32/365 - February 1, 2010

Hello, my name is Emily and I’m a book addict. I keep buying new books even though I haven’t finished reading the last books I bought.

This is my current To Be Read pile, though I’m halfway done with the book on top. I’m going to try not to buy anymore books until I get through at least half of these. However, my birthday is coming up soon…

Did I think it was a bad book? No. Did I think the writing was bad? For the most part, no. There was just some really gimmicky devices he used that annoyed the hell out of me. Like when he starts having imaginary conversations with his “brother” or his friend “John” which are really just an excuses for some self-indulgent rambling. I originally thought that this was another example of being fresh in 2000 and stale by 2008, but then I went back and read the (amusing) Preface (which he advises you to skip in the first place) and he acknowledges that he knows he did some gimmicky stuff. So the fact that he admitted that kind of annoyed me even more.

The thing about this book is that it feels like you are reading this guy’s blog. Which is maybe why I think it hasn’t aged well? I read blogs every single day and have been for years, so this style is nothing new to me. In 2000, it would have been. Always late to the game, I guess.

Also, like a blog, it’s really pretty uneven. There’s some really good chapters (The first 4 chapters which he also suggests are the only ones you need to read and can stop afterward since it gets worse from there. Does it make it better that he knows the book is uneven? How can I completely get behind this book when the author doesn’t even stand behind his own work! See? Annoying.) and there are some that are just annoying or boring (or both). Like the whole chapter where he had the audition for the Real World and he turns the audition into this really long interview (that never happened) where he just rambles on and on about his childhood and none of it matters. We don’t need to know that Mr. T lived in his hometown to understand him as a person. Yes, it’s an fun fact and if it were me, I might want to try to find a way to include it in my memoir as well, but at the same time, it’s completely pointless for anyone else other than the author to know about. But that’s why it seems like a blog to me, because that’s the kind of stuff someone would write in their blog.

The thing that saved this book for me (and I think is the basis of whether you love or loathe it) is that I actually did care about him (even if his behavior annoyed me sometimes). Plus I could empathize with his situation. My life has certainly not been as bad as his, but I know what it feels like to lose a parent and all the crap that comes with that. I understood a lot of the feelings he had about life in general and will admit that I am just as neurotic and self indulgent as he is (and he’s really neurotic and self-indulgent). Since I was invested, I kept reading through all the boring/annoying parts. If I wasn’t invested, though, there’s no way I could have gotten through this thing.

Also, the ending? With the teen angst and rage crap? A little overdone and I don’t think it really gelled with much of the rest of the book. I liked the inter-cutting of stories in the last chapter all the way up until that point, though. But again, it adds to the “bloginess” of it all, because it’s very much something someone in his situation would write if he was having a bad day (Fuck you all!).  Not really the best way to end the book, though.

Reading back over this, it feels like I’m saying I didn’t like this book. That’s not really the case. I think as a whole it’s a good book. And it’s not all dead parents and orphans either. Yes, there are sad parts but he’s a funny writer and is able to put things in perspective and not be all sentimental or cloying about his situation. That’s definitely another saving grace of this book.

Would I recommend this book to others? Yes. But I might tell them to check it out from the library instead of buying. If you love reading blogs and memoirs, though, you will probably like this book. If you are more of a straight up fiction kind of person, you may hate it, but you should definitely give it a try, even if you only read the (superior) first four chapters.

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2007?

Well, according to Library Thing, I’ve read 24 books this year. That’s not even counting that I re-read Harry Potter 1-6 and I read 7 twice. I also re-read my two favorite Nick Hornby books, High Fidelity and About a Boy. And I’m in the middle of a book now that I will hopefully finish before next Monday. So that actually puts me at 35. That’s about 3 books a month, which is a pretty good average for me since I’m a fairly slow reader.

Highlights would definitely be Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (duh). Also the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman. I’m so glad I finally read those books because I think they’re wonderful. Even though each book gets slightly worse, as a whole I think they are fascinating and thought provoking. I re-read very few of my books but I’ll definitely be re-reading these in the future.

