Monday, January 7, 2013

Books: My eyes are bigger than my...eyes.

My book plate is overfull. Right now, I'm partway through:

The Table Comes First, by Adam Gopnik
Pirate King, by Laurie R King
Ghost Walk, by Marianne MacDonald (Finished! Around 1/13)
A Death in Summer, by Benjamin Black
Winter of Discontent, by Jeanne M. Dams
Escaping into the Open, by Elizabeth Berg
Write Away, by Elizabeth George
A Charitable Body, by Robert Barnard
Cool, Calm & Contentious, by Merrill Markoe
The Chicken Chronicles, by Alice Walker
What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman
What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons, by Lorna Ladvik (Finished! Around 1/17.)

Well, that's just alarming. I didn't know, when I started the list, how long it would be. Odds are that I've forgotten some, too.

I think that this explains why joining 100+ challenges hampers my reading--I feel pressure to finish the book not too long after I started it. And it doesn't count if I don't finish it in the year that I started it. So I'm declaring my own 100+: My goal is to finish 100+ books this year, irrespective of when I started them. If I continue that from year to year, then it really doesn't matter when I started them.

That's the plan. I should probably go read something now.

10 comments:

  1. Currently slogging through: Can You Forgive Her? which is old Trollope at his heftiest, and he is pretty hefty. Second part very exciting though.
    100 books is ambitious. Brave you are.

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  2. he he, i always think 100 books sounds like such a good round ambitious number. declaring 50 books is so boring. but 50 books it is for me. the one and only time i completed 100 books was the year that i raced through so many good books and didn't enjoy them as much as I would have without all the racing. maybe my new challenge could be to go back and reread the titles from that year of blurry reading that I raced through all the while regretting that I wouldn't be lingering.

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  3. I've been half through the Pirate King for a year now. :) I stopped at some point and never picked it up again which is strange as I usually love that series. Oh well.
    I'll be counting it as well for this year if I manage to finish it. I'm counting everything. :)

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  4. I love Elizabeth Berg! And Jane Hamilton, who for some reason popped into my mind at the same time, possibly because she is shelved next to her. I read so few hard copy books any more, it is a disgrace. Used to manage at least 50, now it is probably less than six.

    I am just coming to the end of my brother's book, "The Million Death Quake". Never thought I would find a factual book on earthquake prediction so darn engrossing - and entertaining. And I would say so even if I wasn't his sister. : - )

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  5. Blacknall! (Allen? BA? How are you properly addressed in this environment?) That sounds impressive and, indeed, hefty. The books I'm reading 100 of are generally much, much shorter.

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  6. Yo, Cynthia! Yes, I managed not to rush my way through books, but I did force myself, to some extent, to stick to one book. Which I find boring, and so then I don't read any book at all, and instead I putter on the Web. So maybe this new definition of 100+ will work for me.

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  7. Yo, Ines! Yes, there's something just not quite right about Pirate King. I suppose the absence of Holmes for so much of the beginning is part of it; has there been so little of him at the beginning of any other book of the series?

    I'm reasonably confident that it will redeem itself, but right now I've shifted elsebook, to, today, Ghost Walk. Which, I now discover, I've already read. :P At least I don't remember how it ends.

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  8. Howdy, Vanessa! Y'know, it didn't occur to me that, oh, yeah, if she's talking about writing her novels, _she's written novels_. Elizabeth Berg, that is. And Jane Hamilton? I'll make a Note.

    An alarming number of my books are on the Kindle app in my iPad. This is annoying because I can't bring them into the bathtub, and guilt-inducing because my local bookstore doesn't profit. The original plan was that I would have precisely one eBook for occasions when I was out and about without a book, and otherwise read dead trees. Somehow I failed in that. I think that I need to give in to the eBook thing and find out what eBook scheme is available to independent bookstores, now that Google's made it clear that they're dropping the old program on the floor.

    That was a long comment, wasn't it? I must also make a Note of your brother's book.

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  9. The funny thing is I stopped reading exactly when Holmes appeared.
    I guess I lost interest by that time.
    Happens to me quite often. But unfortunately, I rarely pick those books up again.

    Btw, happens to me too - I pick up a book I already read and can't remember at all how it ends.

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  10. Heh. Now I worry that I may not finish it at all. I did finish two of the books on that list, though. (Yay!) I'm thinking of writing "quick sniff"-equivalent book reviews.

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