Category: 2015 Reading Challenge

Reading Challenge May Wrap Up

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This month was really slow. I knocked off another couple of boxes, but took a break while I was waiting on some library books to come available before I started something new. Of course, I do still have Jane Austen’s Emma on the go, but I really don’t want to read it.

So first up, I finished Imaginary Jesus, which is completely perplexing and strange, but at least it was short. This definitely leads me to believe that I have a lot of books downloaded to my Kindle that I am never going to read. I sometimes feel a little panicked that there are so many books in the world to read, but not enough time to read them all. But, being realistic, most of those books are probably not worth my time.

I also read Still Alice, which is was a little nervous about but ended up really enjoying. I have the movie waiting for me to watch still, and I’m interested in how they portray the relationships in it. I think I’m going to remember this book for a long time, because it kind of sticks with you in an emotional kind of way.

The other book I completed this month is Yes Please by Amy Poehler, which was so disappointing to me. I read this book for my book club, and I really thought I was going to love it, based on the buzz I had seen about it. It seems to me that Amy has enough good will generated from her various things going on to paint the book in a better light than it would have been just on its own. I’ll be honest, after following her Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls facebook page, I was really hoping for a feminist diatribe/memoir. This wasn’t it, for sure.

Next on my reading pile is the final two books in the Divergent series. They are downloaded to my Kindle and ready to go. I’m also considering tossing Emma to the side, and reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover for my old book instead. It’s also been banned, so that would check off yet another box.

The whole question of books that have been banned is kind of a tricky one, to be honest. I feel confident choosing Lady Chatterly’s Lover as an example of a banned book because it’s kind of the poster child for book censorship. But so, so many books have merely been challenged, and not actually banned. Also, a book that is banned in one city may not raise an eyebrow in another.

So should I stick with Emma, or toss it? That is kind of the big question. I would almost rather just watch Clueless again.

I checked off 5 boxes this month, so that brings my total up to 28 boxes total, and 17 books read.

 

Review: Yes Please

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Yes-Please

I did not expect to be so underwhelmed by this book, but I was. The structure was barely hanging on, and it was so all over the place, I had difficulty keeping all the story threads together.

Obviously, Amy Poehler had gone through a lot of personal and career upheaval during the writing on this book and was probably not at a very good place emotionally. She also doesn’t like talking about herself, as is evident from several subjects that are just a no go, including her divorce, embarrassing moments, and a few other things.

The book reminded me of a lot of reasons why I disliked Mindy Kaling’s book (and I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on either of them). It was just a bunch of vignettes, loosely strung together and attempting to be funny. I guess it even reminds me of Ellen Degeneres’ latest book. Chapters of narrative style writing, interspersed with odd bits, like emails, poetry, or lists. It doesn’t work for me. For a great example of memoir, everyone should read Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. Now that was fantastic.

There were a few things I found interesting and thoughtful about the book. The chapter of apologies was good, and I enjoyed the story, the honest depiction of anger and shame, and then acknowledging that the thing she did was careless. More of those stories, yes please! I also liked the portion where she talked about her brief touch with sexism in the workplace, with the unwanted physical touch. But I get the sense that even though she is famous, her life isn’t really all that interesting. I think the real reason she hated writing this book so much was that she really didn’t have much to tell. It’s not that she is a bad writer. It’s that she just didn’t have anything to work with.

3 stars (and that’s generous)

This book fulfills the funny book requirement for the challenge.

Review: Imaginary Jesus

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When I first got my Kindle, I thought the free ebooks were awesome, and I regularly scoured the free list and looked up websites that also had lists of free books, and I pretty much downloaded them indiscriminately. That is how this book came into my possession. I needed to find a book whose author had the same initials as I do for the challenge, and there were two books with MM authors, this one and another. This seemed the most interesting, but I didn’t read a synopsis or anything.

So I began the book, and within the first chapter I was completely baffled. “What have I started reading?!” was my initial thought. The book essentially starts off as a guy, eating a vegan meal in a “communist” cafe in Portland, with Jesus sitting across from him, listening to music on an iPod. So you know, already I was caught off guard. Then a burly man comes in and strikes up a conversation with them, then accuses Jesus of being imaginary. A brawl ensues, with Jesus making an escape on foot. Then, the burly man introduces himself as the Apostle Peter and they take off after the escaped Jesus. There are talking donkeys, time travel, mysteriously appearing guys on motorcycles, and reformed prostitutes. And about 100+ “imaginary Jesuses”, all depicting different stereotypes of how people envision Jesus.

