50 Book Challenge - June & July

16. The Book of Joe - Jonathan Tropper
Highly readable but ultimately forgettable story of a guy who left his small town, wrote a snarky book about it, then has to return there when his father dies. If you've read any Jonathan Tropper before you're familiar with where this goes - dysfunctional family, thirtysomething unsettled Jewish guy learns things about himself, blah blah blah.

17. And When She Was Good - Laura Lippman
Suburban mom lives a double life as a high class hooker, then it all starts to come apart when people from her past begin to get killed off. Enjoyable enough crime novel.

18. Say You're Sorry - Michael Robotham
Every year I say I'm going to read 'quality' books for my 50 Book Challenge and every year I fall back on page-turning mysteries and crime stories. A present day murder ties in to the disappearance of two teenage girls several years earlier. It's a pretty gripping story but the reveal of the villain is kind of eh.

19. Mohawk - Richard Russo
I was mildly obsessed with Richard Russo in the 1990s and I remember reading this and loving it. Second time around - ehhhh, not so much. It's about several different people in a small town and it is mildly interesting, but very much a clunky first novel.

20. The Last Policeman - Ben H. Winters
Now this I liked. Set in a world where an asteroid is about to hit the earth in 6 months and destroy everything, most people have given up bothering about much. However, one policeman still does his job and sets out to prove that an apparent suicide was in fact murder. The crime and resolution is a bit hokey, but the premise is awesome and I really enjoyed it. Apparently it's the first of a trilogy so I'll be hunting down the next two.

21. Snowblind - Christopher Golden
Oogedy boogedy horror novel about creepy creatures who come out in two extreme blizzards years apart in a small town. It started off well but got really bogged down with all the different characters. Christopher Golden seems to have been going for a Stephen King everyone-has-a-POV kind of thing, but it doesn't really work.

22. All Fall Down - Jennifer Weiner
Incredibly tedious novel about a suburban mommy blogger with a secret (she thinks) pill addiction. It drags on and on forever with so much repetitive detail that I almost chucked it. Somehow I ploughed through to the end and then immediately wished I hadn't bothered. Avoid.

23. Cop Town - Karin Slaughter
Set in the 1970s in Atlanta, this is a novel about the attitudes of white male cops to their changing environment - a lot about women on the force, homosexuality, a half-arsed nod to racism, and a mildly interesting crime story of a serial cop killer. I found this book riveting while I was reading it, but after I felt a bit uncomfortable and I'm still not sure why.

Well over halfway through the year and I'm not even halfway through my 50 books yet. Must get cracking!

50 Book Challenge - May Books

I read nothing but magazines in April, but I had a spurt of book activity in May. Still pretty behind on the 50 Book Challenge, but I can catch up. My reading spurt is continuing - I've just finished my first June book and started another.

12. My Notorious Life - Kate Manning

This is a story about a midwife in New York in the 1800s, a woman who rises from extreme poverty to great wealth, but then comes unstuck by an infamous moral crusader. Loosely based on a real woman known as Madame X, this is what the kids call a ripping yarn, though it does start to drage a bit in the last third of the book. Overall, though, I really enjoyed it and it kickstarted a good spate of reading for the month.

13. Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher

I didn’t realise this was a YA novel until I started reading it. I generally hate YA novels. However, I was curious enough about where this was going to keep reading, and it was very easy to read. It’s about a teenage boy who receives a series of cassette tapes from a girl who has recently committed suicide, where she names and shames every person who did anything to her that eventually led to her taking her own life. It’s kind of meh. I am sure it will be made into a movie with some pretty young people and a hip-but-angsty soundtrack and everyone will go bonkers for it. It’s that sort of story.

14. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

I don’t want to say much about this – it’s one of those stories where it’s best to know as little as possible about going in. The most I will say is that it’s a dysfunctional family tale. I ploughed through the first half really quickly but the second half dragged and bored me a bit. It was a good story but just went on a bit too long.

