Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Take a deep breath.....and read!

The Goodreads Seasonal Reading Challenge Summer 2011 has come to a close.  I hit a personal best for these 3-month challenges, reading (or listening to) 61 books and almost 19,000 pages. My list is here (I managed to read the books in bold type.)

Most of the tasks have been posted for the Fall Challenge, and I've made up my reading list. This varies over the challenge as new books come my way or I move some around, but I'm trying to read from my shelves this quarter so that I can continue with my book purge.

I'm starting off this challenge with a few items from the library:

Books:

What to Eat by Marion Nestle. I've been wanting to read this ever since it was published, but hadn't gotten around to it until it finally came up on my hold list at the library.  It's 600+ pages of clear, straightforward, no-nonsense writing and I'm enjoying it.

The Idle Parent: Subtitled "Why Less Means More When Raising Kids".  Recommended on the excellent blog Mental Multivitamin, I'm reading this mainly to feel better about our laid-back attitude to parenting, as it's too late to change much at this point.

The Young Man From Atlanta by Horton Foote. I borrowed this Pulitzer Prize winning play from the library for the summer challenge, but didn't get to that task. I'm hoping to find a place for it on my list when all the tasks have been posted.

Three graphic novels that I picked up after browsing at my local library branch. I like this genre because the story is told in fewer words but the artwork is typically engaging and tells a good part of the tale. The first two are by American writers and the third Japanese.

Filthy Rich

Narcoleptic Sunday

Ristorante Paradiso

Audiobooks that I've downloaded from the public library onto my iPod:

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande. I know about the essence of this book having read an article in the New Yorker (I think), but I'm looking forward to a longer description of this approach to reducing errors in different industries.

The Night Road by Kristin Hannah. I don't know this author and the book was published in March 2011, so I must have read a review of it somewhere and put it on my hold list.

Prisoner's Base (Nero Wolfe mystery) by Rex Stout. I like Nero Wolfe mysteries and they're good, quick listens.The narrator on all the ones I listened to in the past has been excellent.

The Good Guy by Dean Koontz. I chose this for a task where you have to read a book by an author who has a retired hurricane name. You "get out" of reading a second book if the book you read was written in the year the hurricane name was retired, in this case, 2007.

 

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