2016 Reading Challenge: Summary!

Well, 2016 has come and gone and I have to admit: I didn't complete the challenge.  But I'm not upset about it, and I don't feel down on myself, and I'm not gonna let it keep me from reading in 2017 out of some lame "well if I couldn't do it LAST year..." excuse.

Honestly, the main reason I failed to complete the challenge is because I read several books that didn't count towards the challenge!

I did kind of stop choosing to read while at home, letting games and my nails and crocheting get in the way of that again, but I always read for about an hour a day on the Metro!  Actually, that's not entirely true - I also listened to one and almost a half audio books.  I never thought I would have the attention span for audio books, but as it turns out, they're great for a Metro commute - I can let my sleepy pre- and post-work eyes rest and still make progress in the book!

So if we're counting audio books (and I definitely think we should), I did manage to check off one more book from the challenge: a book recommended by a friend.  When I asked my coworker for an audio book recommendation (I explained to her that the only one I'd ever listened to before was Harry Potter, so I was used to an incredible narrator), she suggested Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, narrated by Stephen Fry.  Oh. my. gosh.  It was an incredible experience listening to that narration!  Stephen Fry did different voices for different characters, which is the #1 thing I need in an audio book so I can tell who the heck is talking.  And his voices were so. funny.  The book constantly had me laughing out loud on the Metro - I'm sure I got some funny looks!  The rest of the series (which I now definitely want to listen to) is narrated by none other than Martin Freeman.  (Is he knighted? cuz I kinda want to call him Sir Martin Freeman.)  I could tell while listening to the book that Martin was absolutely perfect for playing the role of Arthur Dent in the movie (which I did see, but don't really remember; I do remember that it wasn't received terribly well by fans of the book).  So for him to narrate the rest of the book series is just so exciting!

Okay, so, let's go over the list one last time:

BOOKS FOR THE CHALLENGE

• A book published this year: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, JK Rowling 💖
• A book you can finish in a day: The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami 👍
• A book you've been meaning to read: Not Quite the Classics, Colin Mochrie 💖
• A book you should have read in school: Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut 💖
• A book chosen for you by your spouse etc: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams 💖
• A book published before you were born: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne 👍
• A book that was banned at some point: Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 👎
• A book you own but have never read: Haunting Experiences: Encounters with the Otherworldly, Michelle Belanger 👌
• A book that intimidates you: Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring,  JRR Tolkein 👎
• A book you've already read at least once: The Book Thief, Markus Zusak 💖

SKIPPED CHALLENGES

• A book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller: skipped because I never got around to seeking recommendations (partly because I don't know them personally and I'm chicken to introduce myself)
• A book you previously abandoned: skipped because I have only ever abandoned books that bored me senseless, and I didn't want to hate the book I was reading

BOOKS THAT WEREN'T A PART OF THE CHALLENGE

• Bee Season, Maya Goldberg 👍
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (audio book - not finished because the narrator was pretty boring and did NOT distinguish between character voices) 👌
• Magic Kingdom for Sale, Terry Brooks 👍
• The Black Unicorn, Terry Brooks (got about 1/3 through before the year ended) 👍

I decided to rate the books I read this year with a super professional and adult emoji method. 💖 means I loved the book and/or loved reading it; 👍 means I liked it a lot but didn't quite love it; 👌 means it was ok but I didn't quite like it a lot; 👎 means I did not like reading it but doesn't necessarily mean I think it's a bad book.  I did write up a blog post on most of these books, so if you're curious as to why I rated it a certain way, find it in my previous posts!  They're conveniently all tagged with "2016 reading challenge."

So, even though I only got 10/12 on the challenge (which is still a passing grade, hey!), I definitely enjoyed it!  I'm so glad I made the effort to read more in 2016.  I will be sure to stay in the habit for 2017!  Perhaps I'll challenge myself to read one book more than I did this year. :)

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!

2016 Reading Challenge: A book that was published this year

Since Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been out for less than 24 hours, I promise you that there will be NO SPOILERS in this post.  This post is just my general reaction to the book as a whole, and to keep with the continuity of how I've been doing this challenge.

At first, I was happy that this is a script instead of a novel because everything moves faster in a script.  No descriptive paragraphs, no pages of a character's internal struggle or confusion.  Everything  just happens.  But as I finished Part One in under three hours, I realized that a novel would last longer.  After all, it took me at least two full days of binge-reading to get through Deathly Hallows.  I finished Cursed Child within 13 hours of owning it, and that's including breaks for 7 hours of sleep, two meals, and doing a load of laundry.

