... Yet More Resolutions

The beginning of the year is a fabulous time to get interested in book challenges. There are so many starting right now that I felt like a kid in a candy store browsing around and picking which ones I wanted to join. Since I started this blog (a few short days ago) I've been dipping my toes in the pool of book challenge goodness, and now I'm taking the plunge (so to speak).

So here goes. I'm joining 7 challenges so far this year, and I hope it will actually become more!

Sci fi Experience

I have already posted about the , but here's my reading list so far (almost all books mooched from the parents):

Books/Stories by Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly
Our Friends From Frolix 8
Paycheck
The Minority Report
The Man in the High Castle
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Radio Free Albemuth

Books by Ray Bradbury
The Toynbee Convector
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Quicker Than the Eye
The Illustrated Man

The Planet That Wasn’t by Isaac Asimov
Transition by Vonda McIntyre

Short Story Challenge

For this challenge, I have choices between 10 short stories during 2008 or 10 short story collections. I haven't finished my reading list, but this is the start:

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman (collection)
Old Times on the Missippi by Mark Twain (story)
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? By Philip K Dick
The Overcoat by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

I'm planning to keep up to date on this one by participating in the discussions on A Curious Singularity

The Mythopoeic Award Challenge

I really like this one. I get to pick 7 titles from the books which have contended for the Mythopoeic Award. I might have to add more as I get more into this one:

Little, Big by John Crowley
Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

In Their Shoes Challenge

For this one, I'm reading however many books I want to that are autobiographies, memoirs, or biographies:

Eat, Pray Love Elizabeth Gilbert
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Candy girl: a year in the life of an unlikely stripper by Diablo Cody.
The year of magical thinking by Joan Didion
Paula by Isabel Allende
Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim

Young Adult Reading Challenge

For this one I'm reading 12 Young Adult Books. I haven't had the time to quite finish this list either, but I figure I'll browse the library as I check out new books. Now that I've finally figured out where the YA section is:

Feed by M.T. Anderson
House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint
Esperanza rising by Pam Mu~noz Ryan
Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Chunkster Challenge

For this I was a little apprehensive... 4 books in 2008 that are 450 pages or longer. But then I realized I already have a chunky book that I've started on, and another I'm planning to read for the Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge. So... easy peasy:


War and Peace
The Once and Future King by T.H. White
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

My Year of Reading Dangerously

The point of this one is to read books that are challenging, or at a minimum ones you don't normally read. This one comes with an official list, which I'm going to stick with so far. The one that sounds the scariest for me is Great Expectations. Hope I can find all of these books in the library! If not, there will be some substitutions.

January: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
February: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (African American)
March: Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood (Atwood for Atwood's sake)
April: Transformations, by Anne Sexton (Poetry)
May: Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote (Southern)
June: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
July: The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (adolescent)
August: Maus I and II, by Art Spiegelman (Graphic Novel, Pulitzer winner)
September: The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy (Independent)
October: The Human Stain, by Philip Roth (Contemporary/Jewish)
November: A Month of Classic Short Stories, Various
December: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (Dusty)

Bookmooching

My mom just got Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover for Christmas. While visiting, I started reading it, and started getting really into it. So before she could even finish it, I asked her if I could please please borrow it because I just wanted so badly to finish it and start my own money makeover. She agreed, on the condition that I bring it back asap.

Husband and I are recent college grads and we both had read over the majority of the book in a few hours and we were absolutely amazed. Dave Ramsey claims that we could could get out of our amazing mountain of student loan debt in 2 years or less. He breaks down his plan into baby steps (a send up to "What About Bob") and I realized that we had actually started on his plan by recently paying off a minor student loan in 4 months instead of 10 years.

I quibble with Dave on a few minor points, but then again he is the one with the wealth, and I'm the one with the student loans, so I'll post an update after we get rolling and let you know how his techniques are working for us.

Total Money Makeover wasn't the only thing I mooched though. I have been getting more and more excited about the many reading challenges online, and in anticipation of the ones I hope to join soon, I cleared out a few shelves of my parents' books. I felt like I hit the literary jackpot, leaving with 2 bags worth of books. My parent's collection is pretty sci fi heavy, but I did score with War and Peace, a short story collection by Mark Twain, Animal Farm, The Gangs of New York, and Lord of the Flies.

The final thing I was uberexcited to recover from my parent's place is a stack I had been keeping of stories I've written over the years. I didn't have time to sort through it yet, but I saw stories as far back as middle school. One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to write more stories. Hopefully I will be inspired by all of the fabulous books I'll be reading!