15. What Came Before He Shot Her - Elizabeth George

I have had this on my ‘to read’ list for a really long time and I don’t remember why. In fact, I think having it on my list was what led me to read a couple of the Inspector Lynley novels last year (and then give up and just watch the TV show). Right, so. This isn’t about Inspector Lynley; instead it’s about a child who becomes involved in a crime in another Inspector Lynley novel (With No One As Witness), and how he got to that point. I haven’t read the other book, but I think I will. The story itself is really grim and says a lot about the plight of the disadvantaged. My problem with it was that it was relentlessly repetitive. I get that it was meant to show the endless grinding down of this kid and how it led him to the choices he eventually made, but the key word there is endless. Over and over again the same things happened and it just got a bit tedious after a while. The language was a bit twee too – the author is American, and it is fairly obvious she ‘researched’ how people of colour in London interact and speak to each other rather than ever actually being around any of them and hearing them for herself. It sounds real, but kind of ‘fake real’, you know?

Did Not Finish

One More Thing - BJ Novak

I read 5 stories and could not bear to go any further. I get the impression that B.J. Novak has deliberately written a bunch of pointless, meaningless pieces of garbage to see if everyone would pretend to get them, and then in a year or so he can smugly come out and say, ‘You idiots, they’re not meant to make sense! I’m so much smarter than everyone.’

50 Book Challenge 2014 - March Books

9. The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl - Shauna Reid

This is basically a blog turned into a book, and that’s pretty much how it read. It was an easy read though, and I zipped through it pretty quickly. It’s written by a woman who grew up overweight and decided to lose weight in her early 20s, while simultaneously going to live overseas for a year, and it’s just about how she got slim and found a fella. Cute but forgettable.

10. Mothertime - Gillian White

I read this way back in the early 90s and didn’t remember much about it besides the bare bones. A group of children tired of dealing with their drunken mess of a mother decide to lock her in the basement until she turns into the mother they want. It sounds more sinister than it is. The story is actually a really interesting feminist text about the destructive effect that a selfish man who doesn’t like women has on the women in his life. It made me think a lot about Don Draper and his wives.

11. Missing You - Harlan Coben

Very typical Harlan Coben story about people from the past showing up suddenly and not being who they appear to be. There’s an internet money-fishing scam going on and a sub-plot about a murdered father, then a bit of a rubbish twist that is pretty obvious from early on in the novel. Definitely not one of his better ones, but it was a fast read – I cleaned it up in a day.

50 Book Challenge 2014 - February Books

Well, gosh. After a sparkling beginning in January, February fell in a bit of a heap. In my defence: WEATHER. For about half of February, I had no energy for anything beyond staring vacantly at a television screen. So I only ended up reading two books this month. I’m back into reading now after that heat-related slump, so hopefully my list will be more impressive at the end of March. 

7. The Breaker - Minette Walters

I read this a few years ago but because I have the memory of a goldfish I can read crime novels every couple of years and not remember the story. I wish I'd remembered this one though, because it was crap. This is probably her worst book - the obvious suspect at the beginning who seems way too obvious turns out to be the killer for a ridiculously convoluted reason that doesn't even really make sense. Spoiler alert: don't bother. 

8. The Alienist – Caleb Carr

This book is about 20 years old and crops up in ‘100 Best Blah Blah Books’ type lists all the time, but I never had any interest in it before, as the little I knew about it (old timey detective novel) didn’t appeal to me. Then a few weeks back I was reading an article about Lucien Carr (member of the Beat Generation and BFF of Jack Kerouac), in which it was mentioned that Caleb Carr is his son. I had a mild obsession with the Beat Generation as a teenager – I devoured biographies about all of them, and attempted (and failed – lord, a lot of it is garbage) to read their actual work, so anything related to this group of fascinating weirdos piques my interest. Hence my sudden decision to read The Alienist, a book which has nothing at all to do with the Beat Generation. But that’s just how my brain works.

The story is one of early forensics – Teddy Roosevelt, then the Police Commissioner of New York, asks two of his old college friends to discreetly investigate the murder of a child prostitute in 1896. The two men – a brilliant psychiatrist looked on with suspicion by the public for his innovative ideas, and the police reporter who is telling the story – realise very quickly that the murder is in fact one of a series, and off on the trail of a serial killer they go. The book is incredibly detailed about the methods of investigation they use – there are pages and pages outlining the brainstorming sessions the two have with the crew they have assembled to help catch their killer, along with long explanations of what were then virtually unknown forensic methods like fingerprinting and criminal profiling. In lesser hands it could have been a really boring book, but I found it fascinating – and not only am I not generally fascinated by anything to do with serial killers, but I side eye people who proudly state that they are (that’s a rant for another day). I think the distance of time helps – an olde worlde (fictional) crime – even one as shocking as this – is much more palatable to read about than a more recent one. But I also found the painstaking detail of how forensics came to be used in the solving of crimes back in ye olden days and how it was looked on with suspicion very interesting. Caleb Carr is a historian, and it shows – the man has obviously done his research.

