My friend Claire reads one-hundred books every year.

After Claire published a list of the books she read in 2011 I started thinking about how much I would like to read more.

Everyday I read a minimum of twenty blogs not including the countless articles that are emailed to me or found on Twitter or Facebook.

Still, I really would like to read more books. I want to prove that Facebook has not killed my attention span for good.

I went on Amazon and ordered a bunch of new books to dive into and then I stole about ten books from a good friend and I was on my way to becoming the best book reader ever.

Actually, I was just on my way to collecting 100 books I might read…someday..

One night I sat down and tried to estimate how many pages I would need to read everyday to finish a book in two-weeks. Finishing an entire book in two-weeks seemed like a do-able challenge. I then realized that if I read one book every two-weeks I would only read twenty-four books in the next year.

It then occurred to me how much Claire must REALLY love books.

It also made me wonder if I was friends with super woman.

So my new goal is to read twenty-four books this year. (baby steps)

Here are the two books I read in end of January/early February-ish:

Minor Characters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last year I read “On the Road” and was disappointed at how un-impressed I was with the book. I couldn’t figure out why Jack kept running across the country and why he liked sandwiches so much and why any of these girls would speak to someone like that. Minor Characters was written by Joyce Johnson who was with/kind of dating Jack when he became famous. I had so much in common with Joyce Johnson and I started to understand the madness of Jack and why everyone was so crazy about him.

A couple of my favorite parts: 

“I’ve had a lifelong reluctance to reenter places I’ve left, a resistance to anniversaries, family holidays, visits to graves or to offices I used to work in. My adult life has been one of discontinuities. To pass a house where I once lived is to feel a magnet pull upon my innards–I feel I could open the door, climb up the steps, take the key out of my pocket, walk into rooms just as they looked before moving day.”

“My real life was something they would never know, as I would never quite know theirs, yet they continued to love the child I’d been. For that child, they’d always be there. It seemed we were bound to each other for good–incompletely, imperfectly, our painful love as unspoken as all of the other truths we’d never bring into the light.”

Overall review: I give this book 3 thumbs up. It was a great story but some parts were a little drawn out. I am pretty sure I just stuck with it because I had convinced myself that I was Joyce Johnson.

 

Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never really understood the art of short story. I really like memoirs and novels and long drawn out stories and always felt like short stories would be a rendition of Chicken Soup for the Soul. This book was AMAZING. It was this collection of short stories all based around universally simple experiences that are really emotional. I promise you will love it, whether you have a heart made of stone or are known to tear up at the Hallmark commercials.

“I think there are two different kinds of people: those whose natural state is alone, and those for whom solitude is like swimming underwater: you can only do it for so long before you simply  have to come up for air. I fall into the latter group, not by choice but by the same virtue that I am a human being and not a fish.”

Overall Review: Why are you still reading this? Go buy the book now.