Book # 46 - Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Well I guess I just don't "get" Little Women. Sure I'm not in the targeted demographic but still I don't quite see how people love it so much. Overall I thought it was okay but kind of boring. Of the four sisters, two of them are pretty dull. Like I can't even think of anything interesting about Meg. Was that her name? I'm already forgetting.  And the plot is fairly thin. To me most of it just consisted of the girls doing everyday activities and having their mother continually preach to them about the importance of doing their housework. B-

Book # 56 & Sci-Fi Book # 19- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Well droogs I've just reread A Clockwork Orange, a work that I read a long time ago as a molodoy nadsat. As a malchick I messel it was quite horrorshow, the only difficulty being able to understand the nadsat slang, but now with this polezny Internet veshch I can look up a glossary of slovos in a minoota and just breeze through it real skorry. And I'm glad to say as a starry veck it is even better and makes one think about free will. Though it is hard not to continually think of the sinny while reading it. My only shilarny about the whole veshch is wanting to know if the 21st chapter was intended to be included by Burgess or not. Apparently he kind of went back and forth on it, but maybe that's not a baddiwad veshch. As a nadsat I thought it dobby without but now I've probably changed by mind. It is like choose your own ending! How oomny! A.

Sci-Fi Book # 16- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Maybe after reading Ulysses and The Hunt for Red October I enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time a bit more than I should since it is a nice and easy kids book. I'm not sure how it was never really on my radar growing up. If there's any criticism it is that a lot of the stuff that goes on in the plot seems a bit arbitrary and lacking in details... but hey I guess that's explained away as this being a children's book. I liked all of the characters... the kids seemed well characterized and the three Mrs. Ws were a lot of fun and I was left wanting some more of their back story. Let's go A-.

Mystery Book # 84 - The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Way back in high school I gave Tom Clancy a try. Reading The Hunt for Red October  now just reinforces what I thought back then... His plots are decent but there are just too many details about stuff I don't need to know. I feel like I learned something about how submarines work and the inner workings of our military but really I have no clue if any of it is actually accurate. Still I enjoyed it for the most part, B+.

Book # 4 - Ulysses by James Joyce

Well it was bound to happen... I finally got to a book that is highly acclaimed (# 4 on the list!) and did absolutely NOTHING for me. That book being Ulysses by James Joyce. Now I can see why people admire the technique and varying styles within the book... but to me that's all it is. This was a huge chore to get through. The only upside is that it put me soundly to sleep every night for a month and a half. I could probably go on and on about how much I didn't enjoy it. Sure there isn't really a "story", and I'm fine with that but neither did it capture any type of emotion for me. It is just chapter after long chapter in varying experimental styles. To me it is just style over substance. Sure maybe I just don't "get it" but the book seems to try and alienate the common reader at every turn. I'm not sure what kind of person would even enjoy this book. It seems like a book written purely to be studied and not enjoyed. Supposedly it is funny... but I just didn't get the jokes. Maybe Joyce is laughing at me from the afterlife because I actually sat and read the whole darn thing. Maybe for me one of the problems is the length of some of the chapters that are totally experimental. Like there's one chapter that is a nonsensical hallucination that takes a couple of hours to get through. Another chapter is written as someone's thoughts. Now that chapter is unique in the way it captures the fragmented way people think... but 1. I don't care about this character , 2. this character doesn't have novel or interesting thoughts, and 3. it takes at least two hours to read. So I don't think I can really even give it a grade. It gets a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  but is placed only above Atlas Shrugged in my rankings. Also it mentions Don Quixote. 

Horror Book # 25 - Books of Blood Vol.4 by Clive Barker

So while I was taking a break from reading nightly for a bit I still needed something to read if I went out for lunch. And so that's how I ended up reading Books of Blood Vol. 4 entirely on my phone. And it only took two months! This volume has five stories and all of them were pretty solid and definitely scary. My favorite is the one about a guy's hands that take on a life of their own and decide to rebel. A-.

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

This may have been the first Stephen King book I've read that I thought was too short! Gwendy's Button Box is a nice short novella about a young girl, Gwendy, that is given a magical box by another incarnation of RF. Will the box corrupt her? Destroy her life? Maybe because it is a collaboration the ending here is completely satisfying. Let's say it gets a B+.

Mystery Book # 67 - Stick by Elmore Leonard

Wow... almost two months between entries. See this is what happens when I decide that the next book I'm going to read is something that is super long and generally considered a difficult and not fun read (Ulysses). So instead of reading that specific book I find ways to procrastinate. First I started using my small window of free time each day to watch television instead of read...(Westworld! Check it out!). Then I put holds on library books (like Stick) and figured I'd have to read Ulysses after those... So someday I'll start Ulysses... just not yet.

