"Buying more books than one can possibly read is the soul's way of aspiring towards infinity." - Kim

Ali reads books! Not necessarily fifty, but hey, we all have to have goals.

The rules I follow are: anything counts, as long as I finish reading it. Graphic novels, trashy novels, literature, picture books. They all 'count,' because I'm here to read for fun. If you study literature and enjoy thinking highly of yourself because YOU don't read that trash and think they shouldn't count, please consider this. You are asking me to study what you have chosen as your CAREER in my FREE TIME. I have chosen taxation as my career. Please feel free to prepare tax returns in YOUR free time. Then perhaps we will talk about me reading fucking Ulysses.

Other rules: I don't cut for length OR spoilers here unless I REALLY feel like it, so keep that in mind. Don't go crying that I broke your friendslist or your spoiler-free heart. I also don't expect readers of my personal livejournal to link this one. This is here for me to keep track, and if you want to see it, feel free. I will not cry if you don't want to see it and therefore do not friend it, for I am not twelve years old.

The Books in 2006

The Books in 2007

The Books in 2008:

1.) Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Parenting Advice - James Lileks
2.) A Girl named Zippy - Haven Kimmel
3.) Underground Woman, Marian Swerdlow
4.) She Got Up Off the Couch and Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana - Haven Kimmel
5.) Fables 9: Sons of Empire - Bill Willingham, et. al
6.) The Lost Princess of Oz - L. Frank Baum
7.) Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz - L. Frank Baum
8.) The Mole People - Jennifer Toth
9.) The Initiate Brother - Sean Russell
10.) Moneyball - Michael Lewis
11.) Little Heathens - Mildred Armstrong Kalish
12.) Tartuffe - Moliere
13.) Five Women Wearing the Same Dress - Alan Ball
14.) The Angry Black Woman's Guide to Life - Denene Millner, Angela Burt-Murray, & Mitzi Miller
15.) The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - E.L. Konigsburg
16.) Y: The Last Man 10: Whys and Wherefores - Brian Vaughan & Pia Guerra
17.) Fine Prey - Scott Westerfeld
18.) Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut - Jhonen Vasquez

I reread this because I wanted something one-shot. Bathtub reading, if you will. Originally, my brother read it and gave it to me to read. Before you ask, no, I have never gone to a comic con and orbited poor Mr. Vasquez like a creepy fangirl, because that is not how I roll.

My brother introduced JTHM to me with "You know all those people in movie theaters that won't shut up, or annoy you? This is about a guy who kills them." It also introduces Devi, who later shows up in I Feel Sick, and who is awesome.

I ended up focusing more on my reread than I thought I would; the book just draws you in. It starts out as an outlet for frustration and ends up musing on the nature of God and the Devil, and humanity. I know that sounds pretentious, but it comes off as very earnest and very interesting.

I also have to show deep love for something that involves Satan referring to himself as "Senor Diablo." (Can I call you "Mr. Satan?") Good times.

Those of you who were with me when I told stories might remember hearing mention of my cousin Sean, who steered our canoe down the Spring River, invented many fun games we played as kids, introduced me to the fact that swinging on vines in the woods is awesome, and then grew up and got married and had kids and became a writer.

He also has a blog. It is here.

This is relevant to the book journal because he has written one. So there.

Also he plans to have the feature "the loudest noise I heard today," which is my favorite, and is awesome.

I picked this book up at a used bookstore, primarily because I'd read Westerfelds 'Uglies' trilogy (which now has four books in it, but I haven't gotten to the newest of them), which is classified as junior fiction. Intended audience: teenagers. When I read that trilogy, one of the main things that bothered me was how simplistic some things seemed. I assumed that was because it was written for a younger audience, and sucked it up accordingly. I bought this book because I wanted to see the differences in Westerfeld's writing when the story was intended for adults.

( Cut because not so much safe for work. )

Recommended by: dslartoo

Okay, Phil didn't recommend the SERIES to me (he would have, however, if he'd known I was looking for a dystopia run by crazy bitches), but he did encourage me to finish it after I was kind of 'meh, what' about the ninth installment. I was worried that the series had jumped the shark and gone off in a weird ass direction that would annoy me, but he assured me it was awesome.

He was right. Thanks, Phil! I wouldn't have seen it through if you hadn't said that.

