Reading Challenge Updates

Well, guys, that's a wrap!  I've finally finished my 2016 reading challenge.  Here's the final few books that I finished!  I'll also get an "overall" post up on the 31st with some brief thoughts about the total books for the year, and how the challenge went as a whole.

Completed
-A National Book Award winner.  For this, I pulled up the list of National Book Award winners and selected The Shipping News.  It's a strange book, with a lot of different elements that I'm not sure always work together, but I really did like the writing style, and I enjoyed reading it overall.

-A book of poetry.  I reread a book for this: I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasely.  I am not a poetry person in general but Beasely has this really striking poem that I think is the gem of the entire collection, "A Cast of Thousands," that I loved.  I still enjoyed it a lot rereading that, but on the whole I am reaffirmed in my position that poetry is not for me.

-A book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller.  I hate talking to people and therefore didn't actually ask for a book in this category, but lucky me, I got one anyway!  A local bookstore always puts bookmarks in the books you buy, and for their 40th anniversary this year the bookmarks are printed with book recommendations from some of their sellers past.  From this list, I got Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.  While I do believe what everyone says about it being an important book, I didn't enjoy reading it.

-A book you should have read in school.  In tenth grade, every English class in my school was supposed to read The Odyssey.  However, my teacher never got around to assigning it to us because she was too busy going gaga over the Hero's Journey in Star Wars and having us make heraldic crests.  (Why?  I don't know.)  So I finally got around to it this year!  It's a classic tale of heroes and gods and monsters, but I'm not sure my translation was the best, and the tale in general is so repetitive.

-A book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF.  My boyfriend selected The Samurai's Tale for this category for me.  While I didn't find the story itself to be that good (it was highly unrealistic, I had a lot of problems with suspension of disbelief) I can definitely see how it might serve as a "gateway book" to other books about the time period in question, like James Clavell's Asian Saga.

-A book recommended by someone you just met.  I asked the NaNoWriMo Facebook group what they thought I should read this year and got a reply of The Machinery.  It has a good premise and strong world but stars above, it was boring.  Nothing happens in this book.  I do not at all feel compelled to read its sequels.

-A graphic novel.  Though I originally intended to read a Sandman volume, my boyfriend directed me to Bone, Vol 1: Out from Boneville instead.  This was a cute, quick read, and while I don't feel compelled to read further I think this is a series that could have some appeal for a wide age-range because of its mild but amusing content, quirky characters, and light dialogue with a bit of adventure and mystery mixed in.

-A book you previously abandoned.  I finally trudged through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for this one.  I'd had the book for years and had never gotten very far in it, but was hoping for a different outcome this time.  Well, I read it, and finished it, but it never really pulled me in.  I've started watching the BBC adaptation on Netflix and am enjoying it much more--I would definitely recommend watching over reading for this one.

The Machinery - Gerrard Cowan (The Machinery #1)

The Machinery was recommended to me by a random person in the unofficial National Novel Writing Month Facebook group to fulfill my reading challenge category of "A book recommended by someone you've just met."  I put it off and put it off because there were just more intriguing things on my list, and honestly I'm glad I did because if I hadn't read it with a looming end-of-year deadline, I don't think I would have finished it.

The main draw of this book is the world.  The story takes place on one continent of the world (though it's made apparent the world is larger than that, and there has been some contact beyond this continent) where the government is chosen by something called the Machinery, which was created by a man known as the Operator.  The Strategist is the head of the government and he's supported by a number of Tacticians.  There are a group of people called Watchers who can see into your soul using their masks, also created by the Operator.  And then there is a string of suspicious deaths, starting with the current Strategist and expanding to involve some of the Tacticians, in the year in which the Machinery was prophesied to break down and not select a new beneficial government, but rather someone who will bring ruin.  And then there's Katrina Praprissi, the last of a once-powerful family, who watched her brother be stolen away by the Operator ten years ago and has spent the time since becoming a Watcher.

This is all a very interesting setup, but here's the thing... Nothing actually happens in this book.  A few people are discovered dead.  The people wait for new ones to be selected by the Machinery.  There is a lot of going to and from different places and describing different buildings and how impressive it is that they exist.  That's it.  Even the most promising bits, typically involving Katrina and, later, one of the Tacticians, tended to drag a bit, and then peter out into nothing at the very end.  But the end wasn't enough to redeem the sheer dullness of the rest of the book here.  Honestly, a lot of this could have just been cut and the end brought up further, giving room for things to actually happen.  But as it stands, I was pretty much bored out of my mind while reading this, and as I mentioned above, I think I would have abandoned it if I hadn't been on a deadline for my reading challenge.  There's really not that much else to say about it.

2 stars out of 5, for a promising world but a story that failed to live up to its full potential.

The Samurai's Tale - Erik Christian Haugaard

For my 2016 reading challenge, there was a category of "A book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF."  This was the book my boyfriend chose for me to read. He really enjoyed it when he was younger, evidently, and it was a nice short title to help fill out the list, so it worked out pretty well for the category.

The story revolves around Taro, a boy born as nobility in the Warring States period but reduced to the status of a servant when the rest of his family is killed.  But Taro still dreams of being a samurai and gladly accepts his new "captor" as a sort of father figure and works his way up the ladder to gain warrior status, which is actually really weird in retrospect.  There is no revenge factor here, and one would think that there would be.  The early chapters are very episodic and focus on specific events that influence Taro as he grows up; later the chapters gain a more continuous flow and cover the story of Taro's role in an ongoing conflict.

Taro is, of course, good at everything he does and all good and wise people like him.  Only evil people are his enemies.  He is also made out to be morally superior to everyone around him.  While most samurai cut off the heads of their defeated enemies for proof and glory, Taro views the practice as despicable and would never dream of such a thing.  Now, I'm not saying we should encourage teenage boys (who are clearly the audience for this; it was also obviously written in the period before YA became a thing, and so it includes a weird mix of middle-grade and more adult content, but is missing the tropes of modern YA) to chop of people's heads, but this characterization doesn't really fit Taro's time or place, or the position to which he aspired.

Overall, this wasn't really a great book for me.  While I liked some of the episodes, I felt like the whole thing felt kind of off in regards to authenticity of characters and setting.  However, I can definitely see how this acted as a "gateway" book for my boyfriend, who has gone on to have a voracious appetite for James Clavell's Asian Saga books.  It has a flavor to it that I can see being appealing, though the writing itself wasn't my cup of tea.  It has the feel of a written oral history rather than a story written for a novel form with the simple language, limited language, etc. and those have never been my favorite.

2 stars out of 5.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is a book that I've had for probably a decade.  I'd started it before but didn't manage to get very far in, which made it a good candidate for a reading challenge category revolving around a book that I'd previously started but hadn't finished.  It's a long book, at almost 800 pages, but I decided to give it a go again.

The plot revolves around the two titular characters, who claim to be the only two magicians in England.  Strange is Norrell's pupil, but the two have very different views on magic.  Norrell wants to stay away from faeries and faerie magic, claiming that it has no place in a modern England--despite the fact that he used faerie magic to bring a young woman back from the dead, though no one knows that's how he did it.  Strange, on the other hand, wants to embrace faeries, faerie magic, and Jonathan Uskglass, the Raven King, who supposedly once ruled over both part of Faerie and northern England.  After Strange goes to Spain to aid in the fight against Napoleon, their differences begin to become even more pronounced and the two split, leading into a "rival magicians" story, until they must ultimately overcome their differences to deal with the consequences of Norrell's early magic, which have reverberated further than anyone would have thought.

