2016 Reading Challenge: a book published before you were born

Honestly, the challenge in finding a book for this category was in narrowing it down to just one book!  I'm pretty sure that ALL of the canonical classics were published before I was born.  (That year was 1991, so booknerds, please let me know if there are any classics that are younger than I!)

Before I spent too much energy trying to decide on a book, I went to my town's Labor Day weekend festival with a friend.  (People from Berkley: it's basically like Berkley Days, but for Labor Day!)  There was a used book sale going on in one area, and books were ALL $1 each!  Ahh!  I grabbed two mysteries that seemed interesting, a Kathy Reichs book, and then I happened to notice sitting there a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth.  It's a very nice hard cover, with a built-in bookmark ribbon, and by the inscription it was evidently a Christmas present for someone named Connor in 2009 from his aunt and uncle.  I kind of really like knowing who it used to belong to!  I hope that Connor at least read the book, and willingly donated it to the sale.  If he lost it and it somehow wound up donated to a book sale, I'd feel bad.

Anyway!

Yet again, Jules Verne's writing style kind of disappointed me.  It was nowhere near as bad as getting through Tolkein, but it definitely did drag every now and then.  Some of it - the high formality of the language, for example - could be the fault of the translator.  There were definitely a few sentences that I had to read a few times in order to understand.  (My beginner's knowledge of German could imagine the different grammatic structure of the German sentence, and then imagine the translator struggling between a literal translation which probably felt more "true" to him, vs a more casual English sentence structure that reads easier but is perhaps a technically less accurate translation.)

I ended up reading this a lot more quickly than I normally would have.  When I read the first few chapters, it was at home on my couch as usual... and I kept struggling to stay awake, due in part to my odd fatigue all summer long, the slow/formal language of the book, and how comfy my couch is.  But before too long, I got an internship with The Advocacy Project in downtown DC!  I decided to take the Metro rather than attempt to drive during the morning rush hour, and boy oh boy does that ~40 minutes each way 3 days a week make for a lot of great reading time!  One day, there was a 20 minute delay on the Metro, and rather than get all frazzled about being late to work I simply smiled and read for an extra 20 minutes that morning.

When I saw the 2008 movie with Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson, I either heard or figured (or both) that it was quite different from the book.  But, wow, it was REALLY different.  It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but I remember them doing a lot of running from dinosaurs and something about a ground that was over a bottomless pit, and said ground was very fragile and dangerous to walk on.  Not to mention that they spent the majority of the movie actually in the center of the Earth.

But the book?  They didn't even enter the extinct volcano (from several thousand feet ABOVE the surface) until HALFWAY THROUGH the book.  Then, while they certainly spent several months and a good portion of the book very deep beneath the surface, they actually never make it to the center of the Earth!  The book is definitely more about the journey TO, while the movie is about the adventures IN.  So, that was definitely a surprise.  Of course I figured that the book would be slower and a little less action-packed, simply because of the time period it was written in, but I guess I also expected some of the scenes that I remembered from the movie to be in the book.

Despite the differences, I did enjoy the book.  I don't think it quite earned a place on my list of favorites, again mainly because of the formal language, but I'm definitely glad that I read it!  It also amused me that I read the bulk of the book on the subway, which averages about 4 stories below ground.  Here are my heroes several hundred leagues under the Earth, and I'm suffering from the pressure on my ears less than one thousandth of a league under the surface!

Coming up next in the challenge: probably a book chosen for me by a friend.  Last night at my crochet meetup, we talked a lot about books and I complained about how many difficult books I've read this year.  My friends had a looooot of good recommendations for me!  I'm excited to read some of them.  I'm also planning on reading The Magic Kingdom of Landover series, which I discovered on Goodreads and am very intrigued by.  Also, I started watching Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell on Netflix, and I'd reeeeeally like to read the book!  I got the audiobook on Audible (woo free Gold subscription trial!), which I think will be great on the Metro because I'll be able to let my eyes rest but still get through my book.  If you had told me this time last year that I'd be flying through much more than one book per month, I'd have been pretty surprised!

