2011 Books Read

Better late than never. Remember how I used to blog and make OCD-worthy lists and collages of all I’d read? I still make lists, but collages these days, while never extinct, are few and far between.

2011 was a slim yet memorable reading year. I discovered Lisa Kleypas and dedicated the entire spring to reading her backlists. And new author crush: Stephanie Perkins! I plan to write an entire blog post on how much I swooned during the reading of Lola and the Boy Next Door.

The Wild Rose, the  final installment of Jennifer Donnelly’s Rose Trilogy came out in August covered in awesome sauce. There were Lawrence of Arabia and motorcar chases, dude.

In between, there were many ‘Did Not Finished’ books. I’m a notorious abandon-er of books (known to abandon on the last few pages!), so I don’t count something as ‘Read’ unless I read or liberally skimmed every. single. word.

Oh, and I read The Witch of Blackbird Pond again. It’s a sickness. This is re-read #12.

Jan. 2011
Room by Emma Donoghue

Feb 2011
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare (re-read)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (re-read)

March 2011
Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Re-read).
Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas
Blue-Eyed Devil by Lisa Kleypas

April 2011
Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas
It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
After the Night by Linda Howard
Mine Till Midnight by Lisa Kleypas

May 2011
Scandal in Spring by Lisa Kleypas
Seduce Me At Sunrise by Lisa Kleypas
Tempt Me At Twilight by Lisa Kleypas
Married by Morning by Lisa Kleypas
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas

June 2009
Intensity by Dean Koontz
The Lost City of Z by David Grann (liberal skimming)

July 2011
A Shore Thing by Snooki
Jane by April Lindner

August 2011
The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly (liberal skimming)

September 2011
Fury by Elizabeth Miles

October 2011
Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur
If Tomorrow Comes by Sidney Sheldon
Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Dec 2011
Legend by Marie Lu

Playing Catch-Up 2009

Before and during my MIA stint, I’ve been reading…instead of blogging. I’ve got one word to sum up my feelings about this: Crap. A sinking crappy feeling. My poor neglected blog. My abysmal readership. My stats! My plummeting, nose-diving stats!

Below, you’ll find the list of books I’ve read thus far. How many have I blogged about? Zero. Resolution: Blog about all of them in wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am format.

Look forward to my Hit and Run Review.

Books Read 2009

Jan 2009

1. The Ghost Writer—John Harewood

2. The Little Prince—Antoine De Saint-Exuprey

3. Fingersmith—Sarah Waters

4. No Plot? No Problem!—Chris Baty

5. Stein on Writing—Sol Stein

6. 20 Master Plots—Ronald Tobias

7. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt—Nick Hornby

Feb 2009

1. Here on Earth—Alice Hoffman

2. Silk—Alessandro Barcio

3. How I Write—Janet Evanovich

4. Nefertiti—Michelle Moran

5. Aquamarine—Alice Hoffman

6. Indigo—Alice Hoffman

March 2009

1. Garden Spells—Sarah Addison Allen

2. Incantation—Alice Hoffman

3. Holidays on Ice (Santaland Diaries)—David Sedaris

4. The Heretic Queen—Michelle Moran

5. The Sugar Queen—Sarah Addison Allen

6. Tipping the Velvet—Sarah Waters

7. The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins

April 2009

1. Graceling—Kristin Cashore

2. Paper Towns—John Green

3. What I Saw and How I Lied—Judy Bundell

4. Danse Macabre—Stephen King

TBR Galore

Why do I persist in adding more books to my TBR list when I cannot possibly handle the load? Likewise, why do I persist in checking out stack upon stack of books at the library when I’ve already got a monster pile threatening to topple over at home? It’s a sickness I tell you! I’m a greedy little book hoarder.

Here is this year’s TBR list. The notebook paper I keep it on is about to disintegrate so in the interest of good housekeeping, I’m transcribing it here.

Lets see if I made much of a dent:

Crossed out: Finished

Italics: Abandoned (not necessarily abandoned forever) or ‘put down to read at another time.’

