Care to join me?

1.  The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

2.  A Town Like Alice

3.  The Lace Reader

4.  The Devil in the White City

5.  Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

6.  The Ask

7.  Faithful Place

8.  The Strain

9.  Crossing

10.  Sea

11.  City of Fallen Angels

12.  Crescendo

13.  In a Perfect World

14.  The Walking Dead, Vol 2 & 3  (and more)

15. Paranormalcy

16. The Glass Castle

17.  Blindness

18.  Nothing Left to Burn

19.  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

20.  The Sparrow

21.  The Mockingbirds

22.  The Unidentified

23.  The Scorch Trials

24.  Before I Fall

25.  Perfume:  The Story of a Murderer

26.  Ship Breaker

27.  Freedom

28.  Kitchen Confidential

29.  Tinkers

30.  Moon Over Manifest

31.   Will Grayson, Will Grayson

32.  Beautiful Darkness

33.  Boneshaker

34.  Innocent

35.  Blind Descent

36.  The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

37.  Beowulf on the Beach

38.  A Visit from the Goon Squad

39.  Mr. Toppit

40.  The Adoration of Jenna Fox

41.  American Gods

42.  We Need to Talk About Kevin

43.  Don’t Look Now

44.  The Good Thief

45.  Leviathan

46.  The Unit

47.  Fun Home

48.  Fables

49.  Phonogram

50.  The Unwritten

51.  Peter & Max

52.  Woman on the Edge of Time

53.  Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

54.  The Count of Monte Cristo

55.  Across the Universe

56.  Please Ignore Vera Dietz… which I’m currently reading

57.  Unearthly… which I have an ARC of and need to move to the top of the list

It’s an odd list, yes?  I may not read them all, but it’s a start.  Some of these have been hanging around the list for a while.  And there are so many new ones to come.  It’s like a dream, writing these lists.  A way to jump into something new.

Already chalked up to 2011:  Super Sad True Love Story and The Scent of Rain and Lightning.

Plus a few late 2010 books that merit note:  Anna and the French Kiss (delightful book, a lovely skip down my own study abroad memory lane), Skippy Dies (one of my 2010 faves – so very good, honest, unflinching), and Delirium (this one was an ARC, and I have more than a snippet to say about it, more to come).

• 57 books read, according to my Goodreads recording system (more if you count the chapter books I read aloud to my kids)
• 10 books given as Christmas gifts
• Who knows how many books and bookstore gift cards given throughout the year
• 1 party based on a book
• 5 books read on my nifty new iPad
• 5 authors met
• Countless book conversations had on Twitter
• Only one actual book club meeting
• 1 resolution to write more and read more in 2011

I’ve read three of the books in this series: The Iron Daughter, The Iron King, and The Iron Queen. And it’s been an odd experience for me because as much as I think the books are well written and the world is well-drawn and interesting, the story never appealed to me in the same way that something like Hunger Games or Graceling or Incarceron did. I loved the Winter and Summer parts of the world that Kagawa created – Puck and Ash, Oberon and Mab, Grimalkin…especially Grimalkin. When the characters were in those parts of the world, the story came alive. But Kagawa created a new twist to the faery lore: the Iron Kingdom, the intrusion of technology into nature. And that’s where she lost me. I like a good reboot as much as the next person. Little Red Riding Hood as a werewolf hunter? Bring it. But this one just couldn’t capture my interest. I kept longing for the characters to return to the other parts of the realm, and I think that there was plenty for them to do there: the branching into the Between, the ways that the faery world crosses into our modern world through backrooms and alleys, the friendship of Puck and Ash, the Winter prince. But the Iron Kingdom is the story that Kagawa wanted to tell, and I have to respect that.

In talking with some friends who have also read all three books, I know that they loved the books and the Iron twist to the mythology and the ending, and that’s important.  Not every story will reach every reader; it seems as though I’m just outside the mark for this one.

