Friday Fun! (Reading Goals for 2012)

It’s that time of year again!  Time to think about my reading goals for the year.  Reading is one of my main passions in life (I’d say the others are writing, fitness, and animal rights).  I love it, but I also like to see how I change and grow and provide myself with a bit of direction, especially now that I’m out of school. (YAY).  To that end, let’s first take a glance at my goals from January 2011 and see how I did.

Successful:

• Read 100 books. I am so freaking HAPPY to say that I not only met this goal but surpassed it! Yay me!
• Frugality.  I had a hard time deciding if this was actually a success or not, after all I DID purchase a kindle.  However, buying my kindle opened up a whole world of cheaper books for me, including eARCs and the land of 99cent kindle sales.  I also completely stopped using PaperBackSwap and found a library branch convenient to my lifestyle.  By some odd combination of all three of those, I’d definitely say I drastically improved in this area, so I’m counting it a success.

Unsuccessful:

• Travel the seven continents. HAHAHAHA. This wasn’t just a fail. It was an epic fail.  My first book for this goal set me off on a Chinese lit tangent and then getting to know Amy and Kinna got me onto Nigerian lit and Ghanaian lit and then The Real Help Project got me onto black lit and um….yeah.  One thing I realized about my reading style is I get into things and read everything I can get my hands on in one fell swoop.  That means these challenges that cover large areas are just not for me.  I’m still happy with the new places I visited via my reading though.

Goals for 2012:

• TBR Pile Challenge with Amy.  Amy was doing a challenge with her roommate, and I elbowed my way in. (Thanks, sweety!)  As of January 1st, I had 47 books that I acquired before 2011 still unread.  My goal is to finish them all this year and hopefully faster than Amy can finish hers (47 from before 2009).  Whichever one of us finishes first gets a kindle book courtesy of the other.  I obviously wanted to read these books at some point, so I may as well do so sooner rather than later!  I mean, goodness, they were on my shelf over a year without being read? Oh dear.  See the whole list here.
• Diet for a New America Reading Project.  My passion for health and a reversion of the American health crisis and obesity epidemic led me to create this project.  Every month (we hope) on the third Saturday I’ll be reviewing a pre-determined book and hopefully at some point each month at least one fitness book or cookbook.  See the list of planned books and more details about the project here.
• One historic nonfiction book a month.  Memoirs do not count, unless they are written by critical figures.  Biographies do count.  Preferably about: time periods I know very little about, history of non-whites in the US, socialism, animal rights, etc….
• Read 110 books.  100 books was such a challenge that I’m just going to push myself a tiny bit, haha.
• Finish catching up with my accepted ARCs.  This was a goal in December, and I did a pretty good job with it.  I’m almost caught up, but not quite yet.
• Read six environmental nonfiction books.  The count last year was kind of sad for someone whose life goals involve minimalist living, positive or at least neutral impact on the environment, etc…  Vegetarian/vegan/animal liberation books do not count in this category.  Preservation of endangered species does.

Phew!  I think that’s more than enough goals for me for the year!  What do you guys think of them?  Any plans for your reading for this year?

2011 Reading Stats!

It’s the last day of 2011, so it’s time to compile and post my reading stats!  It’s so fun and interesting to see how my reading progresses and changes over time.  This year was especially interesting, since it was my first year out of school in…um….forever?  Seeing what I read when all of my reading is for fun was fascinating.  Also, this was the first year I owned an ereader, my kindle, which definitely impacted my reading style.  Anyway, onward with the stats!

Last year, I read a grand total of 70 books, and the year before that 52. This year? That number skyrocketed.