I mentioned the Hornby books above. They are my FAVORITES and will always be, especially High Fidelity. Though when re-reading About A Boy, I realized I actually like the movie a bit better. The ending was changed to be more movie-ending-y, which I don’t really mind, plus the casting is just perfect, but the book is wonderful in it’s own way that books can be and movies just can’t. I read How to Be Good, another Hornby book, and it didn’t have the magic of the other two. It was pretty damn depressing actually. Won’t be re-reading that one.

I also got into comics and graphic novels this year as I’ve been reading Buffy: Season 8 and Angel: After the Fall. I’m currently reading Y: The Last Man, which is fantastic. I’m up to volume 4 and have ordered the rest because I cannot wait to find out what happens next.

Other favs for me include: Kitchen Confidential (I LOVE Anthony Bourdain and this book was interesting and wonderful in a way that I didn’t think a book about cooking could be). The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart was just a short little character driven tale with some mystery and romance and despite being a little cliche, the quality of the writing rose above it’s flaws which made it a nice, satisfying read. In the same vein is The Flawless Skin of Ugly People by Doug Crandell, another character-driven journey story with nice writing.

I also loved Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs. He one of my favorite authors and I liked this collection of stories. I also read Possible Side Effects another collection of his stories, but I didn’t like that one nearly as much. It seemed he was kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as story material for that one.

Lastly is Black Swan Green, which took me a while to get started, but turned out to be a beautiful and very wonderfully written book.

All-in-all it was a good year for books. I don’t think I read any that I hated or even disliked, most I liked a lot. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find equally good books in 2008.

Do you use any of the online book-cataloging sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin))

If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

I use Library Thing, which I like. I was reading in other places that some people don’t like it. Like, it’s too meticulous or something? I don’t know. I’ve looked at Shelfari and a few other similar places and they seem more social network-y. I don’t really care about that aspect of it. I just like to have a place to list all the books I’ve read. Plus since I took the time to add almost every single book I’ve read in the past 15 years, I don’t really want to have to do that again at another place.

Before I started using Library Thing (probably about a year ago?), I just wrote down all the books I read and the date I finished them on, in a little notebook. I started keeping it around 7th grade, I think. I was totally OCD even back then. Though I know I’m missing quite a few books from my Library Thing list because I would forget to write books down sometimes. But I’d say I have a record of about 85-90% of the books I’ve read since I was about 12.

Now, does that matter? Does anyone care? Probably not, but sometimes I just like to look over my list and I feel somewhat accomplished that I’ve read those books and that I still read regularly. Plus I just love the list aspect of it. It warms my OCD-riddled heart.

Here’s the little (and I mean little) blurb on the back of this book:

Thanks to “Ugly Betty”, we’re finally ready to read a love story about a couple that isn’t sleek, slick, tucked, pulled or plastic.

That made me want to read the book. I like Ugly Betty, so that made me think that this book was going to have the same tone: quirky fun with a lot of heart.

Well, it didn’t really turn out that way. Quirky? Check. Heart? Double Check. Fun? Not so much. It’s actually a pretty darn depressing book. But the good thing is that it’s short, about 200 pages, so it goes by fast and you don’t really want to put it down. If it had been long and depressing I would have hated this book, but short and depressing is ok with me, so I liked it.

