Heather's 100: 2010 Reading Log

I don't have any particular goals this year. Resolving to make the TBR stacks smaller never seems to work for me. And I'm not too fussed this year about balancing light and serious reading. So it's more of following my nose into semi-random reading for me in 2010.

1. Lisa Lutz - Curse of the Spellman's

Amusing comic mystery -- somewhat in the Janet Evanovitch territory with less mayhem.

2. Norman Penner - Canadian Left: A Critical Analysis

A bit on the dry side with fewer of the usual lacunae found in histories written by former party members. Out of date in most ways: accounts of the early left politics are covered in more detail by Ian McKay in Reasoning Otherwise.

3. Joey Comeau - Overqualified

Short epistolary novel made up of cover letters for job applications: funnier than you'd think especially if you're gearing up for a job hunt. Inhabits the same universe as Lynn Coady, Joel Hynes, and David Adams Richards.

Some light reading this week:

4. Mary Ann Shaffer -Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

5. Ian Rankin - The Complaints

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a light but fun read! I enjoyed it when I read it last year. It was one of those books that went through the 75 Book Challenge group and most people liked it.

It was one of those books that was sitting in my bookshelf for months and months: a gift. Not sure why I put off reading it but it was a pleasant surprise. It's made me want to read some Charles Lamb.

6. Seth - George Sprott

The first graphic novel of the year and I think I read it too quickly. The drawing is gorgeous--very much like It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken--and the story melancholy with much left unsaid.

7. Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

Another historical novel: this one more absorbed in exploring the nature of creating or imagining than the nature of reading. I quite liked the narrative control you can see as Foulds shifts from one character's point of view to another's, all while maintaining focus on interior lives. I would have enjoyed hearing more from some of the minor figures in the novel but all the same a good read.

#5> Heather, I haven't read Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society yet, but I also recently read a book that concerns Charles Lamb - The Lambs of London. I thought it was rather good, if you want to read a fictionalised account of his and Mary's life.

And I'm looking forward to The Quickening Maze!

Thanks for the Lamb reference--it's been years since I read any Ackroyd.

I should take a ramble through the local used bookstore: I used to see heaps of Lamb but always passed them by, small leather bound books.

A couple labour history books this week with a business book tossed in for balance (sort of).

8. Richard Pipes - Communism

A short, too-sweeping account from a rightwing perspective.

9. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith - Trust Agents

Clear and to the point.

10. Jean Evans Sheils and Ben Swanky - "Work and Wages!": Semi-Documentary Account of the Life and Times of Arthur H. (Slim) Evans

Much more a scrapbook than a history and therein lies its value. The reproduced newspaper articles from the 1930s and 40s are much easier to read here than on microfilm.

Experiences a slight slowdown in reading as my brain is held captive by my life.

11. Martyn Waites - Speak No Evil

Competent mystery based, I suspect, on the Mary Bell case. I know I've read another novel about Bell but for the live of me I can't recall it.

12. Jess Walters - The Financial Lives of the Poets

The conceit--financial commentary in blank verse--and the situation--an attempt to stave off bankruptcy--are interesting enough and contemporary enough but somehow it didn't work for me.

Big changes afoot so lots of light reading ahead.

13. Martyn Waites - White Riot

14. Martha Baillie - Incident Report

It would be interesting to compare this to Comeau's Overqualified: both use fragments to move through a more or less clear narrative line.

15. Terry Prachett - Night Watch

Getting a house ready for sale is a lot of work and leads to not particularly ambitious reading choices.

16. Terry Prachett - Thud

17. Apostolos Doxiadis - Logicomix

18. Janet Evanovich - Fearless Fourteen

Seems to me that there's been another book somewhere along the way but all memory of it is gone given the house prep and showings.

20. Alison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

A quick, innocuous read.

21. Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

Awful. Can't explain why I finished it. Lapse in sanity perhaps.

22. Alexander McCall-Smith - No 1 Ladies Detective Agency

Innocuous.

