Books Read So Far

I've mentioned that I have a goal of surpassing last year's reading total, which clocked in at 51 books.  Even though I have no intention of reviewing every book that I've read (look how long it took me to review the three I read on vacation - Geez!), I thought I'd at least keep you updated with a list of what I'm reading this year every so often.  As of February 25th, I've completed:

1. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
2. A Memory of Light - Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
3. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? - Mindy Kaling
4. Between a Mother and Her Child - Elizabeth Noble
5. Warm Bodies - Isaac Marion
6. We are Water - Wally Lamb
7. Friend of my Youth - Alice Munro
8. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared - Jonas Jonasson
9. Beauty - Robin McKinley
10. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
11. Rose Daughter - Robin McKinley
12. The Inheritance - Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm 

As you can see, I'm doing pretty well so far.  I've enjoyed a lot of what I've read.  There's really only been one that I haven't enjoyed (Between a Mother and Her Child).   I seem to be on a bit of a fantasy kick at the moment.  We'll see how long that lasts for.  I've also been rereading some old books - why buy new ones when you've got some on your shelf collecting dust that you haven't read in years?  In some cases, it's been so long since I read them, that I've forgotten much of the plot. It's like reading a new book all over again - which I guess is an inadvertent case for buying books.  Whoops!  Actually, who am I kidding?  One should never feel bad for buying books!

Vacation Reads, Part Two

I read two other books on vacation.  As I said in my last post (which is SO long ago, oops!),  it rained every day during our vacation, and on the first day where it didn't rain during the day, I insisted on going to the beach to read during my break.  Yeah. It was still kind of cold.  As in my fingernails were turning purple, but I was adamant that I was not leaving my chair by the beach. 

Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? was a typical "beach read".   This has been out for a while, and I really had no intention of ever reading it.  To be honest, her character on The Office, which I watched sporadically when it was on, annoyed me, and for whatever reason, I kinda figured that Kaling was the exact same kind of person as her character in real life.  Because, you know, every actor is EXACTLY like the persona they play on T.V.  Funnily enough, she addresses this in her hilarious memoir, and says that people tell her this all of the time.  I wonder why?  I'm totally able to separate other actors and their characters.  It's not like I think that the kid who plays Joffrey in Game of Thrones is a complete ass wipe in real life, like he is in the show.  Why are certain actors always associated with their characters?

Anyways, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me is certainly not great literature, but it is pretty hilarious.  I found myself laughing out lout during certain parts, and didn't want to put it down.  She covers her childhood, college years and her career up to The Office.  Some things surprised me - such as the fact that Kaling was actually hired on The Office as a writer first, and not as an actress.  Other than that, there wasn't anything majorly exciting about her rise to fame - it actually seemed pretty smooth, in terms of catching her big break. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for an easy, yet funny read.    

The other book that I managed to finish on vacation was the only "meh" book for me.  It's Elizabeth Noble's Between a Mother and her Child.  I've read other books by Noble, and enjoyed them, so thought that I'd like this one too.  Unfortunately, this one turned out to be a bit of a disappointment.  Between a Mother and her Child is about a family learning to move past the death of their oldest son in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Phuket.  As in a lot of families where a child dies, the family has fallen apart, and Maggie and Bill Barrett, the parents, have split up.

Maggie completely falls to pieces after the death of Jake, and basically falls into a deep depression, relying heavily on her younger sister, who lives across the world in Australia.  She manages to keep it together for her youngest son, Stan, who has a learning disability, but basically ignores her daughter, Aly, and then wonders why Aly is turning away from her.  This really bothered me.  Now, I've never suffered from depression, and I can't imagine the kind of grief that I would feel should anything ever happen to E, but if I had two other children, I'd like to think that I could keep it together for them.  They are every bit as important. 

There are other subplots in the book.  Bill has started to move on into a relationship with another woman that he meets in a grief counseling group (which seems like yet another recipe for disaster in my opinion), and as mentioned, Maggie's sister Liv, in Australia, has fallen in love, and is struggling to put herself first, after putting her sister first for so long.  There's a whole lot in the beginning and middle about Liv, and all of a sudden, in the final third of the book, we barely hear from her or about her. 

