2016 Reading Plans

In 2016 I am cutting back a bit on challenges to focus on my Classics Club list and some other non-book stuff. In the next few days I will be signing up for the What's in a Name Challenge at the Wormhole and for the Alphabet Soup Challenge (this one is by titles rather than authors). I am also mid-year with the Canadian Book Challenge at the Book Mine Set.
I finished 20/24 of the challenges in the 2015 Read Harder challenge and plan to read for the remaining 4 categories in the first part of 2016. I hope to do at least one read-a-thon in 2016 and will probably participate in Bloggiesta at least once as well. My GoodReads goal for 2016 will be 101 books.
I was intrigued by the Reading New England Challenge, but decided it was more than I want to take on right now.

Review: Social Media for Business

Social Media for Business: 101 Ways to Grow Your Business Without Wasting Your Time by Susan Sweeney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book, by two Canadian business consultants, provided a decent overview of various social media sites and tools and I did come away with a few things to try/research further for my Etsy business. Much of the book was focused on large businesses with numerous staff/departments which made it less useful to me than a more DIY approach would have been.
My major complaint about this book was that the promotion of the authors' websites and various social media channels was ridiculously heavy-handed. Every chapter ended with a list of resources and every one sent you to the main web sites of the authors as well as their various feeds (not to pages focusing on specific topics being discussed, just to their sites).
There are better books out there on these topics, like Face2Face.

A-Z Challenge Completed

I have completed the Authors A to Z Reading Challenge hosted by Samantha Lin. If I posted about he book I have linked to the post, unlinked books I read but didn't write about.

A - Ariely, Dan (The Upside of Irrationality)
B - Bourdain, Anthony (Kitchen Confidential)
C - Capote, Truman (In Cold Blood)
D - Davidson, Diane Mott (Tough Cookie)
E - Eble, Kenneth (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
F - Fluke, Joanna (Blueberry Muffin Murder)
G - Grabenstein, Chris (Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library)
H - Holloway, Emma Jane (A Study in Ashes)
I - Isaacs, Susan (Compromising Positions)
J - James, Eloisa (Enchanting Pleasures) 
K - King, Laurie R. (Garment of Shadows)
L - Leon, Donna (A Question of Belief) 
M - Mandel, Emily St. John (Station Eleven) 
N - Novak, B. J. (One More Thing, Stories and Other Stories)
O - Offill, Jenny (Dept. of Speculation)
P- Pratchett, Terry (The Colour of Magic)
Q - Quinn, Spencer (To Fetch a Thief)
R -Rosenstrach, Jenny (Dinner: A Love Story)
S - Sayers, Dorothy L. (Murder Must Advertise)
T - Todd, Charles (A Test of Wills)
U - Upson, Nicola (Fear in the Sunlight)
V - Verne, Jules (Around the World in 80 Days)
W - Whitehead, Colson (The Colossus of NY: A City in 13 Parts)
X - Xiaolong, Qui (A Loyal Character Dancer)
Y - Yancey, Richard (The Highly Effective Detective)
Z - Zouroudi, Anne (The Taint of Midas)

ReadHarder Challenge Mini-Reviews

I have finished several books recently toward the Read Harder Challenge. Here are mini-reviews:

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is my "graphic novel" for the challenge. The images of the machine Babbage envisioned were wonderful and there was a lot of interesting information about both of these historical figures, but I found the "adventures" silly and there were so many footnotes it was hard to read the book. There were also 'endnotes' which worked well as sections of text between the graphic sections.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was Fiszgerald's first novel and it wasn't as good as Gatsby, but I could definitely see indications of the brilliance that was to come. I am counting this as my "book written by someone before they were 25"










One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first story in this collection was great -- about the Tortoise and the Hare. After that I liked some and I thought some were lame. A few were really observations rather than fully-formed stories. I listened to this on audio book and liked the way the author read his own stories, in some cases with a few additional narrators helping out. This counts as my "collection of stories." 



I have several books left to go for this and only a few weeks left in the year. I may give myself an extension (to March 31, 2016) to complete this challenge. Still to read:

• A collection of poetry
•  A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade 
• A book by an author from Africa
• A book published before 1850

Classics Club Spin #11

I haven't participated in a Classics Club spin for a while and since the current spin gives us until February 1, 2016 to read the book I decided to play along this time. Here is my list of 20 titles:

1. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
2. On Green Dolphin Street, Sebastian Faulks
3. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
4. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
5. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
6. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
7. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
8. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
9. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
10. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
11. Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham 
12. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
13. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
14. Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
15. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
16. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
17. Dubliners, James Joyce
18. Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
19. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
20. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Review: The Magician's Nephew

The Magician's Nephew
by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love the narrative voice of this book -- the story is humming along full of excitement and adventure and the author pops in with a word or two of omniscient observation which brings you back to a broader perspective (and keeps it from getting too scary). This is a beautiful book and echos familiar stories (I won't spoil the book by telling you what stories).

"This was a difficult and delicate job but they managed it in the end. The little paper bag was very squashy and sticky when they finally got it out, so that it was more a question of tearing the bag off the toffees than of getting the toffees out of the bag. Some grown-ups (you know how fussy they can be about that sort of thing) would rather have gone without supper altogether than eaten those toffees." (p. 164)

This is my final book for the What's in a Name challenge (one with a familial relationship in the title) and is the 105th book I read this year, which completes by GoodReads goal for 2015. I'm looking forward to the 2016 WIN challenge.