My brother had been hoping that Yorick would find Beth, but she would be with another man. That is not what happened, but what happened was just as good, and ultimately more realistic, since the other men were. You know. Dead.

Natalya was not eaten by the eels at this time, and she remained completely fucking awesome, lo unto the very end. This pleased me, because I love me some Natalya.

Biggest shock: Alter. I felt sick and horrified and wrong when I found out what she was up to, and yet I couldn't deny there would be women that would feel that way, even after so long trying to run the world without men in it. How far she went to do what she was doing... I just don't know, y'all. It made me sick and sad inside, and I was so pleased Yorick didn't give her what she wanted, just because I didn't want her stupid, selfish ass to get what she wanted. I loved Yorick's mom so much, you guys. SO MUCH. That was seriously all I could think, was how I loved Yorick's mom SO MUCH and she died for a such a STUPID, SELFISH reason. But hey. That's war for you, you know? A good storytelling choice, and a believable one. Just so sad.

Anyway, a great end to a great series, and for me, a welcome return to the things I loved about the story after what I felt was a weird, random, and kind of unnecessary left turn to cracktown in installment 9.

Recommended by: Jezebel.com's weekly "Fine Lines" column

Jezebel has a weekly column discussing books that girls read when they were young. I'd never read this one. I never even had a copy of this one, and I have no idea why. All I had to read in the discussion was that some kids run away and hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I wanted it. I found it, I purchased it, I read it. Good times!

It's kind of like The Da Vinci Code for kids, except that book annoyed me and this one I enjoyed. I didn't enjoy the whole Michaelangelo subplot - and I do consider it a subplot, and one that is wrapped up entirely too quickly and neatly at the very end of the book - but I enjoyed the main coming-of-age plot and all the discussion on the nature of secrets and why people keep them, and I loved to pieces every second of what the kids were doing after hours in the Met, and where they stayed and what they did.

Good times, fun times.

I'd never read this, but I saw production shots from the year Rhodes performed it, which was also the year before I attended there. So all I knew of the play was those shots - good shots, of Shea Flinn wearing an X-Men T-shirt and being an angry, angry son, of Marla Rolfs as Elmire faux-seducing the guy who played Tartuffe.

So I read the play and enjoyed it, and see why it's one of his most popular. It's a common theme - a charismatic, strategically brilliant and manipulative man very nearly ruins his victims completely. He is able to convince a man to disown his son, sign over his estate, break his daughter's betrothal, etc. etc. etc., despite the rest of the family knowing, and telling him repeatedly, what is really going on. How does Tartuffe do this? Why, by hiding behind the I AM THE BEST OF GOOD CHRISTIANS AND AM JUST CONCERNED FOR ALL YOUR SOULS banner. Fun note: it was actually banned for the portrayal of someone as a religious hypocrite. Because surely that NEVER happened!

So: yeah, still relevant today, with someone successfully hiding behind the banner of faith to further their own personal desires, and also still relevant today with how very well the frustration of the family is presented. It is really very, very frustrating when your loved ones just refuse to listen to you about something that is so important, particularly in Elmire's case, where her husband staunchly refuses to believe that another man totally wanted to fuck her, and not only wouldn't believe her, but then INSISTS THAT SHE KEEP CONSTANT COMPANY WITH THAT MAN, JUST TO SPITE HER FOR TELLING SUCH HORRIBLE LIES ABOUT HIM.

One of the themes in Marriage of Figaro I noticed here too (Tartuffe was written first) - the servants are way smarter than the noblemen, and have a much better handle on what they want and how to get it. Sort of like the modern sitcom often displays fathers as complete and total nitwits who are strung along in every area of competence by their superwives. It's impressive to me that Tartuffe, first performed in 1664, and Figaro, in 1778, both have this going on, and yet the aristocracy was like, "Wow, the peasants think we're indulgent assholes? We never realized!"

Anyway: enjoyed it! Would like to see it performed.

This is one woman's memoirs of life on a farm during the Great Depression. As you might imagine, the author is quite advanced in age. She is also a wonderful storyteller. Some of the detail I already knew, like how headcheese is made, and how to make a button lamp, although the author says she doesn't know anyone who has heard of it. I can't imagine people aren't still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, so I'll assume she means she doesn't know anyone whose heard of it as something they or their families ever did.