TBR 2008

1. Out of Africa—Isak Dinesen
2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—Washington Irving
3. Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
4. Captain Blood–Rafael Sabatini
5. Travels with Charlie in Search of America—John Steinbeck
6. Seven Gothic Tales—Isak Dinesen
7. Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire—Amanda Foreman
8. Charlotte Sometimes—Penelope Farmer
9. A Little Princess—Frances Hodgson Burnett
10. The Little Prince—Antoine Saint-Exupery
11. Lock and Key—Sarah Dessen
12. Ten Cents a Dance—Christine Fletcher
13. The Host—Stephenie Meyer
14. Breaking Dawn–Stephenie Meyer
15. Bird by Bird—Anne Lamott
16. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks —E. Lockhart
17. Saving Juliet—Suzanne Selfors
18. The Luxe—Anna Godbersen
19. Life As We Knew It—Susan Beth Pfeffer
20. Fearless Fourteen—Janet Evanovich
21. The Somnambulist—Jonathan Barnes
22. The Pillars of the Earth–Ken Follet
23. The Time Traveler’s Wife–Audrey Niffenegger
24. The Winter Rose—Jennifer Donnelly
25. PS, I Love You—Cecelia Ahern
26. Doubt—John Patrick Shanley
27. American Gods—Neil Gaiman
28. Neverwhere—Neil Gaiman
29. Smoke and Mirrors—Neil Gaiman
30. Sovay–Celia Rees
31. Beastly–Alex Finn
32. Thirteen Reasons Why—Jay Asher
    
33. How I live Now—Meg Rosoff
34. Girl, 13–Starla Griffin
    
35. Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos–R.L. La Fevers
36. Sloppy Firsts—Megan McCafferty
    
37. The Virgin Suicides—Jeff Eugenedies
38. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! —Laura Amy Schlitz
39. Inkheart—Cornelia Funke
    
40. Henry V—William Shakespeare
    
41. Paper Moon—Joe David Brown
    
42. The Witchcraft of Salem Villiage—Shirley Jackson
43. The Bloody Chamber–Anglea Carter
44. Matilda–Roalh Dalh
    
45. The Witches–Roalh Dalh
46. The Twits–Roalh Dalh
47. Click 8–Nick Hornby
48. Housekeeping vs. the Dirt–Nick Hornby
    
49. Angela’s Ashes—Frank McCourt
50. Watchman–Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
51. Rumors–Anna Godberson
    
52. The Tea Rose–Jennifer Donnelly
    
53. Forever Amber—Kathleen Winsor
54. A Woman of Substance—Barbara Taylor Bradford
    
55. The House of Riverton—Kate Morton
    
56. Dead until Dark—Charlene Harris
    
57. Sin in the Second City: Madamns, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul—Karen Abbott
58. Seasons of Passage—Christopher Pike
    
59. The Ruby in the Smoke—Philip Pullman
    
60. Out–Natsuo Kirino
    
61. The Outlaws of Sherwood—Robin McKinley
    
62. Beauty—Robin McKinley
    
63. Paper Towns—John Green
    
64. Rapunzel’s Revenge—Shannon Hale
    
65. Chains—Laurie Halse Anderson
    
66. The Hunger Games–Suzanne Collins
67. The Graveyard Book–Neil Gaiman
    
68. The Explosionist—Jenny Davidson
    
69. Dracula–Bram Stoker
    
70. The Minister’s Daughter—Julie Hern
    
71. Nefertiti—Michelle Moran
    
72. Mystic River–Dennis Lehane
    
73. Shutter Island—Dennis Lehane
    
74. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—John Berendt
    
75. Dandelion Wine—Ray Bradbury
    
76. The Martian Chronicles—Ray Bradbury
77. About a Boy–Nick Hornby
    
78. Strangers on a Train–Patricia Highsmith
    
79. The Talented Mr. Ripley—Patricia Highsmith
    
80. The Thin Man–Raymond Chandler
    
81. What I Saw and How I Lied–Judy Blundell
    
82. Peeled–Joan Bauer
    
83. Fingersmith–Sarah Waters
    
84. Asylum–Patrick Mcgrath
    
85. The Pale Blue Eyes (P.S.) —Louis Bayard
    
86. The Ghost Writer–John Harwood
87. Five Mile House–Karen Novak
88. The Haunting of Hill House—Shirley Jackson
    
89. Dragonwyck–Anya Sexton
    
90. The Thorn Birds—Colleen McCullough
    

Outlander: Breaking the Romance Mold

Much has been said of Diana Gabaldon’s controversial twist on the traditional romance novel formula. For those of you who have never had the inclination to read a romance novel, you’ll be curious to know that the formula goes something like this:

