Smell 'ya later, 2015! Get on in here, 2016! (Come for the books, stay for the pie!)

2015 is being crammed in the recycle bin, hello 2016!  This has been a year of amazing reading and life and I think it was pretty damned excellent.

So, how did I do on non-reading resolutions posted back in January 2015?

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - keeping this up will help so much with financial responsibility and the general amount of excess stuff in my house that I will never get around to reading/liking/re-reading. - This resolution went well until about fall and then ALL the books were published, so not terrible but not great.
2. Be timely on reviews - such a big deal, especially for books that I have requested as a reviewer (I know that there has been a lot of discussion in the book blogging community about what is "owed" to a publisher but, in my opinion, if a publicist, etc. has taken the time to send me an ARC or DRC then I should return the gesture by reading and reviewing the book in a timely manner). - Slightly better, but I tend to have review-writing binges because, let's be honest, I like to read books far more than write about them even if I do like to write about them.
3. Drink more water - do I need to drink as much Dt. Pepsi as I do? No. Although, #deathbeforedecaf is still a mantra (you cannot separate me from my coffee). - eh, I did better not buying two+ mochas per day? I made my own coffee?  Didn't drink that much more water.
4. Move more - the hip (and knees and back) and I have come to an agreement on ways of moving so I should be able to at least get on the elliptical and basic weights at the gym. - The hip got worse (in fact, I had two cortisone shots last week) so gym was not an option but I did walk a lot.
5. Cook for myself - I got a Dutch oven and new pots and pans for Christmas so this year the goal is to wean myself off of frozen dinners for 2/3 of my meals (they are handy, but my MSG-sensitivity is much less of an issue if I cook food for myself). - This went really well.  Fell off a bit in the summer but got back in the cooking groove in September.
6. Be brave - I still hate having my picture taken or meeting new people but I need to keep putting myself out there. Nothing gets accomplished by holing up in my house with the cats and books and not interacting with actual people in a social setting.
7. Take a vacation - I hope (HOPE HOPE) to have the finances sorted out enough to visit my friend Kate and see Rhinebeck (aka New York Sheep and Wool) this year. ALSO, Book Riot announced their first live event in early November in NYC and I really, really, really want to go to that, too. (And see my friend Beth! And maybe Karen!)
8. Relax - cf. resolution #7. - For 6, 7, and 8, this is all down to Book Riot Live.  I took a real vacation and flew out to see Beth for a few days then we went to BRL which was amazing.  And I rode the subway all by myself.

And now for the pie!!  Pie charts!

To start, I blew past last year's total of 195 books with 269 books (I had a brief spat with Goodreads, who thought I'd read 270 but it turns out the site had recorded a "finish date" for a book in progress...data, man).  I read so much great stuff this year, too many to pick a favorite, but standouts include runs of ODY-C and The Wicked + The Divine, Between the World and Me, Citizen, Come as You Are, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Rogue Not Taken, Dancer, Edinburgh, When a Scot Ties the Knot, and The World Between Two Covers, which influenced a lot of my book purchasing and reading for the rest of the year and beyond.

How many different genres did I read?  More books = more genres!

 

I leaned farther toward physical formats than digital this year, mostly due to a dislike of how Comixology was redesigned after the sale.  I let my subscriptions expire there and transferred them to my LCS (Geek City Games and Comics, holla!) if I wanted any of the new runs.  This will also be the last year for Oyster in my stats (boo!) but in July the three local libraries pooled their digital resources to make Digital Johnson County - now I can borrow ebooks and e-audiobooks using Overdrive!

Speaking of library use, I put that library card (all three) to good use this year and started snagging library books and audio CDs instead of buying all the things.

This year I started tracking whether the book was translated into English, a result of my having read The World Between Two Covers.  An informal count for last year puts my number of "books read in translation" under 10 so this is an improvement.

How about the percentage of genders?

This was the first year in a long while - since 2006 -  that male authors crept up to the 50% mark, due to the runs of ODY-C, The Wicked + The Divine, and Wayward where the writers and authors are male (white males, too, which will come up again in a bit), to the tune of 20+ issues read in physical comic form.  In contrast, my aversion to the Comixology format caused me to forgo reading Ms. Marvel in issues and wait until the last two trades were available in paperback to read them - changing approximately 11-12 issues into two books.  It changes the "opportunities" in the data for G. Willow Wilson.  Also worth pointing out, to my knowledge all of these authors are cis-gendered; I don't really track orientation, though I know a number of authors I read in 2015 are gay or lesbian.