Above all, it was nice and informative to read about a family that is self-sufficient without the preachy, 'I'm better than you are because I did this' attitude some other authors seem to radiate. Kalish misses the taste and texture of the vegetables of those days, and notes several times market-available produce is nothing like what they produced in the thirties, but she seems to understand that for most people today, that manner of life is impossible. Most of us don't own the land, for starters. But it was nice to read about it, in a time when it was possible.

I also always love to hear about what people did for entertainment, back before tv and the interwebnets. Some of that is impossible now, too, and a great deal of it Kalish acknowledges as dangerous. I believe that sometimes dangerous is necessary and beneficial of course, but I? Would not attempt to tame raccoons, and certainly would not let them gnaw on one hand while I patted them with the other. Do I look like Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind? No. I do not. Because I am not.

It's also obvious in the course of reading why it's so much easier to be obese these days, and that is: these people were involved in never-ending, back-breaking manual labor, just to stay alive. As Alan Cummings says in Reefer Madness, our lack of fortitude is our own fault, doubtless our storied hardy frontier women would share a laugh at our expense.

I respect the hell out of them, but I wouldn't want to be them. I love progress! Hooray for tampons and running water!

This book is about how if vulcans played baseball, they would kick all our asses.

No, really. It is.

And it was AWESOME.

Recommended by: Suboshi

I think Suboshi is going to be on track to pick my favorite book of the year AGAIN. Pinkhouse is totally my fix for sweeping fantasy epics, since I am afraid to pick them up these days myself on account of I'm afraid they will confuse and annoy me like Tad Williams.

The key is, I think, that with The Initiate Brother, even though he does the Tad Williams thing with having a zillion characters, all with unique and sometimes similar names (because some of them are related), they are all interesting enough, and do significant enough things when they are introduced (and also in subsequent scenes) that I don't have any trouble remembering who is who.

Anyway, this book: awesome. Political intrigue is EVERYWHERE, and one of the most brilliant things about this book is that while I could figure out some of it (there's a hilarious prophecy at the end where character Y is all, 'this prophecy is about an unknown reborn fierce warrior, it must be about character X,' and I was all, 'oh no, honey, that's you,' there are a LOT of places where something is clearly being set up for the second book (it's a two-book series), and even though I can tell it's being set up, I don't know what will come of it, and there are enough twists EVEN IN THE FIRST BOOK that it is AWESOME. They also compare real life regularly to gii (go), which as pretty much everyone knows by now makes me scream with delight and attempt to kiss the author with tongue and get arrested for assault and spend some time in jail, where I beg for more of his/her books to pass the time, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle.

I don't know if that's something that's bad from a writing perspective, being able to tell that the author is obviously setting something up, but in this case, with the very distinct parallel being drawn between the game and the real story, I think it's deliberate, particularly since one chapter has a comment that you must conceal your real plan behind a another real plan, which must seem even more feasible than the real real plan, or your clever enemy will catch wise and give you a comprehensive thumping (excuse me while I wet myself with STRATEGY LOVE).

The cliffhanger at the end is also brilliant, and I am glad Suboshi gave me both books together, because otherwise I would cry. It's just very neat, both as a wrapup of everything that has been culminating, and also a lead-in to the next book.

I was also very, very impressed with the lady-type characters, as you all know is a big thing with me. The author did amazingly well at writing really bad-ass ladies, even though in the society of the book, the ladies are in a secondary social position. It's like The Lions of Al-Rassan, where there are certain social parameters, and the ladies work within those to be bad-ass, and are simply bad-ass in different ways than the men, which I think honestly takes more clever planning and thought than just making a society where everyone is already equal. It's really easy to do it wrong, and when it's done wrong, I get annoyed no matter which gender gets the shaft, because then it's all I can see. If you can't write women, just don't; take the Tolkien route and just tell us we have to believe Arwen is awesome because Aragorn loves her, and Galadriel is awesome because everyone says so and also she has a ring. If you can't write men, just don't; don't turn them into women with dicks, because they're not. (Most writers for Pern games have this problem.) (I should say here that I can't write men either and TOTALLY make this mistake myself, which is why I will never be an author.)

Anyway. Good book. Long ramble. YAY STRATEGY.