Still - and obviously -  I loved every second.  I absolutely devoured it.  I considered forcing myself to stop for the day, to preserve the length, but really, there was never a chance of that happening.  Rowling's fast-paced style and tendency to end a chapter (or in this case, a scene) on a very intense moment if not an outright cliffhanger were not marred by the presence of the other two authors.  So it was pretty painful to put it down for five minutes to go put the laundry in the dryer.

For years, I've been wishing that I could temporarily delete everything that I know about the Harry Potter series, just so I can experience it for the first time again.  The suspense, the thrill, the wonder and joy, the twists and reveals.  I finally got to experience all of that again, and as an adult at that.  Of course, it happened all too quickly and once again I'll be cursed with the knowledge of what happens, unable to feel surprise because I knew what was coming at every turn.  It's a blessing and a curse.

One more thing, because I fear that if I keep going on I'll reveal too much: I WANT TO SEE THIS PLAY.  The stage directions in the script must be beautiful.  Of course I can picture them in my head, what's happening, as it would in a movie or as I would picture a book happening... but some of these things seem so impossible to happen on stage without the use of CGI!  Some of the stage directions actually gave me goosebumps as I tried to imagine how incredibly magical they would look when enacted on stage.  It makes me hope that Cursed Child will wind up like Phantom of the Opera - it'll have its home base theater for at least 30 years, and there will be occasional tours so that people outside of London can see it, and maybe after about 18 years they'll turn it into a movie.  (I hope it takes way less than 18 years.)  The effects should be as well-known as Phantom's falling chandelier, but I don't think that would take the magic away because everyone still adores the falling chandelier, even after 30 years.

Okay, that's enough out of me.  Maybe, probably, I'll write an entirely spoiler-riddled post that anyone who hasn't read the book yet will know to avoid so I can share my reactions to specific points.

I only have four books left for this challenge!  Once I finish them, I'll officially have out-challenged myself.  Hoorah!  I'm so glad to have gotten back in to reading.  I didn't realize how much I'd missed it. <3

2016 Reading challenge: A book that has been banned at some point (update: I'm finished!)

For this challenge, I decided to go with another book that my 11th grade English teacher often talked about: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  I honestly don't remember when or why be brought it up - I just remember scribbling the name in my quote book (an amazing part of my life in which I wrote down hilarious moments from the day and occasional random notes).  For all these years, I've had the book on my read-eventually-maybe list but never gotten around to it.  I'm not entirely sure I was aware that Lolita had been banned, as I wasn't at first sure what to read for this challenge.  But while I was perusing a random list of banned books, I saw the title and I immediately decided on it.

I have one word to describe this book so far (I'm about halfway through the book at the time of writing): Ugh.

Let's ignore for a moment the content of the book and focus on Nabokov's writing style.  I like to call it "fancypants smartybutt."  There are lots of random big words that sound like a high schooler used a thesaurus to impress his English teacher.  (I realize that I've kind of been pooping on high school English teachers while writing this series; I do apologize to any teachers reading this and want to stress that it's nothing personal.  I actually really liked four of six of my high school English teachers (I had three in one year thanks to maternity leave and a semester switch), but you know... high school English classes are obnoxious.  I don't think it's entirely the teacher's fault 100% of the time.)  And, UGH, why are there so many French words, phrases, occasionally sentences?  Okay, the narrator is from France.  But the author is from Russia and he wrote the book in English while living in America.  There shouldn't be so much French in a book that takes place in America.  It's annoying and it sounds pretentious and, again, makes it sound like either the narrator or the author was trying to prove himself as a fancypants smartybutt.

Why do I say "either the narrator or the author"?  Because of the format of the book.  It's written in the first person, past tense, and presented as Humbert (the narrator)'s memoirs that he wrote while in jail awaiting his trial.  And it's obvious that Humbert thinks very highly of himself.  So I do understand that he, as a character, would want to use big words and French sentences to sound smarter to the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or to the "dear reader."  Buuuuuut I also kinda feel like there's a way for the author (Nabokov) to do that without grinding on the reader's (me) very last damn nerve with all those French and fancy words that need to either be looked up (ain't nobody got time for that) or skipped over and not understood.  Or, I guess, there's the third possibility that Nabokov really was such a fancypants smartybutt that he assumed that everyone who read his book would be equally as smart and fancy and know all of those French and fancy words.  (Or that he only wanted fellow fancypants smartybutts to really understand his book.  hmm.)