And then there's Kate, a woman who has no relation to the family, who is depressed and alone after the death of her husband.  Kate comes to live with Maggie and her children, acting as a housekeeper, even though there's no financial need for her to do so.  She simply wants the companionship.  She is hailed as the savior of the family, although she doesn't really move into the home until midway through the book, and magically starts solving all of their problems immediately.  It's a weird part of the novel, and an unnecessary one at that.  Her character is kind of superfluous, especially given the way the novel ends, which of course, I can't reveal.

All in all, I would give this book a pass.  It was way too long, clocking in at over 400 pages, and there are a few too many plot holes for my liking.  Not a good beach read. 

Vacation Reads

Last year, I somehow managed to read 51 books.  This was the year that E arrived at the very beginning of the year, mind you.  I had no lofty goals in mind at the beginning of the year, and in fact, had you asked me how many books I figured I'd be able to read throughout the year, I probably would have put the number very close to 10 - and I mean under 10.

Now, some of these books were short and sweet, and I won't lie, there were a few teen books in there - including the entire Anne of Green Gables series, which I reread.  But still, 51 books, all while caring for a newborn.  I'm pretty darn proud of myself, even if 51 is far below the normal average (what that is, I honestly couldn't tell you, because I've never actually counted before) of what I normally read throughout the year. 

All that to say is that I'm planning on doing the same this year, if not exceeding that goal (with an increasingly busy toddler to run after - yeah, right!).  Originally, I planned to blog about all of the books I read, but in all honesty, a lot of the books I read are "meh" books, meaning that I finish them and put them down, and don't have a whole lot to say about them.  Maybe this is a hint that I should be looking for quality over quantity?  But how I will know if it's good or not until I've read it?  But I digress...  I do intend to review the ones that I really enjoyed, or those that left me thinking about them, long after they were finished.

D, E and I were in Cuba last week.  It was pretty bad.  It rained all week.  Like every day.  All day for the first four days.  Needless to say, I got a lot of reading done, even though, as I complained to Dan on our way home, "I only finished three books."  Still, one of them was the 932 page final book in the Wheel of Time series A Memory of Light.

A Memory of Light was written by Brandon Sanderson, using notes left by the original author of the series, Robert Jordan, who unfortunately passed away before the series could be finished.  I first started reading The Wheel of Time back in University (and no, I don't even want to think about how long ago that was!). At the time, the series was only about 4 or 5 books in, and had I known that it would stretch as long as it did, there was no way that I would ever have begun it.  It almost became a chore reading the series, but I was determined to finish the damn thing, especially since I had invested so much of my time in it.  I was one of those nerds who used to reread all the books in the series before reading the newest volume came out.  That didn't last very long.  Those books were all sacrificed the year before last in the great wedding wreath massacre of 2012.  Still, rereading the earlier volumes did have some merit, in that I was pretty confused for many events happening in this volume, since it's been a few years since I read the last one.  I didn't have the trusty Internet to help me out when I was confused either, since we were on a Internet free resort in Cuba.  It wasn't too bad, but it could get pretty annoying, now and then.  Wait?  Who is this again?  Why is Mat on his own?  Didn't so-and-so die like 6 books ago?  Why do they have a different name now?  Gah!!!

A Memory of Light pretty much covers the Final Battle, or tarmon gai'don, where Rand Al-Thor must battle the Dark One for the final time and save the world.  His battle in and of itself is pretty lame, in all honesty.  It's a whole lot of "well, this is what the world will be like if I win/if you win" visions.  It's the other characters who are all fighting "real" battles outside that the novel is focused on, which is great, if you like battle scenes.  I confess, I did find my eyes glazing over at some points.  I'm not a huge fan of battle scenes.  I'm sure they were impressive, and all that, but I cared about the characters, and finding out who was going to survive the final battle.  I won't spoil anything, but of the original group from the Two Rivers, only one character dies, and the rest all manage to survive. 