The ending fell down a bit for me – I found it quite flat and in the vein of 90% of crime novels in that it all seemed to be tied up in a slightly ridiculous, slightly too quick, slightly unbelievable way. However, if I’ve enjoyed the majority of a novel, I can generally forgive a bit of a rubbish ending, especially when it comes to a mystery solved.

50 Book Challenge - 2014

I have slacked off on blogging for the past few weeks because it has been SO FREAKIN' HOT. The weather is doing me in, I'm not even kidding. There have been times when I've looked at the forecast and almost burst into tears. Why could I not have been born into a cold country? Or at least one that doesn't get to 'fried egg on a footpath' levels in the summer.

Anyway, because of that I have postponed everything - no weekly makeup baskets because it's too hot for makeup; it would just melt right off me. No new resolutions beyond 'try not to cry when you see the weather forecast'. No perfume testing because it's too hot for anything more than a quick spritz of Jovan White Musk, and man are those perfumes piling up. Eeek! No swatching the many eyeshadows and things I've been intending to get to because it's too hot to be outside dicking around with a camera. And so on and so forth.

However, what I have been doing is a lot of reading, because I have no energy to pull myself off the couch. Hopefully after last year's pathetic effort, I'm more on track to beat the 50 Book Challenge this year. I'm going to do a monthly update, which should hopefully encourage me to actually make an effort to have something to report.

1. Night Film - Marisha Pessl
There is a lot to like about this book. It sets up a creepy story about an elusive film-maker and a disgraced investigative journalist who tries to track his story. The book is full of cool gimmicks like photos and news articles. However, about a third of the way in it really started to feel bogged down and taking a huge amount of time to get anywhere, and the ending was a mess. That said, overall I enjoyed reading it, and it creeped me out in a fun way. I knew nothing at all about the story going in, and as with most books, I think it's one of those 'the less you know the better' ones.

2. Tell Me - Lisa Jackson
This book was so unmemorable I had to look up the plot, and I only read it a few weeks ago. One of a series of crime novels featuring a reporter and her police detective fiance. She wants the 'real story' of her childhood friend's murder as the ostensible murderer - the girl's own mother - is about to be released from prison. The solving of the mystery at the end is a dog's breakfast. Don't bother.

3. The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion - Fannie Flagg
I loved Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe back in the day, and the couple that came out after that, but when I tried to read some other Fannie Flagg book a few years ago I found it ridiculously twee and couldn't finish it, so I almost didn't bother with this. I'm glad I did though, as I really enjoyed it. It's FF all the way - a present day story and a past story that links together nicely in the end, lots of sassy girls with kooky names being useful and independent, a bit of a mild mystery referred to in an understated way and then casually solved at the end. In the present, perfect Southern WASP housewife Sookie discovers she is adopted and that her biological family are Polish Catholics. In the past, the story of her Polish family is told. It's an easy, page-turning read.

4. The Silent Wife - A.S.A. Harrison
This is being touted as 'this year's Gone Girl', and I can see why people are putting them in the same category, but I don't think it's on par with any of Gillian Flynn's novels, really. It's a page-turner though, and what more do you want in a mystery novel? It gets a bit bogged down and silly in the end, but I read this in one day and enjoyed it while I was reading it. It's about a couple who have been together for 20 years and what happens when - well, again, it's a story best read knowing little to nothing about it. If you want to while away the afternoon, you could do worse.

5. Before We Met - Lucie Whitehouse
Yet another domestic mystery with a twist, this one is about a woman whose husband is not where he said he was on a business trip, seems to have disappeared, and has told some weird, apparently pointless lies about his past. What could he be up to? Dun dun dun! A decent enough story, but took a heck of a long time to get where it was going - a more ruthless editor was needed here. As with so many of these kinds of books, the ending was a bit all over the place. Overall I quite liked it, though.

