Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Shouldn't Have Bothered Finishing

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! A few weeks ago, we talked about books we didn't like but were glad we'd read anyways. The actual topic for this week are books we decided to stop reading too quickly. I almost never DNF (do/did not finish) my books, but there are some that if I'm being honest with myself, I should have because the book did nothing for me.

Where'd You Go Bernadette: I knew almost as soon as I started reading this that the tone was a mismatch for me. That never changed.

Bonfire of the Vanities: I'd previously read and hated Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I should have bailed when I started this and realized within like 50 pages I hated this too. Instead I read the whole thing and hated every second of it.

On Trails: I've actually got a pretty rocky history with the books my book club reads, but I love the group so much so I stick with it. This was last month's read, and the scattered way the information was presented was something that annoyed me pretty quickly and then just never stopped annoying me. This is a minority opinion, though...my book club overwhelming liked it!

The Sisters Chase: This was another book club selection and holy smokes it was awful from the first page all the way to the last. This time everyone else in book club agreed.

Sophia of Silicon Valley: If you're going to like this book, you have to really be rooting for the titular Sophia and given that I thought she was terrible from the jump...it did not work out well.

Vinegar Girl: The gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew are hard to update to the modern world, and the wit and snap that would make it work do not materialize. Skip this egregiously bad book and watch 10 Things I Hate About You.

The Witches of Eastwick: The movie version of this book is a cheesy 80s delight with some genius casting. The book, which I was surprised to find out was written by the legendary John Updike, was a dull, tortured plod and never got good.

The Circle: I was so excited for this book before I read it...a 1984 for the social media generation? Sign me up! But then it fell SO. FLAT. Lazy characterization, clunky dialogue, and the least interesting plot choices made. Though I'm always honest when asked for my opinions, it's very rare I'll actively discourage someone from reading a book. This is one of the few exceptions.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Two Eggers in a row...my practice with any given author is that if one book doesn't work for me, it's just as likely to be a weaker offering or just the wrong book at the wrong time as it is to be that I'll never like that author. Two, though, and I give up. Why I made myself suffer through this simultaneously anxious and boring book before I wrote off Eggers for myself I can't quite understand.

Dune: This space opera hits like 100% insanity right away and I do better when there's a little more world-building first.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Shouldn't Have Bothered Finishing

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're going through books that surprised us. I'm going to split mine up, and highlight first five books that surprised me by how good they were, and then five that I was surprised to find I did not enjoy.

Happy Surprised

Anna Karenina: Never having really read Russian lit, I thought I didn't like it because it was too long and boring. And then I read this book and discovered that I really did love Tolstoy. Both this and War & Peace are a million pages long and amazing.

Moby-Dick: Again, a book with a reputation of over-long snoozer, this time about some dude obsessed with a whale that ends up killing him, the end. But this book is actually delightful and has a ton of information about whales and whaling, religion, seafaring life, and so much more, as well as creating some truly unforgettable characters.

Jane Eyre: I thought this was just a gothic romance, which has never held that much appeal for me, because all you ever hear about is Mr. Rochester and his crazy wife in the attic and the looooove story. I was happy to find out that this is much more a book about a young woman discovering herself and making her own place in the world and very much liked it.

The Rosie Project: I usually shy away from romances (no offense to those of you who love them, they're just generally not for me), but I'd read such good things about this one and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really did enjoy reading it! It's just incredibly charming and a breezy, pleasant book.

So Big: I never would have picked this up but for its Pulitzer Prize (I'd never even heard of it before), because a story about a young woman being widowed with a baby son and scraping out an existence in midwestern farm country doesn't sound like something I'd really like. But Selina DeJong is an incredible character and I got totally sucked in and this book is really really good, y'all.

Not Happy Surprised

Don Quixote: I've gone on a classics kick over the past several years, and found that I actually liked a lot more of them than I thought I would. And then I got to Don Quixote and words cannot adequately describe how much I hated it and it was so long and reading it was like torture.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Everyone I knew who'd read this book described it as super funny and really good. And then I read it, and found its cavalier treatment of mental instability horrifying. I know they're making a movie of it and I think it might work onscreen, but it fell so very flat on the page for me.

Crazy Rich Asians: This is kind of along the same lines...rave reviews for a frothy fun romp and I mostly wondered if Kevin Kwan had ever been in a relationship before, because the one at the center of the book was deeply unrealistic and not in a good way.

Fahrenheit 451: I loved many of the dystopian classics I read in high school, and I wanted to love this one (it's about book burning! how could I not love it?) and I found it so boring I honestly can barely remember it.

Yes Please: This pains me, because I love Amy Poehler so much and wanted to just love every second of her book but it did absolutely nothing for me at all. It was neither interesting nor funny nor insightful. It was just kind of there.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Book 114: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

"Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it's complicated. Just because it's complicated, just because you think you can't ever know everything about another person, it doesn't mean you can't try. It doesn't mean I can't try."

Dates read: December 30, 2016- January 2, 2017

Rating: 3/10

I'm big into both the page (obviously) and the screen. Some things work beautifully in one medium, but not nearly as well in the other. Some, like Game of Thrones, manage to be fantastic both ways, but those are relatively few and far between. There's a reason The Great Gatsby has had such a hard time being adapted well as a movie...the story isn't hard, but that elegant expressed feeling of longing and loss is hard to depict visually. And the madcap antics of Arrested Development are so dependent on amazing cast chemistry and perfect comic timing that in another format that another format would likely collapse that souffle.