Whether or not they have happy endings is hard to say, since we're left just days after the end of the final battle.  There's no conclusion telling us what happened to everybody in later years.  I don't know if this is what Jordan intended all along, or if Sanderson simply didn't know, and couldn't make his own assumptions, but I wanted that second epilogue, damn it!  I'm one of the few people who liked the 102 endings in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.  I like my endings resolved nice and tidy, even if it's not always a happy one.  Finishing these books was always going to be bittersweet.  As I said, I've invested so much of my time in them, and as in a lot of books, it's like the characters have become friends.  Not having everything resolved just makes it that much worse for me, in that I will never know what happened to these friends.  Still, the book was on my mind for a couple of days after I finished it, so in that regard, I guess you could call it a success. 

Reviews of my other two vacation reads still to come...

On Sleep

I've always been a pretty bad sleeper, which is ironic, because I LOVE sleep.  Bedtime is by far my favorite time of the day, hands down.  But the bitch of it all is that despite this, I suck at sleep.  I can vividly recall not being able to fall asleep when I was a kid, and sitting at the top of the stairs, willing myself to call down to my parents, but not doing so, because I knew I would get the inevitable "why aren't you sleeping yet?" response.  Other nights, I would end up in my parents room, where my poor father would have to decamp to my bed, while I shared the bed with my mom.  On those nights, sleep was also not happening.  She'd allow me to chat away, about anything and everything.  Although she probably wanted sleep just as much as I do now, mom probably encouraged the talking, given our usual acrimonious relationship, even at that age.  It was the only time I ever opened up to her.

As an adult and a parent myself, it's only gotten worse.  Before E arrived, I was a so-so sleeper.  I would have my bouts of not being able to sleep, but when I got tired enough, I'd be able to count on at least a few good nights of sleep.  And of course, there was always the chance to sleep in on weekends and days off.  When I got pregnant, my sleep slowly got worse and worse.  If it wasn't the need to go to the washroom umpteen times per night, it was general aches and pains, or the old standby of absolutely no reason at all to be awake, and yet I was.  Nothing enraged me more than when people would say "get your sleep now, because you'll get none when the baby comes".  Last I checked, sleep is not a form of currency - it can't be put into a savings account for a rainy day. 

With E here, sleep has become a distant memory.  The one thing that I didn't want E to inherit from me (other than my huge ass calves, but that's a story for another day!) was my inability to sleep.  I so wanted her to be a sleeper like D, who is able to drop his head on the pillow and be asleep in seconds.  I so envy this ability.  I won't keep you in suspense - clearly, my side won out, and poor E is a terrible sleeper.  As a result, I haven't slept more than a five hour stretch (and those nights could be counted on one hand) for over a year.  The annoying thing is that she has the ability to sleep through the night - she actually slept from 7 - 5:30 last night.  But most nights, she doesn't.  It could be something small, like she's lost her soother, or something major, like tummy troubles, but there are very few nights where she's not awake for a stretch of time during the night.  And there's always at least one stretch where she's awake for a good two hours or more.  It's aggravating, because we can see she wants to be asleep just as much as we want her to be... and would also like to be ourselves.

And here's the most annoying thing: on the (very) rare occasion where E sleeps through the night or D is being a superstar and has taken the monitor to the guest room so I can try and sleep, you would think that my exhausted body would let me sleep.  Nope.  Last night, I was awake off and on (mostly on) from 3:30 until E got up at 5:30 for absolutely no reason at all.  D, God bless his heart, asks why don't I just stop thinking, and tell myself to go to sleep.  I wish to all that is holy that it could be so simple.  There is no simple telling myself to go to sleep, and quickly falling asleep. I toss and turn, check the clock umpteen times and nudge poor D awake when he's blissfully snoring beside me. You would think my body would eventually cave, and allow me to sleep, but so far... nope, nada. 

This lack of sleep is turning me into someone that I really don't like.  In simple terms, I've become a huge grump.  I take it out on D and E, and neither of them deserve it.  The search for a solution continues, because something has to give, sooner or later.  What do you do when you have trouble sleeping?