Simona's 50-Book Challenge
Yeah, you heard right: one year, 50 books
N.B. clicking on the name lets you buy the book on Amazon
Book #28 is The Angostura Historical Digest of Trinidad and Tobago by Gerard A. Besson
This one's so long and complex I'm tempted to call it two books...but I won't. Anyway, it was interesting. I learned more stuff about my own country from this one book than I did in years of history lessons, which I pretty much hated.
Probably the most outstanding thing I retained from it is that, contrary to popular (or maybe just my) belief, not every black person in the Caribbean is the descendant of a slave. Lots of black people actually volunteered to come from Africa to find work. Many of them were free and had their own businesses. That's nice to know!
Book #27 is Will Write for Shoes: How to write a chick-lit novel by Cathy Yardley
Will Write for Shoes is a fun, easy read, very simple and straightforward, with lots of good advice, especially for beginners. Well worth reading.
Which didn't stop me from blubbering like a preschooler every time she mentioned romance writing, or the RWA, or anything that even vaguely reminded me of my current predicament as a literary Jack-'o-lantern, wandering hither and yon, looking for a new publishing house.
I have begun to fear for my sanity.
July 7
Book #26 is What Would Wally Do by Scott Adams
You can't have worked in an office at some point in you life and not love Dilbert. It's impossible, nay, irrational! As always, Adams slices and dices the idiocy, tedium, and pointlessness of corporate life, but the fact that this is my first week as an unemployed person -- sorry, as a freelance writer -- since I was, oh, 21 or so, put a different colour on the experience.
There I was, laughing at the Dilbertian dystopia that is the office, shaking my head and muttering, ah, so true, so true...and then reminding myself that I am no longer a resident in the exclusive gated community called corporatedom.
Weird, that
As a footnote, all the comics in this collection have to do with Wally. The book is essentially a collection of strips culled from the series over a number of years. Not a problem, except that whoever compiled the bits didn't bother to keep the damn things in order. Ergo, strips that should have been presented in sequence were scattered far and wide all over the book.
Not that I minded, once I got used to it. It was sort of like a treasure hunt.
July
3
Book #25 (halfway through, and just in time!) is Bad Kitty by Michele Jaffe
If I was 14 I'd have adored this book. It's quite well written, for what it is - a teen whodunit. It's got cute little things going for it, like the secondary characters having side conversations in the footnotes, and the spunky little teen lead has that little something that takes her beyond being the stock snarky teen.
I found the perpetual cliffhanger-at-the-end-of-every-chapter a little irritating and kind of soap opera-ish but otherwise I quite enjoyed it. I wish there were YA books when I was a YA!
Book #24 is Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
Eh. I guess this book was okay, but it just didn't grab me. Maybe it was a little too rudimentary, maybe too surgical, cold, deliberate, but it just didn't float my boat. He's addicted to Dean Koontz, by the way (or somehow managed to wrangle large-scale permissions for many stories) as his book is peppered with examples from his books. All well and good.
But the nail in the coffin, as far as I'm concerned is that the many, many examples he drew from his own books just aren't all that good. Eh! There will be things I can take away from it, of course, so it wasn't a waste of time, but I'm not jumping up and down either.
Book #23 is Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
A genuinely sweet, funny read that made me tear up by the last page. Paul is a smart, funny, loving gay Holden Caulfield, only significantly less screwed up. His entourage of friends are brilliantly drawn: high school quarterback/drag queen Infinite Darlene, spunky lesbian Amber, gay hottie Noah, wonderful mix.
And the voice! So earnest and unpretentious and fresh. First person present tense, damn, it takes a genius to pull that off. I won't spoil it for you. It's a great book. Read it yourself.
Book #22 is Away Laughing on a Fast Camel by Louise Rennison
I love Young Adult fiction, especially if it's well
done, and this is very well done. I somehow missed out on a few in-between
installments, after having read and loved Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
I laughed out loud, almost suffering loss of bladder-controlousity in the process. Georgia Nicholson is a female Adrian Mole, and a young Bridget Jones. I enjoyed every second of this book. I'm only sorry that my rule against reading the same author twice in one year prevents me from reading the next installment!
May
26
Book #21 is The RWA Romance Writer's Report February and March 2008
Remember, my rules say my professional journals count as books, but for fairness sake, I'll count two as one. Both these issues were particularly valuable, especially the articles about internet marketing.
I'm really happy with how the journal is evolving; we're spending a lot of time discussing business issues: marketing, selling, contracts and publicity, rather than just craft. I like that. We need to remember that although we love to write, this is a business, and we need to treat it as such.