So here's the big, big deal: did I read more authors of color?  Last year, only 11 of 195 (5.6%) authors were non-white so I gave myself a D- in Diversity.  This year:

Not a great jump, 15.5% non-white, but at least it didn't go backward.  So I will advance myself to D+ status.  Still, not a passing grade.

I decided to do a second breakdown, this time race by genre, to see where non-white authors are coming into my reading and where I really need to start looking (and actually reading - I have a lot of POC in my TBR stacks).  I deliberately didn't combine comics and graphic novels/manga so I could see that all the comics issues have white writers (to be honest, the East Asian authors in the GN/Manga bar are all from the manga genre).  There are a lot of places to improve.  A LOT.

My reading is still very heavily from Anglophone countries, however, my reading The World Between Two Covers did prod me to widen my reading to include more authors with origins outside my very safe US/UK/Canadian reading borders.

What are my plans for 2016?

1. #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks
2. Be timely on reviews - I have made serious use of my OmniFocus apps to get the release dates for DRCs/ARCs I have organized and to help my organize my reading into individual tasks (GTD FTW!!) which should (ideally) help with getting reviews written and posted in a more timely manner.
3. Drink more water - the FitBit app can help track this, so I should use it.
4. Move more - the cortisone shots take full effect by the end of January so I hope to at least be back on the elliptical in a regular manner.
5. Cook for myself - this is going really well.  I also received My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl and I want to make all the things!  This is also good for the budget.
6. Be brave - I'm better at not hiding in general but if you throw me into a crowd by myself I tend to either not talk to people or glom onto the one person I actually know and talk A LOT (read: too much about nothing in general).  And in that vein...
7. I am going to BEA!!!  I just got registered for my very first BEA (ouch, the dollars) so I will have to be super brave, and network, and find my way around a huge convention center filled with people and not glom onto my roommates for the week.
8. Stop driving to work - last week was a bust with the cortisone shots, but this week in taking the bus to work rather than driving has been going well.  I hope to keep it up because $10-15 per day to park the car (plus the extra gasoline) vs. $2 per day riding the bus is a way better fiscal plan.
9. Last, but certainly not the least at all, I need to increase the percentage of books and comics I read that are written by non-white authors.  Some genres (like fiction) will be a simple matter of reading books already on my TBR, others (comics, romance, biography, sciences) need me to put forth a far more conscious effort.  I would also like to start tracking LGBTQIA as best I can - I use a relational database, so it's not hard to add and even compare to previous years, but this might take more than just reading an author's bio.  People do not fit neatly into boxes, and I certainly don't want a world where each author fills out a form and checks all the boxes related to diversity just because that makes it easy for poor little me, but I need to think about how to look for that information.  (My default right now is "white, cis-gendered, straight, USA" if I can't find information that is self-identified otherwise.)  I'll try to take a look at reading stats at least halfway through the year, if not more, to see how I'm doing.

And that's it!  Bring it, 2016!

The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan

Summary from Goodreads:
A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author's year-long journey through a book from every country.

Following an impulse to read more internationally, journalist Ann Morgan undertook first to define "the world" and then to find a story from each of 196 nations. Tireless in her quest and assisted by generous, far-flung strangers, Morgan discovered not only a treasury of world literature but also the keys to unlock it. Whether considering the difficulties faced by writers in developing nations, movingly illustrated by Burundian Marie-Thérese Toyi's Weep Not, Refugee; tracing the use of local myths in the fantastically successful Samoan YA series Telesa; delving into questions of censorship and propaganda while sourcing a title from North Korea; or simply getting hold of The Corsair, the first Qatari novel to be translated into English, Morgan illuminates with wit, warmth, and insight how stories are written the world over and how place-geographical, historical, virtual-shapes the books we read and write.

Some time in late-2012 I stumbled across a blog titled A Year of Reading the World.  This very nice lady, Ann Morgan, was apparently wrapping up a year-long blog project wherein she read a book from every country in the world.  Plus a territory chosen by poll from her readers.  197 books in all.

197 books, one from each country.  Translated into English.  (2012, for me, was the year I read 192 books, mostly romance novels because my mother was undergoing treatment for cancer and I couldn't handle much else.  So Ann's project caught me attention simply for her level of ambition - I have blog projects, but I am absolutely the worst at reading to list or schedule or timetable.)  As 2013 rolled in, I backed up to the beginning of Ann's blog and read it all from the beginning.  Not only did she find some really interesting books to read she also had a fair amount of trouble getting books to read from more countries than I would have guessed.  Ann's experience led me to check and see how much in-translation work I read....which, like my percentage of POC authors, was pretty terrible.  And then Ann announced she'd been offered a book deal based on her blog....

https://www.tumblr.com/search/Kermit-flail#

(Full disclosure: once I found out that Norton's Liveright imprint was going to publish the US edition I begged a galley off them.  I have no regrets.)

