Jennerosity

I decided to start off my year of reading challenges by soliciting more suggestions from my friend Cait. I don’t like reading book reviews very much. Instead I like to get recommendations from people I know and trust. So far, it’s working out pretty well for me.

Here are some gross generalizations about what I learned:

• There are some excellent Australian authors out there
• John Green is a good author too, but just isn’t my style
• Compelling characters and an enchanting tone can make a story with flawed structure more enjoyable

I wasn’t very diligent in writing up book reviews this time around. I don’t particularly enjoy writing reviews even though I enjoy discussing books in person.

Next reading challenge is much less exciting, but no less important. I’m tackling finance books, so if you have any recommendations, let me know about them in the comments!

Entwined by Heather Dixon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wonderful fairy story! The plot was compelling and I liked all of the various character arcs. The romances were good but didn’t steal center stage. I especially liked the father character and the balance between king and father that was there. Definitely one I’d recommend to others. Also one I’d love to see done right with a film adaptation!

View all my reviews

I enjoyed it so much last year that I’ve decided to do it again this year. Yup, the reading challenges are back. We’re starting with Cait’s Reading Challenge Extravaganza part II. Which is basically just my way of buying time until I have to decide what my next challenge should be. I’ve already set some reading goals, but I enjoy how the challenges make me focus on one particular area. I’m already hoping that Cait’s Reading Challenge will help me take care of some of the books on my to-read shelf goal. Here are some of the possibilities for the challenges this year . . .

Non-fiction

• Finance/money/business/leadership/organization
• Parenting
• Creativity
• Spirituality

Fiction

• Arthurian
• Part 2 (because I’ve read quite a few books that were the first of a series lately)
• Favourites re-read
• Wheel of Time (the final book of the series is due out this year)

So people . . . now’s your chance . . . what should I read next?

Goals . . . resolutions . . . whatever you want to call them, I make them. One of my favourite things about the New Year’s Eve holiday is this part. I started doing quarterly goals last year, and I think that works even better. Helps to take some of the pressure off this time of year and sets up a review period so you can see how you’re doing. I always try to work on goals from the same general categories. Last year I did them each as separate posts (reading, fitness, money & random), but this year I think I’ll do one overview¹, but do less detail about each goal.

Reading

• Read at least 50 books
• Complete at least 1 non-fiction reading challenge
• Read at least 12 books that are currently on my to-read shelf

Fitness

• Be able to run for 30 minutes straight by the end of the year
• Establish a daily walking habit

Travel

• Plan a trip to Japan in 2013
• Research a trip to either France or Hawaii

With Locutus around I don’t want to push myself too hard to achieve things. Instead I’m just focused on building a strong family foundation. The older Locutus gets I’ll be able to re-asses my progress and add more goals as I’m able.

1. With the exception of the money goals, which get their own post with more details [↩]

Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later by Francine Pascal

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Part of me is wondering if the original series was also this badly written and I just never noticed.

One of the things that irked me from the very start was when she mentioned a couple of pop songs at the beginning. It immediately dates the book, and unless it’s a song that will be well-known enough to last the ages, doesn’t convey any sort of mood or tone beyond the brief span of time when people would be able to recognize it. It added nothing to the scene or overall book.

Also, there was no real conflict in the book. Everything was solved by the main characters simply getting together and talking it out and there were no events in the book that really prevented them from doing so. The book used flashbacks and jumped between the characters in order to create false suspense. It was completely contrived and unsatisfying for the reader.

Also, the characters didn’t really seem to have clear motivations or goals.

View all my reviews

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really enjoyed the book. I liked how the characters were mostly believable. The villains were a little bit cardboard, but for some stories, you just need a big, bad, evil dude at the end. They had their own motivations but were not very sympathetic at all. I’m wondering if the rest of the series will help to flesh out the world a bit more and perhaps give a better perspective to where they might have come from?

I also like the fact that this seems as though it will be a series of standalone-type stories that are loosely interlinked. Like some of Shannon Hale‘s work and China Mieville‘s, it’s nice to be able to come into the world again, but not be left dangling at the end of book one and needing to read book two before you get a complete story.

View all my reviews

For my next reading challenge I’m tackling books that I already own, but for one reason or another, haven’t read yet. Some are books that I won in contests or giveaways. Others are books that Benevolance bought/had in his collection that I’ve been meaning to tackle. In order to keep focused, I rounded up a bunch and stacked them up on my nightstand so that I can work my way through them. I’m hoping that one or two of them aren’t worth keeping because we’re kind of looking to thin out our book collection at the moment. I’m setting up a new goodreads widget for the sidebar and might be blogging reviews if I have time. Just for fun, here’s a visual of the stack of books I gathered up.

Quite the variety, hunh? I’m starting off with Graceling and we’ll see where I go from there.

So, I figure I should do another follow-up post summarizing what I liked and learned about the challenge. I’m just going to focus on the romance books because I read a lot more of those and the non-fiction/research books I really won’t be able to evaluate until it’s time to put some of the stuff in them to practice. Just like last time, here’s a visual overview of the books in the challenge:

I didn’t do reviews of individual books this time around, but if you want to see what I thought of a book, just click over to goodreads and most of them will have a star rating. My rating system works like this:

*= complete waste of paper & I’m not sure why I even read it
**= still pretty bad, but may have a redeeming quality or two. Would not recommend.
***= glad I read it but I’m not likely to re-read it in the future. Would recommend to others to read.
****= really enjoyed it, would re-read it if I have the chance and is definitely a book I’d recommend others read.
***** = loved it, had a profound impact on me, want to re-read it, will probably purchase a copy (if I don’t have one already)

Things I liked about this challenge:

• Part of it took place in Mexico. There’s just something so fitting about reading romance novels while sitting in tropical breezes and sipping frozen drinks!
• It was a really good mix of serious reading and escape reading.
• It also helped to refine my reading tastes in the genre of romance. This genre is so huge with a lot of sub-genres that it really helped to have some time where I could try out different titles.
• I also got help on this one too. Cait, from the last reading challenge, forwarded me a big list of a paranormal romance titles that were recommended by her friend Christine. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on the books so I was limited to what was available at my library and read quite a few as ebook formats.