Here's the thing about this book.  It.  Is.  Slooooow.  So, so, incredibly slow.  It gets off to a slow start, and the pace never really quickens.  It continues at a sedate rate for the entirety of the narrative.  This is much due to the style of writing.  It comes across as very proper and English and suitable to the time period in which the book takes place, but it greatly detracts from actual engagement with the story, instead keeping the reader at a distance.  Another problem I found is that, despite it being a story about magicians, very few acts of magic are actually depicted on the page.  The characters talk about them being performed, but most often we don't actually see them.  This starts to change later in the book, a bit, once Strange becomes more of a central character, but by that point I think it's past the point of no return on the "boring" scale.  Because that's what this ultimately is: boring.

It's sad, because there is such promise here with the plot.  Ultimately, it's a very good plot.  I think if a few hundred pages (yes, a few hundred) had been trimmed out of here, the writing could have been greatly streamlined, made more engaging, and the premise and setting used to their full advantage to make this an excellent read.  There's enough mystery floating around in the background to make many of the things discussed, particularly the Raven King, intriguing, and the supporting characters ultimately become very entwined in the plot as well, though they didn't seem to be on that path at the beginning.  As it is, though, this is not something I could see myself slogging through again.  It just takes too much effort for too little payoff.

This book was turned into a TV series (of one season) by BBC, and is available on Netflix in the US currently.  I've started watching it, and at halfway through the first episode we're already making much better progress than we were in the book.  I think this is one that, ultimately, will do far better on the screen than the page.

I'm going to give it 3 stars out of 5, but it's honestly more for the potential of the story, and how it came together in the end, than for overall enjoyment.

The Killing Floor - Lee Child (Jack Reacher #1)

The Killing Floor is the fist book in the Jack Reacher series, and it was a book my mother had mentioned she was interested in reading, so I picked it for a reading challenge category.  I'm coming to it nearly twenty years after it was first published, but I have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed with it as a whole.  There were aspects of the mystery that I didn't have quite pinned down, but I had an idea of them, and other parts of it were glaringly clear.

But here's the thing: it's not a bad book.  But it's very generic and the writing isn't particularly riveting.  It was Child's first book, so I can completely understand that.  Reading my favorite author's first books at this point in life makes me wince, though I can definitely trace her growth as a writer over time.  But for this particular one...  The writing is very stilted, the sentences choppy--though complete, which is more than I can say for some books I've read this year--and Reacher as a character just grated on my nerves.  He has a massive superiority complex to everyone around him, who are all cardboard cutouts of characters.  He also seems to have a detrimental effect on everyone around him.  When he stumbles into a problem occurring in a small town, he manages to convince the few honest people he encounters--who are cops, nonetheless--to be okay with at least a dozen murders, several arsons, and a dozen other crimes to boot, and then to just let him walk away.  That's something that most thriller/mystery books never seem to get right: the legal aftermath.  But this book seems to get it even wrong-er than most, if for on other reason than the sheer scale of what the aftermath would have realistically been.

It's another recurring pet peeve of mine that in mysterious no one ever seems to call in backup.  Case in point here: despite the main plot revolving around a massive counterfeiting scheme, Reacher and his cronies spend their time doing everything except the one thing that actually makes sense: calling the Secret Service.  Instead they apparently think that Treasury bureaucrats and university professors will do a better job of solving their problems.  And Child can't really play it off as if the thought that the Secret Service was corrupt; it's pretty clear from early on that the counterfeiting is a small, local operation.  It's one of those things that just grated on my nerves for the duration of the book, and I couldn't get over it.  Someone like Reacher, who apparently spent decades working in military police, should have known better.  But apparently, because he's no longer in the military and doesn't have a permanent home, he's free to do whatever he wants, and damn the consequences.  Honestly, what he and his buddies did her merits a coverup at least as big as that of the counterfeiting scheme--they did destroy several million dollars, on top of everything else--but no one seems to care, at all.  What?

First books can be rough.  I get it.  But something that I do expect in a first book, even though the writing might not be as polished as that of an established author (and, let's be honest here, there are plenty of authors that debut with beautifully written books, so we can still only push that one so far) is that they be thoughtful, and this was not that.  This is clearly a massively popular series (I believe a movie adaptation of one of the later ones came out recently) but it's obviously not something that's up my alley, and I think I'll be skipping most of these.

1.5 stars out of 5.

The Shipping News - Annie Proulx

The Shipping News was a pick for my reading challenge for 2016, for the category of "A National Book Award winner."  I thought it was going to be a real slog for some reason; it wasn't, but at the same time it left me baffled as to what makes a book a bestseller and award winner and what doesn't.

The main character here is Quoyle, whose family hails from Newfoundland but who was born and raised in New York.  Following the end of a terrible marriage, Quoyle takes his two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, back to Newfoundland along with his aunt, who is a professional upholsterer.  The town they end up in Newfoundland seems like a terrible place, which was one of the baffling parts of the book.  Objectively, it's horrible: car crashes and sexual abuse abound, and the food is, by all accounts, horrible as well.  The cliffs are charming despite the bodies found at the bottom of them; the house on the rock is charming despite the menace of the moaning cables and house's own background.  But somehow Proulx makes the place, food and all, seem charming.  But this was a baffling book overall, so that probably suits it just fine.

What's so strange about the book is that it can't seem to decide what it wants to be.  A narrative of a family recovering from loss and finding a new way?  Maybe; that's what it tends towards most of the time.  But there are also paranormal and supernatural elements, and elements of mystery and horror, that are never fully explored and are just kind of floating around the background.  And in the end, there's a startling lack of resolution.  The story just sort of...ends.  Now, there wasn't a real running "plot" to wrap up, but some of the elements are left hanging in a strange way.  For example, what on earth is up with Bunny and her apparent premonitions?  And what happened to her fear of the white dog, that just vanished?  And where did the house go?

Overall, I thought this was an interesting book, with some beautiful writing at times and a wonderful sense of atmosphere.  But I'm not sure what propelled it into actual award territory.  It's very confusing to me.  I've read so many books that are absolutely stunning that can't shoulder their way into the awards, and yet ones that have a few compelling elements but are overall just okay somehow end up being bestsellers and lauded from all angles.  If someone can explain this to me, please do.  In the meantime, I'd be up to reading something else from Proulx, but I don't think she's someone who I will search out as being on an auto-buy list, or whose back catalog I'll ravage.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Wuthering Heighs - Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights is one of those books that people seem to classify as a classic romance sometimes, but it's really not.  It could be a type of love story, and obsessive one, I suppose--but it's definitely not a romance, not in the modern sense of the word.

At its heart, Wuthering Heights is about revenge for something that's really quite petty.  Though it's told through two different first-person perspectives (a tenant of the house that neighbors Wuthering Heights, and the housekeeper who was intimately involved with the families the book concerns) it's ultimately not the story of either of those people, but rather of Catherine and Heathcliff.  Catherine was the daughter of the Earnshaw family, whose father found Heathcliff and raised him as a sort of foster-son.  Following the father's death, Catherine's brother, who never liked Heathcliff, exiles him to servant status in a sort of reverse Cinderella-type situation.  Meanwhile, Catherine befriends the Lintons, the family who own the house that the aforementioned tenant ends up letting.  She ends up marrying the son of the Linton family and Heathcliff, in a fit of pique because of the marriage and something he heard Catherine say, though he didn't hear the context, decides to ruin Catherine's happiness and the happiness of everyone connected to her.  Because, you know, that's how you show you love someone.