I think this would have been a great book if it had not been a novel. There were some good insights about Jesus and suffering, and about compartmentalizing Jesus and removing the context of the actual time that he lived in. But the fictionalized aspects were so nutty that it made me want to dismiss the whole thing altogether. A tube race down a snowy mountain, where two Jesuses need to battle it out theologically, until one is eaten by a bear? I wish I was making that up. And the ending went soft on real insights. It makes me cringe when people literally put words into Jesus’ mouth, too. He spends a chapter or two ragging on Mohammed and the Book of Mormon, when he essentially does the same thing. Yeah, he doesn’t set up a religion, but don’t smack talk “Conversations With God” if you are going to slip into the same narrative.

“Wouldn’t it be great if someone wrote a sort of semi-autobiographical novel comedy thing instead of a Sunday school lesson for once? Wouldn’t that be cool?” (Chapter 31)

Well, I guess you did it.

2 stars.

This book fulfills the book you own but have never read, and book written by an author with the same initials as you requirements for the challenge.

Review: Still Alice

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Still Alice cover

I knew that this book was about a woman who slowly descends into Alzheimer’s disease, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so profound about the meaning of life. Alice Howland discovers she has early on-set Alzheimer’s disease shortly after her 50th birthday, when she is in the prime of her career. Her children have recently moved on into adulthood and she and her husband John are empty-nesters, with prestigious careers at Harvard University. The diagnosis shakes her to her core, and John is firmly in denial throughout most of the book.

While I really enjoyed a lot of the story that centered around an understanding of what it may feel like to have Alzheimer’s (because we really won’t ever know), I think part of the story that really captivated me was the reaction from her family. Her relationships at the beginning of the book are so different from the end. Her two eldest children, Anna and Tom, are closer to Alice than Lydia, the “wayward” youngest, who has defied her mother’s expectations for her and moved to Los Angeles in order to begin a career as an actress. Alice has spent most of her life deep into higher education, and she places high importance on it. It seemed to be a personal slight to her that Lydia dismisses it out of hand. But, as Alice loses more and more of her memory and “self”, Lydia is the one that seems to deeply understand her, or at least is interested in meeting her where she is.

Alice’s relationship with John is probably the saddest part of the entire novel. At first, he rejects the diagnosis outright. He wants to meet with the doctor himself, and argues over and over. When Alice has a DNA test done and it reveals that she has a genetic mutation found in many Alzheimer’s patients, John is on a new mission to find some kind of cure or treatment. He begins researching it with as much fervor as he does with his Harvard laboratory experiments. But as Alice descends farther and farther into her disease, John retreats from her more and more. He clearly feels like her handicap is slowing him down. He can’t stand to be around her. He won’t watch her take her medications. And near the end, when she can’t remember the names of her family, or even that she is related to these people, he moves to New York City for a new job and leaves Alice behind.

One of the plot threads that runs throughout is Alice’s plan to take her own life once her symptoms become out of hand. She sets an alarm on her Blackberry to ask her every morning to answer 5 basic questions: What month is it, Where is my office, Where do I live, How many children do I have, and When is Anna’s birthday. The document instructs her to find a bottle of sleeping pills and take them all when she can no longer answer the questions. The Blackberry unfortunately meets an untimely demise in the freezer, but while poking around on her computer some time later, she happens upon the document, entitled Butterfly (an allusion to her mother’s prized necklace that she has taken to wearing). She tries to carry out the instructions in the document, but her forgetfulness (and possibly John’s removal of the pills) prevents her from completing the task.

This book is important, I think, for families that have a member who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, or even someone in the early stages of diagnosis. There is an empathy that comes from reading about this experience, even if it can never be verified that this is actually how it feels.

I checked off the box for something that scares me, because the idea of one day having Alzheimer’s, or caring for someone that does, is really frightening. It does run in my family, although I don’t think I’ll be having my DNA tested. (Like Lydia, I’d rather not know.) But somehow, this book has tempered the fear. It would still be not the most awesome outcome, but maybe it wouldn’t be that terrible.

5 stars

This book completes the a book that scares you and a book that made you cry.

Reading Challenge April Wrap Up

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I don’t know why, but April seemed way busy. Too busy to get much reading done. I really only managed to read 3 books, because the Captain Marvel was a short graphic novel and I read the whole thing while Ruby took a nap in the car one afternoon. I checked off even fewer boxes because half of the books I read fulfilled zero requirements. I’m trying to change that this month with my choices. But I’ll get to that. First, what I read this month.