Total books read: 107
Average books read per month: 8.9
Month most read: Tie between August and December with 14 (Interestingly, these were the months I mostly read on my kindle. I’ve discovered I read faster on it than in print).
Month least read: Tie between January and April with 6 each (January was my first month out of grad school, so I was burned out.  I honestly don’t know what happened in April).
Longest book read: It by Stephen King with 1,090 pages
Fiction: 89 (83%)
Nonfiction: 17 (16%) (I really expected this to be higher!)
Formats:
–traditional print: 44 (41%)
–ebook: 46 (43%) (ebooks have officially taken over!)
–graphic novel: 11 (10%)
–audiobook: 6 (6%)
Genres:
–scifi: 16 (Winner for the third year running)
–horror: 13
–dystopian: 11
–humorous: 11
–black lit: 10 (Courtesy of getting to know Amy and Kinna and The Real Help project).
–fantasy: 10
–nonfiction memoir: 10
–YA: 10
–thriller: 9
–contemporary fiction: 8 (This came out of nowhere).
–mental illness: 7 (Kind of embarrassing how low this is, given that I host the MIA Reading Challenge, heh).
–mystery: 7
–nonfiction history: 7 (I want this to be higher next year!)
–european classics: 5
–historic fiction: 5
–postapocalyptic: 5
–american classics: 4
–feminist lit: 4
–paranormal romance: 4 (Way down from the previous two years).
–japanese lit: 3
–short-story collection: 3 (A new genre, yay!)
–alternate history: 2
–chinese lit: 2
–erotica: 2
–nonfiction environmentalism: 2
–poetry: 2
–romance: 2
–urban fantasy: 2
–vegetarianism/veganism: 2
–cozy: 1
–cyberpunk: 1
–nonfiction diet: 1
–nonfiction fitness: 1
–nonfiction lifestyle: 1
–steampunk: 1
Vampires vs. Zombies vs. Aliens vs. Demons:
–zombies: 7 (Success! I wanted them to win this year )
–vampires: 4
–aliens: 3
–demons: 2 (Poor, poor demons).
Numbers of stars:
–5 star reads: 20 (19%)
–4 star reads: 48 (45%)
–3 star reads: 29  (27%)
–2 star reads: 7 (6%)
–1 star reads: 3 (3%)

What I found most fascinating in assembling these stats was that I apparently read much faster on a kindle than in print.  Why is this?  Maybe the screen makes my brain remember its speed-reading lessons from middle school that I did on a screen?  Maybe the lack of physical knowledge of how much is left keeps my enthusiasm up?  I’m not sure.

I’m really pleased to see that my serious reading went up.  Now that I’m out of school, I can read up on the topics that I myself want to know more about, and I did!  I hope that my environmental and veg reading will increase next year.  I also hope to continue to see a strong showing in black lit and an increased showing in Chinese and Japanese lit.

Overall, this was a great reading year.  My first year getting over 100 books!  Stay tuned for my reading goals 2012 post.  Any suggestions?

Friday Fun! (Better World Books)

Hello my lovely readers!  I hope your weeks have all been awesome.  My week was fairly busy as per usual.  I baked cookies, made pizza, had a movie marathon with a friend, and was finally forced to put my ac in thanks to the recent surge in temperature in Boston.  My cat is shedding up a storm.  She’s been loving up the extended brushing sessions she’s now getting.  She’s also been showing an intense love for water and getting wet (by repeatedly trying to climb in the shower with me).  She’s an odd duck, and I’m considering giving her a bath to help with the heat/shedding issue.  I’ll let you know if I wind up torn to shreds.

I’m finally finishing up my spring cleaning I started during vacation.  After bringing my weeded books to a local indie then posting to PaperBackSwap, I still had a few left-over.  I was pleased to discover an awesome charity that pays for the shipping so you can donate books at no cost to you–Better World Books.  Basically it’s an online bookstore that uses all their proceeds to benefit worldwide literacy and libraries.  It helps them immensely when their stock is donated.  I know most of my followers are big readers, so I highly encourage you to check them out if you’re weeding or adding to your shelves.  Both activities help out with literacy, and that just makes for a better world all-around.  (Hence the name of the bookstore, I imagine).

My weekend is going to consist of going to see Bridesmaids with a friend, some necessary clothes shopping, and a Team Unicorn gathering.  Happy weekends all!

Friday Fun! (Spring!)

Hello my lovely readers!  Spring has finally started to show up in New England!  Spring is always a conflicted time for me.  I love the warm weather and appearance of new life, don’t get me wrong.  I also, however, am seriously allergic to spring.  Even with meds, I still have to limit my time outside.  So even while I want to go out and run along the Charles River path and be completely ridiculous, I can’t really.  Well, unless I want to spend the entire next day in bed wheezing for air.  So my days in the spring pretty much consist of, “Yay! It’s 60 out!  I could go for a nice long walk……wait. No.  No I can’t.”  So spring is a bit of a Catch-22 for me.