Heathcliff is a complete sociopath.  He hurts animals.  He kidnaps people.  He has no sense of shame or moral compass, and is really a despicable human being all around.  That Catherine was attracted to him isn't the strange part here.  That seems to fall into the realm of "she thinks she can fix him" tropes, which unfortunately are very common in real-life as well.  What's strange is that, ultimately, Bronte seems to have made Heathcliff so despicable that she didn't know what to do with him.  Something had to happen, clearly, for the story to come to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, but Heathcliff was really so terrible that nothing but the most melodramatic of deaths wouldn't really have been suitable for him.  And while melodramatic might have been Heathcliff and Catherine's style, it doesn't actually seem to have been Bronte's.  And so the end has a weird feeling, like Bronte didn't know how else to end it, and so she just...did.  The contrast of the dark, dramatic days at Wuthering Heights and the sudden sweetness and light at the end felt very odd in contrast to the dark and brooding mood that pervaded the rest of the book.

And that mood--that's definitely something that Bronte knew how to do well.  I've never been to anywhere that had moors, but the cold and dark atmosphere of Wuthering Heights the book certainly suited the dark happenings of Wuthering Heights the house.  The one thing that Bronte included that I absolutely could not stand was the servant Joseph.  Bronte gave him this horrible accent that's written phonetically in the book, and I consequently couldn't understand anything he said, even when I attempted to sound it out.  As a result of that, I found myself skipping pretty much everything he said.  It must not have contributed to the book overly much, because I understood everything that went on perfectly without it...which also made me question the usefulness of his inclusion as a character in the first place.  And really, the characters as a whole, other than Heathcliff himself, had absolutely no agency in this book.  Heathcliff was the only one who was ultimately pulling the strings and making things happen, and none of the other characters had any hand in the story's ultimate outcome.  It's one of those things that, as I was reading it, I didn't notice, but now in retrospect I can't help but notice it.  It's kind of like how in the first Indiana Jones movie, the outcome of the plot would have been exactly the same even if Jones had never gotten involved.  It's a story in which the hero's "fatal flaw," rather than any outside force, brings about his ultimate demise.

Overall, there's a wonderful mood here and I can see why it was so popular in its time, and it's a story of revenge that I think ultimately appealed to me more than the other great "revenge" classic, The Count of Monte Cristo.  But there are definite flaws with it--not surprising, really, because it was Bronte's first (and only) novel.  But I think it was still an enjoyable read, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.

4 stars out of 5.

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

I read Midnight's Children because I needed a book for a category in my reading challenge, "A book recommended by your librarian or bookseller."  Well, I have no idea why anyone would think I actually want to talk to someone, but luckily for me Kramerbooks (a local bookstore here in DC) provides bookmarks whenever you buy a book there, and one of them had a list of books recommended by their booksellers of the past!  Hah!  Midnight's Children was one of these, and I picked it from among the rest for two reasons: the library had it available for Kindle without a huge waiting list, and the elements of magic that the description promised sounded intriguing.

The story is about Saleem Sinai, who is born at the exact moment of India's independence from Britain, and how his fate is tied to that of the country and the other "Midnight's Children," all born within that first hour of independence and who all possess magical abilities.  Saleem is recording the story decades after it begins, with his grandfather, and is doing so because he is starting to actually crack and fall apart, and he wants to record what happened to him and his.

This was an interesting premise and I'm told it's an important book, but it didn't rub me the right way.  I found myself incredibly bored reading this.  Part of this is Rushdie's writing style, which meanders here and there and has many deviations from what I would consider to be "the point."  This fits in with the structure of the book, kind of...it's kind of like when your grandparents tell a story and keep getting distracted.  But Saleem is only 30 years old when this takes place, so it also doesn't make sense.  And then the other part was that it just takes forever to get to the actual "story" part of this, with the events building up to the destruction of Midnight's Children.  The book is divided into three parts, and the third starts 75% through the book, and it was infinitely more interesting than the entanglements of his family.  Part of this is probably because I actually don't know a lot about Indian history.  Saleem's personal history is supposed to be tied closely to, and mirror, that of India as a country, but I only saw the most obvious of those parallels when Rushdie specifically pointed them out.  If my history in this area was more up to snuff, maybe I would have enjoyed it more because I could have followed the more subtle strings that were, as it was, lost to me.

And finally, Rushdie's version of Saleem's life didn't seem to play by its own rules.  The Midnight's Children are supposedly all born with powers--and yet Saleem needs an accident to get his working.  He has another ability connected to his nose, which lets him smell things that most people can't.  For most of the book these are regular scents, but then at the end, when Saleem actually gets around to writing the story, he can apparently smell history to the point that he can relate what happened in his family going back decades before he was born--and yet this isn't connected to his magical "midnight" ability.  He also plays with time, trying to make a point that it's fluid by pinning certain events to drastically wrong dates, but to me this just seems sloppy and makes Saleem into an unreliable narrator, whose whole story can't be trusted.

There were good parts of this.  While Rushdie tends to ramble, some of his prose is absolutely beautiful.  I also loved how, in the third part of the book, he manages to do a really cool duality thing, showing how history has two halves to it.  The concept of the Midnight's Children was also very cool, and I would have loved to see India tied more closely to all of them, rather than just Saleem who actually rather sounded like the most boring of the bunch--especially with the question of whether he really was supposed to be some sort of "chosen one," which seemed unlikely to me, or if he was just full of himself, which seemed rather more likely.  I think this is a book that could also potentially interest people in Indian history, but it was too rambling for me to have that effect.  I believe what other people have said, that this is an iconic book for its time, place, genre, etc., but as a book to just read, it didn't agree with me.

2 stars out of 5.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This was an exhausting book to read.  I picked it up a while ago at Kramer's Books here in DC, and it sat on the shelf waiting for me to get to it, as many books do.  I'm one of those people who buys books and puts them aside and then never reads them because I'm too busy reading other things.  But I finally decided to go for it for my "A classic from the 20th century" category for my reading challenge, and so out it came.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the chronicle of the Buendia family over a period of about a hundred years, in the town of Macondo which was founded by one of the family members.  There's a family tree in the beginning of my edition, which was very helpful because the Buendias follow the tradition of using family names, so everyone seems to be called some variation of Arcadio or Aureliano, and I had to keep flipping back to the tree to check who was who and how they fit into the web.  Marquez does make light of this at several points, and the naming convention does fit into the plot, so this didn't annoy me as much as it would have otherwise.

There are two things that really stood out to me in the course of reading the book.  The first is all the magical realism--you know, magical acts that are just treated as matter-of-fact but in a book that doesn't really count as a true fantasy.  From flying carpets to girls ascending into the heavens to the mysterious fertility of the family livestock at one point, and with a dozen other strange things thrown in, there's a ton of it here.  Every time it seemed like things were going to settle down, something else strange would happen just as casually as if it had been someone selling bananas.  The second thing that stood out was the amount of incest in this book.  Dear lord, it's a lot.  It's rather the point of the book, of course--a family that's pretty much in love with itself and whose members keep getting caught up in various romantic entanglements--but it was a bit much for me at some times nevertheless.  I kept having moments of, "But she's your aunt!" and other such mental statements that made me shy away from it a bit.

But what is truly exhausting about this book is the writing style.  While Marquez can write absolutely beautifully, and has a real knack for imagery, what he apparently doesn't like is paragraph breaks.  The paragraphs in this book frequently last for pages, and so there's no sort of mental break as you change gears into the next paragraph.  It was very tiring, and it meant that I had to put the book down more frequently than I probably would have if those long paragraphs had just been broken up a bit more.  There were plenty of places to do it, so it seems like a stylistic choice not to have done so.