Anyway, Stick is pretty much what I expected from an Elmore Leonard book... a likable criminal type gets in trouble with unlikable more criminal types and finds a way to scam their way out of a jam. I enjoyed it but the details are already evaporating out of my memory. Maybe I'll watch the movie version from 1985, it looks like it has a good cast but then I won't have time for Ulysses. B

Acceptance (Southern Reach #3) by Jeff VanderMeer

Well Acceptance doesn't really answer all of the questions posed by the previous two books in the series. But really those kinds of questions usually don't have satisfactory answers anyway... So I did enjoy reading it and several of the threads from the previous two books are picked up while giving a sense of what maybe Area X really is. I guess it ties up the story as best as possible. B+

Book # 54 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Even though I watched the film version of The Age of Innocence maybe fifteen years ago or so I had no idea what this book would be about. Memory huh? Anyway the book is set in New York during the late 1800's and is about this guy that falls in love with his fiancee's cousin. The writing is to be admired and there as some lovely passages... but for the most part I couldn't get into the story. I guess I wasn't really sold on why Newland would fall so much in love with the Countess, or vice versa. And the end was a bit frustrating too, or at least that's my interpretation of it. Another list book, Middlemarch, gets a mention. Let's say B+

Book # 32 & Sci-Fi Book # 22- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Have I ever mentioned here that Slaughterhouse-Five is my favorite all time book? Well it is. Probably because when I first read it as a teenager I really found the whole dark humor, meta-fiction, ironic tone thing right up my alley. Plus it has time travel and space aliens while still being considered serious literature. How could I not love it? And got me thinking how most people's favorites are formed before they hit their thirties. I'm pretty sure that nothing I read during this list project will dethrone this as my favorite book in the same way that I know my favorite superhero movie will always be the 1989 Batman. Why? Because I saw that movie when I was 13...

Now I'm not sure if I thought this the last time I read it... probably not... but on this read through it really seems like the novel is about PTSD and you know maybe the Tralfamadorians aren't actually real. I think I always took it at face value... it was after all nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo. But I think we're dealing with an unreliable third person narration here which is I'm guessing fairly rare. Really, if someone with a history of mental problems tells you that they were abducted by aliens and lives life non-linearly would you really believe them? Especially when that life is always going back to the most traumatic events in that person's life? So yep, still my favorite book A+. Also, The Brothers Karamazov are mentioned.

Mystery Book # 63 Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey

Wobble to Death has a nice little set up about a murder during a six day footrace in late 1800's London. But by the end I didn't care about who was the murderer. Additionally I found the main detective to barely have any personality at all. I really couldn't tell you anything about him. Really the most fascinating thing was finding out that there used to be six day races and the whole strategy behind them. C+

Book # 93 - An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Well I started out really enjoying An American Tragedy but man is it a long book... It is broken into three sections and the first two sections are great, but the third just drags. Two of the long chapters in that section basically just recap the previous events of the book. Anyway...

The book tells the story of Clyde Griffiths, a poor young man that was raised in a roving religious family. He decides to get a job, earns a bit of money for himself, falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes involved with the wrong woman. This leads to a tragic accident that causes Clyde to runaway. But that's just the lead up to the main story... eventually Clyde discovers that he has a rich uncle with a factory and by chance ends up meeting him. The uncle offers him a job and Clyde (still poor) finds that he isn't liked by the rich crowd or the working class (since they seem to think him rich because of his relation to his uncle). So of course Clyde does the one thing he's specifically told not to do... date a woman, Roberta, that he supervises at the factory. But then a woman in the rich crowd takes a shine to him and Clyde is thrilled because all he can think of is how much prettier and richer this second girl is. Well the complication comes in that he has now gotten the first woman pregnant and this being set in the 20's would be scandalous if anyone finds out. Now let me point out this is about half way through the book... so it is long but a lot happens. Clyde reacts to this news by ***SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT*** trying to find someway for the woman to have an abortion. At this he fails and convinces Roberta to leave town for a bit while he gets some money together and maybe he'll marry her but really he's pretty passive aggressive about it and just keeps hinting that it would be better if they just never saw each other again. At the very least Roberta agrees to give him a quick divorce after the child is born if they get married. But this won't work for Clyde because it'll ruin his chances with the rich girl and everyone will realize that he dated someone at the factory and he'll get fired. So yeah, Clyde is never a likable character. He's selfish and stupid. You just know that he'll do the wrong thing. He can't NOT do it. So he happens upon an article about a boat accident in which a couple died but the man's body was never recovered. See he can't even think of his own plan for murder either... So he figures he'll get Roberta out on a deserted lake, knock her out of the boat and fake his own death under an alias. Are there logical problems with this? Of course and Clyde sees none of them. So he gets her out there and has second thoughts mostly because he's a coward but he does then kind of accidentally/sort of on purpose (maybe) creates the very scenario he had planned on. And because Clyde is a dummy he pretty much gets caught right away. Now at this point we're maybe 70% through... which means maybe only 300 pages left...  So then the rest of the book follows his trial and subsequent time on death row. So yeah... lots of recap at the trial and Clyde convincing himself that he's really innocent. 

Overall I liked it... just the ending kept dragging on and on... A-

Authority (Southern Reach #2) by Jeff VanderMeer

You know what this book reminded me of... one of those episodes of Lost that take place off the island. At first you're excited to get some answers... and you do but they kind of take the thrill out of the initial mystery. And of course off the island things are also kind of weird for some reason and you get other mysteries that are slightly less interesting. This also ends on a cliff hanger so the feeling of it being incomplete lingers. Let's say I enjoyed it but not as much as the first one. B

The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King

Since I'm slowly making my way through the whole Dark Tower series I figured I should probably read The Eyes of the Dragon too. And I started out really enjoying the book... the whole set up is fun - A king's evil magician conspires to kill the king and place the youngest prince in power as his puppet. But somehow I was led to believe that there would be a bit more fantasy quest type action that never really materializes. Like I kept expecting a dragon to show up and one never does. And even though it isn't really a long book it could have used a little bit of condensing. I'll go with a B+.