The US title of Ann's book is The World Between Two Covers and if you thought it was going to be a potted, bound version of the blog you're going to be disappointed.  What the book turned out to be is a very well-written examination of why the Anglophone (specifically UK via Ann's experience and US by extension) reading population and publishing arm reads little world literature, particularly in translation.  At best estimate approximately only 3% of non-Anglophone world literature is translated and published in English.  Only 3%.  That's terrible.

Ann touched briefly on many translation or publication issues on her blog but the book allows her to expand her topics in a very accessibly way.  There are a number of roadblocks one encounters when trying to find and read literature by authors (and, by extension, purchase legally) from, say, Burkina Faso or Nepal or Kuwait or Monaco or Lichtenstein.  New countries may not have a strong press or literature tradition (or even a written tradition as we define it in Western literature, as Ann found with some island nations).  Some authors turn increasingly to the ebook self-publishing industry for publication and access to readers, some are fleetingly available through small specialty presses. A huge list of books to read can be derived from Ann's work both in the actual 197 books she read in 2012 and the books she references in mulling over her experience.  The World Between Two Covers will make you think and grow your TBR list by leaps and bounds - which is exactly what happened to me.  You can also watch me natter on about this in two videos - I talk about the book and then about some recommendations for literature in translation.

And I made a display at the store because, ugh, so much good stuff to read.

Other things booksellers do: find a book they like so much (@ayearofreadingtheworld 's WORLD BETWEEN TWO COVERS) that they make a whole display based on it of international literature

A photo posted by Melissa W. (@balletbookworm) on Apr 23, 2015 at 7:47pm PDT

Recommendation: buy this sucker and read the heck out of it, pen in hand.

Dear FTC: I requested an ARC from the publisher, nearly read the cover off, and had to buy a nice, clean copy for my shelf.

Out with 2014, in with 2015! (With Pie Charts!)

2014 is fading into the background so that means its time for little old me to look back at my year of reading.  I had a few reading-related (and other) resolutions for 2014:

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - I did really good on this in the second half of the year and really made good use of my library cards (I finally got signed up at ICPL and NL) and my Oyster subscription.
2. Be timely on reviews - I think this was kind of a fail.
3. Drink more water - also kind of a fail.
4. Move more (the Fitbit is helping, but I need to be better at going to the gym) - I was diagnosed with a probable tear in the cartilage in one hip and the gym going was really limited.
5. Cook for myself - I really limited my fast food consumption this year and started remembering to make my own coffee in the morning which helped with the mocha/latte consumption.
6. Be brave - I visited Rebecca of Book Riot when I went to Virginia for the AXS biennial Conclave (and met Amanda, too), I started a YouTube channel, and I also made sure to make use of the new FilmScene art-house movie theatre.
7. Take a vacation - I visited Washington DC with my parents and, of course, stopped by Politics & Prose in Georgetown.
8. Relax - maybe?

So, overall, I think I did pretty good with my resolutions this year.  Now, what about those pie charts I promised.... It's taken me a few weeks to wrangle my book database but I did!  And I have stats!

This year I used the .csv file generated from Goodreads to build the backbone of my book database in Access (I have an analytics background and am teaching myself SQL so this was several hours of merrily wallowing in code and Google searches and spreadsheets back in February/March).  I've been tracking genre, format, gender, nationality, and race this year and I have a little historical data, too.

To start, I smashed my Goodreads goal of 130 books by reading 195 books.  BOOM.  (Yes, I counted comic books as "books" - who cares?)  Some of my favorite books this year were Jenny Offill's Dept of Speculation, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, Sarah MacLean's Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, G. Willow Wilson's/Adrian Alphona's Ms. Marvel, Brian K. Vaughan's/Fiona Staples's Saga, and Eloisa James's Three Weeks with Lady X.  And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head!

I read a pretty wide range of genres:

And a pretty wide range of formats (I'm about 50/50 or so on paper/digital and that suits me just fine):

My gender breakdown is 60/40 ladies to gents, which makes sense given that a good chunk of my genre reading comes from romance:

The 60/40 split has been pretty steady for a number of years, with the exception of 2012 because romance novels were almost the only thing I could handle reading when my mom was being treated for cancer (a guaranteed happy ending can go a long way...).

Most authors I read come from the US (followed by the UK, Australia, and Canada so it's really Anglophone up in here):

(and I'm super-sorry about spelling Malaysia wrong - it's corrected in the database now so should be correct next time I do this).

