A twenty-something thirty-year-old Hawaii transplant living it up on the East Coast for the past 10 years (Boston and Stamford, CT). This blog is to document my daily adventures and things that I find cool, uncool, hilarious, awe-inspiring, and annoying. Please feel free to email me at hawaiigurlinct@gmail.com.
January 6, 2012
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Boo-ness! I had a goal for 2011: read 52 books a year. But I failed. I only made it through 45. I just kept getting distracted and picking up one book after another without finishing the previous one. But as I’ve recently had a bunch of free time lately, I’ve finally ended up getting through most of those books that I was struggling with towards the end of 2011.
An Amish Christmas: December in Lancaster County by Beth Wiseman, Kathleen Fuller, and Barbara Cameron
I’m cheating by including this book on here as I never actually got stuck when reading it, a fact that surprised even me. In fact, I thought it was pretty great. I used to work across the street from Borders and on their last day in business I stopped in figuring I’d make out like a bandit with hundreds of books all marked down to $1. But I only left with 4 because the pickings were really slim. Even for $1 I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything written by or about Sarah Palin.
I chose this book as one of my four because I had just finished Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult (a story about an Amish girl on trial for the murder of her newborn baby, born out of wedlock) and was thirsty for more insight into the Amish way of life. Although without a murder and trial included, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be captivated. But captivated I was. Although the novella was made up of four short stories written by four different women, the stories were interwoven together with the same recurring characters, making it seem more like a regular novel, which I appreciated. True there was no evil, manipulating antagonist and the big hurdle that the main characters had to overcome typically related to fighting with their own pride and / or forgiveness, but it was really sweet and a nice book for the holidays. AND the book ended with a bunch of Amish recipes, including Friendship Bread, which I absolutely love!
Belle de Jour: Diary of a Unlikely London Call Girl by Anonymous (at the time, it has since come out that Belle de Jour is U.S. born Brooke Magnanti)
I picked this book up in hard cover form to read on my honeymoon in 2006. We had just boarded our flight and I was settling in with the book when we had to deplane, get rebooked and started our three day disaster jaunt from North Carolina to Barbados via Canada (if your confused, the whole debacle is here). In all the rushing around, my book never made it off the plane in NC and was never seen by the likes of me again. Over the next couple of years I came across it while browsing for my next book to read but as the price always seemed a little expensive to buy FOR A SECOND TIME - and (I’m betting because of the content) the Darien and Stamford Libraries were not carrying it, I never got around to it. So when I saw that the book wasn’t too bad of a deal on Kindle, I decided it was finally time to finish it up.
I kind of wished I hadn’t even bothered. For a book with sexual antics that made me seem like the biggest prude, I was incredibly bored. Perhaps because it was in diary form. Or taken from her original blog. But it just seemed to ramble on and on without me ever getting invested in any of the characters. I thought reading the non-fiction story of an educated girl in London whom decided to make ends meet by becoming a prostitute would be more interesting than it was. So to summarize, if you aren’t stuck on your back, high on morphine, and hooked up to an IV machine for a couple days, it’s not worth your time.
Kitchen Confidential
The book that put Anthony Bourdain on the map. I couldn’t think of what to write, and this book is pretty old so everyone’s probably read it by now, so I’ll just leave you with a few of my favorite quotes:
Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.
Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way.
I don’t know who figured out that if you crammed rich food into a goose long enough for its liver to balloon up to more than its normal body weight you’d get something as good as foie gras - I believe it was those kooky Romans - but I’m very grateful for their efforts.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
I’d been wanting to read this book for awhile but when I finally got around to it I was initially weirded out by the narrative (death him/herself) and the use of colors, definitions, etc. interspersed throughout the books. But as soon as I got used to the different style, I became immersed in the novel and it became one of my favorite books of the year. Similarly, Death became one of my favorite narrators of the year with comments such as, “It’s probably fair to say that in all the years of Hitler’s reign, no person was able to serve the Fuhrer as loyally as me.”
The entire story was so beautiful. I loved the main protagonist, Liesel (the “book thief”), and her father from the beginning but some of the other major and minor characters took me a while to warm up to. But once I did, I just kept crossing my fingers that they’d all get a happy ending, not at all nerve-wracking when these characters were Jewish-sympathizers in Nazi-Germany at the height of Hitler’s reign.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns by Mindy Kaling
I have trouble with memoirs (or whatever this is classified as). I mean, I love Anthony Bourdain, I think he’s hilarious, a great writer, and a god. But it still takes me a while to get through his books. Similar with reading books by food critics or comedians. My mind just tends to wander. But not with Mindy’s book. Mindy was fantastic. I could not stop laughing. Outloud. In public. She made me want to go out and watch all episodes of The Office. As unpopular an opinion as this is – I saw the pilot last year and hated it, but she makes me want to give it another try.
Mindy wrote this book as if she were speaking to her good friend. And between her including storylines from Twilight and Harry Potter and Titanic, I’m pretty sure if we met we would be best friends. How can I make this happen? Suffice to say, I now have a new girl crush.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Not that I’ve done a good job explaining any of the other books, but as this one is now a major motion picture starring two A-list celebrities, I feel everyone must know the storyline of this book by now, that of Oskar Schell coming to grips with the loss of his father due to the 9/11 attack. And perhaps the lesser known (at least I never saw it advertised in the film commercials) plot line of his grandparents and their survival during the Dresden firebombings.
***possible spoiler alert below***
From reviews I’ve read, people either loved this book or hated it because they thought it was too gimmicky. I loved the gimmicky stuff. The images splattered throughout the book, the typed letter from Oskar’s Grandfather filled with grammatical corrections. And Oskar himself I was in love with. An imaginative and incredibly smart 9 year old whom my heart went out to for the tragedy in his life and the fact that he had a personality that was not going to be socially accepted by his peers. So I liked the book from the beginning, until the end. And then I was appalled. I felt the characters didn’t learn anything, grow, or change… The worst tragedies have happened to these people, they had a right to be screwed up of course, but I just dedicated 356 pages to cheering them on and it didn’t seem to do them much good.
I also thought the story line was pretty unrealistic. I mean, I can believe that a girl who has nothing else to live for in life other than a sparkly vampire is a beautiful love story. Or that a secret society could have covered up the fact that Jesus had a child but left clues in DaVinci’s artwork. But a mother that let’s her son run around unchecked throughout NYC (they explained this a little – I just didn’t buy it), and no one’s calling her parenting into questioning? That it ridiculous.
And now that I’ve finally put all those half read books from 2011 to bed, I am so excited for my next book - provided by my Tumblr Buddy!!! - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