I read the 5th book in the Kissed By An Angel series, Everlasting. It made me interested enough to track down the 6th book, that I serendipitously found at Half Price Books for less than the Amazon price. I should probably read it soon, before I totally forget what happened in the previous book. Good thing I have these reviews to remind me.

Then, was the Captain Marvel graphic novel. I was really surprised by how much I loved this. Of course, I went into it knowing I was going to love Chewie (the cat, not the Wookie), but the entire story was great. I really felt like I got a sense of who Carol Danvers is as a character, although I would like to read the origin story. I will probably add this series to my list of graphic novels that I follow (since I do that now.)

I only really read Sycamore Row to get some kind of perspective on my feelings about A Time To Kill. I definitely can see how John Grisham has improved as a writer (or at least found a better editing team), but some of the old sexism lingers. It makes me curious about his other works, but I don’t know if I have the patience to read all of them and see how things change over time. At least the racial aspects got better.

The last book I completed in April was Where We Belong, which I had been wanting to get to for some time and the library didn’t have an ebook copy and so I just kept neglecting it. I finally ordered it from Paperback Swap and then it sat on my shelf for awhile. Finally, I picked it up so I could check off a box, and as hoped, I really enjoyed this (despite the air-deflating ending).

I have slowed down a little in my reading frenzy, as usually happens around summer time for me. I’ve been watching some movies and catching up on podcasts in my down time, and so I haven’t been racing through books. I did read Still Alice for my upcoming book club meeting, and I sort of halfheartedly read a bit of Emma. I’m considering tossing Emma to the way side because I just can’t get into it.

Next up is my short story collection. I have a book that I’ve had for a really long time that I will probably read. I’m hoping one of the short stories takes place in France, because that would also knock off another box. I also have my last Kissed By An Angel book to read. I think I found the book I’m going to use for poorly reviewed, which is a memoir from a frequent wedding guest called Save the Date. The reviews on Goodreads and Amazon aren’t good, even though most of the published book reviews I saw were pretty good. The Britney Spears book is still a contender though!

I’ve read 14 books and checked off 23 boxes for the challenge!

Review: Where We Belong

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There are a few books that I’ve read, where I’ve been trucking along happily, really enjoying the story and then I turn a page and suddenly it’s over. The ending couldn’t be more jarring if it had ended mid-sentence. It kind of leaves me feeling a little sour about the whole thing, even though I did enjoy reading it.

Obviously, what I’m trying to say here is that I liked this book although I did not like the ending. To be fair, it wasn’t a really terrible ending. I mean, it could have been “all a dream” or someone could have unnecessarily died right at the end. I wanted the romantic “leads” to wind up together and they didn’t, and it left me feeling wanting. On the one hand, that makes me feel slightly betrayed as a reader, because I read fiction in order to be swept up into a story and my expectations were not met. On the other, however, doesn’t that show how good the novel was at making me root for these two characters to wind up together, that I am so disappointed that they did not?

Either way, let that be a warning for anyone who reads this book. Marian is a single woman at the end of this book. I do feel that it was well written, though. The perspectives go back and forth several times between Marian, a woman in her late 30s who is a successful TV producer and kind of high-strung, and 18-year-old Kirby, who is kind of a meandering young woman who doesn’t give a shit about just about anything. As the story progresses, they sort of blend together, keeping their distinctive personalities, but sharing the good sides of each other. Marian kicks back and relaxes a little, and begins to follow her heart rather than her rules. Kirby begins to see the good in people and starts to care more about her family and her future. Each character’s “voice” is distinct and clearly separate from the other, which is kind of difficult to do.

Giffin tends to interweave characters from her other books in her novels, and so I was delighted to recognize Claudia from Baby Proof, which I read several years ago. This makes me hopeful that Marian, Conrad, or Kirby will show up in a future novel (or maybe they have before!).

I realize that I haven’t detailed anything about the plot (other than the fact that this is not a satisfying love story), but you can glean pretty much all of it from the book jacket. Kirby is adopted, Marian is her birth mother. They begin a relationship and it is complicated. Which sounds like a boring book, but I did really enjoy reading it. I found it difficult to put down particularly when Marian and Kirby go to meet up with Conrad, who is Kirby’s father and Marian hasn’t seen since she first discovered the pregnancy.

I enjoyed this very much, but that ending. It cost my review one star. I bet in the movie version, they would end up together.

4 stars.

This book fulfills the book by an author you love and haven’t read yet requirement for the challenge.