The Blue Screen of Death... or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the External Hard Drive

Let's hear it for fortuitous circumstances. One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external hard drive, and December 26th is when my husband backed up all of his files on it. On December 27th, the Blue Screen of Death appeared.

While the body of the Dell is now broken (although hopefully revivable), its files, or soul, if you will live on. Simply in another format. To really mix my religious metaphors, you might even call it reincarnated in the external hard drive. Let's just call the whole situation what it is. A Christmas miracle! (picture a small child with very wide eyes saying this).

Anyone else experience any Christmas miracles? Or, if you will, Christmas fortuitous circumstances?

Bold Blue Adventure Goes to the Dogs

Or… what I am learning from my puppy.

I read a great deal of books about Cavaliers, puppies in general, house breaking, and training, before we got our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Rusty.

Rusty loves those books too. He really loves eating them.

Other favorite hobbies include chasing that long furry thing on his butt and barking at that interloper in the mirror. New people mean new smells and new excitement.

Let’s pretend for a minute this is a post where I am reviewing a book, thus doing you, the reader, a service, and not simply gushing on about how my puppy is the cutest puppy in the world. Alright. I choose to review Cesar’s Way by Cesar Milan.

Cesar is the one who went from illegal immigrant to nationally famous Dog Whisperer based on his ability to rehabilitate dogs who have major (and minor) behavior problems.

I have not seen his show at all, but I was impressed by his stories of how he saved many dogs who were so mishandled by their owners as to be unfit to be around humans or other dogs. He (and his ghost writer) has an excellent ability to explain how dogs think, and I find myself going back to his advice frequently when I am interacting with Rusty. I’ve learned, for example, that making a big fuss when Rusty bumps his head or is scared of something new only leads to Rusty feeling more scared because I, his pack leader, have shown him that its okay to react fearfully.

However, much of his advice seems aimed at larger dogs. Cavaliers are small and have such an easy-going temperament naturally, that I honestly skipped over some of his chapters that didn’t seem to apply.

However, I did find this quote sums up quite nicely what joys dogs bring to our lives: “Every day… dogs remind me to live in the present. Maybe I had a fender bender yesterday or I’m worried about the bill I have to pay tomorrow, but being around animals, I am always reminded that the only real moment in life is now” (p 96 if you’re curious).

I am not the perfect pet-parent of course, but because Rusty is a dog and lives in the right now, he will forgive me as long as I provide food, a lap, and a face to be licked enthusiastically.

Book Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

I was reading the other day about a controversy at a local college over the English department’s chosen common text for the semester. I immediately decided to read it because there is nothing I like more than a controversial book.

The Handmaid’s Tale describes a dystopian society in the near future where a totalitarian regime has removed nearly every trace of freedom from the women. Women are covered from head to toe and no longer allowed to read. Declining fertility leads to a class of “handmaids” who act as concubines to the wealthy men. The extra twist is that the setting is the US, taken over by Christian fundamentalists and renamed it the Republic of Gilead.

Offred, the title character, is a Handmaid; the concept is stolen from a very literal reading of the Biblical story of Rachel and Leah’s who gave their handmaids Bilhah and Zilphah to their husband Jacob in order to increase the number of their offspring. Although Offred was once an average American woman with a husband and daughter of her own, her only job now is to have sex once a month with her Commander in order to produce he and his wife a child.

While The Handmaid’s Tale treads similar territory to Brave New World and 1984, I think it is a fascinating read well worth the effort. Having attended for many years a Christian church in the throes of an extremely fundamentalist line of thinking, I found myself wanting to pump my arms in the air and yell “Yes! This is what happens when extremists use religion to justify their politics!”

The Handmaid’s Tale should definitely be on your reading list. Not because it is an accurate picture of the religion by any means, but it does offer a look at fundamentalist teachings taken to their ultimate conclusion and warns us that the picture isn’t pretty. Atwood writes beautiful prose and I was totally drawn in to her writing. The book doesn’t explain everything that’s going on right away, and in the early chapters, each tantalizing clue as to what happened to Offred and what the Republic of Gilead is makes it hard to put the book down.