• The hero is usually in his thirties. Why? A man in his thirties is more mature and financially stable.
• The heroine, preferably a virginal one, is always younger than the hero. She ballparks around 18-23, and is most inexperienced in the ways of love…
• Which allows the hero (that rakish rascal), to teach her how to make love…
• While she, in turn, teaches him how to feel… so much so that he will never look at another woman again.
• Meanwhile, there are other complications with the plot…
  • An inconvenient fiancée.
  • A case of mistaken identity.
  • An abduction.
  • A diabolical villain.
  • A misunderstanding that could have been cleared up if someone just said something.

When all these complications are cleared up, a marriage takes place.
Then along came D. Gabaldon who turned the genre upside down with:

• A heroine who is older and more experienced than the virginal hero.
• A romance that takes place after the marriage, thereby proving that there is life after marriage!
• An abduction, true, but this time it’s the hero who gets abducted and brutally raped… er…made love to by the villain.
• A villain who is such a badass that you can almost forgive his little “indiscretion.”
• And the most interesting dialogue this side of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

“Jamie and Claire”

The Outlander YouTube movies are increasing in number and getting better by the minute. A few months ago, these fan videos were primarily casting oriented, but now, they’re branching out into storytelling territory. With that said, I would like to introduce a new Outlander video entitled “Jamie and Claire” that deserves honorable mention in telling the story all the way to the end of Dragonfly in Amber. There is, however, an anachronistically modern picture of Claire (casted as Anna Friel) that raised my eyebrow just an inch north of doubtful before I was quickly won over by the music (“Bonny Portmore” by Loreena McKennitt) and creative subtitles.

Men of the Mist

It it a truth universally acknowledged that if you’re going to have crush on a dashing fictional hero, you might as well go the extra step and provide him with his own atmospheric mist. My earliest memory of being able to see man-mist occurred on my first reading of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The sardonic young seaman, Nathaniel Eaton, makes an appearance from out of the mist of the Connecticut River in order to come to Kit Tyler’s rescue. From that point on, the mist never receded from his general vicinity.

Nor did the mist leave Sydney Carton’s side as he took his final stroll along the cobblestone sidewalk under Lucie Manette’s window. Likewise, if Outlander were ever to be made into a movie, Jamie Fraser would have his own fog and wind machine. He must have wind blowing through his flaming red hair at all times! None of this sissy mist, I demand a gale for this God among men!

And last but not least, Mr. Darcy came out of the mist… in slow motion. And yes, there was a faint breeze tousling his Regency era sideburns ever so gently askew…

Of course, this was all in my imagination. Never did it cross my mind that others were thinking the same thing. Until one day, in a smoky theater in Westwood Village, I feasted my eyes upon this image and nearly fell out of my seat from sheer exhilaration.

All around me, there was a collective intake of breath from the female audience as Mr. Darcy, played by Matthew Macfayden, came out of the mist, his morning-walking coat billowing behind him as he approached Elizabeth Bennet in, dare I say it, slow motion. What a thrill to see the image that has been ruminating in my mind realized before my eyes. And then, after this scene, the theater erupted into a collective sigh.

The male audience, however, were not amused.

Tea with the Queen

In my earlier synopsis of Sweet Valley High: Beware the Wolfman, it slipped my mind to mention one other important plot element. How could I have been so careless!