Review: Sycamore Row

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The writing style between this and A Time To Kill are very similar, but Sycamore Row is so much more polished, if a little less interesting. Part of that is the overall plot is just not as attention-grabbing as the plot to A Time To Kill. It answers a lot fewer “big questions” (is it okay to take the law into your own hands, etc), and becomes mired in a somewhat boring dispute over an estate. It only begins to get interesting when there is a BIG SECRET. Several of Grisham’s writing “tics” are present here as they were in the first novel, but not as overused. One of the biggest differences I noticed was a huge lack of the n-word. It was liberally sprinkled over A Time To Kill, but Sycamore Row is much more reigned in. He engages in a lot of telling rather than showing, which is not only a good rule for visual entertainment, but is also good with books. Near the end, he actually writes “As seasoned lawyers, they should have known better than to plan the rest of the trial” which is such a huge dun dun DUNNNN.

Essentially, the plot is that an old man who is estranged from his family commits suicide, leaving all of his sizable estate to a black housekeeper he had only known for 3 years. His surviving family is outraged, and so they hire some big guns and take it to court. The deceased has a long-lost and presumed dead brother who is found, and tapes a shocking deposition that illuminates exactly why this man left 24 million dollars to this woman. Being able to boil it down so concisely is part of its downfall. There just wasn’t much there to fill all 447 pages.

In contrast to A Time To Kill, I felt like the racial aspects were better, although not perfect. It was still exceedingly sexist. I was somewhat bothered that Ellen Roark doesn’t exist at all in this novel, even after in the conclusion to A Time To Kill she had been brutally beaten by the KKK and left to die, and that is basically how her story ends. It would have been nice for her to even make a cameo in this novel, at least so we know that she is doing okay. (I realize that most people wouldn’t have read both stories back-to-back, but she was a major character in the first!) Jake’s secretary at the beginning of the book is just as belittled as Ethel Twitty was, except instead of being old and ugly, she’s a lazy housewife. (C’mon, John…) It’s like he wants to emphasize that he is such a moral man because he is NOT TEMPTED BY HIS SECRETARY. Because there’s no way an ugly, old, or lazy woman would ever be tempting, am I right? The stand-in for Paralegal Ellen Roark in this book is Portia Lang, the black housekeeper Lettie’s daughter, who has just returned from being abroad and in the military, and now is interested in studying the law. How cool would it have been for Portia and Ellen to work together, and learn from each other? (Ok, I’ll drop it.)

I’m sure that my declarations of the sexism in this book are being scoffed by the two people reading this. So I have a selection of excerpts to share.

“I got the impression she’s a fairly typical black woman for these parts.” […] “Is she attractive?”

Jake and Dewayne exchanged a nervous handshake while shapely Kamila watched close by.

“Tell Carla I love her and lust after her body.” “She knows it. Later.”

Portia found her to be polite, gracious, and seemingly comfortable with another black female in the house.

The last one kind of is shockingly terrible. Why on earth would a woman be uncomfortable with another woman’s presence, whether they share a skin color or not? Are they dogs, sniffing each other and growling over territory? I kind of wish I had notated some of the even more terrible lines throughout A Time To Kill. Rest assured, it can be worse.

There is some minor fallout for Jake with regards to the Hailey trial, which is referenced quite a bit. Grisham doesn’t pretend that Jake isn’t an arrogant jerk (although, supposedly a moralistic arrogant jerk), and the troubles he is having collecting the insurance money on his charboiled house is due to that. His slimey divorce lawyer pal fixes that up for him rather conveniently, but there are lingering problems with the arsonists going free and many having not been charged at all. The KKK hasn’t returned, but there are mutterings that maybe they haven’t finished with Jake and so he carries a loaded gun in his briefcase to protect himself and his family. I did appreciate that small sliver of continuity.

My takeaway from this book is that is it okay. It’s fine. Nothing special. It’s much better as a piece of writing than A Time To Kill in many ways, but part of its problems began in that book and carry over to this one. The sensibility of the town is actually pretty good, and it may be both novel’s most fully developed character.

3 stars.

This book fulfills no requirements for the challenge.

Review: Captain Marvel: Higher Further Faster More

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I don’t know when I became the type of person that is interested in superhero comics but here we are. I heard about this graphic novel from the Worst Bestsellers podcast (which you should definitely check out if you enjoy hearing snarky reviews about badly written books) end of year special, and the idea that Captain Marvel had a bad tempered cat that no one could stand so she had to take him into space with her – I was sold. That is only a very small part of the story arc in the 6 issues that are collected in this trade, but it is still one of my favorite parts.

