2014 Reading Recap

I can't believe I read 96 books this year. By about November, I realized how close I was getting and really wanted to get to 100 (which has seemed like this mythical number that I've never been able to cross over the last few years), but it turned out that moving mid-December and traveling for Christmas proved too much for me and I just could not do anything more. So I will be proud of my 96 books for this year and realize that I probably will not read more than that for a very long time.

Without further ado, here are some of my favorite books from this year. I can't narrow it down any more than this and some of the categories overlap, but I don't have to worry about that because this is my own blog.

Best Quick Reads: On the Fence, Blackmoore, Virtuosity

Best Fiction: Dear Mr. Knightley, Crossing to Safety, Eleanor and Park, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Best History: Mornings on Horseback, One Summer: America, 1927

Best Nonfiction: 168 Hours

Best Mystery: In the Woods

Best Memoirs: Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Truth and Beauty

I have been putting off this annual review of my books for a while now (I am writing this on January 6, although posting it so that it will still show up in December 2014). For some reason, I haven't been looking forward to it like I usually do, and I think it is because I didn't love love many books I read this year. There were plenty that I enjoyed, but I think that I didn't give myself time to savor them (trying to reach 100!) and that I read a lot of books that weren't necessarily very noteworthy (particularly towards the end of the year). I want to change this for myself for 2015. I want to read books that I really love and to not rush through them in order to check them off a list. My reading goal for 2015 is the opposite of last year's--I'd like to focus on reading a few GOOD BOOKS in hopes that I love them and find some new favorites.

This is my classic book list (all of which I haven't yet read) that I'm hoping to tackle in 2015:

• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Waverley by Walter Scott
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

There are only 14 on here because I know I'm going to find many other books I want to read throughout the year too. But if I can read these I will feel like I've accomplished something this year, and I know I'll enjoy it and get something deep out of reading these.

Book #96: Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

I loved Gaudy Night enough that I checked out four more Sayers novels at the library--all of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels that involved Harriet Vane, who was the main character in Gaudy Night. I liked Harriet's and Peter's relationship in Gaudy Night and was interested in reading about how they met and how their relationship developed over the series of novels. Strong Poison is a lot more of a standard mystery novel than Gaudy Night though--Harriet is accused of poisoning and murdering her lover, and Peter believes that she didn't do it so he is determined to prove her innocent, so he has to figure out who would have done it besides her. He makes some great connections and figures out who the actual murderer was (not Harriet!) with the help of this group of assistants he hires. (It felt like they did the majority of the grunt work instead of him doing much of anything except for figuring stuff out, which I feel like is almost cheating.)

I was kind of hoping for some more illumination into the Peter-Harriet relationship and didn't really get it in this book. The thing I loved about Gaudy Night was how complicated and difficult they were together--Peter keeps asking Harriet to marry him and she's always refusing. I also liked how that book was inside of Harriet's head, so there was so much more explanation behind why things happened that way. But in this book, he basically just starts proposing to her for no reason at all--he falls in love with her with NO reason, which I feel like is a little bit of a cop-out on Sayers' part. He sees her on the witness stand in court, decides she's innocent, and then goes in and proposes to her in jail. What? I did not understand the attraction there and I didn't feel like Sayers did a good job making them seem real. I think I will still read another book of hers, but I wish she would write more from the perspective of Peter or Harriet and not just about them--that was the part I really liked about Gaudy Night.

Book #95: Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan

I'd avoided reading this book for a while because I felt like the cover made it look like a quick-read romance novel, which I just don't feel like I'm in the mood for this month. But for some reason I still checked it out from the library and had it hanging around the house--and once it became overdue I decided to just power through it and read it. It WAS a quick read, so I finished it quickly (and now still have yet to return it to the library--oops), but it was not a romance novel (which, theoretically, I knew, but the pink cover was still misleading!). Glitter and Glue is really a memoir about Corrigan's relationship with her mother, and her beginning to understand who her mother is, once she's moved away and left her family behind for a yearlong trip around the world. She begins working as a nanny for a few months for a family in Australia, and as she begins to act as a mother for some recently motherless children, she begins to hear her own mother's voice in her head and to feel closer to her mother than she ever has. This experience of nannying was a turning point in her relationship with her mother--and the later experiences of being married and having kids of her own.

I really liked how Corrigan wrote about her experiences living in Australia with the Tanner family, and how she described her experience of basically becoming more of an adult. She gets that realization that all young adults have to go through of figuring out that their parents aren't crazy or ridiculous but just humans trying to do what they think is best--and it's pretty natural that that realization comes when she's first forced to think about other people first (these kids she's nannying). I really liked how she showed how much her mom's words came to her mind, and how she began to relate her mom's life history to that of the mom and family she was living with. All in all, this was a great book about the parent-child relationship and how that relationship changes with the seasons and years.

