All in the Wrist and Other Excuses

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything to this blog, and not for lack of thinking about it. Here are my excuses, in chronological order:

1.      November-December: “I’ll just wait until the holidays. I’m so busy, and blog readers will probably be pretty busy anyway.”

2.      January: “I have injured both wrists. Since my day job involves typing and other wrist-centric tasks, when I get home at night I can barely do anything.”

3.      February: “I have been sick. Twice.”

4.      March: “I’m having an existential crisis that is being exacerbated by a worldwide pandemic and a statewide shut-down the day before my birthday.”

5.      April: “I need to do my taxes. I need to do my taxes. I really don’t want to do my taxes. I think I’ll download Stardew Valley instead.”

And that’s how we got to May.

My Personal Ranking of Mark Twain's Works

1. The Mysterious Stranger
2. A Tramp Abroad (NF)
3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
4. Life on the Mississippi (NF)
5. Pudd’nhead Wilson
6. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. The Private Life of Adam and Eve: Being Extracts from Their Diaries, Translated from the Original Mss.
8. The Prince and the Pauper
9. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
10. Those Extraordinary Twins
11. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
12. A Double-Barrelled [sic] Detective Story
13. A Dog’s Tale

My Personal Ranking: Charles Dickens' Works

Quick note: I am only including works by Dickens that I have actually read and remember. For example, I think I read Dombey and Son at one point, but can’t remember any of it! (I sense a reread coming on….) 

1. A Christmas Carol (I have to put it at the top of the list, if only because I have reread it most!)
2. Nicholas Nickleby
3. Our Mutual Friend
4. Great Expectations
5. Oliver Twist
6. David Copperfield
7. Little Dorrit
8. Bleak House
9. Sketches By Boz
10. The Pickwick Papers
11. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
12. Hard Times
13. Barnaby Rudge
14. A Tale of Two Cities
15. The Cricket on the Hearth
16. Martin Chuzzlewit
17. The Old Curiosity Shop

New Year's Reading Resolutions for 2018

Looking back upon my year of reading in 2017, I can’t help but feel as if I could have done better. Granted, there’s a point where reading A LOT can take over one’s motivations and it suddenly all becomes about page numbers and book totals and whether a novella is more of a short story (and therefore doesn’t count) or a true novel (which would totally count!). It’s not right to make reading all about the numbers. That would make reading more like math, and we certainly can’t have that.

Yet sometimes goals are good, because they force us to push our limits, shake us out of apathy, plunge us into deeper subjects than we’re used to swimming in, and generally make us leave our comfort zone. This is especially true in today’s society where reading is secondary to other forms of entertainment. In fact, that’s why I feel I could have done better; I feel my reliance on other media (TV, mostly) caused me to waste valuable free time that would have been more profitably spent reading.

I refuse to feel despondent about my self-supposed failure, though. Instead I choose to look toward 2018 with new resolve. Setting lofty goals may be setting myself up for failure…but what if I reached those goals? Often it’s more about proving yourself to yourself than to others.

As usual, my baseline goal next year was to read 100 books. Then I thought, “Why stop there? Why not up it to 125? To 150?”

A List of Recommended Winter Reads

In my previous post I explained the why Winter Reads are—or should be—different from the usual Summer Reading fare. Winter Reads should take advantage of the fact that (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere like me) you are cooped up inside during long nights and cold days, and finally turn to those books that require a bit more focus and patience to appreciate. In this post I’ll present some books I’ve read in winters past. Without further ado, and in no particular order, my recommended winter readings include:

General Rules for Helpful Titles

Because it’s bad manners to point out flaws without having something positive to suggest as an alternative, as a continuation of the last post I present some rules and examples of books with titles that actually do tell us something about the plot contained within the covers.

Granted, most book titles are not extremely erudite. And the following is, as always, my opinion and therefore up to debate. But once some parameters are set (such as were set forth in the last post showing what might disqualify a title), it becomes a rather interesting game of comparison and analysis.

