Gwendy's Magic Feather (The Button Box #2) by Richard Chizmar

 

Maybe in the end I was a bit disappointed, but while I was reading it I did enjoy Gwendy's Magic Feather. I was probably just waiting for some twist that never really came about. Unlike the first book nothing really bad actually happens to Gwendy and she never seems particularly tempted to push the buttons on the magic box. Basically she just gets super stressed out when the box reappears and helps solve a missing child case through some type of magical means that isn't fully explained. Maybe all will make a bit more sense in the next book. Since it was short and there's still a chance that this was all a set up for the final book in the series I'll go easy on the grade and say B.

The Fallen Star (Star Wars: The High Republic) by Claudia Gray

If I counted correctly, The Fallen Star is the 300th book I've read since starting this blog. Really that means nothing but hey, just figured I'd mention it. Anyway - these Star Wars High Republic books keep coming out and I keep reading them. Are they great? No, not really but now I'm somewhat invested in them. My qualms are the same... just too many random Jedis and aliens with weird names and it is difficult to keep track of them. And how are there not more workers or engineers on their space station? Did they hire a staff for this place? And the lack of a linear reading path somewhat bothers me. I'm supposed to know these characters that only appeared previously in a children's book? ARGH. I guess it is a B

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

 I'm not exactly sure how a short story that takes maybe half an hour to read (and has little to no plot) is transformed into a three hour film... as is the case of the story "Drive My Car" in the collection of stories by Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women. I guess I'll have to watch the movie now. Overall I enjoyed all of the stories. Since they're written by Murakami there are of course disappearing women, mysterious cats that seem to know more than they let on and numerous mentions of jazz albums. Ask me in a year if I recall any of these stories and I probably wouldn't be able to, but still it was a nice read. B

Mystery Book # 12- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

 Well I wasn't able to guess "who did it" by the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And yet all the clues were there and in the end it made complete sense. So without doing any research this book seems to be like the standard English murder story set in the countryside with a houseful of suspects that the odd detective has to investigate and in the end sits all the suspects down and says "I know the murderer is in this room"... but was this book the first like that? Or just one of the best? It all felt very cliche (yet entertaining) but these things have to start somewhere and this book is fairly old. So let's say an A.

The Christmas Pig by J.K. Rowling

 Well this took forever....I started reading The Christmas Pig to my daughter sometime before Christmas, and only am just now finishing it. I can't say I really recommend it. First off - it is way too long. The story is aimed at small children but is like 350 pages long. And the story is way too padded out and repetitive and there isn't much to interest or charm adults either. Harry Potter this is not. C

The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah by Stephen King

I read the first six Dark Tower books within the space of a year. And now almost five years later I finally picked up the next installment. I'm not sure what took so long. And for a book that's 400+ pages not really that much happens. Roland has a long conversation with the author of the book and Susannah finally has her baby. I enjoyed it but it seemed to mostly be setting up the final volume. B

100 Greatest Novels - A Recap

 So it only took 10 years, but I got through the whole list of 100 novels. Here are a few final thoughts and my highly subjective ranking of the books -

-If you asked before I started this project to list my four favorite books they would be the same as the top 4 books my final ranking. I think it is hard to have a new "favorite" something after a certain age. Plus, a book can't really be one of your all time favorites if you've only read it once. So maybe if I ever reread A Farewell to Arms it'll become one of my all time favorites then.

-Some books from the list that I'd consider rereading again - Les Miserables, Invisible Man, Don Quixote, A Farewell to Arms, The Magic Mountain and Pale Fire.

- Books that I was surprised that I really enjoyed - Birdsong, Tom Jones and Don Quixote.

- Book that I least understand the appeal of - Ulysses.

- Books that I already forgot most of what they were about - Tristram Shandy, Sons and Lovers, The Ambassadors.

- Biggest slog - the final four volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.

- Books I had previously read that disappointed me both on the first and second go - On The Road, the 3rd volume of His Dark Materials.

- Biggest disappointment - The Count of Monte Cristo.

- Don Quixote is mentioned in at least 6 of the books. And that's not including Don Quixote itself which in a meta way references itself as a book (or at least that's how I remember it).

-Overall I really enjoyed 80 of the books on the list, 10 were maybe just not my thing and 10 of them I'd probably advise people to avoid. Life is short, don't spend time reading Atlas Shrugged. I'm sure that I'd be even more infuriated by it now if I had to read it again.

1. Slaughterhouse-Five

2. The Catcher in the Rye

3. The Lord of the Rings

4. Dune

5. Les Miserables

6. Invisible Man

7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

8. Don Quixote

9. The Hobbit

10. A Farewell to Arms

11. The Grapes of Wrath

12. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

13. The Trial

14. The Magic Mountain

15. 1984

16. David Copperfield

17. Great Expectations

18. Love in the Time of Cholera

19. Lolita

20. Birdsong

21. Moby Dick

22. The Harry Potter series

23. Tom Jones

24. A Clockwork Orange

25. The Stand

26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

27. Pale Fire

28. The Handmaid's Tale

29. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

30. The Chronicles of Narnia

31. The Name of the Rose

32. The Great Gatsby

33. The Sound and the Fury

34. Frankenstein

35. Pride and Prejudice

36. The Call of the Wild

37. As I Lay Dying

38. Lord of the Flies

39. Tess of the D'Ubervilles

40. The Brothers Karamazov

41. The Old Man and the Sea

42. The Color Purple

43. Of Mice and Men

44. Jane Eyre

45. To Kill a Mockingbird

46. Things Fall Apart

47. Tristram Shandy

48. Heart of Darkness

49. Midnight's Children

50. Wind in the Willows

51. Anne of Green Gables

52. Rebecca

53. The Stranger

54. Brave New World

55. Atonement

56. One Hundred Years of Solitude

57. Native Son

58. Anna Karenina

59. Sons and Lovers

60. War and Peace

61. A Passage to India

62. Beloved

63. A Tale of Two Cities

64. Animal Farm

65. Vanity Fair

66. An American Tragedy

67. I, Claudius

68. A Prayer for Owen Meany

69. Middlemarch

70. Watership Down

71. Madame Bovary

72 Brideshead Revisited

73. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

74. The Count of Monte Cristo

75. The Scarlet Letter

76. Winnie-the-Pooh

77. Crime and Punishment

78. Emma

79. Catch-22

80. Persuasion

81. The Age of Innocence

82. The Portrait of a Lady

83 Charlotte's Web

84. Wuthering Heights

85. For Whom the Bell Tolls

86. On the Road

87. Remembrance of Things Past

88. Possession

89. Bleak House

90. Little Women

91. The Sun Also Rises

92. Nostromo

93. His Dark Materials

94. Absalom, Absalom

95. The Ambassadors

96. To the Lighthouse

97. Mrs. Dalloway

98. Gone with the Wind

99. Ulysses

100. Atlas Shrugged

So what now? I'm still working on reading the ever changing top 50 Science Fiction books at   https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-science-fiction-novels-of-all-time  and the top 50 horror books at https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-horror-books-of-all-time. It is only "slightly" frustrating that these lists keep changing. There's also the 100 mystery books list, https://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+Top+100+Mystery+Novels+of+All+Time+Mystery+Writers+of+America. Somehow even though I haven't touched anything on there for two years I've managed to read over a third of the books. So maybe I'll continue with those? Just a lot of the books on the list seem to be somewhat "disposable" types of books. In a hundred years no one will be reading or talking about Wobble to Death or The Steam Pig. And then of course there's the continuation of the original list that goes from 101-200. It is tempting to continue... but there are 8 books that are 1000+ pages! A Dance to the Music of Time is 3000+!