1. It’s not so much a “love story” as one side of a love story. It’s from the point of view of Hobbie who is in his late 30′s and has severe acne (which he’s had since he was a teenager). I don’t mean a few pimples here and there, but like face disfiguring, children running away kind of acne. Of course, this is all from his point of view, so it’s very likely that it’s not as bad as he thinks it is. Our flaws are always more apparent to us than to other people. But still, it sounds pretty bad.
2. His “wife” (they aren’t legally married, but have been living together for so long, they might as well be) has a severe eating disorder (that has also been plaguing her since she was a teenager) and has checked herself into a weightloss clinic. We never get her side of the story as she’s off at the clinic for most of the book and refuses to let Hobbie contact her while she’s there. She does send him increasingly cryptic letters as she starts getting to the root of her weight issues.
3. To add even more psychosis, they met and fell in the love when they were 15 and confessed to each other that they’d both been molested by their deacon. So basically, these people are Fucked. Up.
4. Anyway, so this book is about Hobbie finally growing up. He hasn’t been without his wife since they were teenagers and for the past 15 years they’ve pretty much cut themselves off from the world, living in the “anonymous” suburbs, moving from place to place when people started recognizing them. They’ve basically been in stasis, never shedding their fucked up teenage selves. Now he’s by himself (though he has the cutest dog ever that goes with him everywhere) and has to figure out what to do with his life. Through a series of events he winds up staying with his father-in-law and creates a family/support system (which he needs because there is some dark and twisty drama that I won’t reveal) and then he sets out to find (or “save”) his wife.
5. This book got to me mostly because I could relate to the characters. I’ve never been molested (thank god), but I had bad acne in high school (and my skin still isn’t perfect) plus I’ve struggled with my weight all my life. There’s this part (this is going to be gross, you may want to skip down to the next paragraph) were Hobbie talks about the stress relief he gets from picking all his pimples. Even though he knows it only makes things worse, he can’t stop himself. Man, can I relate to that.
6. Plus their whole relationship is very reminiscent of my relationship with my boyfriend. We’ve been together since high school as well (though we didn’t bond over some terrible event like the characters of this book). Sometimes I feel like we haven’t really changed much since high school, like maybe we’re holding each other back? I don’t know, that’s a whole other post entirely. But this book made me think about it.
7. The writing is very clear and concise compared to the last book I read and the characters were well thought out. Honestly, I would LOVE it if Doug Crandell wrote this book again but from the wife’s point of view because I think it would would be equally as interesting (possibly more so).
8. Despite being somewhat depressing (though there are some funny parts/characters, too, it’s not all acne and sexual abuse), it has a very hopeful ending. Plus, like I mentioned, lots of heart. I can count one on hand the number of books I’ve read that made me cry and this is one of them. I genuinely cared about the characters and their outcome. There’s a part near the end of the book when Hobbie has finally tracked down his wife and I swear my heart was practically beating out my chest with anticipation.
9. Definitely recommended if you are looking for a quick read that’s quite the emotional roller coaster.

I’m very glad I finished this book, but, man, was it hard to get started. I bought this book earlier this summer because of a recommendation from one of my favorite sites. I think I read about 3 pages and gave up on it. I consider myself quite the anglophile, and am mostly hip to the British slang these days, but British slang from the early ’80s? Not so much. Ace doss, indeed. (After reading the whole book, I think that translates to “cool shit” or something like that. Ace definitely means cool, but doss is used in a few different ways, so I’m not sure about it.) Some other snippets that threw me in the first three pages:

“Moron, grinny-zitty as ever. His bumfluff’s getting thicker, mind.”

“Moron’s my height and he’s okay but Jesus he pongs of gravy.”

Pongs of gravy? I still don’t know what the hell that means.

1. Anyway, I came back to the book last month because I don’t like starting books and not finishing them. It still took me forever to get through. It’s fairly short at about 300 pages, which I can usually get through in a week or so (I try to read for at least 30 minutes every night before bed). I think this book took me about 3 weeks. Besides the slang and bad grammar of the 13 year old main character (couldn’t've, etc.), the writing is just very dense. The denser the writing, the slower I read. Plus it has long chapters and for some reason books with longer chapters take me a longer time to read. I don’t really know why. It bothers me though, because I like to stop reading at the end of the chapter and some nights I could only get through the half the chapter. My OCD really has issues with that kind of stuff.
2. Once I made it over the hump of those first three pages, the first chapter is really quite interesting and well written. It sets up pretty much everything that is going to happen in the book. But then it kind of goes into the realm of the supernatural talking about ghosts and witches (not really but kinda) and that threw me, like, what kind of book is this? And it ends on this cliffhanger and I wanted to know what happened and the second chapter has absolutely nothing to do with it and you don’t really learn what happened until the last chapter.
3. But I’m dumb. Because I didn’t figure out the structure of the book is that each chapter is about an incident from each month of the main character’s 13th year until I was about halfway through. So most chapters end on some kind of cliffhanger and sometimes what happens gets addressed in the later chapters and sometimes you just have to read between the lines.
4. I’ve mainly been reading chick-lit, dick-lit or “kids” books like Harry Potter and His Dark Materials this year, so I’m not used to actually having to do extra work to understand the story, so I think that’s why this one took me a long time. But it was definitely worth the effort. The last four or five chapters were much easier and faster, so I don’t know if I had just gotten used to the British-ness of it all or I cared about the character more or what.
5. Anyway, it was a sweet and fun (And funny, though I think it would have been funnier if I hadn’t been a year old when the story took place. Early ’80′s references are a bit beyond me. ) story of a boy coming of age. The trials and tribulations of his pursuit of popularity were quite realistic. (It was hard to keep track of all the popular kids. There seemed to be A LOT of bullies. I think 13 year old boys are just assholes in general, though.) So was the disintegration of his parents marriage (not a spoiler, it’s on the back of the book). Especially for the book being from the Jason’s point of view (and being mostly ignorant of the intricacies of his parent’s marriage and marriage in general), and snippets of their conversations being really the only clue to their troubles. It was really well done. I especially loved the chapter comparing the Falklands war with his parents war of the backyard water feature.
6. The last chapter was quite nice and summed things up just as well as the first chapter set them up. I really liked the last exchange between Jason and his sister:
   

