Okay, I Get it, Sweden is Really Fucking Cold!

11.  Faceless Killers

Mankell's name has been all over the place since the incredible success of Stieg Larssen's Millennium Trilogy, and the other day I picked up one and recognized the name of his detective Wallander and so decided to give the first book a try.  It was a fine, pretty standard mystery, but I did think the ending fell a bit flat.  the truth is that I think I may have liked it better had I not read it on the heals of Theorin's Darkest Room.  Both have a bit of the aimless Scandinavian bloat, and it seems they all take place in the heart of winter with the below zero temperatures and brutal wind.  But this one just didn't live up to the pace of the other.  Although I read it in two days so I have to give it some credit, I just am not left with a great desire to pick up the next in the series or a real trust in Wallander. 

We see him after his wife and daughter have left him, his amount of alcohol intake is jarring, he has an odd meeting with a former best friend who he then leaves to flap in the wind, has a horrible meeting with his father and also leave him but in far more dire straits.  He forgets all the plans he makes with people, essentially assaults a colleague, and we are supposed to find him upstanding?!?  I can't imagine how hard it would be to live the life of a police officer but certainly in order for them to be effective in their job they must have a handle on themselves, and I am not sure Wallander does.  Maybe just seeing how he ends up would be enough to get me back to the series?  Guess we will see.

Thief of Time

10. The Swan Thieves 

Overall, I found The Swan Thieved to be frustrating and totally forgettable.  I was not one of the people who was blown away by The Historian so I didn’t have great expectations, but my frustrations developed quickly. 

The issues with point of view continued.  No variances in the voices developed, and then suddenly we started to get information from unknown sources.  For the first half of the book we had either word of mouth or letters for the doctor to find his information but then we were suddenly privy to information that wouldn't have been available.  Was it the doctor's imagination?  I have no idea.  

The ending was ridiculous! All along we have been trying to figure out what made this man go 'crazy', once we do (I almost beg to differ that we ever really got anywhere at all, but I digress...) he shakes hands with his doctor and walk out the door.  WTH!!!  He never spoke, he was never evaluated, he was never treated.  How does his doctor discovering who he was painting and why make this man no longer crazy!  WHAT?!?  I can't even think it out properly.  

Ugh.  Waste of my time, thieves indeed.

Bogged Down

The past few days I can't even get myself to read this book.  In the first chapter the psychiatrist is selected to help the patient because he too is a painter, and now I am wondering if you need to be a painter in order to enjoy these drawn out descriptions of an artists retreat.  This woman is boring, and predictable and, frankly, a bit annoying.  At this point I don't really see any need for her character and it is just annoying to read about her.  I just need to force myself to carry on and hope that there is some purpose to it all.

The switch back from 1887 to the present and comparing the two couples is very reminiscent of Possession as well.  So far I am finding very little of the story or the structure to be original.

Points of View

I love when authors play with point of view, but it is a hard thing to do. I love Tana French and she is a wiz at handling both male and females POV, Elizabeth Kostova is not.

In The Swan Thieves, she writes alternating points of view as well as alternating time frames, which is quite the fad lately. The plot has enough intrigue to pull the story along but the points of view are confusing because they all are the same. I guess the fact that each chapter is titled with a character name should have been a big clue that this wasn't her forte. The men sound the same as the women, the current characters the same as those living in the 1800's. The names help to keep things straight but it is a bit of an annoyance so far.

The Swan Thieves

I liked The Historian, but I wasn't as wild about it as most people so when I read the not-so-great reviews about this one i stayed away. But now I am on a library book kick and this one was actually in (probably not a good sign!) so I picked it up and started yesterday.

So far it is okay. It has going for it that I woke up this morning excited to give it a chunk of time so I could really get in to it, but it has going against it that about 30 pages in I had to read the back cover to figure out the sex of our hero (I thought it was a heroine!), but let's blame that on the reader for the time being.

26 Books

I have been looking at other book blogs to see what is out there and found one called 26 books.  It is made up of reviews from different readers who each have a goal of reading 26 books in a year.  So I thought I might keep track of the number I read this year to see where I come in.  Now, I don't work so I have a bit more time on my hands than most.  Here is my list so far:

9. The Darkest Room
8. The Host
7. World War Z
6. Wolf Speaker
5. Cosmopolis
4. Wild Magic
3. Tree of Codes
2. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
1. To Play The Fool

And I guess now I should get back to #10 (even though I am sure I will finish others before I finish it), Middlemarch.  I am not really sure why my mind constantly wanders when I read it, maybe because I feel like I have to.  I do like it though and I am about half way through.

The Best Kind of Weekend

So I started this blog to write more about the reading of books as opposed to just giving reviews, but this weekend was a perfect storm and I didn't stop to write because I was too busy reading!

First of all, Chris was home, and since he was gone all last week Darren was not interested in me at all so I curled up and read while they played.  I do have to wonder what Chris thinks I do all day!  He must think the poor child is left to fend for himself, not true though.

Second, I started a great book and just finished it.  The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin is a mystery but it is also a very creepy ghost story with lots of twists that you never see coming but that are really smart, and a totally satisfying ending, which I have been missing lately.  I know I read a recommendation for this book but I can't remember where and I really wish I could.  I am positive it had something to do with Stieg Larssen but I just can't remember, but whoever wrote it was right - this was so good!

Third, it is raining, so no reason not to love every minute of my time on the couch!

Like I said, a perfect storm.  Great company, great page-turning book, and the warmth of our home.  Lucky lady to say the least.