On the plus side, now I get to plan my container garden!  Last year was my first year, and I learned a lot.  “Learned a lot” means that I only successfully grew one plant.  However!  Here’s hoping that this year I will be able to apply what I learned and get at least two successful plants.  Maybe even four.  Mhm.  I’m thinking of trying a pepper, a tomato, a zucchini, and some sort of bean.  I want to see climbing things in my kitchen!  So pretty!  Hopefully the cat will leave the plants alone.  She’s periodically good and periodically bad.  Just like a person.

Other than that, life continues on as usual.  I have some of the most awesome friends in the world who I see as much as possible.  I’m getting in my gym time and ever improving the quality of what I eat.  I feel healthier every day and every week is a new adventure.  Of course, I’m also consistently reading.  My first passion in life.  Happy weekends all!

Friday Fun! (I’m Being Boring Lately So Here’s Some Wishlist Highlights)

Hello my lovely readers!  I hope your weeks went well.  Last weekend I went to a collegiate hockey game with a friend.  It was crazy fun and full of adorable 10 year old boys in Bruins jerseys rooting for BC.  It also was surprisingly warm for a building housing an ice skating rink.  That could be the Vermonter in me talking though.  I also hung out with one of my friends and watched trashy horror movies.

Other than that, my week has been quite normal.  Well.  Aside from having finally done my taxes and seeing I get moneys back for having been in graduate school last year and also being poor.  Yay!  I suddenly feel totally justified in getting my Xbox Kinect.  So.  Since I’m being an epically boring vegetarian librarian alternating between reading a shit-ton, weight lifting and doing chin-ups at the gym, and watching mini-marathons of Teen Mom 2 (for the schadenfreude aspect), I think today I’ll give you all a glance at some books on my wishlist.  (Ok, some of them have yet to make it onto my LibraryThing wishlist, but they’re on my wishlist in my head, ok?!)  I will probably not be able to afford them anytime soon or justify buying them since I currently have a pile of 79 physical books to read in my tiny apartment.  *shuffles feet*  Anywho.  Here we go.

• Meat is for Pussies by John Joseph
  This is marketed as a going vegan book for men written by a vegan male martial arts fighter.  It’s supposed to blow the myth of being a male vegan equating being weak and/or not masculine out of the water.  Since it’s a perpetual problem that veg*nism has a hard time appealing to the men of humanity, I’m very curious to check this out.
• Supermarket Vegan: 225 Meat-Free, Egg-Free, Dairy-Free Recipes for Real People in the Real World by Donna Klein
  Fact: I am poor. Further Fact: I don’t have a car. Even Further Fact: The nearest grocery store to me is crazy cheap and mainstream so it’s not always easy for me to find obscure ingredients often listed in vegan recipes.  (I do take the time to order vital wheat gluten and nutritional yeast in bulk from Amazon though.  That shit is awesome).  Anyway, I’m very intrigued by the concept of this book.  I hope the recipes are creative and not just like “pasta, veggies, rice, have fun.”  We’ll see!
• Canning for a New Generation: Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry by Liana Krissoff
  This comes across to me as the Stitch n Bitch for canning.  I’m very intrigued by canning but am put-off by how old-fashioned most of the recipes and methods in the cookbooks are.  Why am I into canning you ask?  Hey.  Ya’ll know how into local food and preparing for the zombie apocalypse I am.
• Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
  Ok, so I could own this already, but I own the previous books in the Sookie Stackhouse series in mass market paperback, and the SERIES MUST MATCH.  Also, I can’t suddenly switch to ebooks for the series at this point in the game, but I would if I could.
• Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist
  Besides having the most difficult to spell name of any author on this list, Lindqvist also wrote Let the Right One In, which I think is a wonderful twist on/addition to vampire lore.  I can’t wait to see what he does to zombies.
• The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer
  All you need to know about this book is that the zombie plague is an STD in it.  AN STD. MUST READ.
• Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier
  I was completely obsessed with Choose Your Own Adventure (CYA) stories when I was a kid, even the craptastic fundy Christian ones my parental units made me read.  This is a CYA set in the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.  It’s like a zombie videogame.  Only it’s a book. COVET
• The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms by Helen Merrick
  I’m just obsessed with feminist scifi and any study of or collection of feminist scifi I’ve read in the past has been motherfucking awesome.  Can’t wait to see what new authors and stories I’ll discover through this book.

