What are you currently reading?
Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
What did you just finish reading?
Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
What do you think you’ll read next?
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling
Rump by Liesel Shurtliff
Welcome to the first day of October! For those of you that missed it on Tumblr, I completely revamped my TBR list and filled it with all things thriller, fantasy or fall-themed (with the exception of a few books I that have a deadline). We’ll see how many I can get through before the clock strikes midnight on Halloween!
What are you currently reading?
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
What did you just finish reading?
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
What do you think you’ll read next?
Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige
Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
I can’t believe tomorrow is already October. We’ve been in Dallas a month and a half, and things are finally starting to cool down. Or…at least as much as Texas cools. The State Fair just opened up, and my lucky husband gets to take a work trip over there today. I’m so jealous! Hopefully we can make it over there soon.
I read a ton of books great books this month. Now that I’ve set a schedule for myself, I’m getting quite a variety again. And I’m allowing myself to ditch books if they aren’t up to par, which I had stopped doing at one point. Gotta stop wasting time. Some books just aren’t blog-worthy.
(Which, on that point. Aaron’s Rod is on the list below, but I’m not going to do a post about it. I got about 65% through it before I had to give it up. Far enough to count it as “read” but I’m not going to bore you guys with a terrible post. Not DH Lawrence’s best work, let’s leave it at that.)
And now, the books!
Read this month:
Throne of Glass by Sarah Mass
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
The Innocent Man by John Grisham
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling
Atlantia by Ally Condie
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (which didn’t make it onto the list in the picture…oops!)
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence
Welp, it’s been a fun two weeks. The September Readathon was a success in my opinion!
Here’s what I came out with:
2997 pages total
6 total books read + a few partials
Atlantia by Ally Condie
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Winter’s Tale by Mark Hellprin
The Protector by Gennita Low
Short Fiction Classic and Contemporary: Sixth Edition
Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence
I also finished quite a few of the challenges! You can check those out HERE.
I love when books have fun chapter titles. Not too many do anymore, it’s all just “Chapter 1…Chapter 2…”
But, every once in awhile, you’ll come across a creative author who will actually name their sections and they are super fun to read if you pay attention to them.
A Man Called Ove was such a book. He had titles such as:
Chapter titles like this let you know what the book is going to be about.
You also might run into books like The Name of the Rose, where the author actually does tell you what is going to happen. Which is SUPER helpful when the book is extremely complicated and hard to read. I probably would have had absolutely no idea what was going on without those chapter headings!
I never used to pay attention to stuff like that, but, as part of my “educate myself” project, I’m learning that Chapter Headings actually do matter, and there IS a reason for them. Authors really do have points to things they do. Go figure!
Even though I didn’t care much overall for The Name of the Rose, it was filled with little golden nuggets of wisdom.
If you can’t read my handwriting, this says: “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says, but what it means.”
In other words, don’t just take everything you read at face value. Question everything. Research further. Investigate.
Nothing written can ever be truly objective. Humans write this stuff, remember? And humans have opinions and bias. They also cannot see everything. Try to find out for yourself what the world around you looks like.
I received an invite to a new Goodreads Bookclub called BookClubFiction the other day. Because I can’t refuse a request like that of course I had to pick up September’s book…even if I only had a few days before the end of the time period! After finishing The Name of the Rose…that left, well, today. No big deal, right?
Hubby has spent the afternoon flipping through college football, and we’ve been completely lazy all day long. Perfect for a little speed reading.
And Bird Box was a great book to do in a day. This is a very M. Night Shyamalan kind of book. Think The Village or The Happening. Something is out there, causing people to kill themselves….but no one knows what it is. The book refers to them as “creatures,” but pretty much people are going insane after they see…things.
I devoured this book by Josh Malerman. It’s very post-apocalyptic, and so so creepy. I love these dystopian-type books that are almost zombie-like, except the monster is an unnamed enemy. They are chilling, because we don’t really know what is going to end our society, we just know that eventually, something is going to end it. It’s the same feeling I had after reading Not a Drop to Drink, and watching The Last Ship.
This is an adult dystopian. There’s no weird love triangle, and it’s very very bloody. They also describe childbirth in all it’s gory wonderfulness, so just be prepared for that. Also, as I stated before, people kill themselves, and there are descriptions on how they do so.
Towards the end, I thought this was ramping up for a sequel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one was written, but there’s not a huge cliffhanger at the end. Malerman did wrap it up pretty cleanly. I would like to see what happens next and would definitely read a second book if there was one. I’m not sure I would want to see a movie on this–I think it would end up being too much of a slasher instead of the psychological thriller that the book is.
Check this out if you are a Stephen King fan, or if you liked Mindy McGinnis. You’ll appreciate this one too!
What I am figuring out by reading these Boxall books is that while I don’t always understand or like the plot–I am learning how to read literature. I feel as if I am taking a class. I am educating myself in a way I did not know I was capable of. That is why I set out to write this blog in the first place. I don’t only read for pleasure anymore, I’m actually grasping and remembering what I read.
The Name of the Rose is one of those books that I definitely did not read for pleasure but I did learn from it. I have pages and pages of notes about the novel…and I can hardly explain the plot.
I can tell you that it’s a murder mystery set in a Catholic monastery in the 1300s. I know who the murderer is in the end, but there are so many details about how the murder was solved that went right over my head.
From a literary standpoint, the authenticity is really good. Umberto Eco obviously did a fantastic amount of research before writing this. I would believe more that this had been written centuries ago–not in 1980. In fact, I had to Google this multiple times to make sure that it actually was written so recently, because I didn’t believe it.
From a reader’s standpoint, however (or maybe because it was so authentically written), the book is completely droll. Anyone picking this up as a crime novel is going to immediately put it down. The main character is obviously based on Sherlock Holmes. The archetype is obvious, and he even is named William of Baskerville. Duh. But the Catholic doctrine and the debate between the Benedictines and the Franciscans and all the others just drowns out everything else in the storyline.
Another extremely difficult barrier to the reader is that the narrator–a young novice priest travelling with William–thinks/speaks in a mix of English and Latin. He speaks Latin so fluently that there is no pause for reader context and explanation of what he is saying. You either have to 1) stop and Google everything he says, or 2) pretend like you know what he’s talking about and move on.
For example: “In fact, I now saw the girl better than I had seen her the previous night, and I understood her intus et in cute because in her I understood myself and in myself in her.”
“Intus et in cute” means inside and out, but there’s no context in the section to know that without looking it up.
Unless you know fluent Latin…you’re going to find this extremely annoying and frustrating. Sometimes I stopped and translated the phrases, but after while, I just gave up.
I learned some interesting things about the Catholic religion that I didn’t previously know, and I, at the very least, have a good 6 pages of journaling on the break down of this monster. Good enough for me. Not a book I’m going to recommend for anyone, but it was a worthy fight.
What are you currently reading?
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
What did you just finish reading?
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
What do you think you’ll read next?
No Goodbye by Georgie Marie
Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence
Harry Potter 5 by JK Rowling
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
I’m getting ready to finish A Man Called Ove, so I’ll have a post up on that later today. Instead of using that for my Teaser Tuesday, I’m posting from The Name of the Rose, since I started that and took a break for book club. I’ll be resuming that book now.
“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
“When I talk with Ubertino I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.”
–Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
As I Lay Reading 