6. The Husband's Secret - Liane Moriarty
Oh, god. I don't like Australian books. I don't like Australian television. I don't like Australian movies. Of course there are exceptions, but as a rule - if it was made here I avoid it like the plague. They're all the same, these earnest, kitchen sink dramas where 30-something middle-class inner suburbanites spend a lot of time stressing out about their problems and coming to terms with things. I didn't know this book was Australian when I started it, and had I known I would never have picked it up. As it turns out, it was very readable, and I finished it within a day, but it was pretty much exactly as above. To the point where the whole time I was reading it I was mentally picturing who will be in the film/TV show version (and you know there will for sure be one). Justine Clarke, Robyn Nevin, Vince Colosimo, William McInnes, Asher Keddie - mark my words, they're all going to show up here.

Books I gave up on: 

Drinking: A Love Story - Caroline Knapp
I've had this for ages, and I can't remember why. I think I saw it mentioned favourably in an article or something. I read about a third and then couldn't stand anymore. It meanders all over the place, it's overly wordy, the stories are kind of nothing ('I drank too many cocktails at a wedding and my posh mother glared at me'), it's not linear - she constantly refers to these random stories that could be happening at any time. And for a memoir about a drunk it was just phenomenally boring. It was like a therapist told her to write it all down in a journal for her own catharsis and she went, 'Hey, I should publish this!'.

The Happiness Project - Gretchen Rubin
Insufferable. That's all I have to say about it.

50 Book Challenge

Aww, wee Noodles. Bless. <3

Well, this is embarrassing. My last (and first for the year) 50 Book Challenge update was in May! I think it's safe to say I will not be hitting my goal this year. I don't know what went wrong - I think it might be too much choice making me paralysed with indecision. I have picked up dozens and read 10 or so pages and then thought, "Nah", and put it aside. It's so much easier to watch television. Every weekend I resolve to spend an entire afternoon reading but every time I start I end up dozing off within a few pages. I'm not getting much reading done but I am getting a lot of naps!

8. Fever of the Bone - Val McDermid
Um, I don't even remember what this was about. Tony Hill being weird. Some creepy serial killer. Tony's fraught relationship with chick cop whose name escapes me right now. I want to say Hermione something but I think that's the name of the actress who plays her in the TV show. Anyway, as with all Val McDermid books I probably devoured it in a night and was disappointed by the ending.

9. Apartment 16 - Adam Nevill
American small town girl inherits swish London flat from eccentric great aunt. Creepy goings on in the building all pointing to a long empty flat that used to be occupied by some Aleister Crowley like weirdo. This book dragged a lot. The bones of a good story was there but it was way too long and huge chunks of it were really boring. The ending was annoying too. Where have all the good book editors gone? I get that Stephen King can ramble on as long as he likes now because he's rich and famous and can call the shots, but this is a first novel and somebody should have been well ruthless with it.

10. Tampa - Alissa Nutting
Did you ever have a book that you wished you could unread? Well, this is that book for me. I read it because I dismissed it as kiddie porn for the 50 Shades crowd and Clementine Ford (I think) told me I was being unfair. Okay, gave it a go. Guess what - it's kiddie porn for the 50 Shades crowd. Gross and creepy and not in a fun way. And yes, I get that it's meant to be some kind of social satire, but it's really not a very good one.

11. Full Dark, No Stars - Stephen King
Um. I cannot for the life of me recall what any of the stories were in this book. Oh, wait - there was one about a housewife who finds out her husband is a serial killer, and another about a writer who gets revenge after being raped and left for dead on the side of a deserted road. I think all of the stories were readable and okay, but obviously nothing really jumped out at me like the ones in, say, Different Seasons or Four Past Midnight.

12. Miss Minimalist: Inspiration to Downsize, Declutter and Simplify - Francine Jay
It's a blog in book form. This is a trend that has gone way beyond tedious. It's commonsense stuff about decluttering and not collecting useless things and it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but that's okay. It cost me $1, I think. I can live with that.

50 Book Challenge

The fact that we are halfway through May and this is the first time this year I've mentioned the 50 Book Challenge should clue you in to how that's going. I had a flurry of activity early in the year and then the last couple of months has been slumperama. I keep starting books, reading 20 pages, deciding it's boring, and moving on. I have several hundred on my Kindle and iBook, so maybe it's just because I have too much choice. I did go through and delete a bunch that I knew I'd never get around to reading yesterday but there are still way too many looking back at me.

