So, it has begun. Again. My second attempt at reading a book a week for an entire year. While the idea of 52 books in 52 weeks doesn't seem tremendously daunting, my first attempt proved that it was definitely easier talked about than carried to fruition. I completed 34 weeks before hitting a wall that simply refused to let me go forward. I think the name of the wall was "Exhaustion" or maybe "Lack of time"...perhaps even "Start of baseball season." Truthfully, I am not quite sure why I stopped 18 weeks short of my goal, but I did, plain and simple. However over the course of those 34 weeks I was able to read some truly wonderful books (Terrorist, The Snake Charmer, The Keep, The Year of Living Biblically...to name a few) that I otherwise never would have encountered. I did also subject myself to some real stinkers (Fear Nothing, The Night Following, The Front), but for the most part, the good far outweighed the bad and helped provide the inspiration I was looking for to keep the words coming for my own book. I also was able to take suggestions from people that had otherwise never offered me a book suggestion in my life. Frankly, there are only a few select people whose opinions on books I value, because the time you spend reading a novel (big or small) is very valuable time and not to be spent lightly. But by reading books suggested by people I had never asked before, I was able to expand my literary world quite a bit and stumbled on some real gems I otherwise would have deemed too "girly" by just looking at the cover (The Secret Life of Bees comes to mind here). So once again I will be seeking the book recommendations of everyone I encounter (even the guy who works in the book section at Hastings) as I make my way through the year. I will also throw in books I have been wanting to read for a while, or that have been sitting on my bookshelf for far too long. Hopefully, this will encourage you to pick up the book that you've been wanting to read, or maybe even one that I recommend. But, even if you decide that my list is terrible, and would never read any of the books mentioned, even under threat of extreme torture, I hope that you will be reading some book, any book. And who knows? Maybe in the not so distant future, you'll find yourself reading mine.
Week 1: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
The movie version of this book had been highly recommended to me earlier this year, with a warning that it had some very intense and disturbing moments. Now, I will always prefer reading the book version of something over watching the movie, and I didn't have to worry because the movie was a foreign film, Swedish to be exact, which meant it wasn't going to be playing in a theater anywhere near me. So, I got the book for my birthday and finally cracked into it last week. The book contains two main characters: Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist who has just received a jail sentence for libel against a billionaire industrialist as the book opens, and Lisbeth Salander, a hard-edged, tattooed private investigator who works for a security firm and is their best investigator despite her unorthodox ways. After Blomkvist receives his short jail sentence, and before he actually has to go serve time, he is approached by an elderly billionaire named Henrik Vanger. Vanger is the former CEO of Vanger Enterprises and lives, along with much of his extended family, on the Vanger family estate located on the tiny island of Hedeby. Vanger has an assignment for Blomkvist - Spend a year living on the island with the rest of the Vanger clan under the pretext of being there to write the Vanger family history, when actually Henrik Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate the decades-old mystery of the disappearance of his niece, Harriet Vanger. Meanwhile, Salander is being assigned various investigating jobs while at the same time dealing with a sadistic legal guardian who has a history of mistreating women. As Blomkvist gets deeper into the mystery surrounding Harriet's presumed murder and closer to the truth, he enlists the help of Salander to dig into the Vanger family history and business, where they discover that Harriet's disappearance is simply the tip of the iceberg. This was a tremendously good, suspenseful book with two of the most interesting lead characters I have encountered in a long time. It's a decently sized novel, but the pages start flying once Blomkvist reaches the island. It does contain a few disturbing moments, mostly involving Salander's guardian, but the novel was restrained when many other books would have taken it in a more graphic direction. Overall, it was a great way to start my year of books, and I will certainly be adding the rest of the trilogy (The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) to my list.
GRADE = A 590 pages
Week 2: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Week 2 brings about the first real book recommendation of the list. It was highly recommended by both Tarryn and Danielle, who had to use the Stephen King blurb on the back page of the book to convince me to give this "Young Adult" novel a whirl. Frankly, the only thing "YA" about this book is that the heroine is a teenager. Her name is Katniss Everdeen (one of the worst names I have read since the characters from the Left Behind series), a 16 year-old girl who lives in District 12 of the nation of Panem. Panem is post-some-sort-of-apocalypse America, which had been split into 13 districts, but now only consists of 12 (District 13 decided to stage a rebellion against the Capitol...bad idea). Every year, the Capitol hosts an event called The Hunger Games, which takes two teen-aged representatives from each district (one boy, one girl) and then puts the 24 contestants into an enormous arena, where over the course of the next few days they battle to the death on live TV, last one standing wins. Katniss' little sister Prim is selected as the female representative from District 12, but Katniss volunteers herself for the death match to spare her. She and the male representative from her district, Peeta, then travel to the Capitol for a few days of training before the Hunger Games begin, where they are pitted against other teen-agers of various sizes and abilities, some who willingly volunteered to enter. Two things tried to turn me off right away about this book. First, I found myself legitimately uncomfortable and disturbed with the idea of kids killing kids. Secondly (and this is simply a personal preference), I don't care for books as much when they are written in the first-person present tense, and jumping into that style after reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo kind of threw me off. The author also seems to throw various plot twists into the novel that seem less pre-planned as they do devices thought up at the last second to keep her story interesting and alive. However...., the book absolutely works thanks quite simply to the horribly named Katniss. She is a determined, fiery protagonist who I warmed up to rather quickly, and as she struggled to stay alive in the midst of the battle, I could not put the book down and finished it in a day. It isn't a perfect novel, but like last week's book it is also the first part of a trilogy, which means I am looking forward to seeing where this story takes me. I wouldn't recommend it so much to the "YA" crowd, but anyone else would likely enjoy it.
GRADE = B 374 pages
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