23. Lee Siegel - Against the Machine

An easy read but better argued than Cult of the Amateur. Annoying in its lack of notes or bibliography.

24. Christopher Brookmyre -Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks

Amusing.

25. Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

I think this one is worth a re-read. Its refusal of a romantic conclusion and its narrative control are admirable.

26. Joanne Chen - The Taste of Sweet

Didn't leave a huge impression except for the idea of late 20th century notions about sweet eating as lower status activity than savoury eating. Essentially a reversal of several centuries approach to sweets.

27. Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget

Interesting arguments marred by some choppy logic and entire lack of notes or bibliography.

29. Dan and Chip Heath - Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

Less compelling follow-up to Made to Stick

30. Sara Paretsky - Hardball

I haven't read Paretsky in a very long time and enjoyed this one even though it covers similar ground as previous books.

#15> Awful. Can't explain why I finished it. Lapse in sanity perhaps.

I had to laugh at that. :) I did enjoy Patricia Cornwall's earlier books about Dr Kay Scarpetta, but they did lose the plot somewhere along the line.

Now that my mind has cleared, wookiebender, I think I slogged on because I was trying out an ebook reader.

The ebook reader is a fine thing, especially when travelling and when loaded with a variety of library books, but Cornwall nearly put me off it.

I've gone through a phase of bulk reading manga.

31 to 34. I've worked through Genshiken 1 to Genshiken 4 and I'll probably tackle the others since I like the way they simultaneously make me think about the way visual stories are told and about the ways in which people deal with interests that they understand as outside the norm. Most of the Genshiken characters are interested in some sort of intersection between gaming and sexuality.

35 to 39 The five volumes of Yotsuba! are polar opposites of Genshiken though they too are slice-of-life manga. They feature a somewhat odd 4 or 5 year old figuring out (or not) the world and keeping her family and neighbours hopping. Amusing, especially if you like watching kids work things out.

40. Ken Aluetta - Googled

Having spent cough cough years inside a corporation I'm not usually drawn to reading corporate histories but I'd recommend this one to just about anyone who uses Google's services. It's clearly written, moderately argued, and backed up with detailed notes.

41. Mal Peet Tamar

A quick and compelling read and a good YA introduction to WWII resistance movements and their complexities. Not entirely convinced the two narrative timeframes worked well together.

#19> Oh, I'm half-in-love with the concept of an eBook reader. BUT I'm not in love with the cost, and the hiccups that have already occurred. (The iPad reader censored "sperm" from its version of Moby Dick; Amazon.com pulled 1984 off of the Kindles of people who'd already bought it; various worries about the fact that you're buying from the one conglomerate instead of your nice local bookshop.) Not to mention you can't drop it in the bath, or read it on a plane, and you may run out of batteries at an inopportune moment.

But having an entire *library* at your fingertips... *Drool*.

#>21 wookiebender: I baulked at the cost too but broke down and bought a Sony Reader with some Christmas gift money. I'm not a big bathtub reader so I'm safe there. And reading on the plane works well--flight attendants eyeball it once or twice and then ignore it since it doesn't have wireless connectivity.

The battery thing is a pain though. One of the downsides of the Sony Reader is that it has to be charged via the computer's USB port. Upside though is that Sony hasn't been tangled up in the iPad/Amazon interferences. Yet.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to bring a dozen books along with you.

42. Kelley Armstrong - Made to be Broken

Sadly I can't remember much about it: definitely one from the bulk reading column.

43. Ellen Ruppel Shell - Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

I enjoyed much of this book especially the first couple of chapters which cover the history of retailing. It's very US-focused and the content on the food industry will be familiar to readers of Pollan.

44. Marilyn Johnson - This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

I enjoyed this survey of book and library culture in the early 21st century. It's well researched and smoothly written. I've added Johnson's book on Obituaries to the never-ending to read list.

45. Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times

Whatever am I going to read once I've read all of Pratchett?

46. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger - Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

The last third of the book is more speculative than I care for but it was a more satisfying read than Jaron Lanier's latest book.

47. Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island

I don't think I read this as a child but the plot and many of the details were surprisingly familiar from childhood TV.

48. Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin - Three Cups of Tea

I found the first third of the book a bit wooden and from time to time I wondered about the level of fact checking. Can't disagree with the primary point: educating girls is the key to improving many dire situations.

49. Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden

Another children's classic I missed as a child but have a strong memory of the key elements.

50. Seimu Yoshizaki - Kingyo Used Books

Didn't grab me but it offers a survey of the major subgenres of manga.

And that brings me halfway. The next month or so will be a jumble of books dominated by light reading and free ebooks. Everything else is packed up in preparation for a cross-country move. (And yes, even after selling or giving away half our books we still have many, many heavy books to shift into a smaller living space.)

51. Jessica Grant - Come Thou Tortoise

Amusing.

52. Terry Pratchett - Wee Free Men

A re-read. I need to hunt out the sequel which I don't think I've read.

53. Joseph Boyden - Through Black Spruce

54. Steven Leavitt - Freakonomics

55. Linda Fairstein - Killer Heat

Forgettable. (I read it weeks ago and only now stumbled on a note about it.)

56. Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

See above. I think I need to wean myself off this type of bulk reading since it's not making much of an impression.

57. Janet Martin Soskice - Sisters of the Sinai

Enjoyable popular history of Victorian travellers who in midlife transformed themselves into Biblical scholars. I wished for a bit more context setting in the main body of the text but all the same this was worth the read.

58. Octavia Butler - Kindred

My first read from a new library: I've read most of Butler before (including this one) and it was happy-making to find that the novel has improved over time. I suspect I'll start to re-read most of her books.

59. Terry Pratchett - Moving Pictures

One of Pratchett's cultural institution novels. I didn't find this one as compelling as something like Going Postal but I very much enjoyed the first appearance of Gaspode. (I suspect Gaspode may have been the previous tenant in our new apartment's bathroom.)

60. Alberto Manguel - The Library at Night

Pleasant bedtime reading.

Lots of books started and in progress this week--I seem to be incapable of reading only one thing at a time.

61. Lynda Barry - Come over come over

Barry is one of my favourite writers and for a book that's 20 years old, Come Over Come Over has held up well. This is out of print but well worth snagging it you see it second hand somewhere. Barry's tweens are usually confused and in pain of some sort which rings true to what I remember of that age.

62. Annabel Lyon - The Golden Mean

This received lots of positive press in during the 2009 fall book-selling season and it's well-written (the the usual number of ahistorical language slips). I don't know if I'd recommend it and can't tell yet why it left me cold. Reading it alongside Mary Renault would be a useful exercise.

63. Hope Larson - Mercury

A graphic novel aimed at YA market, Mercury approaches a range of Nova Scotian topics with a light hand and affection. The more I think about it the more I'm interested in the ways Larson adapts Nova Scotian folk tales and superstitions into a modern text. Handy companion reading here would be some Helen Creighton.

64. Faith Erin Hicks - Zombies Calling

Another graphic novel with a Nova Scotian connection: some of the backgrounds in Zombies Calling are very reminiscent of King's College and Dalhousie. I quite liked the first 2/3rds of this with its comic approach to zombies and exams and the annoyance of student loan debts.

65. Ronald Liversedge - Recollections of the On-to-Ottawa Trek, 1935.

It's 75 years since the Trek this month. I picked this mimeographed version of Liversedge's memoir at an Ottawa Antiquarian Book Fair several years ago. About a decade after it's appearance in this form it was edited into more formally produced book which is no longer in print. It's a quick read with a minimum of party rhetoric.

