Well, that idea didn’t pan out as expected.

Turns out my brain can’t handle reading that many things outside my comfort zone at once. (It also can’t handle having only one book in progress, apparently.) So, I’ve taken to having at least three books in progress at any given time. One is always a children’s or young adult book, as I’ve mentioned before; sometimes this is one I’ve read before and sometimes it isn’t. Another is general fiction, and the third is one from – you guessed it – one of the top 100 lists. Occasionally I’ll have a fourth book in progress, and this can be anything – nonfiction, graphic novel, whatever.

This kind of makes for slower finishes, but it does mean that if I can always pick up something to suit my mood. So if I want to read but am not in the mood for, say, zombies, I can go back to The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (a selection from the Observer’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time list).

So, what else am I reading now, anyway? Well, I’m continuing with the Oz series and I’m on the seventh book, The Patchwork Girl of Oz (more thoughts on these books to come!). Also, I’m working on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Yes, I know I’m doing it backwards since I’ve never read any Jane Austen. But whatever, that’s how I roll, and I’m enjoying it anyway, so there!

Right now, I’m working my way through the Oz books. I’m not sure yet if I want to go through the entire “Famous Forty” or just stop after the last of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books; I’ll decide after I finish Glinda of Oz, I guess.

Most of the series is actually not a re-read for me. When I was a child, my uncle gave me nice hardcovers of the first three – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and Ozma of Oz. (Yes, I still have them on my shelves!) I read these quite a bit, but for some reason never made it through the rest of the series.

It’s been so long since I read the first three, it was nice to go through them again! Although The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has always been my least favorite of the three, I still find it quite a bit more enjoyable than the film based on it. Most of the characters annoy me much less in the book (Dorothy’s not so much of a damsel in distress, Glinda’s not so irritatingly omniscient, etc.) and there’s a little more going on in the plot. And Marvelous Land and Ozma are both pretty enjoyable.

I’m not actually that far into the series past that. I recently finished Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, which I quite liked, even though a good half of it didn’t actually take place in Oz. Although, it shows that continuity isn’t Baum’s strongest point – a key example being how the ruling family lost the throne and the Wizard’s role/non-role in it all. Oh well. I suppose I can live with that.

Now I’m about halfway through The Road to Oz and… I don’t know, I don’t care that much for it so far. I can’t quite put my finger on why. But once I do, I’m sure I’ll ramble about that here too!

A really good example of this? Reading versus knitting. Reading is my oldest hobby by far, though I’d fallen out of the whole reading-for-fun thing during college. I’d started to get back into it after graduation, but then it fell to the wayside again as my interest in knitting grew. I mean, I only finished 17 books last year, which is really kind of sad for me. If I could read and knit at the same time, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

But… now I can, thanks to my birthday present from T!

It’s so much easier for me to read and knit at the same time now, because I just have to quickly press a button instead of pausing to turn a page. And the e-ink is way easier on the eyes than reading an e-book on my computer monitor.

My only real problem now? I haven’t really found a good place to purchase DRM-free e-books yet – it’s kind of hard for me to tell which ones on the Kindle store are DRM-free and which one are not, unfortunately. At least many books on my to-be-read list are in the public domain, so for now I can just rely on sources like Project Gutenberg.

Those who care about the knitting may be wondering: what’s the project in this picture? Well, it’s a Kindle sleeve, of course!

For example, there was a time when books were my only good friends. Sad, but true.

I was ignored by most of my classmates most of the time during grades 5-8, but I did get picked on pretty heavily by a few of them, and our school’s staff did absolutely nothing to stop the latter. I was fortunate enough to have a couple of friendly classmates, but really, there was only so much they could do to make it better. (Not their fault.)

So, what’s an almost friendless, always picked-on girl to do with her spare time? Read, and read, and read some more. Hell, I read during completely unrelated classes and didn’t even bother hiding it, because it was better than paying attention to my school environment.

Now, a lot of those books weren’t objectively great stuff by any means… I read an awful lot of brain candy in those years. But you know what? There’s really nothing wrong with that. Those books served the purpose of giving me an escape, of letting me for the unpleasantness of my school day for a short time, of entertaining me and giving me something to smile about.

