2016 Reading Challenge: A book you've been meaning to read

Sometime over a year ago, I found out that Colin Mochrie had written a book.  Being a lifelong fan of Whose Line is it Anyway?, I was immediately interested.  Then I read the description - a collection of short stories in which Mochrie takes the first and last sentences of several famous books/stories and makes up his own story in between.  Absolutely brilliant, I thought.  I need to read it.

Well, no libraries around me have this book.  The bookstore at which I used to eat lunch every day when I had a job didn't have it, either - even though they have plenty of fiction, and plenty of books written by celebrities!  My Mom actually captured my unhappiness at this lack of fiction by Mr. Mochrie when she visited me last fall:

 

She thought she was just getting me happy to be in my favorite bookstore, but nope, I was scowling because they didn't have Not Quite The Classics by Colin Mochrie.

Anyway, Christmas 2015 came and went, and my Mom got me an Amazon gift card!  So I finally decided to buy the book, especially since it meant fulfilling another check on the 2016 reading challenge.

Oh my gosh.  I super enjoyed this book.  The short stories were even less related than the ones in Haunting Experiences, so it was even easier for me to put the book down for a few hours (or days) to do other stuff.  This proved to be both good and bad: I never felt even a little taste of a cliffhanger, but I also went a whole week without reading this month.  I know, not horrible, but that was about 5 more days of TV binges in a row than I'd like!  After all, I'm trying to wean myself back in to reading, not off of it.

There are 13 short stories in Not Quite the Classics.  Inspiration comes from all walks of life: Sherlock Holmes, The Cat in the Hat, The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse Five, etc.  While I haven't read every book behind Mochrie's stories, I think he did a great job of capturing each individual author's voice/style.  The few I have read include T'was The Night Before Christmas, The Great Gatsby, and 1984.  Each of Mochrie's stories were written in a style that reflects the style of the original author.  His Holmes in A Study in Ha-Ha was particularly convincing - I couldn't help but imagine Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman acting out the absurd plot!  (Two things on that - one, I say absurd in the most loving of ways, it being Derek's and my word of choice to describe anything silly, hard to believe, cartoonish, or amusing lately.  And two, I have never read any of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels, but I watch BBC's Sherlock religiously.  BBC, if you're reading this, please secure the rights from Mr. Mochrie and produce a special acting out "A Study In Ha-Ha"!!!)

I can't even pick my favorite of these stories.  Is it his version of Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat," of the same name,  in which the narrator quickly divulges into an epic tale about Casey the hockey player of NHL fame?  Or perhaps Mochrie's version of Orwell's famous "1984," "The Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Fourth," a hilarious tale that takes place in a magical land filled with the most convoluted and twisted history I have ever read?  Or maybe it's "Re: Becker," which draws its first and last lines from Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca," detailing the journey of a man set out to fulfill his late friend's last request regarding his ashes.  Each of the thirteen short stories in this book had me laughing out loud at least twice, if not more.  I even snorted at one of them.

I'm so, so glad that I read this.  I'm so, so glad that Colin Mochrie wrote this.  Colin, I know you say in your introduction that you dislike work and that writing is a lot of work; still, should you ever feel inclined to write another collection like this one, I beg that you do not shy away from that urge.

2016 Reading Challenge Review #1: A book I've owned but never read

For my first challenge this year, I went with a book I own but have never read.  It's called Haunting Experiences: Encounters with the Otherworldly and it's by Michelle Belanger.  I know I already wrote a little bit about this book, but now that I've finished it I wanted to give my final thoughts.

I would have liked this book a lot better if Ms. Belanger wasn't so concerned with making sure that the reader believed her.  She admits in the introduction and the conclusion that she has struggled her whole life with the question, What will people think?, so I can see why she would be so self-conscious.  Still, if you're writing a book about this stuff (and this was not her first book about her experiences with the Otherworldly), I feel like you should turn off that inner commentary.  In the conclusion of the book, she says she struggled against "the instinct to place qualifiers at the start of every chapter and to apologize for the extraordinary aspects of [her] claims" (p 250).  Well, she may not have placed qualifiers at the start of every chapter, but in my opinion she placed far too many of them in the middle of chapters instead.

Many of her experiences involved other people.  Many of these people were also psychics, or else they were Wiccas, or else they were simply very open to the Otherworldly.  But some of the people in her stories were devout non-belivers.  And she made a point of telling us this.  In the middle of the spooky action.  It interrupted the story every time.  Something odd is happening, and Michelle's friend turns to her -

And then we get her friend's backstory about how s/he is a devout Catholic and has never, ever believed in ghosts or hauntings.  It's as if Ms. Belanger were saying, "Okay, I know this is hard to believe, but if THIS PERSON knew that something Otherworldly was happening, you'd better believe it wasn't all in my head!"

It actually got pretty frustrating.  Why not place these qualifiers at the beginning or the end of a chapter?  If these were fictional stories, those background details would almost definitely be in the exposition rather than during the climax.  It totally interrupted not only the heat of the moment but the flow of the story.