Conclusion #1: Including a Verb or Otherwise Indicating Action or Movement in the Title Is a Good Start:

Jules Verne is especially good at this:

• Journey to the Centre of the Earth
• Around the World in 80 Days
• From Earth to the Moon

So is Agatha Christie:

• Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Murder at the Vicarage
• Death on the Nile, Death in the Skies
• What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!
• The Moving Finger
• Lord Edgeware Dies
• A Murder is Announced

General Rules for Unhelpful Titles

I’ve been doing a lot of research into marketing for work; how people get other people not only to know about a certain product or service, but also how they get those other people to actually desire that product or service. And, as I am wont to do, as I’ve been mulling it over I’ve been thinking about how that relates to books.

Although you really should not judge a book by its cover, the harsh reality is that we do anyway. Not just the cover art or the size or the choice of font. We judge according to the title. A good title—or at least a unique one—can make a reader pick up a book even if the actual content is subpar, whereas a poor, mundane title can bely a truly magnificent book.

That’s what the modern Publishing Industry and the strategies of marketing would have us think, anyway. But is that really the case? Do we really rely only on a title to tell us what we want about a book? Or, especially for modern readers, do we “do our research” a little deeper, taking recommendations from people we know or looking at star ratings on the internet or actually opening the book and reading not only the blurb but also maybe skim over a bit of the actual text?

I decided to look at my own bookcase to run this experiment: If I knew nothing about a book except the title, would it be enough to entice me to read it?

Prydain is NOT Middle Earth

There are several similarities between Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

Ø  Epic fantasy story-line with a theme of Good vs. Evil and the fate of the world is at stake.

Ø  Villain is a largely unseen enemy working behind the scenes or from afar. Arawn and Sauron even sound somewhat alike. Mordor and Annuvin are also alike in being a sort of realm of Death.

Ø  Though not uncommon in all fantasy novels or even ancient mythology, both series have special enchanted objects. Some, like the Ring of Power and the Black Cauldron, serve as MacGuffins for the characters to pursue. Eilonwy’s magic bauble and the Palantir are seemingly-innocuous magical objects that turn out to be much more powerful than the characters believe at first. And then there are the special swords: Narsil in The Lord of the Rings, and Drnwyn in The Chronicles of Prydain, both of which are meant for specific people to wield and are used as symbols of the power to defeat evil.

Ø  Both books involve “fantasy” beings such as wizards, dwarves, and giant animals (although Llyan is way preferable to Shelob in my humble opinion!). There are also the Cauldron-born, Huntsmen, and the Horned King, which could easily be compared with orcs (specifically Uruk-hai, as both the Cauldron-born and Uruk-hai are “manufactured” warriors), ring-wraiths, the Wraith-king.

Ø  Like the stewards of Gondor, the Sons of Don have kept the evil at bay for a long time before the story begins.

Ø  Caer Dallben, a sort of farming sanctuary, seems to share the same timeless safety as the Shire, and the value of simple living and fruitful labor that Taran eventually learns is a lot like the Hobbit mindset.

Ø  Many characters bear similar characteristics or serve similar roles:

o   Aside from Arawn – Sauron, the best example of this is the commonalities between the warrior-prince Gwydion and Ranger/heir apparent Aragorn.*

o   Eilonwy – Eowyn

o   Gurgi – Gollum

o   Doli – Gimli

o   Dallben – Gandalf

o   Magg – Wormtongue

o   King Pryderi – Saruman

Ø  SPOILER ALERT BELOW

No seriously I'm about to spoil the ending

I'm warning you

If you haven't read the book this is your last chance to stop here and not find out the ending

Okayyyy here goes:

Ross McCammon’s "Works Well With Others": Things I Liked, Disliked, and Wondered About

Things I Liked About Ross McCammon’s Works Well With Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You:

1.       Chapter 2: Should You Keep Reading This Book established that I was well within my rights to skip around in the book. And so I did.

2.       Chapter 4: Classic Interview Rules, Plus One More is a good nutshell list. 

3.       Chapter 8: Ways in Which you Must Screw Up Early On: A Handy Checklist.  It made me feel good to read about someone even more horrible at First Day Jitters at a job than I [hope that I] am.

