This same things happened with every reading program I joined, including one where I completed the entire summer goal for reading in one month. I’ve known since I was young that I would never win more than a participation award for athletics. But put me in a competitive reading environment and I’m golden.
Last year I had two friends of mine mention their “Goodread Goal.” I’ve been a member of Goodreads since May of 2010 and I had never heard iof a Goodreads Goal. I looked into it and knew I would set one for myself for 2013. I read 53 books in 2012, which I thought was pretty amazing – avergaing one book a week. For 2013 I wanted to push myself so when January 1 rolled around, I set my goal at 55 books for the year.
What happens next is predictably obsessive and unnessarily competitive. All this year I have had the number 55 in my head and I’ve been furiously reading. On August 11, 2013, I completed my 55th book for the year. That means in about 32 weeks –20 weeks ahead of schedule – I finished my goal. I averaged 1.7 books a week. And I feel it necessary to point out that though this stack did include some fluffier titles including one Nicholas Sparks book and many Kathy Recihs novel (the series on which the television show Bones is based), I also read some weightier titles.
Goodreads has suggested that I up my year’s reading goal. I think I’m safer to be content looking at my completed goal and to stop reading competitively.
My top 5 book recommendations from my year so far are:
Here are the books I read, in reverse chronological order.
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong did a great job in pulling together this book. It reads a little more “history book” than I was expecting and took my a while to really get into, but the amount of information she relays is impressive and the fun facts she scatters throughout the book are ones I will wow my friends with for sure.
A few weeks ago I was out of town for work and eating alone at a restaurant, reading this book. The waiter, being nice, asked what I was reading. “Ohmigod! When I’m with my friends we’re always accusing each other of being a Mary or a Rhoda! My friend is turning 50 and what do you get a fifty-year-old who doesn’t need anything? Please write down the name of that book so I can get it for him.”
Thirty-five years off the air and still relevant.
I received this book as part of the Goodreads First Reads program.
Although I often tire of books with alternating narrators, I appreciate a well-crafted novel with intertwining storylines. There are plenty of books like this, but too many share a frustrating feature: unlikeable characters. It might sound like a petty issue, but why would I bother reading about someone I don’t like? Author Susan Rebecca White circumvented this by creating an ensemble cast of completely enjoyable characters for A Place at the Table: A Novel.We meet Alice as a child living in the south and see racism through her eyes when she discusses having to enter stores through a back entrance to buy cast-off items and when she and her brother come across the body of someone who has been lynched. When we see her again, much later in her life, she’s living in New York City enjoying some prestige for being the founding chef of Café Andrews.
Read my complete review of A Place at the Table on Nudge.
I reviewed the book for Nudge. Here’s an excerpt:
When Clay Jannon visits Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore for the first time, the bookstore proprietor asks him, “What do you seek in these shelves?” That turn of the traditional question, “How can I help you?” is like a conspiratorial wink that implies, “How can I assist on the adventure on which you are about to embark?” It’s an apt question for such a book as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.
Clay is between design jobs when he gets third shift work at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. What should be a pretty dull job, standing behind a counter at an infrequently visited bookstore in the middle of the night, is made more interesting by the eccentric characters that do come to the store for books. They pay no money for the books they seek, which contain only coded text, instead checking them out them as if at a library. During his near-solitary evenings, Clay can’t help but become intrigued as to how the bookstore can stay open and what the books are that people are checking out.
You can read my complete review of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan on Nudge.
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