And what about race/POC?  The issue of reading diversely was huge this year in the book community, particularly on the bookternet.

Yeah, not so good.  I read more POC authors overall, but since I read more books in general the percentage of POC authors I read didn't go up.

(I deliberately didn't make the denominator discrete "authors" but counted each book individually in these stats - if I read 7 books by the same author, and that author happens to be white, that should be counted the same as if I read 7 books from 7 different white authors).

So the takeaway here is that I get an A+ in reading but a D- in diversity.

Diversity is one of my big, huge goals for 2015.  I am going to be more mindful about reading authors of color (i.e. not-white) and authors in translation which (in theory) might help with reading more POC authors.  I was really struck by Ann Morgan's blog A Year of Reading the World - she spent 2012 reading one book from each country on Earth (about 196 books total) - and now has a book coming out where she expands on themes and issues she encountered while trying to locate and read more books by non-UK/Commonwealth writers.  Reading the World will be published in the UK on February 5 and in the US as The World Between Two Covers in May.  I have a galley and am so excited and honored to have received one.  I'm also participating in the Goodreads Seasonal Reading Challenge group and the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge - a number of these tasks require reading non-white, non-US/Anglophone literature - so that will also help me keep my reading goal.

Other 2015 resolutions, which look suspiciously similar to 2014's resolutions:

1. Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - keeping this up will help so much with financial responsibility and the general amount of excess stuff in my house that I will never get around to reading/liking/re-reading.
2. Be timely on reviews - such a big deal, especially for books that I have requested as a reviewer (I know that there has been a lot of discussion in the book blogging community about what is "owed" to a publisher but, in my opinion, if a publicist, etc. has taken the time to send me an ARC or DRC then I should return the gesture by reading and reviewing the book in a timely manner).
3. Drink more water - do I need to drink as much Dt. Pepsi as I do? No.  Although, #deathbeforedecaf is still a mantra (you cannot separate me from my coffee).
4. Move more - the hip (and knees and back) and I have come to an agreement on ways of moving so I should be able to at least get on the elliptical and basic weights at the gym.
5. Cook for myself - I got a Dutch oven and new pots and pans for Christmas so this year the goal is to wean myself off of frozen dinners for 2/3 of my meals (they are handy, but my MSG-sensitivity is much less of an issue if I cook food for myself).
6. Be brave - I still hate having my picture taken or meeting new people but I need to keep putting myself out there.  Nothing gets accomplished by holing up in my house with the cats and books and not interacting with actual people in a social setting.
7. Take a vacation - I hope (HOPE HOPE) to have the finances sorted out enough to visit my friend Kate and see Rhinebeck (aka New York Sheep and Wool) this year.  ALSO, Book Riot announced their first live event in early November in NYC and I really, really, really want to go to that, too. (And see my friend Beth! And maybe Karen!)
8. Relax - cf. resolution #7.

And that's it!  Bring it, 2015!

You can see me holding my iPad up to the camera (and get a serious close-up of my face) in my BookTube video for my 2014 wrap-up - same thing as here, just more visual.

Out with the old, in with the new: Hello, 2014!

The thing about New Year's Day is that it always comes sniffing around when I'm not ready for it.  But, so long, 2013 - it was nice knowing you.

My goal was to read 120 books - so I read 167 books last year, of course, since I'm that sort of over-achiever.  That made 49,369 pages read (or so, I think a few things didn't have a page count in GR).

I read books of all kinds, so definitely a different genre spread than last year, and so many great books came out this year that I couldn't choose just one favorite book this year: When Women Were Birds, Cloud Atlas, Eleanor and Park, Fangirl, A Sport and a Pastime, No Good Duke Goes Unpunished, The Secret History, Night Film, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Once Upon a Tower, and Sex Criminals (easily the best comic I read this year).  As to least favorite book, that one goes to Joshilyn Jackson's Someone Else's Love Story which I loathed with the fire of a thousand suns and wonder why I didn't give it one star (if you want to know why I finished it, I had to review it for Brazen Reads).  I had one official DNF, Big Girl Panties, because I really couldn't get past the "hero's" i-can't-be-seen-with-an-unattractive/overweight-person-because-it-will-make-me-look-bad attitude (sad, because I got it for review from Avon, but I really didn't want to waste my reading time).

Speaking of Avon, I had some bookish adventures this year.  I lived up to my resolutions of "Be brave" and "Take a vacation" by taking an overnight trip to see Eloisa James and Tessa Dare at Anderson's Bookshop (PS: we did not coordinate our clothes, haha).

