So hurray! Another month of books and I haven’t given up yet! I really thought there was danger of that last month, I spent a fair chunk of time reading and was ready to stop. Despite the fact that I spent more time doing things besides reading, I still managed to get several reads in. The biggest slowdown this month was one particular book that took me forever. Also, I ended up getting some new albums recently (Tara MacLean and Donna Lewis! Yay!) so instead of listening to audio books at work and in the car, I chose my new tunes. I’m sorta getting overwhelmed with books though, so I hope that I can get back into the game for May and up those numbers again. Here we go.
- GFT Relationship Rescue – Dr Phil McGraw [audio]
- UBS The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon [audio]
- LIB The Year of Living Biblically – A.J. Jacobs [audio]
- PBS Atonement - Ian McEwan
- PBS Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – Dr John Gray [audio]
- STR Certain Girls - Jennifer Weiner
- LIB Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home – David Shipley & Will Schwalbe [audio]
- PBS Girls Night In – Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella, et al
- ARC My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy – Andrea Askowitz
- LIB The Feminine Mistake - Leslie Bennetts [audio]
- PBS Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain
- LIB How Doctors Think – Jerome Groopman, M.D. [audio]
7 audio books this month and 5 actual books. Now, my actual book numbers are a little crazy, because Atonement took me 2 weeks to read. It was boring boring BORING. I complained about it a lot over the two weeks, and I kept getting “So stop reading it!” as a reply. I guess they didn’t understand – I had to finish it! It was actually an excellent sleep aid. I took lots of spontaneous naps while reading it.
On the flipside, however, Certain Girls took me about 2 days. Jen Weiner is one of my absolute favorite authors. The book was pretty depressing near the end though, so I guess be warned.
I have a confession. For Girls Night In, I skipped one of the short stories. But in my defense I had read it before, and not that long ago. I attempted to reread it, but I don’t really like reading stories over so quickly after finishing them. I like some time to lapse so I can forget details and feel like I’m reading it for the first time all over again. To make up for it I read all the commercials in the back of the book.
I had 8 non-fictions this month. Most of them were really great. The Feminine Mistake was life-changing. I’ll be blogging about that one later. Send was also really informative. It helped me see a benefit for using “bcc” which I always thought was sort of stupid. Their use involved people that didn’t want their email address publicized, like a celebrity or top CEO, but needed to be briefed on the situation anyways. The example they used was between reporters and news-media, and a celebrity was bcc’d. How Doctors Think was also quite good, because it gave you insight into how doctors make diagnoses and, sometimes, mistakes. It was sort of difficult to pay attention in parts because it was a little on the heavy side. I could picture the hardcover putting me to sleep.
I reviewed two books this month in some detail. Men Are From Mars and My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy. The former ticked me off and I needed to write about it, and the latter was an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) from LibraryThing.com’s April batch of freebies, so a review was, if not mandatory, considered appropriate. (Posting reviews enables me to get more freebies later!) It’s kind of neat to be able to read books that haven’t been published yet.
So this brings me up to 51 books. Think I can break 200 by year’s end?
This Month’s Recommendations:
- Certain Girls
- Send
- The Feminine Mistake
Wow… that’s quite a few books! I could never read that many, but that’s because the only book I could read in 2 days would be The Twits. :P
You can totally get to the 200 mark!! Unless of course you run out of books you want to read, but from the sounds of your list, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.
I think that’s my problem with reading. I need to have a book in mind before I go to read it. I could never read a book about office emailing. BO-ring! My next one is planning to be American Psycho, but you never know what might pop into my lap. There’s one I need to get from Allison and another two or three to get from you! :)
I’m actually working on a list of all my “to-be-read” books for this blog, so you can see what’s coming up next for me!
How was Kitchen Confidential?
It was pretty good, but I didn’t really care for the structure. It’s all random and stuff. There were lot of good anecdotes but overall it was hovering on the mediocre side. I did like his voice though, it was an easy read.