4.       “You cannot be an interesting conversationalist if you are faking interest in something.”

5.       I was so happy to have my “It’s a little earlier than I want to leave this party, so I’d better leave” philosophy validated. 

Looking Back at "Back to the Classics"

2015 was the year where I consistently forgot that I had signed up for a reading challenge, only to remember in December and quickly fill in the qualifying books from the previous months. It also was the year I exceeded my 100 Book annual goal (by a mere seven, of course, but I'll take what I can get), so it was not a total loss. In any case, I completed the Back to the Classics challenge hosted by karensbooksandchocolate.blogspot.com, and here are the results:

1.  A 19th Century Classic -- any book published between 1800 and 1899.

A Tramp Abroad

by Mark Twain

2.  A 20th Century Classic -- any book published between 1900 and 1965.

The Mystery of the Blue Train 

by Agatha Christie

It’s only taken reading the majority of her work, but I’m finally getting the hang of solving Agatha Christie’s mysteries.  I successfully deduced whodunit for The Mystery of the Blue Train and have felt immensely proud of myself ever since.  I wouldn’t say this was either Christie’s best-plotted puzzle or her easiest. Instead it strikes a pleasant chord between the two, and seemed to me an amalgam of Christie’s usual fare of Murder Mystery Set In The Heart Of England and her less famous espionage novels. I would recommend this to be “read” as an audio book, as there may (or may not) be a clue that’s more obvious when read in text.  It all depends on how hard the reader wants to make the detecting.

Fairy Tale Blitz

In my reading life, I’ve entered a sort of second childhood. Mind you, I don’t know that I ever really left. When it came to Childhood, it was simply too short and there were just too many good books to attempt to finish before WHAM next thing I knew it I was an adult being forced to read Mrs. Dalloway in my first college literature course. Like so many things, adult literature, the kind that is respected by academics and critics at any rate, is not nearly as fun as children’s lit. 

Reading Challenge 2014 Summary

In 2013 I completed four reading challenges. In 2014, rather than try to one-up myself and end up reading for quantity rather than quality, I put a ban on my signing up for any reading challenges online. Instead, I self-imposed challenges which will hopefully diminished that behemoth To Be Read pile that swallowed up my nightstand, bed, and pretty much half my room.  

The Finish Line At Last: Reading Challenge Recap 2014

This past week I finally finished my yearly quota of one hundred books. I’m a little early, I know, but I planned to read ten books a month for ten months, in order to have the last two months freed up for the holiday season. After this, anything else is just gravy.*

Below is my list. As I self-restricted myself, not included in the list are any picture books, graphic novels, How-To books (comprised mostly, though not entirely, of quilting or cookbooks), or any books I re-read.

Mystery/Crime Reading Challenges Recap 2013

To continue my end-of-the-year reckoning of reading challenges, I will talk a little about the OTHER mystery challenge, the Mystery/Crime Reading Challenge 2013 hosted by A Bookish Girl. In addition to reading Vintage Mysteries (I'm linking to my own post rather than repeating those reviews here), I went back on my vow not to start any more series until I’d finished my other ones. 

I began this trespass with Charles Finch’s A Beautiful Blue Death. It was good enough for me to want to read the other Charles Lenox sequels, but honestly aside from introducing the characters (who promise to develop nicely over the next few books) I didn’t think it all that memorable.

Vintage Mystery Recap 2013

As the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Thirteen comes to a close, it’s a good time to look back and reflect on all that we have accomplished. I refer to what we have accomplished reading-wise, of course. As usual I read more than I thought…but less than I wanted.

This year I tried something different, signing up for reading challenges. The problem with this was that instead of reading off my To Be Read Pile (an eclectic and growing monstrosity that resides both in my head as I peruse my online library catalog as well as surrounds my nightstand), I was forced under duress to choose other books according to a theme.  Although I selected challenges I thought would help me whittle down that TBRP…well, let’s just say it didn’t quite work out.