66. Hugh MacLennan - Barometer Rising

I surprised myself by re-reading this Halifax explosion novel for the first time in many years. The novel's sentimentality about Cape Breton rural culture still annoys me and the approach to women's sexuality is grating. The portrait of shell-shock and Halifax at war was surprisingly good as were the descriptions of the 1917 Explosion that destroyed the North End and much of the waterfront.

67. Octavia Butler - Wild Seed
68. Octavia Butler - Mind of My Mind
69. Octavia Butler - Clay's Ark
70. Octavia Butler - Patternmaster

Ok -- so a bit of a binge on the Butler: I read these in an omnibus edition that ordered the novels in relation to the overarching story's sequence rather than by publication date. I think this does Butler a disservice in many ways since it ends up emphasizing the comparative weaknesses of the earlier novels. Wild Seed is one Butler's best novels and I'd recommend taking a pass on the others unless you're very interested in the ways she worked and reworked key ideas about power and dominance.

71. Robert Levine - A Geography of Time (1997)

Interesting, easy-reading but now outdated in some key ways. For example, many of the experiments he conducted to measure people's daily tempo would need to be reconfigured to account for the displacement of wristwatches by cell phones and MP3 players.

While the book does an interesting survey of the relationship of a person's sense of time to geographical location and, to a lesser extent, class position, Levine doesn't seem to have considered gender roles as a factor. Odd given that gendered approaches to things like child-rearing and housekeeping affect the ways people understand their relationships to time tied to paid, time tied to non-paid work, and time available for leisure.

72. Elinor Lipman - A Family Man

Moderately amusing novel -- strong dialog but there's something a bit vague about the characters. I'd probably have gotten more pleasure from Lipman's satire of celebrity culture if I paid more attention to celebrities.

73. Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

Flat and formulaic.

74. Laurie King God of the Hive

Reliable mystery with echoes of Dorothy Sayer.

75. Denise Mina - Still Midnight

I think this is one of Mina's best novels and I'd recommend it to mystery and non-mystery readers. It has echoes of Christopher Brookmyre's novels in which the criminals veer toward the comic and of Anne Enright's The Gathering and more in tone than subject matter.

76. Jeff Lindsay - Dexter by Design

Alternately amusing and creepy--as intended I expect.

77. Linden MacIntyre - The Bishop's Man

A confessional novel touching on many Nova Scotian themes: drink, despair, abuse, depression (economic and mental), bad choices, and nostalgia for Gaelic culture. One of the most corrosive characters in the novel is also the epitome of that culture which would make this an interesting novel to read in conjunction with Alistair McLeod's No Great Mischief.

78. Sylvia Maultash Warsh - The Queen of Unforgetting

I was attracted to this novel because of its interesting premise--estranged daughter of holocaust survivors reimagines the life and death of Jean de Brébeuf while trying to write a graduate thesis for Northrup Frye about E. J. Pratt's version of Brébeuf. In the end it fell flat for me--partly because I find the narrator off-putting and partly because the closure of the novel is driven in large measure by domestic romance devices that resolve ultimately in female restriction to stereotypes. (For example, the conflicts in one character are resolved by house-cleaning.)

79. Michael Petrou - Renegades: Canadian in the Spanish Civil War

This is a well-documented, empirically-based account of Canadian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

80. Bryan Lee O'Malley - Scott Pilgrim, Volume 6

81. Christopher Moore - You Suck
82. Jeffrey Deaver - Manhatten is My Beat
83. Walter Mosley -Blonde Faith

Bulk reading--not much more to say.

84. Rick Geary - Trotsky: A Graphic Biography

Quick overview of Trotsky's life rendered in black and white.

85. Alan Bradley - Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Cozy mystery set in 1950s England with slight but hard to pin down echoes of Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

86. Doug Smith - Joe Zuken, Citizen and Socialist

Readable biography but flawed by having no footnotes or references.

87. Lauren Sefton Macdowell - Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen

Detailed account of leading labour lawyer of the mid-20th century.

88. Nicholas Carr - The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Intriguing: makes me want to learn more about different types of reading and neuroplasticity.

