2019 Yearly Recap

I feel like I had a good reading year this year. The last quarter was not as productive, and it wasn't as filled with good books (a lot of them were mediocre). But I am super pleased with everything I accomplished this year. One of my goals for the year was to read 5 plays by Shakespeare, and I did that--I read Hamlet on December 30 to finish it off. I haven't read much Shakespeare (other than the sonnets) on my own, and it was such a pleasure to read those this year. I hope to read some more in 2020.

Here are my favorites for this year:

Best of the year: A Gentleman in Moscow. I listened to it once and read it another time. I just loved it so much and have been trying to get everyone to read it.

Best non-fiction: Being Mortal, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (I didn't read much non-fiction this year, but these two were excellent)

Best classics: Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, All Creatures Great and Small, A Little Princess, Little Women (okay, basically all of the classics)

Best read-alouds to the boys: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (of course!!), The Penderwicks

Best audiobooks: The Mother-in-Law, The Bookshop on the Corner, Pride, One of Us Is Lying (all of these were great books and great audiobook productions)

Best fiction: Station Eleven, Unaccustomed Earth, Oathbringer

I was feeling a little bit blah about my reading for this year until I went back and saw all of these really excellent books I read earlier this year that I forgot about. Almost all of these were from the first half of this year, which shows how I've been in a sort of slump and choosing all sorts of lame books to read lately. I'm excited to read some more high quality stuff next year. I'm setting a goal to read 25 Newbery award winners next year, so hopefully there are some really good middle-grade books to add to my list.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

I read this several times, in high school and college, but this was my first time reading it on my own, for pleasure. There is such a difference reading it on my own, now, as an adult, as opposed to the torture of reading it as a high schooler. Shakespeare's plays really felt impenetrable in my tenth- and eleventh-grade English classes, but they feel interesting and fresh and relatively easy to read now. I don't know if that's just because I'm a better reader, or if it's because I don't absolutely need to understand every line and every symbol that shows up throughout the play; it's just nice to read them and actually like them instead of suffering through them. I listened to this while reading along, because I've found that I like the plays best when I do both--I can understand what's going on better when I hear it, but I don't zone out and stop listening if I'm reading along. I know I'm not getting the most in-depth reading of Hamlet, but I really enjoyed it.

It's a little absurd to try and write a review of Hamlet, considering it's one of the most famous works in the English language, so I'm not even going to try. I am really happy to have read it, and I'm very proud to have reached my goal of reading five Shakespeare plays this year. I may try to do it again next year--because it turns out they aren't really that hard to read.

There was one line in particular that stood out to me: "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." I feel like that goes along with a lot of the psychology/life coaching things that people talk about today--you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you think about it. I like how Hamlet said it better, though.

Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin

I hated the premise of this book, but got far enough in that I wanted to finish it. If I had really known what it was going to be about, I probably wouldn't have listened to it. It's basically the story of an affair from the perspective of the "other woman." And I hate stories about people cheating and infidelity... so this really wasn't one that was up my alley. The story is about Rachel, who sleeps with her best friend's fiance one night when they are both drunk, and then continues the affair because she realizes she has feelings for him. The story was supposed to be rationalizing this affair and making it seem okay (it reminded me that line from The Office where Pam says, "I guess affairs look different to the people inside them"). But it really just made me think of how spineless and unprincipled Rachel was. Giffin made Darcy, Rachel's best friend, seem worse and worse throughout the book, to the point of her being almost completely unbelievable that people are really that selfish and self-centered. I felt totally unsympathetic to Rachel's sad "Will he ever dump Darcy and be with me?" whining and plight, and super annoyed by her unbelievable passivity throughout the whole thing. She refused to ever ask Dex what he was going to do. And I absolutely hated Dex trying to stay with both women the whole time. No matter how Rachel justified it, that was completely sleazy and unjustifiable. So basically I didn't like any of the characters or any of their motivations. The book was well-written, but I hated the story so much that it didn't even matter.