As I mentioned before, the writing is wonderful in this.  I could completely picture Macondo as it went through its various stages, from utopia to utter decay, and the people who came and went through it.  And what a start is has!  "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."  It's a very powerful beginning, hinting at both the wonder of things that happen in Macondo, and the tribulations of things to come.  It's an immediate indicator of what an amazing writer Marquez is.  His works have been overall hit or miss with me, but I did enjoy this overall despite the mental fatigue of reading it and the icki-ness of all the incest.  I see what the purpose was for it; Marquez wasn't trying to titillate (at least I don't think so) but show how these relationships led into the downward spiral of a prosperous, powerful family's ruin, and that I think he did wonderfully.

4 stars out of 5.

Blood, Bones & Butter - Gabrielle Hamilton

This book was on sale recently, so I picked it up and decided to use it as a sort of twist on a category for my reading challenge for 2016.  The challenge category was "a book with a protagonist who has your occupation," but, as a mid-level university bureaucrat (essentially) main characters with my occupation aren't exactly easy to come by.  So I decided to read a book with a protagonist (in this case, the author, as this is a memoir) who has an occupation I would like to have.  Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef and the owner of the restaurant Prune in New York City.  She is also, as I established from reading this memoir, a very confusing and not very nice person.  Well, at least as she portrays herself here.  But then that's the risk of putting out the story of your life for anyone to pick up, isn't it?  Total randos like me, who've never met you, can totally judge you.  And judge I did.

This book is divided into three different parts, following the title: Blood, Bones, and Butter.  Blood follows Hamilton's childhood, the first chapter of which seems to be happy, and the rest of which is about her rather misspent use doing drugs and wandering Europe.  Are there wonderful, heartwarming moments scattered throughout?  Yes, there are.  Her time spent in France sounds lovely, as does her time in Greece.  But then you balance that about the coke-snorting waitress who maintains she earned $90,000 in a year and spent it all on drugs, and you have to wonder a little bit, now don't you?  But still.  She was young.  Life moves on.  She apparently got over her drug problems, decided to further her education in a more traditional sense.  We move on to Bones.

Bones follows her as she goes to Michigan to get her master's degree and also through several different stages of her professional career, from working as the cook at a summer camp to being a high-energy catering champ to opening and running Prune.  This is probably the most diverse portion of the book, and it's also where I started really raising my eyebrows.  The affair, with a man who she apparently finds relatively attractive given that she references making out with him, having sex with him one every available surface, etc. despite her professions that she's a lesbian.  The fact that she married a man, and stayed married to him for ten years (they are now divorced, FYI; thank you, Wikipedia) looking for a deep and meaningful relationship when she apparently knew from the beginning it wouldn't be that way and that the marriage was really for a green card; the way that she portrayed her mother so flatteringly and then as such a raving bitch and then as a wonderful person once again; the way that she acts so superior to everyone else, says that she got over that, and then continues on with it... All of this made me not like Hamilton very much at all.  Here's the thing: I felt like I couldn't trust her.

I know, I know.  People are complicated creatures.  We have many facets.  This also applies to both Hamilton and all of the people she portrays.  But at the same time, when you write a memoir, you're really going through a reflection process and, one would think, clarifying some things not only for yourself but for others.  The things that come out in memoirs tend to be a bit more focused than thoughts running around our heads every day of our lives because of the time and process of writing and focusing them.  That doesn't seem to have been the case here, and also makes me side-eye the memoir as a whole.

Then there's the third part, Butter, which deals mostly with her in-laws and children and the time that she spent with them (and her husband) in Italy, where her husband is from.  This was a lovely part, overall, other than the continuing issues Hamilton as a person that I just couldn't bring myself to get over.  She has a terrible relationship with her husband, and go figure; they live apart, they don't communicate, and yet she seems completely baffled that this marriage, which was formulated on very flimsy pretexts to begin with, isn't a fairy tale.  And she seems to think that all of this is her husband's fault.  I can't even go into this any further, because the amount of justifications that she offers for as to why none of her terrible relationships are her fault, but rather entirely due to other people, are just so mind-boggling that I really can't even.

This is a wonderfully written book--Hamilton has a way of describing food, and places, and even people in a way that makes them seem to live and breathe.  Her way of writing food is mouth-watering and made me crave foods that I have, actually, tried, and didn't like, which is a real talent.  And I could practically see the places she went and the things she did.  The writing at various places is absolutely beautiful.  But there's also the part where this book is apparently about "The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef," and it's debatable whether that's really the case.  There are episodes that contribute to this, of course.  Her time working in Michigan definitely falls into this category, as do her travels.  I think this all really comes out when she's looking at opening Prune.  But beyond that, this seems like an angry dump about, again, all of those terrible relationships that aren't even a little bit due to her participation in them.

This was such a mixed bag of a book for me.  The parts about food and growing professionally were wonderful.  The few parts where she seemed to look honestly at her relationships were good.  But then she would backtrack and start angrily building up a case for why all of her relationships are all crap and it's not her fault that they are, because everyone else is terrible and she's not.  I just don't buy it, and it really tarnished the book as a whole for me, because these parts took up so much room that I think could have been put to better purpose.  Overall, as far as memoirs, and particularly "food" marketed memoirs, go, I think that there are better ones than this.

2 stars out of 5.

I Was the Jukebox - Sandra Beasley

I'm not a huge poetry person, so when "A book of poetry" was included on a reading challenge list, I was not thrilled.  Because I am very ambivalent, at best, towards poetry, I decided to do something I don't usually do for reading challenges and re-read a book I'd consumed in the past.  I originally read I Was the Jukebox for a literature course at my university, and I hung onto it (unlike most of my textbooks) because there was one poem in it that really blew me a way.  Also, at under 100 pages, it was a quick read for an evening--I don't have the patience to break up and savor poems though that is, apparently, how you are supposed to mindfully consume them.

This book is roughly divided into three parts, though I quite honestly am not sure what the divisions are supposed to signify.  But there are a few running "themes" throughout the book, scattered across the parts.  There a number of sestinas, which I distinctly remember Beasley describing as poetry acrobatics (she came to speak in my class) because they use very precise alterations of word order in the ends of lines to create an ongoing flow.  There are a series of "_____ Speaks" poems, in which the peom is written from the perspective of the item or being in the title, such as Osiris, orchids, sand, the world war, and the minotaur.  Another series is "Love Poem for _____" which includes things like oxidation and Wednesday.  And then there's the "Another Failed Poem About _____" series, which features things like music, starlings, or the Greeks.

While I feel that there was probably something lurking in most of the poems that I didn't "get," I might just be looking into it too much and deciding that I'm missing something when there's really nothing there to miss.  Despite that, though, there were a few poems that really stand out in this collection, even to someone who's generally anti-poetry like myself.  The main one of these is called "Cast of Thousands."  It's a poem about a war, and how it affects people, and how the pain and suffering of war has been commercialized for entertainment and used to sell things--gyros are specifically mentioned.  There's an incredible set of lines here: "They burned my village a house at a time / unable to sort a body holding from a body held / and in minute ninety-six you can see me raise / my arms as if to keep the sky from falling."  But the whole poem is written as if it's about a movie being made, which creates this great surreal duality that I really enjoyed and found striking.

Another good one was "Antiquity," which is about how the people of the future will look back at our time and study us.  There are also a few poems that have good comedic elements, such as one about a platypus and "Another Failed Poem About the Greeks," which starts out seeming like it's going to be some sort of epic, and then actually transforms into the story of a very strange date with Heracles.  And finally, the last poem in the book is called "Proposal" and ends with this line, which just struck me: "Promise you're worth my weight in burning."