Now, last year I did meet the challenge but most of what I read was trash - lots and lots of crime novels that I didn't really have to think much about, or horror novels just to have a page turner. My goal this year was to go for quality. Results so far have been mixed. By quality I don't mean anything super high-falutin', but definitely books you'd find in the 'Literature' section of the book shop rather than 'Fiction A-Z by author', if you know what I mean.

Anyway, here is my paltry offering for this year so far. I am fairly confident I can pick up the slack - I just need one good page turner to get me back into it.

1. This Is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
I heard someone talk about this book on a podcast and it sounded interesting. It's about a dysfunctional family (is there any other kind in fiction?) who are forced to sit Shiva for their dead father when they haven't been in the same room together for years. It's pretty much what you would expect - lots of wry Jewish humour. Not a huge amount happens but it's still an interesting read. I liked it enough to seek out the author's other books, which I will eventually get around to reading.

2. Penpal - Dathan Auerbach
I believe it was Rachel who recommended this one, and apparently it began as a story on Reddit. It's a bit clunky - quite obviously a first novel and could have used a fairly rigorous pruning - but the story is quite riveting. It's about a young boy who appears to have been followed by someone his whole life, and it's creepy as hell. 

3. My Mad Fat Teenage Diary - Rae Earl
I adored the TV adaptation of this book, and I had to read it. I think I liked the TV show better, but that's probably just because that's what I saw first. It's still a great read - it's written for teen girls but it's not one of those insufferably dopey dreamy kind of YA novels.

4. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
I had read this years ago as I'm a long time Sarah Waters fan, but I didn't remember much about it. It's about a young girl brought up in a thieving family in Victorian England and her part in a plot to defraud a wealthy young girl. If you read this it's best to know as little as possible going in.

5. 314 - A.R. Wise
A horror book that I read about 3 months ago and have largely forgotten already. It was a page-turner and I enjoyed it but it's basically literary popcorn. Erm, a young girl has repressed memories about a creepy town that has been shut down and... that's as far as I can recall. It's free on Amazon so if you like horror books, it's worth having a look.

6. Six Years - Harlan Coben
Harlan Coben's latest novel about someone who turns out to be living a secret life for years and people who were thought to be dead are not dead and blah blah blah. Highly readable but also forgettable.

7. Mister Sandman - Barbara Gowdy
Dysfunctional family! That's pretty much all there is to it. I enjoyed it.

Hmmm. So I have 7 months or so to read 43 books. I think I'll have to make only half of them 'quality'. Especially since I've already got at least 3 on that list so far that don't meet that standard.

Currently reading: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill.

50 Book Challenge - To Infinity and Beyoooooond!

DONE. AND THEN SOME.

48. Good As Dead - Mark Billingham. It doesn't say much for this book that I had to go and read the Amazon synopsis to remember what it was even about. Cop held hostage by desperate parent. Blah blah. Boring.

49. The Retribution - Val McDermid. Serial killer escapes from prison and goes on a revenge rampage. This is a sequel to one of her earlier books, the name of which escapes me. Is it Wire In The Blood, maybe? Anyway, not great.

50. White Trash Beautiful - Teresa Mummert. One of the very few books I have bothered to write a review for on Goodreads, because it was SO BLOODY AWFUL. Seriously.

51. How To Be A Woman - Caitlin Moran. I have a lot to say about this book and its author, but this is not the time nor the place to say it. Suffice to say, I rather despise her.

52. After The Wreck I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings And Flew Away - Joyce Carol Oates. I had no idea that Joyce Carol Oates wrote YA novels, and I had no idea at the time of reading this that it was a YA novel, or I never would have picked it up. It's about a girl whose mother dies in a car crash (not a spoiler, it happens before the story begins), and she goes to live with relatives. It was really well-written, and I liked it very much.

53. Blindsighted - Karin Slaughter. Standard serial killer crime novel. Man, they're all so samey-same. Even though I've made my goal this year, I've been super lazy with my choice of reading material. Next year I need to up the stakes and stop reading all these shitty 'thrillers'.

54. How To Be Good - Nick Hornby. There were parts of this book that I loved and parts that were quite insufferable. Nick Hornby... I don't know. He's got something, but I just can't entirely embrace him. It's about a doctor whose notoriously ranty, angry husband suddenly becomes a massive do-gooder after meeting a weird guru guy.