The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

I haven't done much to add to my goal of reading all the Newbery award winners the last six months. And this is one of them that I'd technically already read! But I hadn't read it for maybe 20 years, and I didn't feel like it actually counted if I couldn't remember anything about the book. This was one that I actually really enjoyed, and I kept thinking that Dane would really like it too (maybe in another year--it might be a little above his reading level still). It's basically a much more enjoyable and readable Robinson Crusoe about a young girl who gets left on an island on her own for almost two decades. And the most exciting thing about this story is that it's based on a real historical event, a real woman who was abandoned on an island off the coast of California for that length of time. After I finished this book I started reading on Wikipedia about the real woman and the Channel Islands and I was just fascinated. This was a really good read and I'm glad I re-read it. Well worth it (plus it only took me about two hours).

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

I've heard so much about this book from various sources, and I kept putting off reading it because I kind of wanted to read it aloud to the boys. However, my read-alouds with the boys have died off a little when I got so sick at the beginning of my pregnancy, and I have so many books I want to read to them, that I decided I wasn't going to wait to read this one on my own. I read it in a couple of hours right before Christmas--which was one of the days in which this book is set--and it was a very cute, adorable family story. It definitely was reminiscent of the Penderwicks family, with five children who all love each other and aren't perfect, but have good intentions and very distinctive personalities. I love happy family stories, and this is one of them. I also really liked how Glaser made their neighborhood in Harlem seem like a small town, where everybody knows everybody, and it made me want to be more like the Vanderbeekers who are friendly and know everyone. I hope Dane will read this one sometime--it is a little above his reading level now, but will be a great one soon. Overall, definitely worth a read and a very cute addition to our bookshelf.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

I think I may have read this once when I was a kid, but I don't remember ever having read it. I definitely did see the movie several times, at my Grandma Myres' house, so that was what I was picturing as I read this book. I didn't remember much about the story, though--I pictured Uncle Alp being kind of scary and grouchy (which he definitely is not, to Heidi) and I had no recollection of Heidi ever leaving the mountain like she does for a few years in the book. The best part of the story was the beautiful setting in the mountains. The mountains are such an important part of the story--they are almost a character in themselves because of how important they are to Heidi.

I liked reading this cute story. It wasn't my favorite ever, but I think it would have been if I'd read it when I was younger and had some nostalgia built into this read. Now I kind of want to watch the movie with my kids and see if they like it at all.

A Portrait of Emily Price by Katherine Reay

This is my third Reay book I've read this month, and I haven't loved any of them like I loved Lizzy and Jane and Dear Mr. Knightley, which I read years ago and don't even remember now. So either, I have to re-read those books and decide whether my tastes have changed and they weren't as good as I remember, or maybe I just didn't love them as much as I thought, or, maybe they were just better than the other books Reay has written. I didn't dislike any of them, but none of them have gripped me like those other two did. This book was about Emily, an art restorer who is really good at her job (a much more interesting job than I ever thought of, though--that was a cool part of the book, learning about that) and who loves art, who meets Ben, an Italian visiting America for a few weeks, and falls in love and spur-of-the-moment marries him and moves to Italy with him, and then things are harder than she thought they would be with his family when she moves there. I liked Ben and Emily together, and liked how they worked things out and worked together. I don't usually like rushed romances, but that didn't bother me in this story.

I just didn't feel like the story flowed very well--I liked the part set in Atlanta, where she was working as a restorer and helping Ben with his restaurant, and then I liked the part in Italy, where she was learning about this new culture and family and restoring other art, but I just didn't see how they fit together very well. They felt like two completely different stories, like maybe Reay should have written them longer made the second half a sequel to her first half. It felt like Emily didn't really have emotions--she did, but not nearly as many as I felt like she should have when she, oh, married a practical stranger, left her home country, and moved in with a family of strangers in a country where she doesn't speak the language and knows NOBODY except the stranger she married. She seems like she just goes along and is sad sometimes that her mother-in-law doesn't like her, but doesn't seem to mind anything else. And she all of a sudden doesn't have a job, and it is totally fine because she's married now and still gets to restore art for fun and for free in the church down the street? And all of a sudden, moving to Italy fixes her bad painting skills and now she can paint masterpieces and gets her own art show? And I don't feel like the reference to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man works in this book--it plays such a minor role in the story, and I don't feel like she really understood it, and I feel like it was faking it to make it a part of the title of the book.