It's an eclectic collection, with most of the poems being short--less than a page, for the most part.   I think they vary in how powerful they are, greatly, but I think that it's a solid collection if for nothing more than "Cast of Thousands," because it's just such an important message and it's beautifully, achingly, powerfully done.

3 stars out of 5--it's a good collection, I guess, with some particularly poignant parts, but it's just for me overall.

Reading Challenge Updates

Completed
-A book at least 100 years older than you.  I did read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for this one, as planned, and actually found myself rather disappointed.  While I can see where the appeal for this came from in its time, I think certain aspects of it have not aged well, and the endless listing of types of fish really wore on me.

-A book recommended by a family member.  My family aren't big readers (my father, a huge Jimmy Buffet fan, has been reading A Salty Piece of Land for, like, 10 years, no joke, and still hasn't finished it) and my mother, the only one who does read, refused to actually recommend a title.  But she did say she was interested in reading The Killing Floor, the first book in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, so I read that.  I didn't really enjoy it, though I have read other books from my mother's shelves (The Help and The Thornbirds immediately come to mind) that I've enjoyed quite a bit.  This one just missed for me, and since she hasn't read it either, I have to think she probably wouldn't have recommended it if she had.

-An autobiography.  This ended up being a strange one.  As intended, I read Papillon by Henri Charriere, but it ended up being this weird book that Charriere put forth as an autobiography, and seems to be partly autobiographical, but also has a strange mash of all kinds of other stuff in it.  It also doesn't go into his life before he was accused of the crime at all, which seems very strange.

-A book about a culture you're unfamiliar with.  This is another one that went as planned!  I did I'm leaning towards Shutting Out the Sun for this category, which is about Japan.  I liked the first part of the book, which was generally about hikikomori, a group of people who literally shut themselves up for years (but are not agoraphobic) and a neat chapter about women, as well, but I had some serious reservations about the second half of the book that really dragged it down for me.

-A book published before you were born.  I picked out Wuthering Heights a while ago for this and stuck with it.  I enjoyed it overall, despite having some complaints about one of the characters and how the end was a bit strange.  It's probably a better story of obsession revenge than The Count of Monte Cristo, though.

-A classic from the 20th century.  I switched from Lolita to  One Hundred Years of Solitude for this one.  I enjoyed it, despite some really weird incest dynamics (but they served a point other than to titillate) because Marquez has a beautiful writing style and the magical realism of the book was so on-point.  It was an exhausting read due to some stylistic choices, though.

-A book with a protagonist who has your occupation.  I absolutely could not find a book that fit this category, so I twisted it a bit to a book with a protagonist who has an occupation I would like to have.  I ended up reading Blood, Bones, and Butter because it's the memoir of a chef.  While Gabrielle Hamilton, the author, has a wonderful way of writing about food, I found that I really couldn't stand her as a person and consequently didn't enjoy the book as a whole.


Still to Come
-A National Book Award winner.  I don't really know much about book awards, as I tend to ignore them in favor of reading whatever interests me at the time.  So I had to pull up the list of National Book Award winners to have something to go off for this one.  Most of them didn't really intrigue me (who decides what makes a book award-worthy, anyway?) but I eventually picked The Shipping News off the list as looking at least mildly interesting.

-A book recommended by someone you just met.  I asked the NaNoWriMo Facebook group what they thought I should read this year; one reply was already on the list (Grave Beginnings) but the other was not; therefore, I shall be reading The Machinery by Gerrard Cowan for this category.

-A graphic novel.  I love Neil Gaiman but am not a huge fan of graphic novels, so I've avoided his Sandman series up until this point, despite buying my boyfriend the entire series for various occasions.  Now seems like a pretty good time to give them a go and start in Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes.

-A book of poetry.  I'm going to do something I don't usually do (unless a category specifically calls for it) and re-read a book for this one: I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasely, which I read for a writing class in college.  I'm not a big poetry person in general, but there is one poem in this book that I found really amazing, and I'd like to read it and write about it again.

-A book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller.  I hate talking to people and therefore didn't actually ask for a book in this category, but lucky me, I got one anyway!  A local bookstore always puts bookmarks in the books you buy, and for their 40th anniversary this year the bookmarks are printed with book recommendations from some of their sellers past.  From this list, I got Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

-A book you should have read in school.  This I'm going to fill with The Odyssey, which every other English class in my high school read, but my class as a whole did not because our teacher was too busy having raptures about the hero's journey in the Star Wars series to actually assign it to us.

-A book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF.  My boyfriend has selected The Samurai's Tale for this category for me.  I don't really know much about it other than the title, so we'll see how it goes!

-A book you previously abandoned.  I'm planning on using Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for this one.  I've had this book for years, and started it at one point, but I just couldn't get into it.  I'm hoping that time will have improved it some for me, just like how I liked Vellum much more when I returned to it years after first purchasing and attempting to read it.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo was my long-awaited pick for the category of "A book that intimidates you" for my reading challenge.  The intimidating factor was the sheer page count; while I like long books, I was a bit concerned about the timing of this long book throwing off my count for the rest of the year.  I mean, it took me almost a year to read my last very long book, Dragonfly in Amber.  But the pressure of having a deadline helped me push through, and I managed it in a decent amount of time--though it did kill my reading numbers for September!

This is a classic, with a classic's story line: Edmond Dantes, in line to be promoted to the captain of the ship he works on, is struck down by the jealousy of one of his crew mates who, with the help of a man jealous of Edmond's relationship with Mercedes, Edmond's fiancee.  Added into the mix, though unwittingly, is a crown prosecutor who hopes to hide his own connections to Napoleon in hopes of advancing himself under the restored monarchy.  Edmond is thrown in prison, where he stays for fourteen years before escaping and seeking revenge on his persecutors with the assistance of a massive fortune he acquires on the tiny island of Monte Cristo.

I didn't really find this book that intriguing.  I found the plot contrived, and that it relied too much on coincidence to move forward--for example, Edmond just apparently sails around the Mediterranean until someone just happens to invite him to Paris?  What?  How is that a valid plan for revenge?  Also, it's repeatedly mentioned that people always comment on how freakishly pale Edmond is, and yet when he puts on a wig and a robe, no one can possibly imagine that it might be him in disguise!  I also felt like it read like a kind of RP or fanfic, in which Dumas was continually going, "You know what would be cool?  IF IT ALL GOT EVEN CRAZIER."  The way that several of the plots tied up didn't really seem to make sense, either.  We never find out what happens with Andrea, Danglars seems to get off lightly compared to the other people Edmond targets, and Edmond keeping Morrel, the son of the man who tried to help him, in sheer agony for a month before bothering to tell him the big reveal with Valentine.  What?  Some of this stuff might have worked better when the book was originally published as a serial, when readers might forget some of this ridiculousness between installments, but getting it all in short order made it stand out a lot.

The portions of the book that took place in the Chateau d'If, the recollection of what happened at Janina, and some other portions of the book were interesting, but reading about Morrel and Valentine swooning all over each other was not intriguing.  Seeing Albert get duped at Carnival was amusing; hearing about everyone's costume changes for every day of it was not.  It alternated between interesting and dreadfully boring, and Edmond lingers in the background for most of the book, taking away the intriguing main character who was so built up early on.  We can see his machinations coming to life, but without seeing him actually do them, I felt like it lost some of the impact.  I liked Edmond, even as he became bitter in prison and began plotting his escape and his revenge.  I didn't really like the Count of Monte Cristo, who felt very one-dimension in comparison to his previous identity.

This book didn't overall leave me as a huge fan of Dumas.  I might read more of him someday, but I won't be diving for another volume of his work anytime soon.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an interesting novel because it both has and has not aged well.  On one hand, Verne really nailed down the scientific aspects of the book.  The Nautilus is, of course, a submarine that was beyond its time and is still remarkable in our own for how well it pinned down features of subs that hadn't actually been developed yet.  And then there's the stuff like the pseudo-scuba equipment, and the portable lights for under water, and the deep sea exploration in general.  These are things that are still very much in use and relevant even if their form isn't exactly as Verne portrayed it in his book.

At the same time, though, this book dates back to a time when serials for the masses were the craze and when many people couldn't afford to travel, and things like aquariums weren't really accessible to the general populace.  The endless descriptions of every fish that Aronnax (our narrator) sees really wore on my patience, though they probably would have been remarkable to people who couldn't go to an aquarium or turn on a seven-hour nature documentary series about the oceans.  Still, they didn't really age that well and seemed to take up a lot of page space compared to the actual content.  Things like the mysterious passage under the Isthmus of Suez are also total bunk now and really seem like a reach compared to the more finally-wrought pieces of the book.

The actual "adventure" portions of the book also seemed few and far between.  There are two instances here that I think really stand out: the excursion to the ruins of Atlantis and the maelstrom at the end.  Both of these episodes are rather short, disappointingly so amidst the endless fish descriptions, and it's actually a bit surprising that Verne didn't do more with them.  With Atlantis, there's a lot of walking, a couple minutes of standing in one spot and going "Wow!  Atlantis!" and then a lot of walking back to the Nautilus.  With the maelstrom, there's so much drama building up, and then--suddenly--Aronnax wakes up with all the drama glossed over and done with, and with no memories of what actually happened.  For an adventure novel, it's very strange, and it makes it feel very much like Verne was more comfortable with spouting a stream of locations, distances, and fish species than he was with actually writing action.  There are only two big action scenes here that I can think of: when the Abraham Lincoln actually encounters the Nautilus, and the incident with the giant squid.  Even things that are made out to be big events, like the undersea hunting expedition, are mostly a bunch of walking back and forth.

I can definitely see where some of the appeal of Twenty Thousand Leagues comes from, but while it has some cool components that have lingered, I think that the bulk of the book just drags too much for it to be a really riveting read in the modern era.

2 stars out of 5.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister - Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly  Stepsister was my pick for a fairytale retelling for my 2016 reading challenge.  I read Wicked back when I was in high school, and wasn't a huge fan.  There were some interesting aspects to it but I found it overall very strange and it didn't really agree with me.  I liked Confessions much better!

The story takes place in seventeenth-century Holland, where the Fisher family has just fled after the death of the father.  Our main character is Iris, the younger of the two "ugly stepsisters" from the traditional Cinderella story.  When the family finds refuge with a painter, Iris finds a love for drawing and a growing attraction to the master painter's assistant, but is too busy helping her family to survive to act on her desires.  Eventually, the family finds themselves moved into the house of a prosperous trader dealing in tulips, and this is where the Cinderella tale really begins to take shape.  Iris is a much more sympathetic character than the stepsister in the story, but she still has her "ugly" moments on the inside--her looks are nothing to write home about, but her actions are, for the most part, well-intended.

But honestly, the most fascinating character here is Clara.  She is such a weird Cinderella-character, and seeing her essentially relegate herself to her reduced status was something very different, as was her agoraphobia and her, honestly, bitchiness.  For much of the book, Clara acts more like the stereotypical ugly stepsister than Iris and the older sister, Ruth.  Clara's firm belief that she is a changeling is strange, but evidently a mechanism for coping with something that happened to her when she was younger.  While some of the details come out eventually, not all of them do, but based on Clara's actions, I think we can probably make some educated guesses.  It's definitely a darker take on the story than one typically reads, all of the grit of harsh reality without any of the light touches of magic to lighten things up.  Some of the feel of it was, honestly, very similar to The Miniaturist, and I think readers of one would like the other.  The Cinderella story is an overall minor aspect here, and this is more of a historical fiction with a bit of a fairytale-inspired treatment than a true fairytale retelling, because the retelling doesn't truly come into play until so late in the game.

SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH: The thing I didn't like here was Ruth.  I thought the treatment of her character was an interesting one, and she has her own sort of growth throughout the story.  When the revelations came out in the end, I at first thought that it was a fascinating way to go about it--but then there was an assertion by Ruth that I really didn't agree with.  It just didn't seem to fit.  While I think some of her actions, and that everyone underestimated her, suited the story overall, the suggestion that she had basically faked her mental/developmental disorder for her entire life in order to pull one over on her mother was...mildly offensive.  I did not think that aspect worked, at all, and it really turned me off to the ending in general, which is a shame.

Overall, this was good.  I liked it, and it's made me more inclined to read more of Maguire's work than Wicked did.  I think the historical fiction-style retelling worked better than his treatment of Oz, though maybe if I went back to that book now I would feel differently.  The revelation at the end here was a bit of a turn-off, but I think the bones of this story were good and the writing was elegant, I enjoyed it as a whole.

The Kindle edition, though, does need some serious work--there are a huge number of missing quotation marks, the paragraph/page breaks are strange, and the formatting is overall not good; very disappointing for a release from a major house.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Elixir - Hilary Duff (Elixir #1)

Oh, Elixir.  What a twisted path we've taken to each ohter.  See, the thing is, I noticed Elixir when it first came out because it was seemingly everywhere in the bookstores I was going to.  But I didn't read it.  (Why?  Two reasons: it was written by Hilary Duff, and while The Lizzie McGuire movie is the pinnacle of all things amazing, I am skeptical of celebrities' writing abilities, and because the font was too big.  Yes, I did in fact judge books by how large they were printed, in some though that the larger the font, the poorer the quality.  I still think there is something to this idea.)  But it came to mind when I needed a book to fulfill the "written by a celebrity" category of my reading challenge, so off to the library I went.

It was better than I thought, but not great.

Here's the thing.  I think this is a premise that would make an awesome late teen/young adult TV show.  It has all the markings of a great one for these times: a pretty girl with a penchant for photography, a love triangle with two attractive guys, a hint of the supernatural, and various times and places that would make sets and costuming a clear standout.  And for a book in the same vein, it wasn't horrible.  In fact, I liked it quite a bit until about 2/3 of the way through.  The plot follows Clea, who, after looking at pictures taken on vacation with her best friend, finds that the same guy is lurking in the background in all of them, including in places there's no way he actually could have been--like hundreds of feet up in midair.  And then she starts having dreams about him, in four distinctly separate times and places, with her taking on the persona of four different young women.  And then, when she tells her friend Ben about them, he reveals to her that she's not the first person to see this guy in photos.  Clea's father saw him in photos of and by her, too, all through her life up until he vanished a year before while on a trip to Brazil.  Wanting answers about both the guy in the pictures and her father's disappearance, Clea accepts a photojournalism assignment to cover the Samba Parade at Carnival and plans to stop by the last place her father was seen on the way.  And then, while she's there, she and Ben run into the guy from the photos, and everything gets weird very fast.

Here's the thing... Once Clea and Ben run into Sage, all logic goes out the door and the pace of the story dissolves into complete goop.  I think it was actually pretty well-structured leading up to this point, and even for a bit afterwards I thought it was going to go well.  But then Clea decides to dive head-first into a relationship with a guy that she thinks might have killed her in past lives and might be planning to do so again because her other best friend, Rayna, tells her to listen to her heart.  Oh, suddenly instead of just looking for answers, Clea & Co. are being chased by a bunch of baddies who have no problems shooting up malls in Tokyo to get at them.  (This is another scene that was tailor-made for TV but did not work so great on paper.)  Very little is found out about Clea's dad, except that he might actually still be alive, but that didn't really bother me, because that's something that's clearly going to come out more in the other books in the series.  But the end of the book... Ugh.  Clea is all blame-y on Ben for something that was really her fault, and that was so against the logical person she'd been for most of the book that it annoyed me even more than it would have if she'd been a normal brainless YA heroine.  That and a few more minor things (Clea's dad was declared dead after four months?  What?  It's typically seven years for someone to be declared dead without a body, people...) really grated one me, even though I could see how awesome this really could have been.