It was an odd experience for me, reading this series. I love the world, love the writing, love the characters, but I’m meh on the story as a whole. I’ll keep reading it, though, and certainly recommending it to people who may enjoy it more than I do. That’s something, right?

Disclosure: I received copies of both The Iron Daughter and The Iron Queen courtesy of NetGalley.

I’m in Harry Potter mode.

I’m definitely a rereader.  A movie re-watcher, as well.  Some books don’t generate the amount of interest needed for a second (third?  fourth?  more?) read, but so many do.  There are some texts that benefit from multiple close readings.  But some books, like Harry Potter, create worlds that readers simply wish to revisit.   The latter are the kinds of books that we’re sad to leave, lingering over the last few chapters because we don’t want the journey to end.  My list below is a mix of the two.  Here are seven books that will make it back to the nightstand sometime soon.

1.  The House of Mirth.  It’s a world that I’m fascinated by, but not one that I wish to live in.  It’s Lily Bart and Selden who keep me coming back to this book.  (Yes, I’ve already read it three or four times.)  It’s as though the ending will somehow be different if I read it just one more time.

2.  All the King’s Men.  The text is dense, the characters complex, and the dialect can slow you down in the beginning.  It’s one of my all-time favorites, as is The House of Mirth, and the story rewards multiple readings.

3.  Blood Meridian.  For a long time, this was one of the primary texts that I worked with in grad school.  And I read it so many times that I thought the story was permanently burned into my brain.  However, the book has come up in discussions several times recently, and sadly, I barely remember anything other than how much I enjoyed it.  I think I’m due for a revisit to the Kid and the Judge.

4.  White Noise.  Like Blood Meridian, this was one of those texts that I loved and studied and re-read and analyzed, and now can just barely remember what happened:  the airborne toxic event, Hitler studies, Jack Gladney and his black coat (it was a coat, yes?).  It’s terrible that I can’t remember more. And I love the new cover. You should click through just to see it.

5.  A Prayer for Owen Meany.  I love this book, not for what it represented about our culture or the deep meanings that I teased out of the prose.  I read Owen Meany for fun on a beach, and it was like someone had given me the perfect vacation gift.  I never wanted to write about it in grad school because I was afraid it would destroy my readerly love for it.  I miss Owen.  Maybe a re-read of this one will be my Christmas gift to myself.

6.  The Magicians.  Of all of the books on this list, this is the only one I’ve read once.  But it’s sitting on my shelf, begging to be picked up again.  And now that my daughter is reading the Narnia books, The Magicians is oh-so-much more clever.

7.  And my favorite, Harry Potter.  I think that with every single HP installment, I turned back to page one right after finishing so that I could read it again slowly.  I’m so looking forward to a third reading of the Deathly Hallows.  I cried and cried during both of my previous readings, and I’m looking forward to hopping back on that emotional roller coaster.

There are more, of course.  As I look at my shelf, I feel like most of the books (and all of my favorites) have been read at least twice.  But these are the seven that are pushing their way to the top of my stack.

Harry Potter… I know, right?

I began reading the Harry Potter books while in grad school. ( I believe the Prisoner of Azkaban had just been released.) Like most of you, I was immediately hooked and eagerly awaited the publication of each new installment. And when we began to talk about having children, I so looked forward to a day when I could share Harry with them.

And then I had a child, and the worries of parenthood began to creep in. After a particularly bad miscarriage, I sank into a deep depression – one that I feared I might not recover from. I worried so much about death – losing my child, losing another pregnancy. But the big worry was the fear that I would die myself, that my child would lose a parent. I went into counseling, I read the books that were recommended to me, I meditated, I wrote in a journal. None of it helped. And then, ridiculous as it may seem, I started to think about Harry Potter. I realize that it’s an exaggeration of what might actually happen, but the thought that a child could survive a parent’s death, even both parents’ death, and come out on the other side of it okay helped me. The Harry Potter books reminded me that children are resilient, that they will find role models in other places, that at some point friends become an important influence in their lives.  Harry Potter gave me hope that if I died, my children would be okay without me.  It seems silly, but it’s oh-so-serious to me.