But now it’s the end of the year, and those challenges have come due! Like library books!  A sense of panic overwhelms me! Fine, I’ll just start with my Vintage Mystery reviews, which were for the Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge 2013 hosted by My Reader’s Block:

A Color by any other Title

Awhile back  I called the color ORANGE "clockwork," referring to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Although I haven't read this novel myself (and having learned something of the themes in it, it might be a bit too graphic for my taste), it just seemed like the natural thing to do. I love books so much, you see, and am so often surrounded by them, that even their titles enter into my everyday jargon in unexpected ways.

For instance, why call colors by their boring names when you can use literary epithets instead? Your conversation is bound to be more interesting:

ME: I have one with clockwork fur and wallpaper eyes, and another cat with picture-of-dorian fur and eggs-and-ham eyes.  I also have a dog with like-me and fang fur and marbled eyes of island-of-the-dolphins and man-in-the-suit. 

OTHER PERSON: Whaaaa?

ME: Oh, you don't get the literary references to popular book titles?  Well allow me to explain the plots of each of them in agonizing detail....

Back to the Classics Reading Challenge 2013

After weeks of procrastination, I have finished the Back to the Classics Reading Challenge hosted by Sarah Reads Too Much! This is my second completed reading challenge after the European Reading Challenge that I did back in May. According to the instructions for the wrap-up post, I'm supposed to note that I finished one "Entry" for completing all the required category reads as well as two "Entries" for completing all the optional categories. 

Total Entries (unless I counted wrong, which would not be unheard of because math is evil and I hate it): 3

A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner": A Double-Feature Review

Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!

Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!

I don’t much mind if it rains or snows,

‘Cos I’ve got a lot of honey on my nice new nose,

I don’t much care if it snows or thaws,

‘Cos I’ve got a lot of honey on my nice clean paws!

Sing Ho! For a Bear!

And I’ll have a little something in an hour or two!

~ The House at Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne Chapter VIII: In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole, pg. 111

Once upon a time there was a bear named Edward. Sound familiar? Well it isn’t. But if I reminded you that this Bear was later given the nickname of Winnie-the-Pooh…well, things are a little clearer now, aren’t they? And if some of you out there wonder why a boy bear has a feminine name of Winnie…then, as Christopher Robin himself points out, his name is “Winnie-THER-Pooh.” Don’t you know what ther is?* Of course. It all makes sense now.

Anyone who says that Winnie-the-Pooh is for children, or is just some Disney franchise gimmick, should pretty much just shut up and read the book before making such scurrilous remarks.

Because Winnie-the-Pooh is Awesome. Here are the reasons why:

1.      Winnie-the-Pooh is a Bear with Very Little Brain but a ton of Heart. In today’s cynical and “smart” society, we need more people like Pooh.

2.      Piglet is a very small and Timid animal who overcomes his fears and jealousies (even though he doesn’t have a forward devoted to him). 

3.      Eeyore. 

4.      Tigger is Unique and jumps on everyone.

5.      Kanga forces treacle stuff down everyone’s throat. Roo is super.

6.      Rabbit has Nifty catchphrases like “why oh why oh why” and “A-ha!” and is super-paranoid. 

7.      Owl acts smarter than he actually is, and therefore is relatable to pretty much everyone in the universe.

8.      As you can see from this entry’s opening quotation, they find the North Pole. Have YOU found the North Pole?!!! I didn't think so.

9.      There are awesome word-plays like the broken trespassing sign being mistaken by Piglet as a sign of his grandfather’s name. Obviously the sign which now reads “TRESPASSERS WILL” used to say “TRESPASSERS WILLIAM.”

10.  When you read Winnie-the-Pooh, you learn how to capitalize Important Words.

11.  There are plenty of Poems.

12.  The book is oh-so-quotable. If you have read it, then you are Justified in looking up at dark skies from under an Umbrella and exclaiming, “Tut tut, it looks like rain.”

13.  Unlike the entertainment for “kids these days,” there is a lack of meanness in the tone of Milne’s writing. His writing invites one to Delight in the characters rather than sneer at them.