55. Creep - Jennifer Hillier. A professor has an affair with her TA and breaks it off. TA decides to exact revenge. Very obviously a first novel, and clunky in a lot of parts, but quite readable.

56. The Intruders - Michael Marshall. This book has four different sections of story going on at once, entirely seperately for a very long time, and it's very difficult to see how it will all come together. It does eventually, but the ending doesn't entirely work for me. I found that it really dragged for quite a big chunk in the middle, but I kept reading just because I wanted to know how it would end.

50 Book Challenge

I'm going to make it this year, you guys!

43. The Poison Tree - Erin Kelly. I was really into about the first third of this but it gets really bogged down in the middle, and then has a silly twisty ending you can see coming a mile away. Set in 1990s London, it's about a sheltered university student who becomes BFFs with a hedonistic drama queen and her creepy brother.

44. Criminal - Karin Slaughter. Detective who grew up in an orphanage stumbles into a cover up involving said orphanage and his current boss. Mystery ensues, lots of twists and turns, standard crime novel. It was readable, but silly.

45. A Friend Of The Family - Lisa Jewell. There's a genre of British writing (and it's always British), that isn't quite chick lit, but doesn't really fit any other category either. It's usually a story about a family or a group of people doing nothing much at all and just rambling through life. Maeve Binchy is the queen of this genre. This book fits right in there - it's about a family who takes in a mysterious lodger who has an odd effect on each of their lives. The story is set up to be getting to a point, but it never quite gets there.

46. One Hit Wonder - Lisa Jewell. A washed up pop star commits suicide and her youngest sister - who barely knew her - tries to find out why. Again, fits the above genre perfectly. The story is okay, but the 'mystery' is dragged out way too long.

47. I Suck At Girls - Justin Halpern. This is the guy who wrote Shit My Dad Says, which was a surprisingly good book based on a Twitter account. This book is not as good - it's just a series of anecotes about the author's experiences with girls and women throughout his life, and it's nothing different to what most people have experienced with relationships. It just wasn't very interesting.

50 Book Challenge

Awwwwwwww, yeah. I'm back, bitches! I've been reading up a storm, but on my Kindle and iBook apps, so no purty pictures of books for you. What about a random picture of something I like?

Isn't this picture gorgeous? I wish I could remember who it was - it's from an interview with some writer that I read in a weekend newspaper supplement years and years ago, and it's him with his baby daughter in the 60s. I just love it.

Right, so that's out of the way. Books!

32. Heart Shaped Box - Joe Hill. Started well, but rapidly went down hill and towards the end I was skimming big chunks. This is about a has been rock star who collects creepy memorabilia and buys a suit that comes complete with dead owner. Just as an aside, Joe Hill is Stephen King's son.

33. The Art of Mending - Elizabeth Berg. I could spend a lot of time telling you why I hate this book. Suffice to say that this is about a middle-aged woman whose sister tells her she was subjected to years of mental and physical abuse by their mother, and she doesn't really believe it or want to know about it. And we're supposed to sympathise with her (the narrator, not the sister). Really.

34. No Second Chance - Harlan Coben A pretty standard crime novel. Um, from memory a guy gets shot, his wife killed, and their baby girl goes missing. Stuff happens, twists, stupid ending. Very readable but nothing new.

35. Home Safe - Elizabeth Berg. Why do I keep reading this woman's books? This is about a writer who does... something. God, I don't know. I forgot it as soon as I finished it. Short version: nothing happens.

36. Girl Missing - Tess Gerritson. I remember quite liking this while I was reading it, but I can't remember a single thing about it. Missing girl, I guess?

37. You're Next - Gregg Hurwitz. Crime novel, something happened, guy in danger. Whatevs. 

38. Summer of Night - Dan Simmons. This started off so well, but then the author went and killed off the most interesting, well-developed character and it was all downhill from there. And seriously, if you want a retro story about a bunch of kids trying to save their town from an evil entity that includes a creepy spider-monster and a weird, awkward pre-teen sex scene, read Stephen King's It.

39. Four Past Midnight - Stephen King. One of my favourite King books, I picked this up again purely for The Library Policeman, which has always scared the crap out of me since I first read it over 20 years ago. Noodles is currently reading The Langoliers and getting right into it. *tear* So proud.

40. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn. WOW. I could not put this down. When I finished it, I really didn't like the ending but I was describing it aloud to Noodles and as I said it out loud I started to come around to it and now I think it's kind of cool. If you decide to read this (and I highly recommend you do), it's best to know as little as possible about it. Don't read any reviews - just get stuck in. A woman goes missing and her husband is suspected. That's all you need to know.

41. Dark Places - Gillian Flynn. I loved Gone Girl so much that I had to find the author's other books. Again, if you want to read this it's best to go in blind. It's about a woman whose family was murdered when she was a child, and it involves Satanic worship and a bunch of other things. 

42. Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn. I read this author's books backwards - this is her first and the most clunky, but it's still immensely readable. A journalist is sent back to her home town to report on a couple of child murders. Twists ensue.

Currently reading: 
 Bad Science (I've been reading this for weeks, I just keep dipping into it when I'm sitting around waiting, like at the doctor's or for a coffee or whatever).
Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over two thousand years.

50 Book Challenge

 After struggling with a seemingly endless reading slump in the last couple of years I appear to have finally cracked through it and in the past month I've read a ton. I've also been getting more and more into comic books. I know - I'm way past due on that, but I did read my Uncle Bill's extensive collection of Archie and Ritchie Rich comics when I was a kid, so there is a bit of a history there. Anyway, since I haven't done a 50 Book Challenge update since early March, I thought I should get on with it.
 

11- 20: Y: The Last Man - Brian K. Vaughan

A 60-edition comic book series that finished up in 2008, this is a story about a strange occurrence that causes the death of everything on the planet that is male, with the exception of one man and his pet monkey. Like many post-Alan Moore comic writers the author has a tendency to pontificate on random facts just to show how clever he is, but overall, this is a good story that winds up without ever feeling dragged out. I hear there is a movie in the works, though I think it would be better served as an AMC or HBO television show, like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. And it would be fantastic to see a program with a cast that is almost entirely women (Prisoner notwithstanding).

21. The Leftovers - Tom Perrotta
Tom Perrotta is one of my favourite authors, but this is not one of his better books, and all the more disappointing because the premise is fantastic. It's a story about what happens to the people 'left behind' after a rapture-like event occurs, focussing on one family in particular.

22. Is Everyone Hanging Out WithoutMe? - Mindy Kaling
Paaaaaaaaainfully unfunny. I wanted to like this, because I love Mindy Kaling and I think she's really talented, but it was just... bleh.  I think I might have snickered once.

23. Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner
This is one of those 'Oprah's Book Club' kind of books, where a bunch of earnest people in various states of disarray with their lives find the true meaning of everything and grow and discover things about themselves they could never have imagined and blah blah blah blah. You get the picture. It's okay - readable, interesting enough to keep me turning the pages, but pretty forgettable. In fact, I read it a few weeks ago and I'm hard pressed right now to remember what it was actually about.

24. The Last Child - John Hart
Ugh. This might be the most turgid book I've ever read. And that's pretty much all I have to say about it. Full disclosure - I skimmed huge chunks of this. Ostensibly it's about a kid whose sister is murdered.

25. Stay Close - Harlan Coben
Harlen Coben (and to a lesser extent, Dennis Lehane) is my book equivalent of comfort food - his crime stories are interesting enough to keep me reading, and I can forgive the inevitable terrible endings because I've gotten enough enjoyment out of the rest of the book. This one's about a suburban mother whose dark past comes back to haunt her and danger ensues. Pretty much a typical Coben tale.

26. Moonlight Mile - Dennis Lehane
A sequel to Gone Baby Gone, which is my favourite Lehane book. This one isn't as good, but still highly readable and doesn't take a lot of thought. (And by the way, if you haven't seen the film of Gone Baby Gone, you should - it's awesome, though super depressing).

27. Tell No One - Harlan Coben
Another classic Coben trope - the person you thought was dead years ago turns out not to be.

28. Unwanted - Kristina Ohlssen
I had read a really good review of this a while back, so I was looking forward to finally getting around to it. It was disappointing though - very overwritten and dragged a lot. I don't know whether it's the fault of the author or the fault of the translation, but either way it didn't work for me. Serial killer, kidnaps children and murders them because of his own abusive childhood. Etc.