Some prior knowledge of the Marvel Universe is necessary to understand certain parts. Since Parker is very much into superheroes, I had enough passing knowledge to make it through although there were some parts that I was thinking I could use some more context. For example, I knew that Rhodey Rhodes is a friend of Iron Man’s, but I didn’t know he was also the Iron Patriot. There was also an old woman at the beginning of the story who I didn’t know anything about, other than that she is an old woman. Captain Marvel meets up with the Guardians of the Galaxy shortly after going to space, and and I knew enough about them so that it wasn’t horribly confusing. (I did have to clarify a few things – “So, Groot just says ‘I am Groot’ all the time? Is that his thing?”) I also had no context for Star Lord and J’Son’s animosity toward each other, other than they are father and son and don’t agree on nebulous “things”.

But to the story. Captain Marvel finds an alien girl trapped in some kind of device that she initially thinks is some kind of nuclear weapon. She volunteers herself to go into space because she needs some “alone time”. On her way to return the girl to her home planet, she encounters some bad guys who inexplicably fire first and ask questions later. She is aided by the Guardians, who come on her ship to help fix it. Rocket Raccoon freaks out when seeing her cat and starts shooting his weapon at it, saying that it is a Flerken, which apparently is not good and lays eggs. After getting Rocket to stand down, they have exposition time about alien girl and her home planet which is apparently poisoned. Alien girl overhears and goes berserk, wanting to kill Star Lord after she learns that he is J’Son’s son. Once they get that misunderstanding sorted out (as Star Lord and J’Son are clearly not friends), Captain Marvel takes alien girl (who’s name is Tic) back home.

She is not greeted with open arms, as these people (which appear to be many different alien races) are sick and tired of the run around they are getting with the council or whatever the governing body is. They have sick people and so they don’t want to evacuate and leave them behind, they have no air force with which to defend themselves, and the space pirates that attacked Captain Marvel earlier are preventing supplies from reaching them. They are in dire straits. Captain Marvel assembles a rag tag team and they go off to figure out what goods there are that the pirates are preventing them from having. It turns out that the poisoned planet (Torfa, I think) has a giant vibranium mine and the off-gassing from the expedient removal of it is making everyone sick!

I really enjoyed this story arc and I am very interested in where it continues to go, especially since I think Chewie will figure prominently in the next trade. (Spoiler alert: Rocket was right.) It’s nice to see some kick butt ladies for a change. Captain Marvel’s team was mostly female, which was neat (3-2 ratio). This makes me pretty excited about the movie they are making about this character, and I can’t wait to see more.

5 stars.

This book fulfills the read in one day requirement for the challenge.

Review: Everlasting (Kissed by An Angel Book #5)

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The action ramps up further in this installment, and in almost exact parallel to the second novel of the first trilogy, we find out who the real mastermind behind everything is. I have to say, there were so many red herrings, I was actually surprised by who it ended up being. The overarching mysteries aren’t resolved yet, so the third book will have to tie up the loose ends on both Gregory and what really happened to Corinne. I saw a rumor on Goodreads that there are supposed to be 7 more books, but I can’t find proof of that anywhere, so I’m guessing it isn’t a thing.

In the previous book, it was established that Gregory had occupied Beth’s mind, and he was trying to get at Ivy through Beth. The particulars of Beth’s “possession” have been the first supernatural aspect that I didn’t buy into at all. It was too much. She doesn’t talk to anyone, looks vacant and her pupils are so dilated her eyes are black, has personal seances in her room, and does other weird things. Not to mention she disappears randomly. And apparently Ivy is the only one who notices, and even she brushes it off until about halfway through the book. Kelsey and Dhanya are barely in this book too, after being somewhat prominent in the 4th, and I had kind of liked the dynamic with all four girls. This book tends to pit Will and Beth against Ivy, as they are suspicious about her relationship with Guy/Luke, and Beth begins to drop hints that Gregory is actually possessing Ivy to Will, despite how Beth is the one acting strangely.

Tristan has come back, but is now in the body of Luke, who died the night that Ivy had the car accident. The circumstances around Luke’s death are unknown, except that when he died he was on the run as the suspected murderer of his long-time girlfriend, Corinne. Ivy and Tristan are trying to clear Luke’s name, so that they can live happily ever after. This takes them around a few places near the inn, talking to various people who had known Corinne and Luke. One of the frat boys that Kelsey and Dhanya have befriended, Bryan, was close friends with Luke when he was alive, and so he begins to help them try to find out what happened to Corinne.

