National Readathon Wrap Up

National Readathon Day was a bit of a fail for me. The meeting I had was supposed to be an hour but ended up taking two hours plus a half hour of chit chat.

I did make a concerted effort to read the rest of the weekend, though. I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Twelfth Night (which wasn’t on my original list), read some of Empress Cixi biography I’ve been reading and also a little 100 Years of Solitude. I also have to read for one of my classes, so I read half of Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.

It was really fun to read a novella and a play, since those are formats I very rarely read. Based on how I flew through them this weekend, I definitely might add more of those formats to my typical reading wheelhouse. Novellas and short stories also fit into the Read Harder challenge that I talked about in my 2015 goals post.

How did your National Readathon day go?

National Readathon Day

In case you haven’t heard, National Readathon Day is coming up this Saturday! The idea is to set aside four hours in the afternoon to read. I actually have a meeting in the middle of the readathon, but I’m going to try to read as much as possible.

The National Readathon Day is sponsored by the National Book Foundation, Goodreads, Mashable, and Penguin-RandomHouse. Use the hashtag #TimeToRead to follow along with other readathoner-ers. Some towns are having readathon events, so check your local events if you want to get more involved!

I’m doing pretty terribly at my TBR, so I’m going to try to focus on getting some of that reading done this weekend. Readathons are hard sometimes, because I kind of go cross eyed after a while unless the book is really plot driven. To solve that, I like to keep a good mix of books that I can switch between throughout the day.

My TBR for the readathon is to spend at least an hour making progress on Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and make some progress on One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’ve been having a hard time getting into One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I might substitute Deadly Class instead.

Review: Ready Player One

I have kind of an unpopular opinion: I didn’t like this book. (Spoilers ahead)

The premise of this book was great. It’s kind of post-apocalyptic. Humans have polluted the earth so much that huge regions are wastelands. Everyone moves to cities and live in sort of futuristic shantytowns. They all go into the OASIS, a virtual reality, all day. The creator put in easter eggs,  granting the person who found them his fortune and ownership of the OASIS. Wade is chasing the easter eggs, along with some friends he made along the way.

The book is full of 80s pop culture references,which is a lot of fun and part of why it is so popular. There are video games and movies and books and I’m sure a million things I didn’t even pick up on. The premise of hunting for easter eggs throughout  is cool.

Unfortunately, I just can’t get on board with this one. The references were cool at first. Then came a chapter where Wade has to recreate Ferris Beuller’s Day Off to get an easter egg. The book then goes on to describe the movie in excruciating detail. There were some references that were just for the sake of references. Wade has a replica of the Delorean described in painstaking detail only to never be seen again.

The other problem I have with this book is Wade’s infallibility. Wade is living in a world where everyone and is a hacker and we’re supposed to believe that he is this amazing, ridiculous genius. There’s absolutely no backstory that explains his genius. At first I thought his arrogance was going to result in a comeuppance, but no. Instead, he spends a large chunk of this book hiding from corporate henchmen while selling wares on the black market and becoming world famous. He accomplishes all this without a single misstep. In fact, throughout the entire book, Wade never fails at anything. The one time we do think he fails, when he becomes an indentured servant, it turns out that he orchestrated the whole thing. Everything just works out so nice and neat. It defies belief.

I didn’t hate this book. It was fun, it was witty, it had a good premise. The beginning of the book sucked me in, and was what convinced me not to abandon it. Overall, though, I can’t recommend this book. It was just too neat and tidy.

January TBR

Welcome to January! It’s cold as hell, but at least we’ll all get a lot of reading done.

I’m not a huge TBR person. I usually only buy one or two books at a time and I don’t like locking myself down to a specific list. I do have a to-read list on Goodreads (feel free to add me!) that I use more as a dumping ground for books I hear about so when I go to the bookstore or the library I have a rough list to work from.

This month, though, I have some books that I own and haven’t read yet, so here’s my January TBR (to be read in between Friends viewings, of course).

1. Finish Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang
2. Finish America’s Best Nonrequired Reading 2014 edited by Daniel Handler
3. Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
4. Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
5. Start One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

What are you reading this month?

2014 Wrap up and 2015 Goals

Like everyone else, I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the last year and looking forward toward 2015. 2015 is going to be a big year – I’m graduating from undergrad and looking toward the next phase of my life. With that in mind, reading isn’t going to necessarily be as high on my priorities as it usually is. That gives me an interesting in which to make my goals.

2014 Highlights

This year was the first time I set a Goodreads goal. I didn’t quite meet it, reading 57 books out of a projected seventy. I’m still really happy with having read 57 books, though. I’m a little iffy on the Goodreads challenge. I am very goal-oriented. That aspect of the challenge I love. What I don’t love, is that it counts number of books not number of pages. I think the challenge de-incentivizes longer books. I definitely found myself not picking up some longer books last year because I didn’t want to fall further behind. I’m excited for the 2015 Goodreads challenge, but I’ll be setting my goal with that in mind.

2014 was the year of the Podcast for a lot of people, with Serial going crazy and listenership increasing. As I’ve talked about before I absolutely love podcasts. My top three this year were Call Your Girlfriend, On the Media, and Nerdette Podcast.

When I’m not reading books, watching TV, or listening to Podcasts, I’m reading articles in Pocket. Pocket (who is not paying me to say this) is this great Android/iOS/OS/web platform that allows you to save articles online to read later. It formats them in an easy to read format and allows you to archive and favorite pieces. Some of my favorite pieces from this year were “Laurie Penny on Lena Dunham’s Girls: it can’t represent every woman,” “Kids Won’t Listen,” “America’s weird, enduring love affair with cars and houses,” “A Censored History of Ladies in YA Fiction,” “Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Power of Style,” “Poorly Defined Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Used to Blame, Criminalize Mothers,” “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” and finally “Is Philanthropy Bad for Democracy?”

Best Reads of 2014

I was lucky to read some really great books this year. Here are my top five, in no particular order, with links to reviews where applicable.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (Review forthcoming)

Jane Eyre  by Charlotte Bronte

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Reading Goals for 2015

• Read more diversely! Last year my numbers were abysmal. This year, I want to read at least 20% authors of color/LGBT authors/international authors/etc.
• I want to read at least six classics from the western canon.
• Take the time to read longer, meatier texts like Grapes of  Wrath.
• Read at least 50 books.
• Post here once a week.
• Do the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge.

That was my year! Thanks for being part of it. Feel free to share what great things you read in 2014 and what you’re looking forward to in 2015!