Even when I wasn’t being bullied, I didn’t quite fit in anywhere, or at least I didn’t feel like I fit in. Family, school, wherever – until I moved away for college, I never got the sense that I truly belonged, and my own introversion and awkwardness (not mutually inclusive things, BTW!) didn’t exactly help. I guess books were an escape from that feeling as well. Instead of struggling to get my family to understand me, or trying and failing to understand many of my peers and the high school social world, it was really so much easier for me to pore over a book and immerse myself in a world where I didn’t have to go through all that.

But what about these days? What’s my relationship with books, now that I’ve found people that I actually I fit in with? Well, I still read a bit every day, but I don’t spend every waking hour doing it, and I haven’t in years. Books aren’t my only friends anymore, but they’re still my oldest ones, and I think they’ll always be around, no matter what. Maybe not in the same form, but there nonetheless!

But the bookwormy me is back now…

I still haven’t finished Dos Passos’s The Big Money. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this probably isn’t going to happen until December, mostly because it’s just really slow going. Oh well, though. I finished re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia earlier this year, and I’m currently going back through the Harry Potter series. (Only the first four are on the BBC top 100 list, but the last book’s coming out in a couple of weeks, so of course I’m also going to read Order of the Phoenix and Half-blood Prince…)

Fairly recently, I also finished the following:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain: This tries be too many things at once. One of the main themes is satirical, a commentary on the over-romantization of chivalry and the Middle Ages. However, I kind of wished that the main character was real, just so I could meet him and punch him in the face. Hank’s kind of an uncompromising jerk, and this undermines Twain’s satire in places. Oh well, it had its amusing moments. I definitely don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, either.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: I found this surprisingly enjoyable, considering how prominent the love theme was and all. (Why, no, I don’t really care for romance… why do you ask?) It’s probably because I actually really like Jane. There are some remarkable concidences and some overly dramatic moments, and parts of it are a bit tedious. But though I didn’t always enjoy Bronte’s style, I do like the overall story and the way she brings the main characters to life. It’s also nice to read about what life was like in that place and at that time – there’s some great description in there.

Atonement, Ian McEwan: The overall plot and themes are interesting, the writing is generally vivid and otherwise well-done, and the structure is well-suited to the story. The first part moves really slowly, but I flew through the book once I got past that. The second part is especially compelling, but I couldn’t put the book down during the third part, either. And the latter really says something for McEwan’s writing, I think, because the third part focuses on Briony and I really dislike her. Though at least there’s a reason why she’s written the way she is…

That’s that for the finished works. I still have some cleanup to do on the site itself, but that should be done by the end of the day, at least.

Because I really enjoyed Richard Adams’s Watership Down. It’s been one of the books on my “to be read” list for years. Since sixth or seventh grade, if you can believe it, as one of my fellow bookworms just could not get her nose out of that book one year. But it kept getting pushed down the list by other books until now.

It’s not completely a bad thing that it took me so long, though. Because I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it quite as much as a ten- or eleven-year-old reader. It’s not a “children’s book,” per se, and it’s just so involved – you’ve got the main plotline, the informative bits about rabbit behavior, the underlying mythology, and so on.

And a big plus? The characters are nowhere as anthropomorphized as, say, Brian Jacques’s Redwall mice. Okay, so the rabbits talk, but they don’t wear clothes and swing swords and have the most improbable feasts; they do actually share instincts and behaviors with their real-life counterparts. They’re fully realized despite – or rather, because – of these behaviors.

Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle: I hadn’t read this one in a couple of years, but my opinion of it hasn’t changed very much in that time. On the surface it’s a lovely fairy tale about destiny and immortality and love. But there’s so much more to it than that. There’s a charming blend of anachronisms and traditional fairy tale settings, characters who are trying to discover themselves and truly understand their own depth, humorous references to the story’s own genre… the book is so much more than I can put into words, and I know I’m not doing it justice here. It’s just really beautifully done.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells: I don’t find the actual writing to be particularly remarkable, but the concepts are pretty well thought out; for example, Wells details the practical challenges of being invisible. I didn’t love it, but I’d say it’s worth reading, and it goes by fairly quickly (it’s very short, and the plot’s pretty straightforward).

I have to talk about both of these books in the same entry, as Xenocide doesn’t really end and Children of the Mind absolutely cannot stand alone, as it starts right where the previous book left off. In fact, in the foreword for the last book, Card says something to the effect of being allowed to split Xenocide into two novels so that he could tell the story in more depth.