Of course, at the very last minute, they discover that everything has been caused by Bryan from the beginning. He is the one that killed Corinne, and then he got Luke, and then he got Alicia, who Ivy had been able to get an alibi for Luke from. The book ends eerily similarly to book 2, where there is a train bridge and jumping and OH NO WHAT HAPPENED END OF BOOK! Of course, things are slightly more complicated, as Lacey ominously implies that Tristan’s time on earth is about to end. Also, Beth tried to suffocate Ivy in her sleep earlier, then almost hung herself off a church bell tower minutes before the end climax.

I haven’t been able to track down an inexpensive copy of the final book yet, so I may just have to wait on pins and needles for awhile while I look for it. I’m assuming that Bryan is also the one that crashed into Beth and Ivy at the beginning of the 4th book, although Chandler hasn’t explicitly said so. I’m also unsure where this Gregory story is going either, as when Ivy and Will prevented Beth’s attempted suicide, his spirit apparently burst out in a shock of lightning and maybe hit something else.

Again, the book does not work as a stand alone. This entire series has been a weird start and stop journey, somewhat awkward and strangely broken up. I was very interested in the story, but on its own, it just doesn’t work. There is enough explanation in the opening chapters to have mostly skipped book 4, and I almost wonder if that will happen in the final book, where you can just skip the 4th and 5th books and still get most of the story. I really wish I could interview the author and find out exactly why the books were divided in this way. Was it a deadline? More money for writing three rather than one large book? Mistrust in the attention spans of YA readers? So bizarre.

4 stars.

This book fulfilled no requirements for the challenge.

Reading Challenge March Wrap Up

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***UPDATE: I realized last night that A Time To Kill is over 500 pages! So I checked off yet another box on the list. I also made some other edits to this post in bold.***

This month was pretty epic in terms of how many books I finished. It does sort of feel like cheating, though, because 3 of them were those short YA novels that should not have been split into multiple books. But I completed 5 books this month, and checked off 7 more boxes.

First, I finished off the first set of 3 in the Kissed by An Angel series, The Power of Love and Soulmates. I was surprised by how little of the plot I remembered. I basically only remembered the poor kitty’s demise, and everything else I thought I had remembered was not in the book. I particularly thought that Eric was the character that plummeted to his death from the train bridge, not Gregory. I then started the next three books, with Evercrossed. So far, I’m in for the ride, but it is definitely jarring for the characters to have time-traveled to the age of Google.

Between Soulmates and Evercrossed, I finished Divergent. This is a very unpopular opinion, but I liked this book more than I liked The Hunger Games. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t as horrific, or maybe because I find Tris slightly more relatable. It is also a refreshing change that there wasn’t a love triangle. Why does YA dystopian fiction always have a love triangle? (I do need a love triangle for my challenge though…) I have now seen the movie for Insurgent, and I’m anxiously awaiting my turn for the ebook from the library.

The other book I completed this month was A Time To Kill. I really expected to enjoy this novel, at least as an easy light read (as light as a story about rape and murder can be, I guess). I hated it! The writing was clunky, the characters were one-dimensional and uninteresting, and it was so racist and sexist I could hardly get through it. It definitely is a “first novel” because it is somewhat “unpolished”, but I’m not sure some light editing could fix that. I have the movie now and I plan to get to it fairly soon and see what they did with the story.

I started Where We Belong by Emily Giffin as my “latest book by author I like” (as I mentioned in my February wrap up post). So far (2 chapters in), I really enjoy it, but as it is a dead tree book, I haven’t gotten much chance to read it. And since I picked up the 5th book in the Kissed By An Angel series from the library, Giffin will have to be on hold while I read that one. Physical books are just so difficult for me to get to with little ones!

I started Emma by Jane Austen and got a few chapters into that one before Sycamore Row by John Grisham came up on my ebook holds from the library. So I’ve switched over to that one as well, seeing if Grisham’s writing has improved any in the past 25 years. (Spoiler alert – sort of.)

I recently discovered that Britney Spears wrote a novel (wut?), and I’m seriously considering that as my negatively reviewed book. But the thing is, the reviews aren’t all bad. It’s hard to separate the fangirl reviews from the serious ones though. I don’t know if there are any books that are considered awful by everyone. Maybe I can get some advice here – should the critical/literary reviews be bad, or should the Goodreads and Amazon star ratings be bad?

I’ve made it through three months and I’ve checked off 21 out of 50 boxes on my list and completed 10 books total. I’m getting there!