All of that makes it sound like I hated the book... I didn't. I liked a lot of the ideas of the plot, the characters, and the setting of Italy (who wouldn't??). I just never really bought into it and didn't feel very excited about finding out what happened.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

I think I read or listened to this some seven years ago (according to Goodreads) and I hadn't had any desire to read it again, until Tommy has been listening to them and got me interested. And then we watched the movies again, and despite all the fighting (I'm a total wimp when it comes to watching people fight/kill each other, I close my eyes the whole time), I was totally into them. This is the first audiobook I've listened to since I got sick over two months ago--for some reason, I couldn't handle audiobooks and just needed to watch The Office while I worked out--and it was just what I needed: engaging, fast-paced, easy to follow and intense. There's nothing more to say about it; there's nothing deep here, but it is fun to follow along and see what happens.

The Printed Letter Bookshop by Katherine Reay

A novel about a bookshop--was I going to read this? Yes or yes? I am always drawn in to stories about books and bookstores, but I don't know how I felt about this book--I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but part of it just always fell flat for me. I loved the idea of this super-welcoming, adorable bookshop in this little town, that everyone loves and shops at, and I wanted to go there. But I never really got into the main character of Madeline, the young and high-powered Chicago lawyer who accidentally inherits her aunt's dying bookshop and decides to give it a go making it work. I didn't really get her vibe or care about her as a character at all. I don't know what it was about her, but she just seemed aloof, to me and to everyone else. I also never really understood the relationship between her and Janet and Claire, the other two women working in the bookshop, and how they became so tight so quickly. And where did the romance come from? Why would anyone like Madeline, and how did the guy fall in love with her? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I just couldn't quite get past all my barriers there, and I couldn't quite believe that they were going to make this bookshop work in a tiny town, when we all know bookstores are going out of business everywhere forever. It was good, but I am lame and didn't like it as much as I maybe should have.

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters by Balli Kaur Jaswal

I feel like I am drawn to books about Indian characters and families (or other South Asian countries--I hope I'm saying this correctly and not being annoyingly American by overgeneralizing!). I really like books that talk about the cultural differences between groups, and I love reading about these Indian characters and how they integrate--or don't--with other countries. In this book, the Shergill sisters were born in England, but are asked by their mother to go back to their native country of India for the first time together in her letter she leaves them after she dies, to scatter her ashes and to take a trip together. These sisters have never gotten along and don't talk much together, but they are thrown together on this trip and experience India almost as outsiders--and each of them has a dramatic, serious secret that they are trying to hide from the others. I loved the differences between the three sisters, and I loved their dynamics and how they loved each other despite being stuck in their lifetime habits of annoying each other in certain ways. It seemed so realistic to me, how family are the people you reach for and care about the most, but they are also the ones who can wound you most deeply and drive you up the wall. I was driven to find out what each of their secrets were, and what they were hiding from each other, and I loved the climax at the end and how they dropped everything to help and save each other. And I loved the resolution at the end, how they ended up closer together. This was a fun, and really enjoyable read.

I Miss You When I Blink: Essays by Mary Laura Philpott

I didn't know before I started reading this that this was Philpott's description of basically how she got out of a depressive cycle in her life, where she wanted to escape from her (perfect) life and couldn't figure out why she was depressed. Some of the essays have nothing to do with that--they are just funny stories about her life. But as a whole, the overarching narrative of this collection of essays is about how she came through this realization that she didn't love her life, and how she could fix that.

These essays were beautifully written, and I felt like I could relate to Philpott on a lot of levels. I related to her perfectionism and overachiever status, and she seemed like such a normal person that I wanted to get to know her.

I feel like I could have read this book 10 times slower and gotten a lot more out of it. As it was, I read it pretty fast, and enjoyed it and giggled at times and felt feelings at other times, but I think I missed some of the deep stuff that Philpott was writing about. I wish I'd kept better mental notes about which essays I liked and which ones stood out to me, but I don't ever do that very well when I can't fold a page over (this was an e-book). So there were definitely really good moments in this book that I wish I could reference, but overall, it was a good read.

