eden
Tammet – Born on a Blue Day
Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
Westerfeld – The Last Days
Westerfeld – PEEPS
Westerfeld – So Yesterday
Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
Zusak – The Book Thief

Abandoned:
Bronte, C. – Villette
Doctorow – Little Brother
Martel – Life of Pi
Shelley – The Last Man

My stats for the full FitG list look like this:

-Classics/Modern: about 50-50%
-YA: about 25%
-Fiction/Nonfiction: 94/6%
-By women/men: about 33/67%
-Translations and World Lit: aprox 25%

Stats for what I've read (including the 4 abandoned books):

-Classics/Modern: 50-50%
-YA: about 42%
-Fiction/Nonfiction: 86/14%
-By women/men: 36/64%
-Translations and World Lit: 11%

What this says to me is that I've been reading a lot of YA, more nonfiction than I expected, and less translations and world lit.

Also of this list, I liked 14 books, disliked 12 (including the 4 I abandoned), and was pretty neutral about 10. Not bad for a gaps list, I don't think!

I'm looking forward to knocking out another chunk of these in 2010!

No Humbug

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens (1843)

I’m guessing you all know the story and have probably seen it in various adaptations but might not have read it yet. I hadn’t either; good thing we have this list.

Every time I read Dickens, I regret that I don’t have more time to read him more, and I feel bad whenever my attention drifts because, as far as I can tell, all of his passages are rewarding if you only pay attention.

The guy just seems to love to churn our words, but more than merely churn, he makes them bubble and froth. This is from the last part of A Christmas Carol:

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious!

Recently, my kids and I saw the new animated film version of this story. Though I think that Scrooge was miscast and that the Ghosts ought to have been played/voiced by different people, I was impressed by how creepy the movie was and how much it honored the ghost story as a scary visitation from the beyond and not just as a means for time travel. Thinking about the Present (as a gift as well as a point in time) in its relation to the other times is, after all, the point:

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!

Bite Me! by Melissa Francis

AJ Ashe isn't your typical seventeen-year-old vampire—as if there is such a thing! She's stuck in the middle of a huge fight between her two BFFs. Her ex-boyfriend—whom she's still totally in love with, by the way—is now her stepbrother. A former classmate—who, um, she may or may not have turned into a vampire—is stalking her. And now, apparently, the fate of humankind lies in her little undead hands. What ever happened to the good old days, when all a vampire girl had to worry about was the occasional zit and hiding her taste for blood?

Melissa Francis

My thoughts:

I've never been one for YA, so I figured I'd use this list to dabble in it some. If you can't tell, I'm shamefully avoiding all those classics on my list. I particularly have never been one for a book such as Bite Me! by Melissa Francis. One of the main conflicts in the story is that the main character's mother ends up married to the boyfriend's father. Ew! It's just so wrong. They are forced to break up because they are now step brother and sister.

Other than the step brother and sister conflict, it was an okay read. Melissa Francis is funny and that carried the book for me. Even so, it took me a while to finish it and I won't be rereading, but passing it on to my teen step daughter.

Also you should check out the author's website. It's an awesome one.

Happy Holidays!