There’s your glimpse at my wishlist!  Hope you enjoyed!  Hopefully I’ll have more real life stories for you next week.  Also I’m just noticing that this is an interesting mix of zombies, sex, feminism, and veg*ism.  Huh.  I’m *coughs* a unique one, eh?

Friday Fun! (Post Grad School)

Hello my lovely readers!  I hope your weeks have been lovely with lots of time for reading crammed in.  My week has been decidedly uneventful, which I am totally ok with after the insane eventfulness of the last 6 months or so.  I’m settled into a post-grad school routine of work, friends, gym, cooking, professional job hunting, etc…  It’s great to actually have the time to see my friends more often now than when I was in school.  We’re managing to find fun ways to occupy our time in spite of the bitter cold, whether that’s Asian fusion food or hockey games.  (Go BC kick UNH’s ASS).  In fact, I’m so busy doing fun things that by the time I get home at night, I generally grab a quick snack or dinner then climb into bed to read and fall asleep doing so.  I woke up with my glasses still on this morning.  Luckily I was reading on my ipod so it turned itself off at some point in the night so no electricity was wasted.  This does mean that I’m watching far fewer movies, except for when I have friends over to get drunk and watch trashy old horror movies together.    Of course there are the normal post-grad school money worries and the stress of trying to fit everything in to your work week, not to mention actually making the time to wash your laundry so you have clean clothes to wear, but overall, life is good.  *looks around*  *knocks on wood*

Oh!  I also got an xbox 360 and played a Kinect game for the first time and dudes.  It is so fucking cool.  The future of gaming if I do say so myself.  Playing a game with your body and no controls?  It’s like something out of a fucking scifi movie.  The only annoying part is having to move my furniture every time I play.

There’s really not too much else to say right now.  I’m striving for various goals, but I plan on only updating ya’ll on them once I’ve achieved them.  I prefer not to jinx myself.    In the meantime, I hope to keep encouraging everyone’s love of reading and story-telling.  Happy weekends!

Friday Fun! (The Long Winter)

I keep thinking this week about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Book The Long Winter.  We’ve been slammed with snow, sleet, hail, thunderhail, thundersnow, and more almost every single day this week.  It’s dark.  It’s dreary.  Most New Englanders I know are struggling with the winter blues.  I’ve been taking to snuggling up under my electric blanket earlier and earlier at night, and all this reminds me of reading The Long Winter during the long Vermont winters when I was a kid.

Basically, in this entry in the Little House series of books, Laura’s pioneer family faces one of the worst winters ever.  Excruciating detail about the cold, the food, the clothes, and more go into the tale of how they managed to just barely survive that winter.  I’ll never forget the passage in which they hang their wet clothes out to freeze as a close approximation to drying.  Winter is just something northerners have always had to deal with.  I remind myself that at least I have a lot more entertainment and warmth than Laura did, but Laura also could just stay in the house all winter.  I have to go out and get to work.  Hibernation is just not an option.  Not to mention that it’d get lonely after a little while.

But there’s something comforting in reading about other people facing winter when you’re in the throes of it yourself.  I know some people like to read books set in the tropics in the winter, but personally I’ll always reach for tales of freezing cold and survival against all odds.  There’s a sort of camaraderie to it that only other northerners understand.

Happy weekend all!

Reading Goals for 2011

It’s that time of year again!  Time to think about my reading goals for the year.  Since reading is pretty much my favorite hobby, I don’t like to limit it too much, but I do like to encourage myself to broaden my horizons and be practical.  To that end, let’s first take a glance at my goals from January 2010.

Successful:

• Read one book of poetry. I read Beowulf.  Not quite modern poetry, but still counts as poetry. 
• Read at least 3 graphic novels/manga.  I wound up reading 8 and discovered a new format I love!

Unsuccessful:

• Read the books left over from undergraduate classes.  Yes. Um. I only successfully read two of them.  There’s still more left than I care to admit…..
• Read more nonfiction.  There were only 7 out of 63, and all but one of those were memoirs.
• Control books owned by using Swaptree.  Hah!  I actually switched to PaperBackSwap, and my TBR pile has become…..daunting.