While the Wolfman romances Jessica Wakefield, Elizabeth Wakefield, the scholastically unblemished twin, manages to arrange tea with Queen Elizabeth. Imagine that! I didn’t know the Queen was so accessible to her subjects let alone to a Southern Californian teen. Here in America, if any of us lowly plebeians try to hop the fence over to the White House, we’d get shot down by snipers. And they call this a democracy…

But Elizabeth Wakefield obtains a press pass to Buckingham Palace and interviews the Queen over those little cucumber sandwiches. Seems like the Wakefields of Sweet Valley are movin’ on up in the world. Let this be a lesson in determination for all you young folks out there: if you try hard enough, maybe you can also interview the British Monarchy for your high school newspaper. I don’t know about you, but I for one am inspired. Like Elizabeth Wakefield, I too am an average Southern Californian resident. Do you think Her Majesty will give me an extra lump of sugar in my English Breakfast if I present her with the best Roxy T-shirt PacSun has to offer?

A Celebration of Bad Fiction

I came into the world at the height of ninja-movie-mania headed by such fine actors as Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. I was raised in a decade when Baywatch was the most popular show on TV and we were lead to believe that lifeguards really did defend our coast from a slew of international terrorists. So you can see that I know a thing or two about bad taste.

For every good book that I’ve read, there are at least a dozen books that made me look up and say, for lack of a more elegant phrase, “WTF?” Case in point: the Sweet Valley High series. Sweet Valley twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are vacationing in foggy London. Jessica, the more adventurous of the dual, succumbs to the charm of a cute British boy when, to her consternation, he turns out to be a werewolf.

And the plot thickens…

He’s not just any teen wolf, he’s also the reincarnated form of Jack the Ripper. Because it makes perfect sense that Jack the Ripper got away with his 19th century crimes because he’s a werewolf… Has Francine Pascal’s ghostwriter managed to crack the murder mystery that eluded the best detectives of Scotland Yard?

Flashback to me: twelve years old and reading Sweet Valley High: Beware the Wolfman during seventh grade English class. I looked up and whispered “WTF?”

Over the course of this blog, I plan to add a new segment: a celebration of books, cover art, and movies that make you go “WTF!”

Bad fiction is almost as entertaining if not more entertaining than good fiction. In order to get you into the full “WTF” spirit, allow me to share a video that demonstrates how bad fiction can be. This video is called “The Worst Movies Ever.”

Aging: The Fictional Way

Today, I officially turn the big two-three, which makes me the same age as young Jamie Fraser. Yes, so fully does literature consume my world that my life is set in synchrony to the lives of my favorite fictional characters.

Years ago, I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen because then I would be the same age as Kit Tyler of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Of course there were other Young Adult books with sixteen year old heroines flitting through my mind, but I never sought to emanate any of them as much I as I did Kit Tyler. I can’t explain why: Kit Tyler never back-sassed men with the ease of Elizabeth Bennet nor did she resemble the resourceful adventuress Claire Fraser. When I think about it, Kit Tyler was just an ordinary girl trying to live out life one day at a time without stepping on anybody’s toes. I suppose Kit Tyler appealed to me because she was always trying to be good, and in doing so, she became fundamentally good. So for many of my impressionable teen years, I sought to be as good as Kit Tyler, never once realizing how much this book, read as an eleven year old, has influenced the way I lived my life and the way I see myself.

Titanic

In 1998, I was thirteen and deeply devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, so great was my devotion to Leo that I sat through the entire 3 hour duration of Titanic when, in fact, I needed to use the bathroom 20 minutes into the movie. So I sat there and endured, mesmerized by the beauty that is DiCaprio, and tried to ignore the encroaching on-screen water…

Titanic resurfaces in my mind from time to time; I’m reminded of it every time I see Leonardo DiCaprio martyr himself at the end of yet another movie. Last fall, I had an unexplainable urge to revisit the story and picked up A Night to Remember by Walter Lord: an eloquently written, investigative account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. But the novel only succeeded in stirring up my curiosity a step further.

When Titanic was a world-wide box office phenomenon, there was an unfounded rumor of a sequel. When I heard about it, I thought to myself “What a stupid idea!”—the ship sunk, Jack Dawson is at rest in his watery, unmarked grave. Until now… A clever YouTuber has resurrected Jack Dawson from the dead in Titanic 2: Two the Surface. The video has been out for a while, so most of you have probably seen it, but for those of you who have never had the inclination to search for Titanic on YouTube, I’ve included it for your viewing pleasure.