I still have days when I worry.  Okay, I still have a lot of days when I worry.  Looking at my son sleeping beside me, I can’t imagine missing one second of his life.  But when that worry starts to feel overwhelming, I stop, take a deep breath, and remember that he will be okay.  That my daughter will be okay.  That life can go on without me, as much as it pains me to think that it would.  That while my children might not have the same life that they would if I were around, they will be fine.  (I hope…)

Is it absurd to find hope in a book like this?  Perhaps.  But it saved me.  I climbed out of that deep hole of depression because of it.

I have hope today because there’s love in my life.  I have hope today because the world seems to stretch out before me.  But seven years ago, I had hope because I had Harry Potter to guide me – a world to lose myself in until I could handle my own again.

Reading out of my comfort zone isn’t something that I tend to do often. I have a fairly tightly drawn box that I read within.  I read all of the classics in college and grad school (and I do mean all of them).  In recent years, I’ve been reading a lot of YA, MG, supernatural, mysteries, science fiction, and dystopia.  Mix in some edgier literary fiction, and that’s pretty much it.  I tend to steer clear of family dramas (although I may make an exception for Freedom), romances (unless there’s a vampire or werewolf involved, natch), or humor (unless it’s Hornby).  A book has to be fairly extraordinary — or get extraordinary buzz, like Freedom — to get my reading attention.  I took a chance this time on a book that I wasn’t sure I would like, and I am grateful for it.

So I thought I should try reading yet another book that’s out of my comfort zone.  Freedom seems a bit too obvious.  Maybe Anthony Bourdain’s new book?  What do you read when you want to read outside your norm?

My daughter’s bookshelf, a glimpse into her life.

Fond memories captured in these spines – both of reading as a child and of reading to her.

Discussions about characters, conversations about plots, a shared love of books.

The City & The City wasn’t what I expected.  I was expecting something more supernatural or paranormal — portals between worlds, and all that.  What I got was a smart, layered treatment of two cities that highlights the invisibility existing in our world.  It was fascinating and brilliant.  The separate languages, speech patterns, histories, businesses — all made the two cities seem absolutely real and possible.  Two fully realized worlds existing in one space, captured within a book.

While the city construct was interesting, the larger idea, for me, was that of invisibility: the ways in which we “unsee” things around us every day.  If you think about it, you do it; we see people every day, people we shouldn’t stare at and so we “unsee” them.  The homeless, the disabled, the different. I’ve thought about this so much more since finishing the book, reminding me of similar experiences after reading Invisible Man and Notes from the Underground.  (In fact, I had a professor who talked about this very experience while teaching Notes.  He worked as a janitor while in college and said that he routinely felt invisible to those people whose rooms and toilets he cleaned.  He would walk by and they would “unsee” him.)  While those two books focused more on individuals in society whom we choose not to see, Mieville seems to be making more of a political statement. What happens when a group of people is divided along ethnic and cultural lines?  What happens in places where two groups have to share a space even though they do not share a government?  Israel and Palestine. East and West Germany.  The Sunni, Shia and Kurds in Iraq.  In what ways are those groups invisible to each other?  In places of our world, forces of history and geography have created a present that is fractured.  The City & The City boils this cultural and political disconnect to its essence.

This is far more than a noir-ish detective story.  It’s a remarkable work of fiction.

All in all, it was a good weekend for reading.  I finished China Mieville’s The City & The City and read Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me in one afternoon.  I should write my thoughts on both — each one was wonderful but in a different way.  (Perhaps a post or two for tomorrow?)  I started Tinkers but decided, ultimately, to go with The Windup Girl as my next book.  The blurbs on the back were too much for me to resist.