I went all by my little lonesome and had a wonderful time at a pre-event meet-and-greet at a chocolate cafe nearby and met some of the lovely ladies from the Eloisa's Ambassadors Facebook group.  That same day I found out that I had been accepted into the Avon Addicts program, which I had applied to on some wild-haired whim, thinking I'd never get accepted in a bazillion years.  Such a great group of ladies, editors, and authors!  It threw my romance reading-and-reviewing schedule into a tizzy, from which it still hasn't recovered but I'll catch up.  My third bookish adventure involves book subscriptions.  I decided to try on the new streaming/lending ebook service, Oyster, once it came available for iPad - it has a gorgeous interface and a ton of books to borrow for only $10/mo.  This has the backlist that my local public library can't afford so it's so worth the price.  I also subscribed to Melville House's Art of the Novella series and it's been fabulous so far.

The one project I didn't do so well with was my Overdue Reads project and other ongoing projects I have (see the tabs up there? Those).  Although I tried to be more focused with my reading it was still all over the map, very mercurial, and my reviewing is shamefully behind.  To that end, here are my new resolutions:

1.  Be mindful in my reading and bookish purchases - I do not need to purchase every, single book I come across, which is a serious vice of mine.  I cannot single-handedly keep the book industry floating (that has to be the subconscious urge, I'm sure of it).  I already own a ton (literally, I'm surprised the house joists are holding firm) of books and therefore need to read or start/dnf what I already have rather than purchase more books to join them on the unread shelves.  I also need to stay more current with my reading projects so those actually move forward and be smarter at managing my "start-itis" with books (and knitting).  I have challenged myself to read 130 books this year.

2.  Be timely on reviews - reading a book will always be more enticing than writing a review, but I have so many unwritten/half-written/not-even-started reviews that I have some major catching up to do.
3.  Drink more water.
4.  Move more (the Fitbit is helping, but I need to be better at going to the gym).
5.  Cook for myself - ongoing, but I did much better in 2013.  I didn't eat nearly as much fast food.  Coffeehouse lattes/mochas are still a weakness, though.
6.  Be brave.
7.  Take a vacation (I have plans....).
8.  Relax.

Happy New Year, everyone!!

ETA: It was actually 168 books in 2013 (with 49,401 pages read) - I had missed getting the date on the third issue of Sex Criminals. Oops.

Well, hellooo there, 2013!

Here I am again, looking down the barrel of another year.

Ugh, that sounds way more depressing than I meant it to come out but, howevermuch I avoid it, a New Year it is and, hence, a time for me to reflect on goals both reading/blogging and personal.

On the book front, I challenged myself to read 120 books in the 2013 Goodreads Challenge.  I figure 120 is a good compromise between the 110 I used as my goal last year and the 191 I actually ended up reading.  That's the easy-to-set-up goal.

The harder-to-set-up goal is currently going by the moniker "Read the Books I Meant to Read Challenge".  Inspired by Carrie's challenge to read one book per month she's meant to read (and others are reading with her) I am going to do something similar.  I live in a house with a re-donk-ulous number of books and I haven't read a good chunk of them.  Oh, I mean to, of course, since I purchased them, but I just haven't got around to reading them yet.  So the "Read the Books I Meant to Read Challenge" will consist of a list of books I've been meaning to read "for some time" (this is flexible) with the plan to read and finish at least one of them per month.  I haven't sussed out the stack of books/shelf of books/entire bookcase filled with unread books as yet but when I do I'll set up a separate challenge/project post for it.

On the personal front, I really need to get myself in shape, physically, mentally, and financially.  My goals for the year are (unfortunately, they're really vague, and since I learned in my self-improvement crazy-train reading, vague goals are hard to fulfill so they still need work):
1. Drink more water.
2. Get more sleep.
3. Move more.
4. Improve my money management (step 1: finish getting everything into Quicken)
5. Relax.
6. Take a vacation.
7. Be brave.
8. Cook for myself (I have discovered that my kitchen is cleaner when I'm actually cooking in it, random).

I should write those down and leave reminders in multiple places.  Really.

The first step:  I'm drinking coffee and staring at an empty water bottle.  I should fill the water bottle.

Bye-bye, 2012 (and where I reveal how many pages I read)!

2012 was an odd-ball year for me. 

I simply could not read to task.  I couldn't make plans to read certain books - they either had to hit my fancy or not.  This year, my fancy leaned toward...

...romance novels.  Almost to the exclusion of everything else.  I read my way through Eloisa James (nearly everything she wrote), Mary Balogh's Bedwyns, Julia Quinn's Bridgertons, Smythe-Smiths, and Bevelstokes, and discovered Tessa Dare, Sarah MacLean, Caroline Linden, Miranda Neville, Sophia Nash, and Elizabeth Hoyt.  I even tried out the grand-dame of historicals Georgette Heyer (and if you can get Richard Armitage to read it to you so much the better).