Still, the stories were pretty interesting.  My favorite story actually made me choke up a little.  This one happened to her mother as a teenager.  Michelle's mother took violin lessons from an elderly man, and sometimes she would sit in the hall for a good 10 minutes of her lesson time just to listen to her teacher play on his own.  One day, after her teacher had been in Europe for some weeks, she sat in the hallway for almost half an hour listening to him play when the owner of the music store saw her.  He informed her that her teacher had passed away shortly after returning from Europe.  The two of them went into the music room to find it empty, save for a package that the teacher had dropped off before passing away - a violin that he'd bought for Michelle's mother.  This story truly spoke to me because of my connection to music.  I never took private lessons, but I played the viola for 11 years starting in the fifth grade.  My dad plays the violin, my sister the cello, and my other sister the violin.  Music has always been a huge part of my life, and Ms. Belanger's description of the violin's sound for those who aren't familiar with it was absolutely beautiful.  The thought of an old violin teacher's spirit playing one last song for his favorite student is not hard for me to believe.

So, anyway, my overall rating of this book is 2.5/5.  It was interesting and overall enjoyable, but the author's obsession with not sounding crazy detracted from many of the stories.  I can understand her concern, but I also wish she'd done a better job at putting a lid on her concern.  After all, most people who read this book are likely to be either firm believers themselves, or willing to suspend their disbelief for the purpose of being entertained.  The latter would have been much easier for me if she were not constantly reminding us that it were true and she were not "a nut" (her own words).  Most books leave me with a certain feeling that I can't quite put into words - slowly closing the back cover, I usually sigh and think about the beauty of the book, re-feeling many of the emotions that I felt throughout.  But when I finished this book, the only feeling I had was, "K."

I'm much looking forward to my next book in the challenge!  I'm reading Not Quite the Classics by Colin Mochrie.  This one has been on my to-read list since the moment it came out, but I haven't been able to find it in any libraries or book stores near me.  My Mom gave me an Amazon gift card for Christmas so I finally decided to order the book!

2016 Reading Challenge: A book I've owned but never read

Derek and I went to Jamaica for a friend's wedding in January.  I brought three books with me for the long plane rides, figuring I'd want some variety in my entertainment: a book I've owned but never read, a book I've read before, and a book I can read in a day.  Well, on the flight there, I ended up crocheting the whole time (I needed a cute little phone cozy to match my dress for the wedding!), and on the way home I was so exhausted and half-sick that I slept the whole way.  I read about 10 pages of the first book on my list, but I didn't have the energy to keep my eyes open.

When we got back, I admit I procrastinated with reading for a while.  But now I'm already almost halfway done with my first book of the challenge!

The book I chose is one of only two or three books that I own and have never read.  My Mom got it for me who knows when - she used to work at Borders and would come home with books all the time.  (In her words, she was like an alcoholic working at a liquor store.  In my words, she was the worst kind of -holic because she brought her habit home to her kids.) :)

Haunting Experiences: Encounters with the Otherworldly by Michelle Belanger is proving to be a great book to ease myself back in to reading.  One of the reasons that I've put it off so much in recent years is because I used to binge an entire book in a day - we're talking books like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a full 734 pages which were not intended to be read in just one day.  But Haunting Experiences is a collection of short stories, each of which are only about 10-15 pages long, so it's very easy for me to read a chapter or two and put it down.  No cliffhangers keeping me sucked in and making me forget about cooking dinner!

The book is supposedly all true.  Ms. Belanger is a psychic and she has had many experiences with hauntings - ghosts, negative energies, poltergeists, etc.  As much as I've always been a firm believer in faeries and certain kinds of magic, I just have a hard time with the word "psychic."  I can't help but to associate the word with the type of person who was at my high school graduation party, who told me such shocking things as "many big changes are coming" and "big things are headed your way."  Wow!  These things were in my future the night I graduated high school?!

Anyway, whether you believe that the stories are true or not, it's an entertaining book.  Sometimes I feel like Lucy Ricardo when she is so engrossed in reading The Mockingbird Mystery that she accidentally eats her cold cream, and then gets such a scare when Ricky calls to her that she throws her book out the window!  The stories are just scary enough to keep me turning the page without being so scary that I can't sleep at night.  But, because each story is only 10-15 pages long, the suspense never builds up so long that I forget to do anything important!

I'm very happy with my first selection for the 2016 reading challenge.  And I can't wait for my next eleven books!

2016 Reading Challenge: Challenge Accepted!

I used to read a lot, but then I stopped.  I wrote out a detailed post about how much I used to read and all of the excuses that I made for not reading so much anymore, but it turned out to be pretty depressing.  To sum it up: college, work, and new hobbies took up so much of my time that I allowed them to almost completely replace leisurely reading.  In 2014 I re-read the Harry Potter series and Mockingjay - the most books I'd read for pleasure in one year in a long time.  Last year started off strong - I read four books in less than two months, none of which I'd ever read before - but then more excuses came along and I didn't read for the rest of the year.

Towards the end of the year, I started seeing the 2016 reading challenge floating around on Facebook:

A lot of my friends, who are avid readers, were pretty excited about it.  I was interested as well, but nervous because it had been so long since I actually read 12 books in one year.  (Not counting the semester I took two classes on Classical mythology, wherein I read at least 15 books and plays.)  But my friend Elizabeth told me not to worry about last year, and I realized that she was totally right!  Last year is last year, and this year is going to be this year.

In order to encourage myself to read more, I bought a bookshelf from IKEA and strategically placed it next to my TV.  Hopefully, seeing the shelf full of welcoming books will help me to keep myself from binge-watching shows and do some reading instead.

I haven't quite chosen all 12 books yet, but I will blog about the challenge as I go along!  Will you challenge yourself this year, too?