finish line
Nov. 27th, 2005 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omnia_mutanturSo, I finished my 100th book this weekend. It's a remarkably liberating feeling. I'm either never going to read again or start Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norell immediately. i'm tempted to post a list of the books I own but haven't read yet, to see if anyone has any suggestions, but i fear for the lack of comments, so i shan't, at least not yet.
95. Emerald Magic. . a lot of good contributors, Jacqueline Carey being the one that drew me in, but i didn't particularly enjoy it as a whole. and andrew greeley still creeps me out.
96. The devil's larder by Jim Crace. some interesting, a lot of them terribly creepy. I'm intrigued by the man's style and hope to read something else of his eventually. very fast read.
97. cooking for mr latte by Amanda Hesser. but jeffrey steingarten has a bit part. i didn't dare bring it to work to read because the cover was just that pink. A guilty pleasure that was occasionally a pleasure and occasionally just the narrative of a woman I wanted to smack around.
98. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis. and a friend asked me about the sexism in the books and I hadn't read them in years. So a couple trips to B&N and I finished off a couple. The sexism seems pretty much par for the time period, and the Jesus is obvious. I'm a little curious about the witches being descended from Lilith and a couple of the other throw-away lines (like Lewis's opinions about education) and I'll probably read the rest of the them, but I decided to count these three as one book.
99. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. though, as one gentleman proved to me in my life, anything you wait more than five years for has a pretty good chance of being disappointing. It was weirdly gendered, masculine, but she seemed to try to temper the masculine by making it heavily religious. it's got the same slow tempo as housekeeping but somehow it drags rather than lovingly lingers. There were a couple gorgeous moments of prose, though. maybe i just need to steer clear of quite so much jesus in my pleasure reading.
100. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. The writing is pretty, but dense (not in the enjoyably chewy way, but the over-stirred cake way) but i'll forgive it because i like books about authors and books about cooks and this one sort of satisfied both. The food descriptions are fantastic and ideas of the unreliability of writing one's own memoir are always fun to chew on.
I haven't decided if I want another goal for next year, a smaller one, because I'd prefer to learn something as well as read and want to set a goal along those lines, either something about languages, or computers, or sewing. or maybe just set myself the goal of rereading the complete works of shakespeare or just more plays in general, or something along those lines. i like goals, even as i'm expecting to fail at them, and i'm not sure why. it might be the quantifiable nature of these things, it's harder to discount 100 books than it is to discount teaching myself to cook.
either way, i did. now for some gratifyingly obsessivecompulsivedisordersatisfying needlepoint, i think.
95. Emerald Magic. . a lot of good contributors, Jacqueline Carey being the one that drew me in, but i didn't particularly enjoy it as a whole. and andrew greeley still creeps me out.
96. The devil's larder by Jim Crace. some interesting, a lot of them terribly creepy. I'm intrigued by the man's style and hope to read something else of his eventually. very fast read.
97. cooking for mr latte by Amanda Hesser. but jeffrey steingarten has a bit part. i didn't dare bring it to work to read because the cover was just that pink. A guilty pleasure that was occasionally a pleasure and occasionally just the narrative of a woman I wanted to smack around.
98. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis. and a friend asked me about the sexism in the books and I hadn't read them in years. So a couple trips to B&N and I finished off a couple. The sexism seems pretty much par for the time period, and the Jesus is obvious. I'm a little curious about the witches being descended from Lilith and a couple of the other throw-away lines (like Lewis's opinions about education) and I'll probably read the rest of the them, but I decided to count these three as one book.
99. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. though, as one gentleman proved to me in my life, anything you wait more than five years for has a pretty good chance of being disappointing. It was weirdly gendered, masculine, but she seemed to try to temper the masculine by making it heavily religious. it's got the same slow tempo as housekeeping but somehow it drags rather than lovingly lingers. There were a couple gorgeous moments of prose, though. maybe i just need to steer clear of quite so much jesus in my pleasure reading.
100. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. The writing is pretty, but dense (not in the enjoyably chewy way, but the over-stirred cake way) but i'll forgive it because i like books about authors and books about cooks and this one sort of satisfied both. The food descriptions are fantastic and ideas of the unreliability of writing one's own memoir are always fun to chew on.
I haven't decided if I want another goal for next year, a smaller one, because I'd prefer to learn something as well as read and want to set a goal along those lines, either something about languages, or computers, or sewing. or maybe just set myself the goal of rereading the complete works of shakespeare or just more plays in general, or something along those lines. i like goals, even as i'm expecting to fail at them, and i'm not sure why. it might be the quantifiable nature of these things, it's harder to discount 100 books than it is to discount teaching myself to cook.
either way, i did. now for some gratifyingly obsessivecompulsivedisordersatisfying needlepoint, i think.