I think this had to do with the fact that all I could do was worry about my mom.  I couldn't guarantee that her chemo and radiation would do the trick (so far, so good - the MRIs are clear, cross my fingers and toes) and I couldn't fix it so all I could do was read.  I used to read romance novels in junior high and high school because Mom usually had a few laying around the house.  While we don't read to the same taste (she usually read contemporaries while I prefer Regency historicals followed by other historicals) I found that being able to read a 250-300 page romance novel with an almost gold-plated, guaranteed Happy Ending in the two hours between coming home from work and falling asleep not only helped me relax but delivered a weird sense of accomplishment.

So much so that I read 191 books this year when I only meant to read 110:

That is 63,496 pages.  HOLY CRAP ON A CRAP CRACKER!!!  Almost twice as much as last year when I read 102 books.

I guess having an ereader really does make me read faster.  As far as the breakdown of books goes I did like almost everything I read this year (5 stars being "amazing", 3 being "it was OK/readable", and 1 star being "sucked hardcore"):

Likely the best book I read this year is either The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (which just tore my heart out) or One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean (and since it's not pubbing until the end of January 2013 that's sort of cheating).  The worst book I read this year was The Husband Hunt by Lynsay Sands - if I hadn't pre-ordered the ebook I would have lit the damn thing on fire (see reasons why here).  One book is unrated (The Duke Diaries) because I haven't decided where my opinion lies yet - it's for a review in March 2013 so I have time for a re-read.  Nothing was officially DNF'd this year, so that was good.

Speaking of reviews, I started reviewing romance at Brazen Reads this year!  The brainchild of Pam, Brazen Reads is a collaborative blog where romance of all types is reviewed.  I concentrate on Regency and historical so drop on by if you're interested.

I also tried on graphic novels for size this year.  DC Comics had a buy-2-get-1-free sale from late August to mid-November so I decided to rectify a "blind side" in my reading life.  I started with Watchmen, Fables #1: Legends in Exile, and Sandman #1: Preludes and Nocturnes.  I had read Watchmen back in high school in a hopeless attempt to impress the boys in drumline (snare players are uber-cool) and didn't really like it.  This time around I was much more able to appreciate the art and storytelling.  Fables was a great intro to an alternative fairy tale world but Sandman just about blew my mind.  I'm halfway through the series now.  Neil Gaiman is a national treasure (since he lives stateside but is still a Brit I guess we'll have to share him).

The downside of all the reading I did is that I am hopelessly behind in reviews.  Almost shamefully.  I'll catch up don't worry.

Have a safe and happy New Year, everyone!

2011: Later, gator!

Well, 2011 has crept out of my life.  The year was chuggling along smoothly with surprising new reads (I finally hopped on the A Song of Ice and Fire bandwagon and remembered that romance novels aren't quite that bad when I need a reading boost) and surprising talents (I wrote a book - almost done with draft 6 and feeling like I might, just might, let other people read it) when December hit. 

My world shattered into a thousand tiny pieces when my mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor December 4.  Things still haven't settled after three weeks of crazy but we are moving forward.  The surgeons did a fantastic resection, Mom is recovering well, and the radiation and chemotherapy schedule is set to start January 4.  The path ahead of her is uncertain but she has good doctors and therapists and we're going to put up one hell of a fight.

In the middle of all this, the poor little book blog gets neglected.  I still haven't caught up with my reviews.  Oops.  Being a reader I was presented with a dilemma.  I could (a) write my reviews (which takes about 30-45 minutes/review depending on what I have to say), (b) read a book, or (c) edit my own book.  It's safe to say that (b) and (c) won out, with (c) taking a bit of an edge because I almost didn't finish the biggest, but simplest, challenge I ever signed up for.

The Goodreads Challenge

I said I would read 100 books this year.  I've wanted to do this for several years now and always fell short.  Goodreads's little challenge seemed well within my reach...until I started writing.  I didn't read a book for weeks unless you count constant re-reads of my own poor manuscript, quibbling over the placement of a "her". 

But I did it.  I read 100 books.  In fact, I read 102 books.  *cue trumpets*

I liked most of what I read (five stars is "amazing", four stars is "I really liked it", three stars is "it was good/ok/readable", two stars is "meh/uninteresting", and one star is "I really wanted to light this on fire" - I have no one star books because those books I usually don't finish reading and don't bother to review most of the time):











According to Goodreads the longest book I read was A Storm of Swords (according to me, I think it was A Dance with Dragons, but that's probably a quibble over format and the ebook format didn't have any pages listed for ASOS so I had to make do with the MM format just to get page counts).  My favorite book this year is either One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Shatter Me, A Game of Thrones (probably that whole series because I went on a serious binge), or The Wierd Sisters.  I never can decide. 

