On the topic of reading…
My very cool friend Megan challenged herself to read 50 books this year. I would like to do the same. I\’m off to a good start. She posts reviews on her blog. Maybe I\’ll do that sometime in the future. For now, you\’ll have to make do with a list and a very simple rating from me. Five stars is a good thing. One star, not so much. Get it? See, I knew my basic readership was gifted.
2010 Reads To Date: With a Hammer For My Heart by George Ella Lyon *** Taft by Ann Patchett **** (Could have been five if I understood the ending) Bel Canto by Ann Patchet ***** (WOW!) The Time Traveler\’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger **** Smash Cut by Sandra Brown *** The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier *** The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers ****
The only book that I would rate as a one star (or less, if I could figure out how to do that) I can\’t really list because I only made it through about three chapters before I determined that it was an utter waste of the paper it was printed on. I should have known that when I picked it up at Half-Price Books on the one dollar shelf and there were multiple copies of it! I didn\’t really give it a good once over then, just noticed that it was written by Shari Shattuck, who played Ashley Abbott on The Young and the Restless for a brief stint. Hardly a real literary credential, I know. But it was a DOLLAR….and it looked like a fun, interesting mystery about the world of geishas. WRONG. It was crap, which I would have realized had I followed my teacherly advice and read the first poorly written page, or even scanned the back of the book more carefully. Lethal, the title I selected, turns out to be just one of in a series of books by the \”Naughty Girls of Downtown Press.\” Their motto? \”Good girls go to Heaven. Bad girls go Downtown.\” \’Nuff said.
I have an extensive list of wanna-reads in my journal, but that is in my desk at school…where I haven\’t been for four whole days. I would like to branch out into different genres (cookbooks don\’t count!), read/reread more classics, and find some authors whose styles inspire me. Ann Patchett is pretty phenomenal. Each of her books (and I think I\’ve read most, except The Magician\’s Assistant) is unique. No predictability. Her settings range from a home for pregnant teens in rural western Kentucky to an unnamed South American country\’s capital. Thought provoking stuff.
By the way, as I type this blog, I am wearing a crown. It is bejeweled and has purple puffy feathers and sequins. So, that means that what I say goes, right??