Books Read by Month

2008
January
The Overcoat by Gogol
Feed by M.T. Anderson
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
American Gods by Neil Gaiman

February
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason
Firefly Lane byKristin Hannah

March
The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Rises the Night by Colleen Gleason
The Three Incestuous Sisters by Audrey Niffenegger
The Sister by Poppy Adams
Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Fifteen Minutes of Shame by Lisa Daly

April
Araby by James Joyce
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Bikini Season by Sheila Roberts
Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K. Dick
Fifteen Minutes of Shame by Lisa Daly
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Messenger by Lois Lowry
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody

May
Fables: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham
Watermelon King by Daniel Wallace
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
Interpreter of Maladies by by Jhumpa Lahiri
Life is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman
Janeology by Karen Harrington
Stardust by Neil Gaiman

June
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mosim Hamid
Entombed by Linda Fairstein
Sandman: World's End by Neil Gaiman
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Marie-Therese, Child of Terror by Susan Nagel

July
The Absolute Sandman Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Breakout by Paul Fleischman
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

August
The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson
Eminent Domain by Dan O' Brien
Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart
Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman
Farworld: Water Keep by J. Scott Savage
Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

September
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Volume 1: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

October
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon by Philip K. Dick
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

November
Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1 by Alan Moore
Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Last Colony by John Scalzi

December
Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horowitz
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
New Moon by Stephanie Meyer

2009
January
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card
Paper Towns by John Green
Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Corey Doctorow
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
Sandman:Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman
Sandman:A Game of You by Neil Gaiman

February
Eclipse One edited by Jonathan Strahan
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Fables:Storybook Love by Bill Willingham
Fables:March of the Wooden Soldiers by Bill Willingham
Sandman:Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman

March
Sandman:Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman
Sandman:the Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman
Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

April
Heat Lightning by Jason Sanford
Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar
Library: an Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Tigerheart by Peter David
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Zel by Donna Jo Napoli
Sandman: The Wake by Neil Gaiman
Fables: The Mean Seasons by Bill Willingham
Fables: Homelands by Bill Willingham
Fables: Arabian Nights (And Days) by Bill Willingham

May
Laika by Nick Abadzis
Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
Vampire Knight Volume I by Matsuri Hino
Vampire Knight Volume II by Matsuri Hino
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephan Chbosky
The Apprentice's Masterpiece by Melanie Little
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

June
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Fables: Wolves by Bill Willingham
Fables: Sons of Empire by Bill Willingham
Fables: The Good Prince by Bill Willingham
Emma: Volume I by Kaoru Mori
The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman
Emma: Volume II by Kaoru Mori
Emma: Volume III by Kaoru Mori
Emma: Volume IV by Kaoru Mori
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
The Lucifer Effect by Phillip Zimbardo
A Beautiful Child by Matt Birkbeck
The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman

July
Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
Audrey, Wait! by Robin Benway
Emma: Volume V by Kaoru Mori
The Walking Dead: Safety Behind Bars by Robert Kirkman
The Walking Dead: The Heart's Desire by Robert Kirkman
The Walking Dead: The Best Defense by Robert Kirkman
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall by Bill Willingham
Heavier Than Air by Nona Caspers
The Gathering by Anne Enright
The Walking Dead: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman
The Walking Dead: The Calm Before by Robert Kirkman
The Walking Dead: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman
What Do Muslims Believe? by Ziaddin Sardar
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

August
Scar Night by Alan Campbell
Thessaly: Witch for Hire by Bill Willingham
Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond
Persepolis I by Marjane Satrapi

September
Persepolis II by Marjane Satrapi
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
Emma Volume 6 by Kaoru Mori
Emma Volume 7 by Kaoru Mori
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Persepolis I & II by Marjane Satrapi

October
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
A Spanish Lover by Joanna Trollope

November
In the Woods by Tana French
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Under the Banner of Heaven by

December
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The City and The City by China Mieville
Club Dead by Charlaine Harris
Flora Segunda
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

January
Freakonomics
Superfreakonomics
Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Coraline (graphic novel) by Neil Gaiman
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by
The Help by

Finally... A Resolution I Can Keep

I'm not usually one to make resolutions, because I don't like to fool myself into thinking I will actually keep them. This year, though, I stumbled upon a resolution that will be hard to screw up.

In January and February of this year, I'm joining the Sci-Fi Experience 2008 and committing to read some science fiction in January and February. My goals are to read the Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series and also tackle more Philip K. Dick stories. His short stories were the basis for a number of movies, including Minority Report and Paycheck, both of which are personal favorites. I'll post reviews of the books I read on this blog.

As a middle schooler, I used to scour the library shelves for the books marked with the blue rocket ship label. I loved imagining the big "what if". I still browse through the sci fi section at the library. There's nothing better than the feeling of turning the last page in an Asimov or Heinlein yarn, your head buzzing with all sorts of new ideas of what the world would be like if we have robots who became sentient or space ships that could shrink to the size of a molecule. I'm looking forward to this resolution. Want to join? Click here.