Also, according to Goodreads I read 32,330 pages this year.  Excuse me while I peel my contact lenses out of my dry little eyes.  I actually read faster on my nooks (yes, I said nooks because there are several...pardon me while I go beat down Mr. Collins) - if I don't have to turn a real page then I don't have to move my eyeballs and, somehow, that turns into reading faster.  Craze-balls.

I finally read some Jane Austen off-shoots (thanks to Sourcebooks' wonderful ebook sales during December - JA's birthday month) and remembered that, while I really, really still don't like Austen variations/sequels/straight-up modern re-tellings, I do like clever adaptations (cf: Bridget Jones's Diary and Clueless).  I find that I enjoy stories that use JA as a jumping off point (like A Weekend with Mr. Darcy) rather than one of her novels as a skeleton.  My reading of the collection Jane Austen Made Me Do It added more evidence for that conclusion.

I did some re-reading, too.  I picked up Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks (the NYRB Classics re-issue) and read it aloud to my kitty-boys one evening during a storm.  I pulled out my D'Aulaires (also re-issued by NYRB Classics) when I needed some inspiration from Norse mythology  I turned to Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series (with Eloise and Colin and flowery Regency spies) because Letty and Arabella are good friends in a pinch.  And my beloved Jane bolstered me with Pride and Prejudice when I inclined to insomnia due to worrying over Mom.

Other challenges...well, I sorta failed.  The Booker Challenge?  I had good intentions but barely scratched the surface.  I only read one Newbery book (yet to be reviewed).  Only one Best American.  Boo.  Fail, fail, fail.

My trouble is the writing.  What I read seeps into what I write.  Not a bad thing, necessarily (I generally find that authors who cop to the whole "I couldn't possibly sully my process by reading other people's stuff" attitude have the most ghastly prose), but when one realizes that she has unconsciously appropriated key words and phrases from well-known authors...and those words/phrases are unique to said authors' worldbuilding...one starts to sweat just a little.  And stop reading.  (This is where the romance novels come in...they somehow don't affect the writing and saved my bacon with the Goodreads challenge).

But enough about 2011.  On to 2012!

2011 - to set or not to set reading goals?

In thinking about reading (and blogging) for 2011, I wasn't sure I wanted to do any challenges this year.

I've come to realize they distract me.  I think and worry and fret far more about what I need to read for a challenge than what I actually read.  This gets worse when I have greater than one challenge going on at the same time.  I finished one challenge (Women Unbound) but had trouble finishing the other (The Complete Booker) and I only made minimal progress on my projects.

So I think I'll just do one challenge (kind of one and a half).  I'd like to work on The Complete Booker Challenge 2011 - it would help make a decent amount of headway on my Booker Project.  I'll probably start with the "Pix-a-Mix of Six" (read six Booker winners) and it might upgrade to the "A Booker's Dozen" (read twelve winners or nominees from the short- or long-lists).  I'll need to get a challenge post up for that one.  I've also signed up for the Goodreads Challenge - which is simply a goal to read a certain number of books.  Goodreads makes it really easy to track that with the stats page so I signed up with the goal of reading 100 books this year.  I've not made a great start what with the mess of moving and all.  One hundred books in a year is like my personal glass ceiling, somehow.

I slowly started accepting review copies from publishers this last year (well, just HarperPerennial/Harper Paperbacks, really).  I didn't go overboard (thank goodness) but I haven't been very good at getting things read when I need to for publication dates.  So I need to work on that.  I also have to pay attention to what I ask for because sometimes you get what you ask for; I requested a review copy of the new Christopher Isherwood diaries never realizing for one minute that it was going to be quite thick (and, in the manner of diaries, not terribly "readable").  So I must keep a better head on my shoulders (I apologize to Harper for that one, it's going to take me a bit to get that one read).

I also need to work on a few more of my projects - especially the Nobel and Best American ones - because the projects are really my pets.  They cover a nice cross-section of literature without a great deal of cross-over (there really isn't much, from what I've found).

So, in summary, my Reading Goals for 2011:
1) Only sign-up for "real" challenge: The Complete Booker 2011
2) Write a sign-up post for The Complete Booker 2011
3) Be smarter about review copies
4) Work on my projects

Bring it, 2011!

You must visit "Ward Six"

One of the things I love about the combination of book bloggers and Twitter is the never-ending supply of new things to think about and read.