14.  Also unlike the entertainment for younger kids—and many ways unlike the Disneyfied Pooh—the characters are all Sympathetic, but all flawed.  Even Pooh is not above pride or selfishness at times, but these flaws in the characters are something that make them more relatable and, when they overcome such deficiencies, more Admirable.

15.  Make no mistake. Just because there’s a cartoon based on the book does not mean that these books are not Poignant. I dare you to read the part where BOTH of Eeyore’s presents are ruined, or when Owl thinks Piglet’s house is his and Piglet generously lets him take it, and not sob your eyelids off.**  

In addition to this specific example of my personal trauma, there is a dichotomy in the tone of these books: a Sweetness of childhood and a sadness at growing up; a sense of transience as even Christopher Robin knows that he can’t stay in the Hundred Acre Wood forever, and yet at the same time there’s a sense that all these adventures will echo forever throughout history.

Illustration by Ernest H. Shepard from Winnie-the-Pooh Chapter X
Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtD6BzPOOjmNFcnaK-08bQ6nkH2eDlT7yBxea4qoMjKE2LCu_0jDn59-tH6HdbrkszQRAS78kLX4kS74Ss7xFZ2F-8pyEyRsWsAa4F1BgTyhzMDkWNGax7ZJUVJxaph8vnFsHv_iIpBd4/s1600/tea+party+pooh.png

*A.A. Milne doesn’t explain this, but my theory is that it’s a grammatical male “the” like the German “der.” OHCOMEONITMAKESSENSEDON’TGIVEMETHATLOOK.

** I know that’s so gross. But it’s also a really good description of how I felt at the time so it stays in.

RECOMMENDED READING AGE: As soon as possible. I’m not kidding. Do it now. And there is no age cap for this one: even if you’re a curmudgeon you should read this book.

PARENTAL NOTES: None.

AVAILABILITY: Lucky for you there are tons of hardcover collectible copies with my preferred illustrator Ernest H. Shepard included.  Or, if you prefer having the books separate (and would like Milne’s two poetry collections including poems about a Certain Bear, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six—which are both really good and I’ll probably discuss those in a future entry), then you can be like me and have the four-volume Library Binding edition.

ADAPTATIONS:  There’s this one by a little-known animator named Walt Disney that has not gotten much press at all….  In all seriousness, the movie The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh  contains a lot of the events from the books.  And to be fair the animated series, The New Adventures ofWinnie-the-Pooh, while not based on the books, wasn’t all that bad.

See The Book. The Book is Good. (A little bit about Easy Readers)

I suppose I should move on from picture books at this point and talk about Easy Readers.  It’s harder for me to recommend a bevy of Easy Readers because I honestly don’t remember reading that many. My first concrete memories of reading to myself were from chapter books, which led me to suspect that I had almost “skipped” the Reader phase.

Easy Readers fall into that “in-between” niche of a child’s life, between having an adult read to you and fluently reading to yourself. A lot of children aren’t sure this is a smart move. So Easy Reader publishers tend to capitalize on trends: popular picture books, graphic novels, and movies are adapted into Reader form. A lot of the most popular Easy Readers are entitled along the lines of “Meet Batman,” “I am a Jedi,” series based on the picture books of Pinkalicious and Fancy Nancy. Therefore you can probably go through the picture books I’ve recommended and find a corresponding Reader. 

As a result, while I recommend a lot of those continuations from picture book to Reader, there aren’t that many independent Reader series that I remember enjoying off the top of my head. In fact, there are only three titles that come to mind:

Tried-and-True Babysitting Books

The cliché of babysitting is of teen-aged girls who park their charges in front of a TV and then commence raiding the fridge and calling their boyfriends. I always saw babysitting as an opportunity to read picture books, not just because I personally enjoy them, but also because it might share my joy of reading to a younger generation. When I babysit, there are a set of books I habitually take along, which have been tried-and-true to entertain and engage kids in the stories. I would suggest these books not only to babysitters, but to anyone who might have kids come and visit their homes (such as grandparents or other relatives).

Whenever I babysit, my go-to books are the following: