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78. Swan Song by Robert McCammon. Can't even say for sure how many times I've read this book, but it's probably a dozen at this point and I still love it. (And wow, that Amazon edition is about a million times nicer cover than the old one I have, LOL!)

79. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. This was my second time through, and I think I liked the beginning sections more this time than the first read. It's a very, very interesting and creative story. Scary, too.

80. Matilda by Roald Dahl. I was trying to convince my son that we should read this one again, and failed, but when I started looking through it I ended up reading the whole book. It's such a good story!

81. Hungry - A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves by Crystal Renn. Supremely triggery for anyone who has struggled with eating disorders, but a very powerful story. Crystal Renn is now a plus-sized model with a very successful career and a very good head on her shoulders.

82. Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern. If you've enjoyed the tweets, you'll like the book, which alternates more traditional chapters with quotes from Justin's dad.

But I've gone well over the 50 I was aiming for.

75. How To Train Your Dragon Book 4 - How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse by Cressida Cowell. This was the last book the boy has in the series, so we'll have to get some more soon!

76. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. I used to read this comic strip in college and was thrilled to find a huge collection of it at our library. Wonderful stuff.

77. Deliver Us From Evie by M. E. Kerr. Young adult novel told from the point of view of a teenaged boy, about growing up on a farm and about his sister who is gay. Very good.

71. Quentins by Maeve Binchy. Re-read. Not one of my very faves, but good the way all Binchy's work is good.

72. Dirty Little Secrets by C.J. Omololu. Young adult novel about a girl whose mother is a hoarder. Very good.

73. Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy. Another re-read. I really ought to see if the author has come out with anything recent in the past few years!

74. Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip - Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by Steve Dublanica. Meh. Sometimes I like this guy's website, other times not so much. He might just be a little too cynical for my tastes. Bought it for cheap at the used book store.

68. Evening Class by Maeve Binchy. I've read this several times and still enjoy it very much.

69. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. This was really good! Lots of case info about different people's experiences with compulsive hoarding and how their histories might have led to it.

70. How to Train Your Dragon: How To Speak Dragonese by Cressida Cowell. The boy and I are still working on this series, which is adorable.

64. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Sometimes wandered off into tangents that didn't interest me, but for the most part I thought it was very well-written and powerful.

65. Nights of Rain and Stars by Maeve Binchy. Re-read because I couldn't remember what it was about. I've read some of Binchy's books at least a dozen times. Love them despite the fact that I don't find they elicit much of an emotional response as far as the stories/characters go.

66. Next Time, She'll Be Dead by Ann Jones. Difficult to read because the subject matter is so disturbing, but definitely worth it.

67. Everything's Eventual by Stephen King. Short stories, some of them better than others (which is pretty much always the way with short story collections, and also representative of my feelings about Stephen King's writing. I either love it or I'm totally indifferent to it.

59. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto. This book was difficult to read - it's about David Reimer, the twin boy who suffered permanent injury due to a botched circumcision. His parents were advised to raise him as a girl, and did so, but he always knew that something wasn't right and eventually chose to live life as a man.

60. How To Train Your Dragon Book 2: How To Be a Pirate by Cressida Cowell. Read this with my son after having read the first book some time ago. Adorable, great sense of humor, very funny.

61. Martha Stewart Cupcakes put out by Martha Stewart Living Magazine. I want to make all of these!

62. One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead. Very interesting non-fiction book about the huge industry that has been created around the American wedding.

63. Hungry Girl 1-2-3: The Easiest, Most Delicious, Guilt-Free Recipes on the Planet by Lisa Lillien. I didn't realize when I requested this through inter-library loan that its focus is on low calorie eating, which I don't mind as a concept. But a lot of the recipes contain things that I don't really consider to be "real food," like Fat Free Sugar Free Cool Whip and Splenda, so I'm less excited about it than I thought I would be. Some of the recipes sound okay though.

54. Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. I read this one from the library and then bought it and several others by the same author in a lot off Ebay. And I still haven't read most of the others, because I keep re-reading this one. I know it doesn't really make a lot of sense that that's the way I'm handling it, but I LOVE this particular book so much. Snarky characters really, really make my day.

55. Love and Lies: Marisol's Story by Ellen Wittlinger. Young adult book about a young woman who is a lesbian and who wants to write a novel. Not brilliant, but I didn't hate it.

56. Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. I read this because I'd previously read Julia Child's My Life in France (which was excellent) and because I wanted to see the movie version. I enjoyed it but it wasn't spectacular or anything.

57. Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories by Betsy Lerner. Not particularly inspiring, but I saw myself in it, which is probably why I didn't enjoy it very much.

58. Dragonfly Stories compiled by Rainbow Legends LLC. Picked this up the discount bookstore -- Amazon doesn't even have a listing for it. Very short stories about the coming out process and what it was like from many different people's points of view.

49. Other People's Dirt: A Housecleaner's Curious Adventures by Louise Rafkin. This is a really interesting book that reminds me a little bit of Nickel and Dimed.

50. The Unwritten Rules of Friendship by Natalie Madorsky Elman and Eileen Kennedy-Moore. This book overwhelmed me with its sheer amount of information - I'm definitely going to have to read it again at least once, maybe more.

51. The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III by William Dear. I recently got a copy of this again after having read it a dozen times as a teenager. It's really good.

52. Save Karyn: One Shopaholic's Journey to Debt and Back by Karyn Bosnak. This is a true story (mostly, presumably) and I think it would be enjoyable to anyone who liked the Shopaholic series.

53. The Walking Dead (Book 5) by Robert Kirkman. Yay! I would totally buy these if they weren't so freaking expensive. As it is, I have to read them as the library gets them in.

44. Untamed (House of Night, Book 4) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. Still enjoying the series.

45. More Things You Need To Be Told: A Guide to Good Taste and Proper Comportment in a Tacky, Rude World by Lesley Carlin and Honore McDonough Ervin. I picked this up at the discount book store because I find etiquette books interesting and because I was familiar with the authors' website. It was okay. I think their habit of Capitalizing Very Important Things is annoying, though.

46. The Battle for Skandia (Book 4, Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan. My son and I are reading this series. At least this book didn't end in a horrid cliffhanger (unlike the two previous ones, LOL)!

47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. We read this for book club. I had a really hard time getting into it, and really struggled with the first five or six chapters, but after that it was great. Beautifully written, intriguing story. Has anyone read The Virgin Suicides by the same author?

48. Hunted (House of Night, Book 5) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. There are more books in the series after this but this was the last one in the bunch that a friend loaned me, so I'll have to figure out if I care enough to search out Book 6. I liked the books but I'm not sure I care that much.

39. Chosen (House of Night, Book 3) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. Still enjoying this YA series.

40. Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen. I think this book is fairly brilliant and I'm already trying to incorporate some of its ideas into my parenting style. I wish I'd read this several years ago when my son was younger, even though I think it will still be helpful now.

41. Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich. This was okay, though I thought her previous Nickel and Dimed was a far more interesting read.

42. The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl by Shauna Reid. Pretty good, but not astonishingly brilliant or anything.

43. Alma Mater by Rita Mae Brown. I went into this thinking that it was a mystery, so I kept waiting for someone to die and was puzzled when I got further and further into the book and not a murder in sight! But it's a coming out story of a college girl who falls in love with another young woman and how her family and boyfriend deal with it. Moderately fairy-tale-ish.

36. Betrayed (House of Night, Book 2) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. I don't know how long I'm going to continue reading this series because already the second book is feeling fairly similar to the first one, LOL, but I certainly would have loved these when I was a teenager. I haven't read the Twilight books but suspect that teens who liked them might like these as well.

37. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher. At times I really enjoyed the way this book was written, but at other times it really didn't work for me. I think part of it is that the timeline of memoirs tend to be fairly wonky, and I find that to be a distracting way of reading a story. But I get that they're just like that.

38. I'm Not the New Me by Wendy McClure. Another memoir sort of book, highly accessible to people in fandom (and women in particular), I think. It was like reading a lot of blog posts and I certainly didn't dislike that!

32. Dealing With Disappointment: Helping Kids Cope When Things Don't Go Their Way by Elizabeth Crary. Pretty good for what it was, but I sort of wished there were more to it. It seemed insufficient somehow.

33. Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings by Colleen Curran. I love essay books, and I love books about weddings, so this was totally up my alley. As always, there were some essays I really loved and others that did less for me, but overall I thought it was really interested and I enjoyed it a lot.

34. Marked (a House of Night novel) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast. A friend loaned the first few books in this series to me, and I liked the first one well enough that I've started the second. They're young adult vampire novels told in the first person. Pretty good, though unlikely that I'd ever read them more than once.

35. The Icebound Land (Ranger's Apprentice book 3) by John Flanagan. Looking for the Amazon link to this book makes me realize that there are a LOT of books in this series. The boy and I have now read the first three and are a bit into book 4. They're meant for young enough kids that I wouldn't read them on my own, and as I'm reading them aloud I can easily "hear" the places where I think a solid editor would have made a big difference to the quality of the writing. The boy is enjoying them but even at the age of 9 clearly recognizes that they aren't Spectacular Literature.

29. Crave: Why You Binge Eat and How to Stop by Cynthia M. Bulik. I don't know - there are some interesting ideas in this book, and I think some of them are probably good ones, but overall I felt like it took an awful lot of pages to express what could have been an article in a magazine.

30. The Walking Dead Book 4 by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn. I'm still really enjoying this series, and the more I read, the less difficult I find the graphic novel format. This is the last book in the series that our library stocks, ha ha, so I guess it'll be a while before I read more.

31. Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata. Now this is a good book on this subject. Plenty of scientific studies sited, really interesting info, and all of it presented in a way that makes it accessible to the average reader. I'd heard good things about this book for years and I'm pleased to say they're all true. :-)

25. The Bishop's Daughter (a memoir) by Honor Moore. I can't say this did a lot for me, although there were parts of it that I found interesting. It's a memoir, so I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that it meanders quite a bit.

26 & 27. The Walking Dead Book Two and The Walking Dead Book Three by Robert Kirkman. I'm still enjoying this series even though I find the format of graphic novels to be difficult to follow at times.

28. The Diary of an American Au Pair: a novel by Marjorie Leet Ford. Meh. It reminded me slightly of The Nanny Diaries, but that was a far better and more entertaining story.

23. The Walking Dead (Book 1) by Robert Kirkman. I grabbed this from a display of graphic novels at the library and ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would. I'm a sucker for zombie stuff but not generally for graphic novels, but this had a good story and it kept the action moving right along. I would have taken out the second book when I returned the first one, but the display had been taken down and I wasn't in the mood to go searching for it. I'm definitely interested in reading more.

24. The Object of My Affection by Stephen McCauley. I thought I'd really like this but ended up feeling pretty meh about it. I wasn't sure what it was trying to "do" and even though I don't think stories always need to do something in particular, it felt like this one kind of meandered. It was fine, the writing was perfectly reasonable and I did like the main character as well as some of his friends, but in the end it didn't really make me FEEL anything.

20. My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme - What a fantastic book! Julia Child is funny and she kicks ass. Lots of talk of delicious food, and many funny anecdotes.

21. Unlocking the Meaning of Lost (an unauthorized guide) by Lynnette Porter and David Lavery - Interesting discussion of fandom related stuff and detailed discussion of the show itself.

22. Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx. The awesome

sam_gamgee gave me this book - it starts with the original story and then has the screenplay that they used to make the movie, too. It's a beautiful story and I have to say I think the screenplay is an unusually spectacular translation of the original.

17. Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst. Lots of characters and lots of point of views, which I had mixed feelings about. This is about a cast of people playing a reality-tv game show sort of like The Amazing Race, and their relationships with each other. Good stuff, though I far prefer Ms. Parkhurst's previous novel The Dogs of Babel, which is spectacular.

18. Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston. I adored Ms. Winston's novel Good Grief and while I didn't like this story as much, it was still very good. The characters are all real people with good hearts even when they're making mistakes.

19. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. This graphic novel is mostly about the author and her relationship with her father. It includes tons of literary references and I really enjoyed it even though reading it gave me a headache (literally) which I assume had something to do with the format. I was a big fan of her Dykes To Watch Out For in college and it was great to re-discover her.

14. Landing by Emma Donoghue. Beautiful modern love story about two women who meet on an airplane and develop a relationship aka fall in love despite the thousands of miles between their two homes. Great characters, very good dialogue. This story made me very happy.

15. The The Adrian Mole Diaries: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. A bit like Bridget Jones, but 'written' by a teenaged boy instead. I read the first book several times many years ago and loved it, and had no idea that there was a second book until I ran across this copy in a used bookshop. LOVE IT.

16. Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby. I've read these women's blogs off and on for a few years, so I can't say that anything in this book was really all that new to me, but I enjoyed reading it anyway. Good stuff here.

12. Feed Me!: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image edited by Harriet Brown. I really like Brown's website by the same name, and I also enjoyed this collection of essays. Some of them definitely run the risk of being triggery for people with eating issues, though, so keep that in mind if you're interested.

13. Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond. Written by a man who loves candy and chocolate. He goes to a lot of different small candy factories and watches how the candies are made. Interesting book with a fun sense of humor. It made me hungry for chocolate, though!

9. The Optimistic Child by Martin E. Seligman. This is a non-fiction book about how to help your child avoid depression and become a more positive person. It was interesting.

10. It by Stephen King. I've read this book several times before, but I really wanted to read it again, and I'm glad I did. I don't think I learned anything new, but I was reminded of so many of the things I love about the story and about Stephen King's writing.

11. Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden. This was also a re-read. LOVE this book.

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Entries tagged with 50 books in 2010

82 books!

Not looking like I'll hit 100 this year!

Yet again more books!

And yet more books!

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