Overall, I think this is a book that was written with the screen, rather the page, in mind--not surprising, considering Duff's background.  And I think it would have done well on the small screen.  But as a book, the pacing just doesn't feel right, and the way that Clea as a character kind of falls apart at the end, putting a guy she's just met before everyone else, including friends and family she's had for, uhm, ever, really knocked it down for me.

2 stars out of 5.

The Ropemaker - Peter Dickinson (The Ropemaker #1)

The Ropemaker has been one of my favorite fantasy stories for a long time, but I hadn't read it in a while, which meant that it was a perfect candidate for my reading challenge category of "A book you haven't read since high school."  I knew that I hadn't read this since high school because I lent my copy to someone and they never gave it back!  Don't you have when that happens?  But now I have the Kindle version, so all is well--though really, the Kindle version could so with some updating format-wise.  Also, did you know that Peter Dickinson was married to Robin McKinley?  I didn't!

So.  The Ropemaker is the story of Tilja, a girl who lives in the peaceful Valley, which has been cut off from the Empire to the south and the land of the horse tribes to the north for twenty generations due to an act of magic that has been maintained by two families, one of them Tilja's own.  The story starts with the slow failure of the magic that protects the Valley, and Tilja ends up going with her grandmother and two members of the other family who protect the magic to find Faheel, the magician who cut the Valley off in the first place, to renew the spells that keep them safe.

This is, at its heart, a simple story, but I love it.  I think Dickinson has managed to create one of those worlds that might seem simple on the surface, but you absorb a very deep sense of it while reading.  From the Valley to the Empire's capital of Talagh, to the city of the dying in the south, to all of the things and people and customs that Tilja and her companions encounter in between, it's just a very rich world and one that has a lot of cultural characteristics that aren't very commonly seen in fantasy novels.  Tilja is also a simple character, but one that I think makes her approachable for a wide variety of readers.  She's a little bit of a misfit, being the elder daughter in her family but not being on track to inherit her family's farm because she can't hear the cedars in the forest that protects the Valley.  Indeed, Tilja is actually the least magical person, well, ever, and as she goes on her journey she learns to grow into that and use it to her own advantage, turning it into her own sort of special ability.  And while we know Tilja isn't a full adult, it's hard to get a handle on exactly how old she is until about two-thirds of the way through the book, which I think allows you to read her as a variety of ages...and they pretty much all work.

Honestly, this book is a lot like The Hobbit to me: a simple, magical journey with what is ultimately a very simple goal, but also a story that is enveloping and beautiful at the same time.  (I don't have the same feelings for the main Lord of the Rings trilogy.)  I was so happy when this received a sequel, Angel Isle, years after I first read it, and I was very pleased to have an excuse to read it again.

5 stars.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

So, I had this book picked out to fulfill a "banned book" category for my reading challenge, but ended up swapping it for "a book that takes place in your home state," which is obviously Pennsylvania for me, after another title for that category didn't work out.  But man oh man, after reading this, I can see why it was banned from so many schools and libraries.  It is basically the sum of absolutely everything overprotective parents are afraid of their kids reading: sex, drugs, drinking, homosexuality, swearing...the whole deal.  For the things like drugs and drinking, I don't think the book glorifies them; in the case of smoking and LSD, Chbosky actually puts out there multiple times how bad they can be.  But for the other things, they aren't "glorified," but they're also not pushed into a corner and ignored as if they never existed.  They just are, which is fine because these things do happen in teenager's lives.  Should it have been banned?  No.  But I can see why the bands of people who focus on banning books zeroed in on this one.

Now, for the book itself... It's written like a series of letters from the main character and narrator, Charlie, to some anonymous reader.  Charlie basically uses the letters as a way to "diary" his first year in high school.  He's a quiet, withdrawn kid; one of his teachers points out that Charlie isn't really participating in life, but is more just observing it.  In an attempt to change this, Charlie makes a real effort to start participating, and ends up becoming friends with two seniors, stepsiblings Sam and Patrick.  He has a huge crush on Sam, which she tells him not to do, and he tries very hard to do so, but it still ends up shaping a lot of the book for him.  The main "body" of the book is really just the day-to-day-ness of Charlie coming to terms with coming of age, in a way, and eventually learning to let go of things that have happened in the past and of his friends as they leave for college and their futures, though they remain friends.  It's also a real medley of literary and pop-culture references, from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I'm not a huge fan of the letter format, nor am I a big fan of first-person perspectives, but the book was okay, I guess.  I think if I were still a teenager or going through some difficult time in college it might have resonated more.  But I also apparently had a very sheltered adolescence, because even though Charlie never gets in trouble he was in way more "trouble" than I was ever even aware of, all things considered.  But at the same time, I don't think I was sitting back and observing instead of participating, and that kind of does present a skewed view in this book: that in order to "participate," you have to do the things that Charlie ends up doing, and that's not actually the case.  He and his friends spent most of the book behaving in ways that were, frankly, stupid, which makes the cult status of this book a little worrying to me.

And then, just briefly, let's talk about the end.  I'll be honest: I hit the end of the book going, "What just happened?" and had to look it up on Wikipedia because it was left so vague.  It both does and doesn't make sense to me.  First, in the way that it does: Charlie was obviously suppressing things, to a very high degree, and to such a high degree that, even once it all came to light, he still doesn't want to write it down or have to think about it too much.  But at the same time, it didn't make sense because Chbosky had Charlie just come out and talk about so many other things that most people would approach with a greater degree of delicacy, or dance around more, and then suddenly this was the thing that was left in the dark.  You know, the thing that had been affecting Charlie for apparently the whole book?  It just seems strange, and even going back and re-reading the "reveal" sections after I had looked up what exactly had happened, it was still very vague.  I had more a sense of "yeah, I guess I can see that," than of "oh wow, how did I miss that?"

Basically, I think this book has its place, but I definitely wasn't it--and I think the body of the book has a lot more to offer than the ending, left foggy as it is, does.

2.5 stars out of 5.

I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai

So, let me show my uneducated American-ness for a second here.  I confess that, prior to Malala Yousafzai being shot, I had no idea who she was.  Even after she was shot I had no idea who she was, and I honestly had no idea why it was such a big deal.  Because, in my ignorance, I was under the impression that the Taliban was off shooting schoolgirls all the time.  This, apparently, was not the case.  Malala is a bit of a special instance, due to her advocacy for girls' education--though the Taliban insists that she was shot because she was going against Islam, not because of her stances on education.  Either way, her experiences were the reason I turned to this as my pick for a political memoir for my reading challenge this year.  I didn't really want to read about a run-of-the-mill politician, so Malala's memoir seemed like a good alternative.

Now, this didn't end up being as political as I had anticipated, as Malala basically recounts her entire life story up until the time she was shot, and a period of time afterwards when she was recovering.  It was written before she won the Nobel Peace Prize and before she became such a huge force in advocacy for education around the world.  Still, you can see the seeds of that in this, and definitely see her political origins in Swat, Pakistan, the valley where she grew up.  Her father was definitely a big influence on her, and she emphasizes again and again that no matter how much she admired her father and no matter how much he worked with her on her advocacy, it was still her decision to make her speeches and put herself out there.  She's definitely a strong young woman, and someone to be admired for her firm stance even in the face of being assaulted by the Taliban.

My issue with this was pretty much exactly the opposite of the issue I had with the last memoir I read, Climbing the Mango Trees.  In CtMT, I found that the writing was good, sometimes even beautiful, but the content just didn't interest me.  In I Am Malala, the content is amazing and inspiring, but the writing...well, it reads like a teenage girl wrote it.  Malala has a co-writer listed (Christina Lamb; the listing is unusual, but I like it) but I would definitely say that she was heavily involved in this book because of the way it reads.  It really does sound like a high school essay at many points.  Now, I completely understand that yes, Malala was still in school when she wrote it, but the downside of this authenticity of voice means that the writing oftentimes isn't very engaging.  The life she describes and her growth to an active advocate for education is fascinating, but the writing lends a certain distance to this that, at times, almost makes it read more like a Wikipedia article than a memoir.

Malala is an amazing young woman with an important cause, and I really admire her for that.  I'm glad that I read this, because it gave me a deeper understanding of where she came from and exactly why she's advocating for education--even before the Taliban became involved, she wanted everyone to be able to go to school.  The writing wasn't the most riveting I've ever seen, but I'm still very happy with this as a selection for my reading challenge.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Reading Challenge Updates

Completed!

-A book set in your home state.  I was originally going to read American Rust for this, and got it out of the library to do so, but within a half hour of reading knew that it wasn't going to work.  The writing style, combined with the immediately heavy content (there's a sexual assault and murder within the first chapter) meant it was definitely not what I was in the mood for.  I switched that title out for Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I had originally slated for the banned book category, as it takes place in Pittsburgh.  It was fine, I guess.

-A political memoir.  I read I Am Malala for this.  Malala is an amazing young woman who advocates for universal education (with an emphasis on education for girls, because girls are often the group that suffers the most in this field) and in her book she relates her childhood, along with how she became an active advocate and a target for the Taliban.  The content here was impressive and inspiring, but the book definitely reads like it was written by a teenager girl.

-A book translated to English.  I didn't end up using either of my original intended titles for this, because I ended up reading The Little Paris Bookshop by chance and realized that it fit this category.  I think it was a beautiful little book, with charming settings and quirky characters, but it wasn't a page-turner by any means.

-A book that was banned at some point.  When I switched Perks of Being a Wallflower to the home state category, it meant I needed to find a new book for this category.  I finally settled on Sophie's Choice, which is also on the American Library Association's list of commonly challenged or banned books, because I already had it on my Kindle.  It was exceedingly tedious.  Do not recommend.

-A self-improvement book.  An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth jumped out at me from a list of self-improvement books because one of my friends from college read it recently and rated it quite highly, so I went for that.  Why I don't think it was written with the intention of being a self-improvement book, I can definitely see why it ended up there; it has a lot of little lessons that all of us can apply to our lives, but it's not preachy and doesn't try to shove anything down your throat.  A great read all around.


Still to Come

-A science-fiction novel.  Once again, I'm looking for a new title for this category.  I have a few books in my possession that would fit this, so we'll see which one I'll get to first...  It's likely to be The Three Body Problem or The Windup Girl.

-A book based on a fairy tale.  I adore fairy tales, so this category had a whole bunch of possibilities for me!  I settled on Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, which is quite clearly an adaptation of Cinderella from the stepsister's point of view.  I read Wicked in high school and found it good but weird, so I'm interested in seeing how this one plays out.

-A National Book Award winner.  I don't really know much about book awards, as I tend to ignore them in favor of reading whatever interests me at the time.  So I had to pull up the list of National Book Award winners to have something to go off for this one.  Most of them didn't really intrigue me (who decides what makes a book award-worthy, anyway?) but I eventually picked The Shipping News off the list as looking at least mildly interesting.

-A book you haven't read since high school.  This is hard.  I tend to re-read books that I like on a fairly regular basis; hardly a year goes by when I don't re-read most of Tamora Pierce's works in a one-week binge.  That said, I know that the last time I read Peter Dickinson's The Ropemaker was in high school, because I then lent it to someone who never returned it.  So I'll read that for this category.

-A book recommended by someone you just met.  I asked the NaNoWriMo Facebook group what they thought I should read this year; one reply was already on the list (Grave Beginnings) but the other was not; therefore, I shall be reading The Machinery by Gerrard Cowan for this category.

-A book written by a celebrity.  Okay, so I saw Elixir by Hilary Duff ages ago, probably when it first came out, but I didn't read it because I was skeptical.  I mean, celebrities writing?  Who does that?  And I'm always convinced it's really a ghostwriter doing the real work.  But now it seems like it's a good time to try this one out.  I was going to read Tina Fey's Bossypants for this, but I'm already reading a comedian's book for another category, so I didn't want to double-dip.

-A book at least 100 years older than you.  I'm actually going to get around to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for this one, because I want to read one of the steampunk novels that started it all as research for my own writing.

-A book from Oprah's Book Club.  After much perusal of the complete list (found here) I've settled on Malika Oufkir's memoir Stolen Lives, because the categories this year are sorely lacking in nonfiction and this seems like one of the better titles on the list in general--at least among those that I haven't read yet.

-A book recommended by a family member.

-A graphic novel.  I love Neil Gaiman but am not a huge fan of graphic novels, so I've avoided his Sandman series up until this point, despite buying my boyfriend the entire series for various occasions.  Now seems like a pretty good time to give them a go and start in Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes.

-A book with a protagonist who has your occupation.

-A book of poetry.

-A classic from the 20th century.  I'm going to do Lolita for this one, because I feel like I need to squish a Russian novel in here somewhere.  What really makes a classic, anyway?  I don't know, but this list that I found says Lolita is one.

-An autobiography.  I picked up Papillon by Henri Charriere at a used bookstore in New Jersey (Broad Street Books in Branchville, if anyone out there is in the area; it was absolutely lovely and I look forward to going back the next time we're in the area) but put it down in favor of another title.  Now I wish I'd bought it!  Charriere wrote this book about his wrongful conviction for a crime and his subsequent escapes from prison.  Most autobiographies bore me on principal, but this one actually sounds interesting.

-A book about a culture you're unfamiliar with.  I'm leaning towards Shutting Out the Sun for this one, which is a non-fiction book about Japan's "lost generation."

-A satirical book.  I've partially changed my mind on this one; instead of Thing Explainer, I want to read What If? which uses science to answer absurd hypothetical questions and makes fun of how things work in general in the process.

-A book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller.

-A book you should have read in school.  This I'm going to fill with The Odyssey, which every other English class in my high school read, but my class as a whole did not because our teacher was too busy having raptures about the hero's journey in the Star Wars series to actually assign it to us.

-A book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF.

-A book published before you were born.  Let's face it: most of history is before I was born.  This means that I have a very wide scope of titles from which to choose.  I'm going to go with the classics and choosing Wuthering Heights for this one.

-A book you previously abandoned.  I'm planning on using Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for this one.  I've had this book for years, and started it at one point, but I just couldn't get into it.  I'm hoping that time will have improved it some for me, just like how I liked Vellum much more when I returned to it years after first purchasing and attempting to read it.

-A book that intimidates you.  For this I've finally settled on The Count of Monte Cristo.  I was planning on reading it for catch-up for a digital book club, but I'm including it here because its sheer length is intimidating.  I don't mind books--love them, really--but I am a tiny bit concerned that adding in a book of such heft so late in the year is going to throw off my timeline for completing the challenge.