1. With the exception of vampire stuff. It just doesn’t really appeal to me much. I’ll make a rare exception if something is very well rated, or to check the hype. More likely to listen to an audiobook about it than to read through an actual book about vampires. [↩]
2. I love her & Lucy March’s Popcorn Dialogues podcast too! They are hilarious!!! [↩]
3. I didn’t read any for this challenge, but have read almost all the books she’s written so far and loved them. [↩]

Continuing on my mid-year review, let’s jump into some academics . . .

My Reading goals are the only ones where I’ve made any real progress lately. My Goodreads challenge was to read 30 books this year and I’ve already read 25. I’ve also done Cait’s Reading Challenge and am just wrapping up the R&R Reading challenge. I’m part-way through a baby/parenting book that I’ll finish off soon.  I also just finished another romance ebook I downloaded from the library and put the third book in the series on hold.  And I even know what my next (and possibly final) reading challenge of 2011 will be!

• I will endeavor to read books that I own, but have not yet read

Yup, it’s the ‘Own But Haven’t Read’ reading challenge. I figure this is a good challenge to tackle before baby arrives, when I might not have as much time for reading as I used to. Plus, I’m so busy now that I don’t have a lot of extra time to stop by the library to pick books up. And there are lots of books that I have in my collection but haven’t yet read, so I know I won’t be lacking for material. I’ll definitely have my progress on goodreads and I’ll try to do a few blog post book reviews as I read them.

The flip-side of progress is stagnation. Which sums up my Writing progress nicely. Not a word or any progress whatsoever. And I’m not setting any goals for this quarter either.  I haven’t even been able to blog as much since my wrists have been bothering me more than usual thanks to pregnancy side effects.

I started the year with some separate and lofty Job goals too. And made pretty decent progress. I finished the Human Resources Management Course and loved it! But then most of my other job goals got nixed or made irrelevant by ‘the powers that be’ at my job. My final job goal was to get the necessary licensing credits for my 2012 license renewal before going on maternity leave. And as of today, that’s also done :) Now my lofty goals for my job are to just clean out and bring home my personal stuff. Since my computer terminal is getting upgraded sometime I’m not even too worried about un-modifying my personal setup (though I will have to remember to send some digital files home and/or delete them).

At a recent get-together with friends, the issue of ‘age-appropriate’ literature came up. We were talking about books and V.C. Andrews in particular came up. One of the guests commented on how much she disliked the fact that these books were being marketed towards the teen/pre-teen crowd because a lot of the content in those books is quite mature. I’ve been an avid reader since a very young age and always read above my reading age group, so I wasn’t sure if I was atypical for reading V.C. Andrews as a pre-teen. After checking with a few other sources, it turns out that it’s quite common to start reading them that young. Whether or not they were written for an audience that young, it seems as though there is a market for the books with that age group. So is it wrong for the publishing company to market the book for that age group? (Especially considering that they do the reverse for books which are not written for adults, but which have appeal for that audience. Two great examples are the Harry Potter Series and His Dark Materials Series, both of which got subsequent printings with ‘adult’ cover versions.)

Growing up, my sister and I were never censored when it came to our reading material or the movies and tv shows we could watch when we were growing up. It isn’t that my parents ignored us and left us to our own devices, but they didn’t restrict content we wanted to read or see based on whether or not it was appropriate for our age group. But the key there was that we had to actively seek it out and request it. And most of the things that were truly inappropriate for our maturity level we screened out ourselves either because it was (a) boring, or (b) too scary. I think if my parents ever had a legitimate cause to be concerned, they would have probably started a conversation with us about why we wanted to read/see it. And this approach just makes sense to me.

But the person who brought up the objections happens to be a teacher. And she also mentioned a certain level of screening she does with the books in her classroom. If she doesn’t think one of her students is emotionally mature enough to handle the content of a book, she won’t lend it (or not without their parents’ knowledge & permission). It reminded me of when I did my teaching practicum in a grade 8 classroom. My otherwise awesome sponsor teacher would only allow ‘proper’ books to be read during the silent reading time after lunch. A ‘proper’ book was one with an actual story and was in novel format. Which left out graphic novels, magazines, and a lot of non-fiction books as potential reading material.¹ And as a soon to be parent, I’m starting to look at this issue with even deeper complexity than I did before.

Is it up to our teachers to screen reading material for their students? I can understand an English teacher using discretion in selecting their teaching materials, but what about books they have as classroom books? Why have a book available if it isn’t generally appropriate for the students that you teach? If a kid is showing interest in reading at all, why would you potentially dissuade them by not letting them read a book? When is a kid old enough to decide on their own what reading material is appropriate for themselves?

Personally, I think that teachers should be encouraging as much literacy and reading as possible. If you’re worried about a parent objecting to a book you lend to their child then it shouldn’t be in your classroom collection at all. And for my part, I’m going to raise my kid with the same kind of trust my parents placed in me, and encourage them to read the things that interest them, whether the content is ‘appropriate’ for their age-level or not.

What are your thoughts?

1. And the days he left the classroom while I monitored I would find myself fascinated with the ceiling tiles in the classroom. [↩]