Goals for 2011:

• Frugality! This may be my favorite hobby, but I can be frugal about it.  My TBR pile currently has 69 books on it, and that’s just the physical books.  Let’s not even get into the eBooks awaiting me. So.  My rule is to really think about my acquisitions before I acquire them and hopefully get the TBR pile back down so it fits on one shelf of my bookshelf.
• Read 100 books. Ok.  I got to 70 this year.  I think since I’m out of grad school now I should be able to do 100, yes?
• Travel the 7 continents.  Since I can’t afford a real vacation, I want to take a virtual one around the world.  For the inhabited continents, I want to read something set on that continent written by an inhabitant of the continent.  So, no travelogues by old British dudes.  Antarctica may be challenging…..but, hey, there are scientific expeditions there, yes?  also, for North America, the US is not allowed.  It has to be Canada or Mexico.

So, that’s it, but I think they’ll be challenging enough for me!  Of course, I’ll also be reading books that count for the Mental Illness Advocacy challenge I’m hosting. 

Any special plans for 2011 reading?  Advice on keeping the TBR pile more controllable?

Reading Goals for 2010

I don’t want to over-plan my reading for 2010, but I do want to give it a loose structure and maybe broaden my horizons a bit.  I also want to be practical about my reading, for instance the fact that I rarely have time to go to the library (erm, the public one, not the one I work at 5 days a week).  Anywho, with that in mind, my loosely-defined goals for 2010 are:

• Read the books I bought for undergrad classes but didn’t have time to read then.  Seeing as how my two majors are topics I actually like (History and English and American Literature), I actually do want to read these old “assignments.”  Expect to see a bit of ancient literature, Chekhov, and noir.
• Read a bit more nonfiction in areas I want to be more educated in, preferably science.  Seeing as how I work in a medical library, this should be pretty easy to pull off cheaply.
• Utilize Swaptree to get rid of books I weeded from my collection at the end of the year and in turn get books I want to read.  Since I’m doing an exact 1:1 exchange, this should keep my book collection on the smaller side.
• Courtesy of a challenge from @shaindelr over on Twitter who gasped about my not having read any poetry in 2009–read one book of poetry.  However, I’m not making any promises that it won’t be of the ancient variety. 
• Finally, watching Japanese movies got me pretty into the stories their culture has to offer.  That along with seeing some graphic novels in friends’ houses made me want to give the genre an official shot, so I’ll be reading at least 3 graphic novels/manga in 2010.  I’m super-excited to read my first Battle Royale, which I wanted to read after seeing and loving the movie.

Book Review: Setting Free the Bears By John Irving

Summary:
John Irving is an American writer best-known for The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany.  Setting Free the Bears is his first novel and is set in Europe as opposed to New England.  Hannes Gaff has failed his exam at university in Vienna.  Distressed he goes to a motorcycle shop where he meets Siegfried Javotnik.  Siggy convinces Gaff to buy a motorcycle together to adventure across Europe.  Their adventure takes a side-turn though when Siggy becomes obsessed with letting loose the zoo animals in Vienna and Gaff becomes obsessed with a girl named Gallen.

Review:
Irving utilizes a storytelling technique I’ve always particularly enjoyed–a character finding a notebook and the character and reader reading that notebook together.  Here Siggy’s voice is bookended by Gaff’s.  I had a difficult time getting into the book and was frustrated with it at the end.  It wasn’t until reflection that I realized I enjoyed Siggy’s story, but not Gaff’s.

Siggy is an excellent character.  Through his notebook we see how his parents’ unconventional meeting and marriage as a result of uncontrollable war circumstances has made him the slightly crazy person he is today.  Personally I think he is just misunderstood, which is why I had issues with Gaff worrying about going crazy like Siggy.  Siggy isn’t crazy; he’s just unconventional.

Gaff, on the other hand, is not a well-rounded character.  He is someone who I don’t understand and couldn’t relate to.  Although his crush on Gallen is the catalyst for a key plot point, I actually felt that he had infinitely more feelings for Siggy.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but it did make some plot points feel forced.

Overall, this is a typical 1960s generation book.  Siggy and Gaff feel like the middle lost generation.  Their parents were defined by the war, but they are defined by nothing.  All that matters about their lives is their pre-histories–how their parents met and were impacted by the war.  They are left meandering through history on a motorcycle attempting to figure out exactly how things turned out this way from the few clues the war-time people will let them have.  Those who enjoy this theme of the 1960s will enjoy this book.  Others who enjoy Irving’s writing style would be better off reading The World According to Garp.

3 out of 5 stars

Source: Library

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