The Austen Escape by Katherine Reay

Years and years ago, I read several of Katherine Reay's books, and absolutely loved them. They were easy, sweet, fun reads, but didn't feel stupid. They were obviously not Literature, but more than just basic chick lit. And I liked that they were related to Jane Austen and using themes from her books, but not just straight rewrites of Austen's plots. But I've never checked out any more of her books since then, although I've been meaning to. I finally read this one the other day, and didn't love it as much as her previous ones I remember, but it was still definitely a fun read.

Mary, a nerdy engineer at a start-up in Austin, gets taken to a Jane Austen retreat in Bath, England, with her old friend from her childhood who kind of twists her arm and makes her come with her. This friend, Isabel, is kind of manipulative and not super nice, but once they get there, she has a kind of mental breakdown and starts to act like she really thinks she is living in Jane Austen's time and it's really the Regency period, so Mary has to take care of her and also learns a lot about herself. There's obviously also a romance, which is relatively cute.

My favorite part about this book was the oh-so-real relationship between Mary and Isabel, and seeing how Isabel keeps Mary in her place and how Mary feels stuck and not able to stop what she knows is a not-great relationship. Little cutting remarks that Mary feels like she can't respond to, but which make her doubt herself. It seemed so fresh and real, because I've had friendships EXACTLY like that. I also liked Nathan, Mary's love interest, who seemed more like Tommy than almost any male character I've ever read about in a book. However, I felt like it really stretched my ability to believe when Nathan flew over to England and willingly dressed up in Regency-era clothing to help Mary with no warning and with no reason to think she wanted him to come. After a year of them liking each other and not doing anything about it. Really? And also, these people were adults--how could they sit around and long for each other for a year and neither one of them ever do the very obvious thing of just asking the other one out for dinner? I did not buy that at all. It seemed very immature.

But I did love all the Austen that was woven throughout this book. It made me think I need to re-read Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park--I've read the others plenty of times, but I think I've only read those two once.

Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey

I liked a lot of this book. It's about Annie, a girl who wants her life to be a romantic comedy, and how she won't settle for anyone who's any less romantic than Tom Hanks is in her favorite movies. I have to say that I did love all the references to rom-coms throughout this book. But the whole romance in this book kind of fell flat. It wasn't believable at all to me. A rom-com, exactly like those Annie is obsessed with, is starting to get filmed minutes away from her house, and she gets to work on the set because her uncle knows the director--of course! And then the main actor in it turns out to be the love of her life, even though she is convinced he's a jerk even though it's totally obvious that he's nice even though she's determined to take things the wrong way--of course! And he just falls in love with her at first sight, even though there's not much evidence as to why someone would do that. It all felt very contrived, especially the ending. My favorite part of this book was the scenes between Chloe and Nick, Annie's best friend and her boss at the coffee shop where they work. I would actually read the sequel, which is supposedly coming out next year, because it's about Chloe and Nick, and I want to see their relationship get resolved.

Although I just bashed on this book a bit, it was still a fun, mindless way to spend an evening. I didn't mind it too much while I was in the middle of it, it was just once I finished.

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen by Charlie Lovett

I have been reading all the short, easy, quick and fun reads that are on my Goodreads to-read list lately, and this was one of them. Any book about Jane Austen is going to catch my attention (obviously) and I thought this one was an interesting one. Half of the book was a fictionalized story about Jane herself, set in the late 1700s, about the time she was first writing Pride and Prejudice. The other half of the book (in alternating chapters) was about a girl in today's times, who's trying to solve a mystery of how her bookish uncle died and what reason someone could have had to try and kill him, and then later, trying to solve a mystery about whether Jane Austen really wasn't the first author of Pride and Prejudice or if she'd plagiarized it. It was a fun story, but I have to say that the plot was very, very obvious to anyone except the main character. I knew from the first second that the bad guy was the bad guy, and the good guy was the good guy--it was incredibly obvious. And the ending was RIDICULOUSLY abrupt and disappointing--I was seriously four pages from the end and the girl was stuck in a burning house in the middle of the climactic scene. There was no denouement whatsoever, which kind of ruined it for me. But the rest of it was still enjoyable and not a terrible way to spend a couple of hours.