89. Carrie Mac - The Gryphon Project

Flat with too much exposition: needs more show. For a YA novel with a central female character the novel spends most of its time focused on boys' lives.

The Shallows does sound interesting, but I dread to think what it says it does to our brains: I don't want to know anything bad about my favourite timewaster! :)

@wookiebender Carr's a little ambivalent about the Interweebs but far less hostile than Andrew Keen (Cult of the Amateur. I'm not entirely persuaded by Carr's arguments about the web changing our brain structures--I think his arguments need to look at a broader range of web type activities. But I do think the web is causing shifts in western culture.

90. Catherine O'Flynn - What Was Lost

This was shelved and tagged as a mystery novel at the library and while there is a mystery element to it (disappearance of a Harriet the Spy like girl), the novel has a broader approach to the idea that what is missing or lost shapes the people left behind. If you like Kate Atkinson, you'd probably like this.

91. Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This will end up being one of my 2010 best-books-read list. It's a biography of an ordinary woman whose aggressive cancer killed her far too young and provided key elements for much of modern medicine. If you've had a polio vaccination, you owe Henrietta Lacks and her family a thank you. And if you liked Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, you'd probably also like Skloot's book.

92. Daniel Pink - Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

A quick read that may shift the way you think about financial incentives.

93. Patti Smith - Just Kids

This one both amused me--after all it's about the late sixties/early seventies--and saddened me. A lot of people didn't make it through the seventies and even more didn't make it though the eighties.

94. Stephanie Meyer - Twilight

I've read more poorly written YA books than this one and I suppose I'm glad to have a more direct sense of what the fuss is about (attractive male bodies and female desire). But I doubt that I'll read another one in the series: over-controlling men don't do it for me.

95. David Levithan - Boy Meets Boy

YA romance - tho a bit of fantasy too since the wildly accepting community of teens, sadly, doesn't exist in many places.

96. John LeCarre - A Most Wanted Man

Typical LeCarre -- good intellectual puzzle as long as you don't look too closely at the female characters.

I expect my pleasure reading to slow down dramatically from here on out: I just started back at school and my brain will be full of required readings. (I'm starting an MLIS.)

Congratulations on the return to study! MLIS - Masters of Library and Information Systems? Sounds brilliant!

Yes, congrats on the return to study . . . and on almost reaching your first 100 for 2010!

BTW What an incredibly diverse list of books you have read this year.

Thanks Wookiebender and Judylou.

It's been a whirlwind this last couple of weeks . It's lots and lots of shorter readings for me for the next while.

My reading is about to become diverse in a different way since the classes cover everything from business management to reference services to information organization to history and theory.

I'm already missing my pleasure reading but I keep telling myself things will balance out over time once I relearn how to do this school thing.

Well. School ate most of my reading time and tortured me with pages and pages of less than beautiful prose to read. As soon as term ended I started gulping down pleasure reading: a very mixed lot.

97. Allan Donaldson - Case Against Owen Williams

An Early Reviewers book: I'd recommend his first novel--MacLean--over this more recent one.

98. Robert Darnton - The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future

A smoothly written collection of Darnton's essays--pleasant to read and full of interesting bits of history.

99. John le Carre -Our Kind of Traitor

Standard le Carre shifted from the Cold War to financial corruption.

100. Sara Paretsky - Body Work

101. Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards!
102. Terry Pratchett - Men at Arms

I am running out of Terry Pratchett's to read which is a sad thing.

103. Catherine O'Flynn - The News Where You Are

One of my favourite novels of the year. Beautifully written with complex shifting in time.

104. William Gibson - Zero History

And there's still more break time in which to read.

105. Dennis Lehane - Moonlight Mile

106. Carole Enharo - Doing Dangerously Well

Just added The news where you are to the wishlist. I like O'Flynn and this one sounds interesting.

#47> snap! Only I haven't actually read anything by O'Flynn yet, but Heather's comments were too good!