I adore Ender’s Game and enjoy Speaker of the Dead well enough. But unfortunately, Card’s inability to write a series ending that lives up to its beginning’s promise surfaces yet again. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

The later two books are overly didactic and “philosophizing,” though I put the latter in quotes because Card’s “philosophies” in these books are only half-developed. I don’t really care about any of the characters and their contrived conflicts, though Han Fei-tzu and Han Qing-jao have their interesting moments. And my god, don’t even get me started about the ridiculousness of the plot.

I’m not trying to say that Xenocide and Children of the Mind completely lack merit. The role of the descolada virus is still intriguing enough, and I was definitely fascinated by the bugger society and its relationship with the piggy and human societies. But that merit gets buried in the constant half-baked metaphysical and philosophical rambling.

I highly recommend that you do not, under any circumstances, bother with these books unless you’re a die-hard Ender Wiggin or Orson Scott Card fan. As I am neither, I am simply going to pretend that Xenocide and Children of the Mind don’t exist and move on with my life.

Not having read it since my freshman year of high school, I decided I’d read it again, but I wanted to do a bit of research first. Mainly because I’d always felt a bit of a disconnect between the book’s two parts, and I thought I’d be able to better understand and appreciate it this time around if I had more context. I don’t know why I never bothered to seek out such information before, given how many times I’d read the book and come across that disconnect. But I finally did, and I found out that there’s a very obvious reason for it all.

Many modern editions of Little Women compile both the novel of the same name, originally published in 1868, and its sequel, Good Wives, published the following year. My copy is one of these editions. The two parts are clearly marked, but there’s no indication that they were originally separate novels.

So now it all made sense. Which brought up an interesting question: what does the Little Women on the BBC’s top 100 list refer to? Does it refer to just the original novel? Or does it refer to the compiled edition of both Little Women and Good Wives?

I don’t really have a good answer to that question. The BBC list is kind of inconsistent when it comes to book vs. series nominations: the first four Harry Potter books each get an individual nomination, while His Dark Materials gets one entry for an entire series. So the way I’ve decided to go about it is, I’m going to assume that entries on the list refer to individual novels (e.g. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) unless the title clearly belongs to an entire series (e.g. The Lord of the Rings). Well, if you really want to be technical about it, I guess The Lord of the Rings is one novel in three volumes and not an actual trilogy, but I’ll save that discussion for another entry.

Anyway, this means that on my recent re-read, I decided to stop where the original Little Women volume ends, rather than continuing through Good Wives. And going about it that way definitely gave me a different perspective of the work. (For the better, even, as I don’t really like Good Wives anyway.)

Not that I needed much help gaining a new perspective. I’ve commented before that just a couple of years between re-reads makes a difference; just imagine how much difference ten years makes!

One big difference: I’m much more aware of the moralizing and Christian elements of this novel now. I’d noticed them before, of course – it’s kind of hard not to – but I don’t think I realized just how central they are. And I think I’d be even more aware of that theme if I’d read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which Little Women frequently mentions and probably even more frequently alludes to. It doesn’t really detract from my enjoyment of Little Women, but it does considerably change my perspective on it.

And I do still enjoy it. Admittedly it’s partly due to the nostalgic element – I’ve owned my copy since I was six or seven, and I read it quite a bit when I was younger. But putting that aside, it’s an easy and fairly light work, even with the didactic element. I like several of the characters, and the sisters’ dynamic strikes a familiar chord.

Sometimes I read for sheer entertainment value. Blindness isn’t a novel you can do that with, though. The writing style alone made me put in a lot more effort, a lot more careful attention. A vast majority of the sentences are at least half a page long, at least in the edition I read. And the dialogue isn’t separated by quotation marks or by line breaks, only by commas. I originally thought that the disorienting nature of the latter was a deliberate parallel to the blind characters’ disorientation, but I’ve read elsewhere that it’s part of the author’s general writing style. In either case, not easy to sort through at times.

There’s some very strong imagery in this novel, which, compounded with the writing style, made it even harder to read. For example, certain scenes during the main characters’ internment became so vivid in my mind, I couldn’t continue for a time – it’s that intense and overwhelming.

But strangely enough, even though these things and more really bothered me, I still found Blindness to be compelling. For all the breaks I needed to take from it, for all the difficulty I had with it… it’s still an incredible novel, and I’m very glad I persisted and completed it. Not all of the imagery is horrifying; there are also scenes of calm and hope and even joy, and these scenes are every bit as vivid. It’s also beautifully written, probably much more so than the translation can begin to convey.

I just might re-read it some day.