29. Shit My Dad Says - Justin Halpern
Surprisingly entertaining for a book based on a Twitter account. A lot of it is quotes from the Twitter, but many are also expanded to tell the stories behind them, and much of it is hilarious. Much funnier than the Mindy Kaling book, that's for sure.

30. The Woods - Harlan Coben
Wait, so that person we all thought was dead isn't dead? Didn't we already do this?

31. Juliet, Naked - Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby loves music. No, you don't get it. He loooooooooooooves music. And he wants to make sure you are reminded of it at every opportunity. It was bearable in High Fidelity because that book was so well-written, but here it's just super annoying. An ageing hipster unhappy in her long term relationship with a guy who is an uber fan of a long-disappeared musician takes up with said musician after they connect via email. It's as bad as it sounds.

Currently reading:  

Water For Elephants 

Bad Science

Heart Shaped Box.

50 Book Challenge

Totally random picture that has nothing to do with the post, it just makes me laugh. 

It has not been a good start to the year with books. I have been in a reading slump that seems to have lasted about a year so far. It's annoying - I have so many books that I want to read, but I just can't seem to give any of them my attention for more than a few minutes. I'm shamelessly padding my challenge list with comics - I READ THEM. THEY ARE BOOKS.

2. Kick Me - Paul Feig. I've read this before a few years ago, but as I've said many times, I have the memory of a goldfish and can re-read books every couple of years without remembering much about them. Paul Feig created what is probably my all-time favourite TV show (it's either that one or Twin Peaks, I can't choose definitively), and seems to have used quite a lot of his own life for the basis of the show. This is a sweet, funny childhood memoir about a kid who was a nerd before nerds were cool. I'm not a huge fan of most memoirs, because so many of them are just churned out to cash in on someone's 15 minutes, but this low key set of anecdotes is just gorgeous. I can't recommend it highly enough.

3-9. The Walking Dead Books One to Nine - Robert Kirkman et al. I've been banging on about the TV show to anyone who will listen, and despite its flaws I'm still absolutely adoring it and hang out eagerly every week for the next episode. I read the first of these books and was a bit meh about it, because I'm not overly a fan of comic books in general, and the animation is (deliberately) ugly, which didn't appeal to me. However, I found myself getting sucked into the story and spent a week or two devouring about 8 or 9 years' worth of them.

10. Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict - Avis Cardella. This is a really tedious book about an aimless woman who drifted from one quasi-glamourous job to the next, latching on to a series of wealthy men to help pay for her fashion addiction, which she describes in excruciating detail. Yet another book that proves that just because you can write an enthusiastic blurb in a glossy chick mag about the latest Dior, it doesn't make you a writer.

50 Book Challenge 2012 Book #1: The Call Of The Weird

Louis Theroux is a journalist who has made a name for himself in gonzo journalism through a series of television documentaries where he immerses himself in the world of the strange. Well, strange to the average BBC viewer, anyway. His works largely in America, where his schtick is to present as a slightly naive, slightly bumbling Englishman looking to learn more about the ways of the weird people he encounters. Somehow, he manages to elicit the most astonishing revelations from people and still remain utterly charming and likeable.

Louis' Weird Weekends series is a program where he visits a different person or group of people in each episode, each with their own specific quirk or agenda. They run the gamut from the odd but basically harmless (the main players involved in informercials, UFO spotters, porn actors), to the downright terrifying (white supremacists, South African separatists, survivalists, the Westboro freak show). His kind manner and finely-honed listening skills stop him from straying into odious 'gotcha' territory most of the time (though he does have a way of getting complete douchebags to unwittingly reveal themselves as complete douchebags), and he seems to genuinely care about the odd people he encounters. He has a knack for making subjects I have absolutely zero interest in (wrestling, demolition derby) fascinating. In short, I worship him.


The Call Of The Weird revisits some of those people he met in his TV series, including a dodgy motivational speaker who had been busted for fraud and other shenanigans, a not very successful male porn actor, a scary, hateful white supremacist and a strangely likeable right-wing militia survivalist who has since left the cause. It's not much more than a series of little 'so what became of them' stories, and there are not many surprises about what did become of these people. If you haven't seen the documentaries, the book will mean nothing, but for me it was a pleasant trip back to follow up on many people I remembered, and I'm exactly the kind of person who wonders what happens after the camera stops rolling.