Myla Goldberg: Bee Season

My decision to read this book isn't actually part of the 2016 reading challenge.  That's right, after so many years of barely reading, I'm reading an extra book on top of the 12 that I've decided to read this year - before I've finished the challenge!  I'm definitely loving reading more often.

Back in early July (or maybe it was the end of June?), I checked out several books from the library.  My library is only about two or three blocks away (although I don't actually walk on the streets - it's much faster if I cut through the series of parking lots between my apartment and the library).  Sort of on the way home from the library is Roosevelt Square, a quaint little plaza with a Co-op grocery store and a few restaurants and even a movie theater.  (Have I mentioned how much I adore the community in which I live?)  Right outside the grocery store is one of those Little Free Libraries - a small kitchen cupboard unit where people drop off unwanted books, and hopefully pick up a book or two in return.

So as I was walking home from the public library, I decided to check out the little free one.  After all, I'd just returned two books, so why not pick out one or two more?  There were more books in the shelf than I expected.  Most of them didn't really appeal to me, but this one did.

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg proved to be... an experience.  Based on the description on the back, I was expecting it to be on the lighter side and mostly kid-friendly.  But, wow.  The first few pages (the book doesn't really have chapters - just line breaks with asterisks to denote a scene change/time passing) were mostly what I was expecting.  After a few scenes, things started to change.  I don't want to say enough to spoil it, because I'm definitely going to recommend that you read this book.  But... let's just say that because the book is written not just from Eliza's perspective but from the whole family's, things get emotionally heavy.  Much more so than I would ever have understood or liked as a kid.  We get insights into Eliza's parents' struggling relationship, into Eliza's brother's struggles as an unpopular 16-year-old, and Eliza's struggles to understand what is going on with her family.  Towards the end of the book, things get REALLY intense.

There weren't many lines in the book that stood out to me as profound, but there was one very early in the book that I really liked.  As we learn in the beginning of the book, Eliza has never been particularly smart or special at anything.  Her fourth grade class is divided into two reading groups: she is placed in the Racecars group, while the other is called the Rockets.  At first, Eliza enjoys being a Racecar, until she learns the name of the other group.  "... [S]he can't get it out of her head that, while she is speeding around in circles waiting to be told when to stop, other kids are flying to the moon." (p 7).

Something about that line just really struck me as special.  Picturing a child, proud of herself for being a speedy race car, suddenly feeling less than special because her classmates are rocket ships, made me smile sadly.

The climax of Bee Season was very intense.  It felt more like an actual climax than most of the books I've read this year, which was super satisfying.  For really only the second time this year (Cursed Child being the first), I was completely unable to put the book down until I finished it.  Dinner ended up being a little bit later than usual that night.  Derek reminded me that it was 5:00, but I had a few pages left and didn't want to put the book down yet.  (Yeah, we eat super early.  I often start cooking at 4:30ish because we're apparently 60 years old.)  To be honest, it kind of felt like the book ended during the falling action.  It was like climax, some falling action, and not really much of a resolution.  Then again, I was always terrible at figuring out the exact moments that define the story arc.

Don't get me wrong, it was a good ending.  It's just that the emotions were so high and so much was happening at once until just a few pages before the end.  Still a satisfying ending, but I kind of wished there was a little bit more to it, you know?  I guess that's partly because I like a perfectly rounded, happy-for-everyone ending.  When a book ends on a sort of "will it work out or won't it?" note, I'm like "show us that it will work out!"  I know that's not realistic, but that's what I like and I'm not embarrassed to admit it.  I think I've matured enough that I can still enjoy a book (or movie) that doesn't end with the sentence "All was well," but I still generally wish it was there.

So, what's next?  I'm hoping to check off the book chosen for me by a BFF category next.  A friend of mine at my crochet group is distantly related by marriage to the author of a successful fantasy series, but I'm on a waiting list at my library for the first book.  If that takes too long, I might skip to a book that I previously abandoned.  Of course, there's a HUGE plethora of amazing books that were published before I was born, but I have to figure out which one of them I want to choose for the challenge!  And, I've preordered all 3 of the new Pottermore Presents books on the Google Play Store.  They're all super short but I'm definitely going to read them, though they don't count for the 2016 challenge.