My Reading Year 2009: January-June

It’s been a slow year for me with only 47 reads. My grading is a scale of 1-5, so I looked at those with a 4.5 or 5.0 rating.

Surprisingly my 2 5′s were in comic form and were recommendations from two separate people. Those are the first two on the list.

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Someone Knows My Name: A Novel by Lawrence Hill
The Translator: A Memoir by Daoud Hari
Love the One You’re With by Emily Giffin
Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis

I’m on my 50th book so far this year, and the highlights have been (in no particular order):
CJ Sansom, ‘Revelation’ (another great read in the Matthew Shardlake series)
Jeannette Walls, ‘The Glass Castle’ (a memoir that avoids the moaning self-pity of ‘misery lit’)
David Simon, ‘Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets’ (journalism that shows the promise to come in his screenplay for ‘The Wire’)
Philip Norman, ‘John Lennon: The Life’ (thought I knew all there was to know about Lennon, but this book just sparkled)
Bernhard Schlink, ‘The Reader’ (don’t know how I missed this one until the movie was being hyped & I thought it was excellent, though some of my book club called it ‘paedophile porn’!!)
Wally Lamb, ‘The Hour I First Believed’ (there’s definitely more than one book plotted into 832 pages, but I was engaged throughout).

New authors I’ve read & liked this year include: Hakan Nesser, Julia Spencer-Fleming and Karin Slaughter.

I haven’t read any of your top books except for Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran, which I loved. I have Talk Me Down on my TBR pile, though.

Oh, I’m glad that Too Good to Be True made it in your top 5 so far Wait till you get Kill For me, you won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough, so i’m predicting another A-graded book

For some reason, it seems to me that odd years (2007 and so far 2009) are better than even ones

I’ve been hearing so many good things about Chelsea Cain lately, and I swear I’ve never heard of her until this year. Well anyway, my curiosity means I’ll keep this author in mind.

I have the Jennifer Ashley on my shelf, hopefully I will get to it this month. I have been hearing really good things about it. I also have heard a lot of good things about Kristin Higgins. I will have to add that book to the list, as well.

I have a question about grading.

So I read Bliss by Judy Cuevas yesterday (started after a bad day in court — I’m a lawyer a few hours each week and this week’s hours did not go well for me! — and finished last night) and had to explain to my husband why it was so annoying.

I get it that it’s a very very well-written book. But the characters were borderline annoying and the situation that the author got them into was either preposterous for a romance, or depressingly like real life. I actually wanted the book to be the latter — a story without a happy ending. Certainly, I didn’t think the hero & heroine had done enough to a) grow up, b) learn anything, c) evolve into smarter/better people. And the HEA came because someone else (who really should have been watching his only child get married, yes?) was literally TSTL, although I gather from the epilogue that he did actually survive his own stupidity.

(I apologize to anyone who loves/loved Bliss. I’m not right per se, just explaining my reaction to the book.)

By contrast, I had read Debra Mullins’ Two Weeks With a Stranger just before this. Now, that wasn’t an A-rated book, and when I read it I could see why. But it just didn’t offend me the way Bliss did. It was silly & fluffy and so no specific bits of silliness or fluff stand out as being offensive to my tender sensibilities as a reader.

Which brings me to my question for Sarah and others: Which bothers you more: a dim book that is neither very well done nor disappointing in any one respect (call it a solid C), or a very well written, carefully crafted book that misses the mark of a great romance at the very end, falling from a great height with a distinct splat (so you don’t know whether to average all the great writing with the annoyance and give it, say, a B — or grade it on its failures and give it a D)?