The Host

This woman confounds me!  Her writing is overall not good, but she does do dialogue well and maybe that is how she hooks you in.  

The first third of this book was painfully tedious for me, it needed editing.  Not just to be cut down but to be thought about more.  I guess that is often a complaint for me with her work, I wish I could tell that she had really thought things out instead of just writing in a big purge and never looking at it again – of course, I don’t know that she does that but it is how I read it. 

The second third of the book was better; maybe because we got to meet other characters?  And the last third was far too stretched out for the obvious conclusion.  Overall, the plot wasn’t really my thing, but it was an interesting idea, and that is certainly something.  I just wish she had written it better.

Get on With it Woman!

11:00 am - The Host is going to be the end of me!  Enough with the constant will they or won't they kill her.  It is page 200 of 600... They won't.

12:38 pm - "It was true that I did not smell good." pg 233 The Host. Best start to a new chapter ever.

1:49 pm - She just compared the "betrayal" of Jared by Jeb to Jesus and Judas. Really?!? Jesus is right...

2:03 pm - Let me guess, Team Ian vs. Team Jared... Ugh.

6:05 pm - And she makes me cry...

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hardback

At the moment I am reading two books, something that I tend to stay away from.  I am a bit OCD when it comes to reading, well actually, when it comes to life but that is a different story.  Anyway, I read my books one at a time and I stick with them until the bitter end, always.  But for the last few weeks I have been reading more than one thing and I find that it makes me anxious.

My mother received a Kindle for Christmas and so she and I decided that we would read one of the many free classics together.  We decided to tackle Middlemarch.  Now I say tackle only because it is long.  I have to wonder about this because I have read many long books and loved them but I still always react the same way when I see such a huge page count - ugh.  Anyway, I read somewhere that it was Virginia Wolfe's favorite book and I adore her so...  Off we go!  Now my mother works and has a life so I knew I would probably be ahead of her with some time to spare and since I want to share the experience with her instead of just checking in when we were both done I decided to read other books as we go.  It isn't that I don't like Middlemarch, in fact I find that I like it very much, but it all seems like I have read it before.  Girl falls for guy thinking he is one thing when he is really another, she doesn't notice the other men around her that are falling all over themselves for her, the snobby girl wants the man she thinks is rich but who we know is poor, blah, blah, blah.  But actually this familiarity doesn't make it easier to take breaks without losing track of the plot entirely.  And the fact that I am reading it with my mother means I will stick with it no matter what.

 

On a side note, one of my New Year's Resolutions was to stop buying books until I had read most of the many I bought last year - it is a sickness.  I made it six days - I sickness I say!  But I have also started to utilize our library since I take Darren there a lot.  Last week i picked up Stephenie Meyer's The Host - another big book.  Knowing that many people loved it but that I would never buy it.  I am about a hundred pages in and she is already annoying the crap out of me and I have even told her to Fuck Off in one part.  So now I am stuck with two huge books, both that I have to finish, and yet neither is drawing me in.  My solution: go buy some Bolano (Again, it is a sickness) to make me feel less dumb and more inspired.  Although reading three books might send me in to a tail spin...

Cultural Literacy

This is a test...This is only a test.  I had a little idea that I think might motivate me, but I start these things and tend to never finish, so we will see.

The concept of Cultural Literacy is something that I started to think about when I was completing my masters.  I even thought about changing the topic of my thesis from Advanced Placement courses, but by that time I just needed to get the damn thing done, but ever since it has been bashing around in my brain.

Hirsch is the man who came up with the term, but then he went on to publish all sorts of books with lists:  What your first grader should know, What your second grader should know, etc.  And while he points out that they should know these things "in context" it still ticks me off.  Life isn't as easy as a to-do list, and knowledge isn't as easy as a to-know list.  But I am sure that it sold a lot of books so... he wins.

Then I found this quote:

"How does one become more culturally literate? By reading more, by reading about different subjects... When reading becomes a pleasure rather than a chore, one becomes more culturally literate naturally. It's a simple fact that the more one reads, the more one can understand what is read, the more enjoyable reading becomes and... the more culturally literate one becomes."

And I realized that while I have been thinking about Cultural Literacy I have also subconsciously been striving to increase my own under the guise of, "Holy crap, this 1950's stay-at-home mom stuff is mind-blowingly boring!"

When I was pregnant with Darren I found that I couldn't read novels.  I was so stressed and anxious that I simply couldn't concentrate.  It was brutal.  But when he was about six months old I found that I absolutely needed something that was mine and only mine.  So books became my salvation once again and I have been on a tear ever since. 

I have been reading all sorts of stuff!  Recommendations from friends, books from the 1001 books to read before you die list, but mostly fiction.  I write reviews on Goodreads and have really enjoyed that but I have also noticed that a one time review just doesn't really cover how it feels to read a book.  My attention is waning and that brings me here.  I wanted a place to chronicle the actual reading and see if it helps to get me fired up again.

In a lot of ways this is just for me and I don't really intend for anyone else to read it, but it may turn out to be something pretty good, so why not just put it out there?  Who knows, reading is very personal for me but I think a huge component of Cultural Literacy is discourse.  It is great to read about things and take in that information but I also think that a huge part of participating is to then discuss that information with others.  In this technology ridden world talking is becoming less and less common and that makes me sad - as she types in a blog! - so maybe just getting it out here will fill some of that hole for me.  Who knows... but here we go!