   “It’ll be alright.” Julia’s gentleness makes it worse. “In the end, Jace.”
   “It doesn’t feel very all right.”
   “That’s because it’s not the end.”

So, it’s over. I finished it last night at about 1am. I’ve been on a media blackout since about Thursday, so I wanted to get it done with this weekend so I could get back on the damn internet.

Freaking UPS took their sweet time delivering it on Saturday. I actually wound up sleeping on the sofa Friday night because I was absolutely petrified that UPS would come while I was asleep and I wouldn’t get my book. But of course, they didn’t deliver it until 4 freaking 30 in the afternoon. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I should have just waited in line at midnight with the rest of the world. Oh well.

Apparently, I’m a slow reader because I’ve been reading other people’s blogs and comments who got through it in 7-12 hours, but it took me more like 20. Still though, I feel like I read it too fast and I’m going to re-read it this week at a much slower pace.

It really was the perfect weekend. It rained really hard all Saturday and Sunday, and I always just want to curl up with a good book when it’s like that outside. It was fantastic. Poor Brandon was bored out of his mind because I literally said about 5 words to him the whole time. I made up for it a little bit by stopping about 200 pages from the end (because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop any time after that) and making him dinner, but then I went right back to reading.

Final thoughts (no spoilers!)…

I loved it (though I didn’t think it was perfect, the middle dragged A LOT and was overly depressing, but the beginning and end more than made up for it). It ended EXACTLY how I wanted it to end and all my predictions about Snape and Harry were right. Yay! I thought the epilogue was BEYOND corny, but at the same time I wanted it to be longer. I didn’t cry until the second to last chapter, but I did tear up quite a few times before that.

I’ve read a lot of people saying they are sad it’s over, but I’m really not. This whole last year and the year before the 6th book came out were awful! I hate waiting. I have no patience for this kind of stuff. That’s why I’m so glad that I (stupidly) shunned the books until after the 5th book came out. I got to read the first five books in a row. No waiting. It was fantastic. Having to wait for these last two books was torture and it would absolutely kill me to have to do it again.

Plus, here’s how I look it at it. I’ve read all the books (except for this one, of course) 4 times. I’ve read them once a year since I started reading the series. Despite reading them that many times, I NEVER get tired of them (ok, maybe it was a little bit harder to get through Chamber of Secrets on the 4th read). I still laugh at the funny parts, my heart still races at the exciting parts. I love all the characters and my love for them only increases with each read. So while there won’t be any new books, it’s not really over for me. Because next year I can re-read the series in it’s entirety and how fantastic will that be? A beginning, middle and, finally, an end. It’ll be like a whole new experience and I’m sure I’ll discover new things like I have all the previous times I’ve re-read the books.

It’s like how I love re-watching all my favorite shows on DVD. Knowing how Buffy and Scoobies turn out in the last season (and in the Season 8 comic book) puts this whole new perspective on the earlier seasons of show. This is most apparent in places like the Buffy-verse and the Potter-verse whose worlds were meticulously laid out to the finest detail by their creators, and who obviously had an end game set up from the get go (Unlike say…Lost). It’s why Tolkien is still so popular after half a century. Worlds like that live on in the minds of fans because they are so well crafted that they don’t diminish with time, they only get richer and richer.

That’s what Harry Potter is for me and it’s why I’m relieved to finally have a ending, and ending that I am completely happy and satisfied with. I’m happy it’s over and I can’t wait to re-read it again next year.