Reading Wrap-Up

Here we are racing toward Christmas and the New Year and I've hardly stopped to take a look at my recent reading. I managed to add some more classics to my repertoire this year like Wuthering Heights, Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and blogger favorites like The Book Thief, Shadow of The Wind, and Norwegian Wood. Good books, all. Some personal favorites were A Moveable Feast, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Golden Mean, The Bean Trees, and Rebecca. A couple of disappointments came by way of Revolutionary Road (fabulous story but the ending made me want to scream!), Jamaica Inn (there was no need to have a romance in this otherwise good book), and Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress (ehn-I don't remember what it was I didn't like about this one - it was just different from what I expected). The weirdest book I read this year was Perfume. Not only was the whole story bizarre, but the ending? what the hell? And then there were the inevitable DNFs: Olive Kitteridge, The Savage Detectives, The Help, and The Winter Vault - either the writing was annoying/odd, or the story was just not very engaging, so.

Over the holiday's I'll take it easy with Bill Bryson's Notes From a Big Country and Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, both light, interesting and easy to put down and pick up whenever. And then, in the quiet days of the new year, I'll get back to some of the lingering TBRs on my dusty old shelf and the classics I've been on a quest to conquer familiarize myself with.