Book #94: Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone

This book reminded me in a lot of ways of Creativity, Inc.--a tech company-related memoir-type book with a lot of musings about creativity and the impacts people and companies can have. Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, basically tells us about his professional life and how he went from living in his mom's basement with his girlfriend to now a high-tech mogul in the Bay Area. He worked at Google for a few years (with Blogger), then worked on a podcast-related startup, then started Twitter with one of his co-workers. And along with stories about how he made all of these moves, he shares a lot of thoughts about how creativity can happen, how we can accidentally quell creativity, how companies create their own personalities and what he was trying to do with Twitter, and how the goal of doing good in the world has affected him and Twitter (and his startups after Twitter). Honestly, it was a pretty interesting read to learn about how Twitter came about, but I didn't feel that engaged with the book. Stone is an engaging writer and he has really great ideals that he shares (and it was interesting to hear about how he was in debt basically until he cashed in on some of his Twitter shares after it was already huge), but I think I've maybe read too many of these business-y memoirs to be all that into it. Note to self: I don't need to read too many more of these for a while.

Book #93: In the Woods by Tana French

I read French's Broken Harbor a while ago, and it always stuck in my head that I loved it. I remember different creepy aspects of that mystery quite often--some of it was just so off-putting, just in the way that people are confused and insane--and I know I stayed up a good part of the night reading it because I couldn't put it down. But for some reason, it never occurred to me to check if she'd written other books--and turns out that Broken Harbor was her fourth mystery, and her others are also reviewed and rated very highly. So I've meant to get around to reading more of her forever, and finally the stars aligned and I started reading this book a few days ago and then spent all evening powering through it yesterday. I cannot think of a worse week for me to spend time reading--we also closed on our house yesterday, so we have a FEW things to do (cough, cough)--but once I started this one, I couldn't put it down and had to figure it out. Just like Broken Harbor.

This murder mystery is narrated by Robert Ryan, a murder squad detective in Dublin. He and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are assigned to a case of a murdered twelve-year-old girl--which unfortunately happened in the same exact place where Ryan himself grew up and suffered a traumatizing experience as a twelve-year-old. When he was twelve, he and his two best friends were playing in the wood near their house, and they disappeared. When Ryan was found, his shoes were filled with blood and he couldn't remember anything--and his two friends were never found. He feels sure that the two mysteries are linked, and that his participation in solving this one will help him to remember and figure out what happened to him and his two friends. The book is really about Ryan's involvement in solving the mystery and how it's affecting him, how he begins to remember things but can't force his mind to take the leap to what really happened that day. It's also about Ryan's relationship with Cassie Maddox, his best friend and partner on the squad, and how their relationship changes over the course of this mystery. They eventually figure out who murdered the little girl who was found, and they uncover a lot of other stuff in the process.

Cassie is the narrator of the second Dublin Murder Squad novels, which is set after this one ends, and I'm actually really excited to read that one. I will check it out after I've worked my way through the enormous stack of books that I have already checked out from the libraries, and after we've finally moved and settled in and I've finished grading all my students' stuff. (Things are a LITTLE hectic this week--again, why I shouldn't have spent the evening reading last night! Ahh! But I couldn't help it!)

Book #92: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This may expose my naïveté and lack of familiarity with other parts of the world, but I'll say it anyways: every time I read books about young girls in romantic situations in England, it makes me think of Pride and Prejudice. I Capture the Castle is completely different than P&P, of course. It's set in the English countryside, but it's more than 100 years later, and nobody in the book is trying to get married off (okay, the sister of the heroine is). So there's really no reason to make any comparisons to Austen (the characters in the book even do talk about Jane a few times), but it seems inevitable, even as they are driving around the countryside in cars and doing unthinkable things like kissing their beaus (shocking!). This book is about Cassandra Mortmain, as a kind of coming-of-age story about how she falls in love for the first time. But honestly, the romance wasn't even my favorite part of this story--it just seemed very one-sided (as in, Cassandra longing after the man her sister was engaged to and him being in love with her sister) and I never really saw why she fell in love with the man in the first place. But I did love how this book was ostensibly Cassandra's journal, where she recorded her thoughts and impressions about her family and people around her, and how all those impressions and stories were so clear and filled with her own personality and thoughts. I also loved the circumstance of the family in which she was writing--she and her family lived in "genteel poverty" in an old castle, one that was almost in ruins, and without hardly any furniture or food or any sort of income (because everything had been sold eventually to buy the necessary parts of life). It seemed so interesting how they all lived lives that seemed relatively unencumbered, even though they really didn't have any money. Her father had once been a famous writer but had not written anything in years, so they had no income. I loved Cassandra's portraits of her family, and her own recognitions of her limitations as a writer and her abilities to "capture" anyone or anything, other than herself. And in the end, she has to grow up and decide what she really wants out of life, while dodging romance from undesirable sources and figuring out who she really is in love with. It was a great story with some great people and characters that I really enjoyed reading. I didn't love, love it--I would probably need to love, love the romance for that to happen--but it was definitely worth my while.