Anyway, so the author's writing style makes it hard enough for me to get through the book.  Like Tolkein, Nabokov enjoys writing long-ass run-on sentences that take up an entire paragraph and need to be read about four times before you can really understand what it means.  Or, again, simply skipped over and not understood because at page 179 (halfway, mind you) I am getting real sick of these long-ass sentences and their fancypants smartybutt language, I tell you what.  Ugh.

Okay, so, there's my complaint about the writing.  Now on to the content (obviously, spoilers).

I can definitely understand why this book was banned.  Going in to it, I did know that the book was about an adult male who had a relationship with a minor female, but... wow.  I did not think it would be like this. 

Through the first quarter or so of the book, Humbert presents Lolita as a young girl of twelve who has a crush on him because he looks like an actor that she likes, and because he is an attractive (ugh, he likes to remind us of his looks) European guy.  So, even though that doesn't make it okay, it's still at least consensual in his eyes.  And it would at least maybe be exciting for Lolita, even though I know damn well that she can say "yes" all she wants, but it's still rape because she's only 12.

But... then.... Humbert.... is going to... protect Lolita's purity (ugh)... by drugging her up... and fondling her... while she sleeps.  UGH WHAT.  That's not how it works.  That's not how anything works.  So now I'm totally disgusted.  But then.... after Lolita's mother dies and Humbert goes to pick Lolita up from summer camp to deliver the news.... and he does it bluntly and horribly... he whisks Lolita away and takes her on a year-long tour of America wherein he has to constantly threaten, bribe, or spoil her, or some combination of the three, in order to keep her "satisfied" enough to have sex with him every morning.  UGHHHHHHH.  So now it's not even a real relationship, he's just got her as this sex slave that he's carrying around the country in order to get his creepy rocks off and carry out his pre-teen fantasies.  Ugh.

That's pretty much where I've left off.  He seems to have just signed her up for some school that wants to teach young girls how to succeed in society (this takes place in the early 1940s, by the way) by being good housewives and knowing how to dance and have social etiquette and general not actual education.  Ugh.

And the several chapters in which Humbert describes their year-long trek?  Ugh so boring.  It doesn't read like a novel so much as a really bored guy's notes.  It doesn't even sound like Humbert was enjoying remembering that year as he wrote it down in his notes.  So many long-ass run-on sentences, so few conversations, so few actual scenes, so little imagery and emotion.

All right, well those are pretty much all of my thoughts on Lolita so far.  I might (probably will) write another post when (if?) I finish the book.  Literally the only thing that's keeping me reading this book right now is the knowledge (thanks to the forward, which is actually a part of the fiction) that Humbert dies in prison.  Which means he gets what's coming.  I just hope that poor Lolita doesn't also die or suffer any worse than she already has.

On a happier note, there are precisely 22 days and fifteen minutes until the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child!  I am SO looking forward to being able to complete the challenge of a book that was published this year. <3

PS Are you on Goodreads?  You can follow my progress with this book (and all of the books I read this year, for the challenge or not!) by being my friend!  Here's my profile.

UPDATE  7/28

I finally finished the book!  I put it off for about a week or two because I was so fed up with it.  But I'm not a quitter, so I decided to finish it off before Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases IN JUST OVER TWO DAYS AHH.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were about 10 pages of "also by Vladimir Nabokov" stuff and something of an epilogue by Nabokov.  I read a few paragraphs of the epilogue and deemed it unnecessary, so woohoo!

In case you couldn't tell, my opinion of Lolita did not change in the last half of the book.  Yeah, it was cool to see how depressed Humbert was after Lolita left him, but there wasn't anywhere near enough emotion or action involved to truly make it interesting.  After writing the initial part of this blog post, I found myself having to stop and say "You started to read this book, so finish it" quite often.  Pretty much a couple of times per paragraph, because of how many goshdarn run-on sentences there were that had me so confused I had to re-start each sentence about three times before I could finish it.  Why do authors get away with that crap?!  Their editors should say, "listen, I get what you're trying to show here, but the readers are going to be confused because their brains won't be able to follow what's going on.  You've got to make your sentences shorter.  End a thought every now and then before throwing in the next one and then jumping back to the first thought with no transition."

So, yay, I have now read Lolita.  I can check that off on my list of "Books that probably everyone should read because they're written by dead white guys but really aren't all that modern white guys have cracked them up to be."

I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am to get back to some young adult fiction after this!  My next step is, of course, Cursed Child as a book that was published this year.  After that I'll be turning to a book that I previously abandoned - either James Dashner's The Death Cure, which I never started but I did kind of give up on trying to get a hold of it for a while; or Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch.  That's Goblet of Fire translated into German.  My thinking is, I've read the book at LEAST 12 or 13 times in English, so what better way to study up on my German than by reading a book that I know so well?  I've started to give it a try a few times but usually given up and either said "I'll just read it in English yet again" or moved on to something else.

 

2016 Reading challenge: a book you can finish in a day

A book I can finish in a day turned out to be a book I can finish in one sitting.  It took me less than an hour to read Haruki Murakami's The Strange Library. 

I saw this book on the shelf while I was looking for Nabokov's Lolita - M being close to N and all that.  And it looked so cool.  I was intrigued by the flaps, and then when I realized that underneath the flaps was the first page instead of another cover page, I was pretty much sold.  I didn't even read past the first page or the back of the book - I totally judged a book by its cover.  But can you blame me?  Just look at it!

Almost every other page is an illustration, and the font is pretty big, so it was a super short read.  It would have been even shorter if I didn't take a few moments to absorb every illustration - but there was pretty much no way I wasn't going to study each illustration.

The book is about a young boy who gets lead through a strange labyrinth in the basement of his public library.  I honestly don't want to say much more than that because the book is so short that the journey through the labyrinth takes up nearly half the book.  But it's..... weird.  It escalated from "hm, okay, this book is getting started" to "HOLY CRAP this book is weird" in less than 20 pages (out of 96).

I don't think I really understood it.  I mean, I was easily able to follow what was happening, but... I feel like there must be more to this book.  A high school English teacher would probably go crazy over it and force their students to write a 10-page essay on what they think was actually happening to the boy or if the boy was even real or if this book actually exists (because, let's face it, high school English teachers make up so much that they might as well make up an entire book).

Anyway, it was a pretty neat book.  I'd recommend it to anyone who likes cool illustrations or really weird books or very pretty books.  Because it was very pretty.  There was a character who didn't have a voice and spoke with her hands, and her dialogue was printed in blue.  I liked that a lot.

Being so short and odd, there wasn't much that truly resonated with me, but there was one quote at the beginning that I liked.  The boy had asked for some books, and when the old man brought them to him, he told the boy (yeah, nobody had actual names in this book) that they couldn't be checked out and he'd have to read them in a special Reading Room.  The boy wanted to go home because his mother would worry, but the old man got so angry about having gone to the trouble of getting the books for the boy that he agreed to stay and read for a half hour.  Then the boy thought to himself:

"Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?" (p 21)

Oh, little boy, how well I know how you feel.  OH WAIT I THINK THAT THE BOY'S ANXIETY KIND OF MAKES THE WHOLE BOOK INTO A SYMBOL OF HOW PEOPLE WITH ANXIETY ACT IN ORDER TO AVOID DISPLEASING OTHERS.  Have you ever been at a party and kind of wanted to leave but didn't want to seem rude so you ended up being the very last person to leave?  And the whole time you just felt trapped under these societal pressures to be social and polite and seem normal?  I would say with about 65% confidence that what happens to the boy in the Reading Room is a symbolic representation of that feeling.  Ha, take that high school English teachers, I could write a good three or four pages about that!

So now I have two other books that I got from the library last week.  One of them is my banned book, and the other may or may not be the book that I abandoned at some point.  I'll explain that when I write my blog post for that part of the challenge!  In the mean time, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases in 42 days and 10 hours.  I'm so excited for my book that was published this year ahh!

2016 Reading challenge: A book you should have read in school

This is the first challenge that I kind of had to interpret loosely.  I was a pretty great student who read almost every book she was supposed to (except for textbooks in college).  There was one book in my Greek mythology class that I kind of skipped over, but I can't remember the name of it or what it was about, so I have no way of finding it again.  I also gave up on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in high school - it was not at all what I expected and I literally couldn't read more than two paragraphs without falling asleep, even when I got well into the Rising Action.  Plus it was the end of my senior year and I'd already been accepted to college, and bombing one unit in English class wasn't going to lower my GPA so drastically that I'd lose my spot at MSU.  So sue me.

Anyway, I decided to interpret this challenge as a book I feel should have been a part of my curriculum in school.  And so I chose the book that my eleventh grade English teacher talked about almost more than some of the books that we actually read: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  Junior year honors English focused heavily on existentialism, a theory (religion? lack thereof?) that I never really understood.  We read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle that year, and I remember Mr. Duffy frequently talking about Slaughterhouse Five as well.  He also talked about Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita a lot, but I'll get to that later. :)

I've sort of been meaning to read Slaughterhouse Five for all of these years, but never really had a reason to until this challenge.  The moment I saw this particular challenge I knew that I was going to read it.  To paraphrase Vonnegut, me reading this book was meant to be, and it always was and it always will be.

So, it took me less than a week to read Slaughterhouse Five.  I can't even remember the last time I read a book that quickly!  (Okay, it was probably two summers ago when I re-read Harry Potter, because the first three books are so short.)  The quick pace of this book was a huge breath of fresh air after crawling my way through The Fellowship of the Ring.  Vonnegut's short, easy sentences were so easy to get through that I occasionally caught myself wondering why he didn't combine a few of those sentences.

Overall, I liked it.  I've always enjoyed satire.  I even noticed a few bits of symbolism in this book, which is rare.  I don't really know what they mean, but I noticed them.  The train that Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners of war were transported in was marked with orange and black, to denote that it was not to be bombed.  The tents at Billy Pilgrim's daughter's wedding were also orange and black.  I noticed that, said "huh, that must mean something," and then kept reading because interpreting symbolism has never been one of my strong suits.  (I struggled very hard in all four years of honors/AP English.  I think the only reasons I managed to earn good grades were a) my teachers could tell that I was honestly trying and b) I had an English major for a mother who helped me to write my papers.)

The whole Tralfamadore thing and their view on time was at once interesting and obnoxious.  After their first introduction, I was like, "wow, they seem to be able to handle death in a very cool way, I wish I could see it like that," and I kind of liked their tradition of saying "So it goes" whenever they learned of a death.  But the more I read about the Tralfamadorians, the more Billy Pilgrim learned about them, the more I was kinda like "they sound really pretentious."  And the more the narrator said "So it goes" every time death was mentioned, even so much as "they were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not" (p 205), the more it got annoying.  The sentence feels like you're distancing yourself from the death, shrugging it off and basically saying, "whatever."  Of course, I understand why Vonnegut uses the phrase that way.  This book is a satire of war, or more precisely a satire of American films/books/TV shows that glorify war.  This book is criticizing people who look at war as a big, beautiful thing fought by strong, valiant 35-year-olds and say, "Well, the millions of deaths were necessary and not that bad when you consider the alternative to fighting."  (Just gotta point out that I don't know how well I would have picked up on that if it wasn't literally spelled out for us on pages 14-15.)

As usual, there were a few quotes in this book that really resonated with me, and I'd like to share them now.

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep" (p 18).  The narrator says this after talking about visiting the World's Fair and seeing what the past was like and what the future might be like.  (I wish I could have seen a World's Fair!)  I just really liked that quote.  How big is a moment?  Can we hold on to a moment forever?  Do we get to keep moments that were once the present with us as they become the past?  Deep stuff.

"It isn't much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams" (p 104), spoken by Billy Pilgrim's mother.  All I have to say about that one is: Amen sista, I hear you on that.

So, yeah, certain aspects of the book got a little annoying at times but overall, I really liked it.  I wish I'd stayed in touch with Mr. Duffy so I could tell him that I finally read it!

Interjection: has anybody noticed how my writing style in each blog post is influenced by the book that I've been reading?  I've always struggled to find my own voice when writing.  I also struggle to find my own voice when singing - I tend to try to copy every sound, every fluctuation of the singer whether I'm listening to The Beatles or Regina Spektor. 

When I checked Slaughterhouse Five out from the library, I also snagged three other books.  Two of them are definitely for the 2016 challenge, while I still have to decide if the third one is or not.  So I'm not entirely sure which one I'll read first, but I'll definitely be getting started on my next book and challenge soon oh boy!

And uh.  A book published this year?  You KNOW I'm gonna go with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which releases in 44 days AHHHHHH!  I'm so stoked for my first Potter-related midnight release in five years!! 

2016 Reading Challenge: a book that intimadtes you (part 2)

Well, it's taken me over two months, but I finally finished The Fellowship of the Ring!

Part of the reason it's taken me so long is that I simply stopped reading for almost a month.  I went on a 2-week vacation back home, and that was long enough to pull me out of the habit of reading, and then I kind of had to force myself to start again.  And even if I read for half an hour a day, which is a fairly small goal, that's still only like 4 pages of this tiny-text, long-ass-paragraphs book.

I read a review of this book on Goodreads that started off, "I'm sorry.  I'm so, so sorry."  I could tell exactly where that person was going with their review from that.  They weren't sorry about spoilers or the length of their review or their bad English.  They were sorry for not really liking the book.

And that's honestly how I feel, too.

I'm so sorry that I can't say that I absolutely loved it.  That it didn't thrill me the way it thrilled my friend in elementary school, the way Harry Potter thrilled (and continues to thrill) me.  The story, the message, the meaning, are absolutely wonderful.  But.  If I hadn't already seen the movies, or if they never existed, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it at all.  If I didn't already know the overall plot and most of the events that take place, I probably wouldn't have remembered what was going on after I took a month-long break from the book, and therefore probably would have felt like giving up on it all over again.  Hell, if I didn't have a face to put with each character, I probably wouldn't have been able to keep track of who was a dwarf, elf, man, or hobbit except for Sam, Frodo, Gandalf, and maybe Aragorn.  (Although, we do get plenty of frequent reminders of Legolas' and Gimli's races and their relations to each other, so, maybe.)

It's just..... so slow.  So much history and geography and mere passage of time is intertwined with the action that I often didn't even notice when the description of the land had turned into something happening to someone.  And not in a good way, like when an author seamlessly transitions from one thing to another.  More in the bad way, like when an author has been rambling on for so long that you're barely absorbing the information anymore and you forget to pay attention to what's happening.

Again, I am sorry.

I know that these are classic books, canonical texts, and truly beloved by many.  But to each his own, right?  The adventure and the undying friendship and loyalty and the Chosen One To Complete A Very Dangerous Mission aspects of this book absolutely appeal to me.  But, unfortunately, Tolkein's writing style does not.

So right now, I'm left with a decision to make.  Technically, I have read an entire book that intimidated me, which fulfills the challenge, so I can move on to the next category.  However, The Lord of the Rings is all technically one very long book that gets published in three volumes.  The Fellowship of the Ring is the first volume, which means that techincally, I have only read 1/3 of the book as a whole.  I would like to read The Two Towers and The Return of the King some day soonish, but I really think that if I try to read them both next, it'll take me until October and then I'll barely have enough time for the rest of the 2016 challenge.  So probably what I'll do is I'll move on to the next challenges, perhaps reading one or two other books before tackling The Two Towers, then another book or two before The Return of the King. 

Oh, and - spoiler, I guess, though I can't imagine anyone reading this hasn't seen the movies by this point - I was really surprised that Fellowship didn't end with Boromir's death and Merry and Pippin's kidnapping!  The final chapter ended with Frodo and Sam leaving Amon Hen, as the film does; but the rest of the Company is still running through the woods looking for Frodo.  I suppose Two Towers starts with Boromir's death and the kidnapping?  I guess I'll just have to read the next book and find out!

 

Side note: I have no idea what to choose for a book that I previously abandoned.  The only reason I have ever abandoned a book is because it bored me too much to continue.  Do I really want to force myself through the boredom yet again?  Isn't the point of reading to be intrigued and absorbed into the book?  Can I maybe count a series that I abandoned?  Because that would work for me.  I kind of abandoned the Maze Runner series when the wait list at my library was too long for the third book and then I got busy moving in to the new apartment/abandoned reading all together.  But the series didn't bore me.  But I also didn't ever start the third book in the series.  Sigh.  I'll have to think of something for that category.

2016 Reading Challenge: a book that intimidates you

So.  It's come to this.

For this part of the challenge, I've decided to finally tackle J. R. R. Tolkien's classic, Lord of the Rings.  Why does this book intimidate me, you might ask?  It's not the length, I can assure you of that.  I was in elementary school for the first half of the Harry Potter series, and the length was no issue back then.  In fact, the reason this book intimidates me dates back to elementary school...

A friend of mine was a huge Tolkien fan.  For his birthday party, his family recreated the Unexpected Party from The Hobbit and we dined as the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf did (replacing wine and beer with punch and root beer, of course).  The games that we played included a scavenger hunt for The Ring, and whacking a giant spider pinata that was laid out in a web made of rope.  I'd never read The Hobbit, so some of the magic was a bit lost on me, but it was an amazing party all the same.  This friend recommended - demanded, really - that I read Lord of the Rings if I liked Harry Potter so much.  The first movie had come out recently, and I'd seen and enjoyed it.  Why not read the book, I thought?  So my parents bought me a very nice box set of the books (really, it's one huge book, but it's generally broken up into three when it's published) and I started out on my adventure through Middle Earth.

Oh. my. gosh.  The book was so far above my reading level.  I could barely get through it.  I remember complaining to my teacher that the Council of Elrond chapter was unbearably slow.  (The scene in the movie had been so short!  How was I to know that in the book, they sat and talked for like 300 years?!)  She suggested that I read the first few sentences of a paragraph and then skip it if it seemed unimportant.  But the paragraphs were all a whole page long.  And the text was small, so small, that a page unbroken by line breaks and paragraph indentations took me half an hour to drag through.

Somehow, I managed to get through the whole book.  I'm fairly sure that I got at least part way through the second book before giving up.  I have no memory of the second book - even the first book is proving to seem mostly new to me, except for the general flow of events which I know from the movie.  For years, I told myself that I'd try the books again some day.

And then I read The Hobbit in the 8th grade (three years after struggling through LotR).  I'd heard that that book was written in much easier language, intended for a slightly younger audience.  I figured I could handle it - and my sisters probably forced it on me, fed up with me rereading Harry Potter yet again.  But even that one was hard for me to get through.  I did finish it, but when the first movie came out around eight years later, I was like, huh, I don't really remember much about this at all.  When I heard that the movie was incorporating a lot of Middle Earth history, mainly from The Silmarillion, I headed out to the bookstore and bought both The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.

That summer, I read The Hobbit.  It was quite enjoyable, the experience made even better by the fact that I read it at my apartment's poolside, in the late summer when very few students were around making lots of noise.  (Can you tell what kind of college student I was?)  I started the Silmarillion during the following school year, but gave up after a few pages.  This needed to wait until I didn't have homework, classes, work, and film shoots hanging over my head.

It's been almost four years now.  In that time, I've thought about re-tackling Lord of the Rings, but it's just kind of sat there in my mind, all dark and mysterious and full of very long sentences and difficult language and the world's most boring chapter ever.

Well, that was then.  I'm about halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring (and they're NOT EVEN IN RIVENDELL YET), and while it is a bit sticky for me, I'm definitely enjoying it!  My edition of the book has an introduction written by Tolkien himself, and he admits to being more interested in the linguistics and history of Middle Earth than the action.  That is very obvious when you read the book.  I can follow his sentences much better now that my reading level has improved, but the action is definitely slow.  I don't blame the movie for making the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell seem to take only a day or two, because it's been almost two months since Frodo and friends left Hobbiton, and they're not yet in Rivendell after 206 pages.  A great many days of those two months has been described in great detail, even if nothing more happens than the hobbits walk a long distance and are very hungry, tired, and scared.

So, I'm getting through the book.  Not as easily as I flew through the last book in my challenge, but much more easily than I did at the age of 10.  Tolkien's writing style doesn't intimidate me the way it used to, but it certainly does seem to drag compared to the pace at which I'm used to action rolling out in books.

I know that so far for this challenge, I've been writing a post about a book only after I finish it, but I have a feeling that I'm going to write a few more posts as I go through this series.  I have lots of thoughts that I like to write down, and I get the feeling that I'll be too impatient to write them all in a draft and publish them all at once.  In any case, I'm only halfway through the first third of the book, and look how much I've already rambled!  I'm sure that anyone reading this would hate to read all of my thoughts for the next 1,012 pages!

2016 Reading Challenge: A book you've read at least once

Looking through my moderately small book collection, it was obvious which book I should read for this challenge: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  My Mom brought it home one day when she was working at Borders.  At the time, it was just another book I had never heard of that she figured I'd like.  And not only that, but the author had been there signing books, so she snagged a copy for each of my sisters and got them all signed!

I probably put off reading The Book Thief for a while, since it was likely during the school year and I was busy with everything, including assigned reading. (I actually struggled to do well in English class, harder than I had to struggle to do well in AP Calculus - reading is one thing, but analytical writing is, for me, far more difficult and annoying than finding the derivative of sin x squared plus y cubed.)

I know I read this book for the first time over the summer.  I know I read it curled up in my pink butterfly chair.  I probably read it while listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack on repeat.  This was my CD of choice at the time.  Even now, I usually listen to the Hans Zimmer Pandora station, which plays a lot of songs from the four Pirates movies.

The Book Thief had me captivated immediately.  Never in my life had I read a book with such strong imagery.  On this read, which is at least the third time I've read the book, I couldn't stop crying through the first few chapters.  Partly because I got emotional remembering myself curled up in my chair, most likely stroking my kitty Miles absentmindedly as he sat curled in my lap.  Partly because I knew about all of the sad things that were coming.  But mostly, because the book is so god damn beautiful that every bit of imagery had my eyes welling up.  And there is a ton of imagery in this book.  Voices personified more than I have ever seen in any other book.  "She seemed to collect the words in her hand, pat them together, and hurl them across the table," p 35, is one of my favorite examples.

Of course, it's always hard to read about Nazi Germany, even if it's a beautiful story from the perspective of a preteen.  This time, there was a passage that truly scared me.  To set the scene for those who haven't read the book:

During the first air raid in the town of Molching, several families are huddled in an air raid shelter.  They are all holding hands, silent, waiting for the raid to end.

"Did they deserve any better, these people?
How many had actively persecuted others, high on the scent of Hitler's gaze, repeating his sentences, his paragraphs, his opus?  Was Rosa Hubermann responsible?  ... Or Hans?  Did they all deserve to die?  The children?" (p 375-6.)

This passage always made sense to me when I read the book before.  But never has it actually resonate with me before.  Replace the name Hitler with Trump, and... well... you can probably figure out the rest.  Reading this passage, I couldn't help but to envision a dark, scary future in which Trump is President and there is a second Civil War, and a group of people in Trump-America are huddled together, hoping not to die together, each unsure of how much of a part in this war each of them has.

Okay, I don't want to get too political here, but it had to be said.  Moving on.

"There are lines on his cheeks.  They look drawn on and, and for some reason, when I see them, I want to cry.  It is not for any sadness or pride.  I just like the way they move and change" (p 527).

This line made me cry a little.  Because I realized that I am just like Liesel in that regard.  Sometimes, I like something so much that I cry a little.  A line in a book.  The swell of notes in music - even in action movie soundtracks or pop songs, sometimes.  A new scent that flows in through the open window.  A loving hug, in real life or in a movie.  People gathered together in the town square, singing Jingle Bells after Santa lit the Christmas tree.  (That one happened this past Christmas.)  Some things in life are so pretty, or nice, or normal, that I take a quiet moment to appreciate them, and my eyes water either a little or a lot.  (Usually a lot.)

It's worth noting that The Book Thief is one of the only books-to-film that was truly perfect.  Yes, the film cut out some scenes, but it's a 550-page book.  The 2013 film really managed to capture the sad beauty of the book.  That's the best way I can describe the tone of this book: Sad, beautiful.  Tragically beautiful.  Beautifully sad.  Sometimes sad, sometimes beautiful, sometimes both at once.  It's a book that really makes you feel.  It's a book where, every few chapters, there's a sentence so beautiful, so powerful, so tragic, that you just have to stop reading and bask in it for a few moments before moving on.  I won't quote any of those sentences here because it's unfair to pull them out of context and plaster them on to your screen, especially surrounded by my awkward, stumbling, rambling sentences.  (I say that with all the pride in the world for my writing style, and perhaps a bit of inspiration from Zusak's style.)

I think I've said all that needs to be said about The Book Thief at this point, though I know I could ramble on about my love for the book for pages.  If you haven't read this book yet, read it as soon as humanly possible.  If you have read it, read it again when you get the chance.  And watch the movie after you've read the book, because it's good enough that it won't ruin your image of the book.

I haven't quite decided which challenge to do next!  It will likely be one of the following:

-Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello - a book I can read in a day
-Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkein - a book that intimidates me (yes, all 3 books!!)
-Too Far, Rich Shapero - a book that I previously abandoned

I've made my decision of what to read for most of the rest of the challenges, but I don't own any of them so I'll finally have to pay a visit to my library - which is only about two blocks away!  And for the life of me, I don't know what to read for a book that was published before I was born.  There are just way too many classics to choose from!  (Scary thought: there are children at the appropriate reading level who could choose Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for that challenge.  Eeek!)

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?