Like the blog Ward Six.  For whatever reason, I'd never run across this book reviews/bookish thoughts/writing bits and bobs/general book knowledge blog and then, bam, everyone on Twitter is tweeting about this 10-over-80 list of great authors on Ward Six.  So I had a look-see.

It's a great idea - there are always "25 under 25" or "10 new writers under 30" or whatever type lists so I think it's wonderful that someone took the time to honor authors for their longevity.  Beverly Cleary is 94 - 94! - and she still writes books.  Rhian created a great list honoring authors she loves and I'm not going to copy it all here because I want everyone to visit Ward Six for themselves.

So, go visit.  Then stay a while and read more of their posts.

"Which translation?": There is a reason why...

If a customer comes to the information desk looking for Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, Death in Venice, or The Inferno (or any other non-English language work of literature) I will always ask "Are you looking for a particular translation?"  The most common response: *blink, blink*  So off we go to the shelves to look at whatever stock I've got on hand.  It is the rare customer who asks "Do you have the Grossman translation of Don Quixote?" or "Is the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace available in paperback?", made even rarer by the fact that those customers can usually find their own books and are really only checking with me to see if a copy is just hiding in the stockroom.

Given that we're situated in a college town, many students come to our store to buy their books rather than waste their life standing in the interminable check-out line at the University bookstore (doesn't matter if you have them pull your books for you ahead of time, you still have to wait in line approximately one hour if you wait to buy your books after 9am on the first day of term).  So I have learned to ask customers if they have a preference in translation; it does avoid hassle later on when a student learns they've purchased the very pretty Penguin Deluxe edition of Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis, when they really need the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation.  Trust me, that can turn into a serious problem on the sales floor (i.e. tears).  I also have a tendency to quiz the heck out of students when they have no idea which translation is needed; if they're bound and determined to buy a copy right then and there I'm going to try and figure out which translation they'll need.  In a related customer service quest, I have also seriously confused a customer by asking if they needed a Spanish or English edition of 100 Years of Solitude (Marquez does crop up frequently in Spanish-language literature courses in the original).

Why is the issue of translation so important?  Why is it so important to me and why should I care?  Well, in the most superficial instance, it's an attempt to provide good customer service.  I can specifially search for the Lattimore translation of The Odyssey to see if a copy is on hand rather than just dragging the customer over to the poetry section to have a rummage through the shelves only to find *oopsie* we just don't have one in stock and dragging said customer back to the desk to order one.  Also, if the customer is really looking for a book in the original language I need to know before we head to the shelves; we have Death in Venice in a couple of different translations but Der Tod in Venedig has to be ordered from the warehouse (I don't have quite this problem with newer literature - the copyrights are still in place so there's usually just one, maybe two, translations available for authors like Saramago, Kundera, and Murakami).

The more in-depth reason is that I would like the customer/reader (and by extension the recipient/reader, if the book is a gift) to read and like the book that is purchased.  Very few people have the capacity to read fluently in multiple languages so readbility is key, particularly when reading for pleasure (I read very differently when reading for pleasure as opposed to class/bookclub).  Some translations just aren't that fun to read.  Mandelbaum's translation of The Inferno is regarded as one of the most literal while not so poetic; on the other hand, Ciardi's translation of The Inferno does play a little fast and loose with "literal" translation but flows quite well.  Garnett translations of Russian authors like Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are the most common and widely available editions, being the first English translations of those works and, for the most part, in the public domain; however, Garnett occasionally omitted phrases or passages of the original Russian she didn't understand so the reader may be missing nuances in the writing.  A student may need an inexpensive Garnett translation of Anna Karenina for school but I would recommend the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation to read for pleasure.  Similarly, a prose translation of The Iliad might be cheap but a lyric translation evokes an ancient blind storyteller, sitting near a fire:

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
~Robert Fagles, 1996

I would love it if a customer responded to my translation question with "I really hadn't thought about it" or "Not particularly" that way (a) if they didn't know which translation was necessary and didn't want to seem gauche that's a good cover and (b) if they really didn't care and would like me to help them choose it's a good way to get a conversation going.  I do really like to talk to customers about their reading (not about their Grandson Jimmy's dog's fleas or their husband's up-coming colon surgery, in detail).  Having an actual conversation can be a rare thing but it's far preferrable to my last encounter with the translation issue; the student I was helping rolled her eyes when I asked about a translation and slurred "Like, American? duh?"  Gah!

(Incidentally, if you like The Inferno check out the translation edited by Daniel Halpern - 20 contemporary poets translated/interpreted the 34 cantos.  It's really fun to read.)