Arrested Development is a perfect one to mention here, since the author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple, previously wrote for that show. In Bernadette, she uses the same kind of absurdist humor lens to tell the story of Bernadette Fox, a deeply unhappy wife and mother living in Seattle with her Microsoft-rockstar husband, Elgin Branch, and their daughter, fiercely intelligent and independent Bee. Bee was promised whatever she wanted if she achieved perfect grades at her private school, and she claims as her prize a family trip to Antarctica.

This is a problem for Berndadette, whose anxiety and depression has manifested as intense agoraphobia. In an effort to make her daughter happy, though, she engages an Indian virtual assistant to help her both prepare for, and as the trip grows nearer and her fear of it grows, avoid the trip. Her decompensation, including a feud with the busybody mother of one of Bee's classmates, finally breaks through her husband's workaholic fog and he prepares an intervention to confront her, from which she escapes, prompting Bee's search for her (and the title, of course).

It's a satire of the original tech bubble scene, Seattle, complete with a prep school consultant engaged to attract the "Mercedes parents" to the school, a self-help group called "Victims Against Victimhood", and Elgin's status as a TED talk celebrity. And I know a lot of people who loved this book and found it outrageously funny. But the central family story is where it failed hard for me. I think we're supposed to be giggling at Bernadette's "antics" and her clueless husband's attempts to "deal with" them. But all I saw was a story about a tightly wound woman whose deepening unhappiness with the environment in which she found herself should have long since been noticed by her husband and dealt with as a family. Instead, he's spent years ignoring her worsening problems to bask in workplace glory and develops an inappropriate relationship with his secretary, who he tries to bring to his wife's mental health intervention? What? This is supposed to be funny?

Then again, Arrested Development on paper would probably rub me all wrong, too. After finishing it, I actually found myself wishing I'd seen it as a movie first, because I think the right cast could mine real comedy gold from it. But as it was, I thought it was playing a genuine, understandably developed mental health crisis as being the sufferer's fault, laughing at her rather than with her. I don't think that was the intention, at all, but I couldn't shake that reading. If you like Arrested Development-esque zany humor, you'll probably love this book...I'm honestly the only person I know who didn't. But it wasn't for me and I can't in good faith recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends...did you like Arrested Development?

One year ago, I was reading: Marlena

Two years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 114: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

A Month In The Life: January 2017

And the first month of 2017 is already ending! It feels like it went really fast...maybe because it did, maybe because my busy season at work starts in just about a week and I'm not feeling quite ready for the long days it'll bring (expect diminished reading around these parts for the next four months). Let's look back at the last 31 days, shall we?

In Books...

• Where'd You Go, Bernadette: This book was a big sleeper hit a few years ago, but it did nothing for me. When I found out Maria Semple had been a writer for Arrested Development, it made more sense: this kind of absurdist humor would be a lot more palatable on-screen, but on the page it made me hate nearly everyone involved. 
• The King Must Die: Mary Renault's novel takes the mythological story of Theseus and tries to create a real-world story (read: no Olympian gods, for the most part) that might have given rise to the myth. It's good, but it's not especially compelling.
• American Heiress (ARC): I'm a big fan of Toobin, but I didn't find this to be his best work. I definitely learned a lot about the Patty Hearst/SLA situation that I didn't know before, but the bulk of the book was about her life with the SLA and not about the trial, which is what I was more interested in. 
• Americanah: This book has gotten a lot of buzz, and I was worried it was going to be one of those situations where my expectations were so high I'd inevitably be disappointed. But I completely loved this, the prose and the story, and it's something I'd already consider a favorite.
• The Wars of the Roses: Since I've been reading Philippa Gregory's The Cousins' War series, I wanted a primer on the actual history of the dispute and the players. As always with Alison Weir, this was well-researched and very readable. 
• Snow: My book club book for the month, I admired Orhan Pamuk's novel more than I actually enjoyed it. Its central plot points circle around some of the underlying tensions that make up the conflicts between the East and the West, and reading about them from the perspective of a writer from Turkey (a nation that straddles both worlds) provided interesting insights.
• Helter Skelter: This true-crime classic about the Manson murders was written by the lead prosecutor, so it would be hard to imagine a more informed source. And while his writing is engaging and it's an interesting story, it gets a little eye-rolling at points when he makes sure you know how much work he did and how great he was. Not that he didn't both work really hard and do really well, but still. If you're at all interested in the Family, it's a great read.

In Life...

•  Rang in the New Year: This year it was just me, my husband, and our pug at home. I've never been super into the whole going-out-for-New-Years bit, so hanging out with my two favorite guys and and being able to walk just outside the door to see the downtown fireworks (we live just a handful of blocks away) was perfect
• Made it through #nvflood17: Northern Nevada is fortunately not burdened with much in the way of severe weather (we don't even have a tornado siren), but one thing we do get are floods. A heavy storm front moved through the weekend after the New Year and there was significant flooding all over the area, and even avalanches (more than one!) up in the mountains. We were in a safe area, though, so we just chilled out and watched the rain come down. 
• State of the State: The first real event of the political season that's about to kick off, this sets the tone for the upcoming legislative session and a lot of the lobbyists come up for it, so we all get to see our other-side-of-the-state friends for the first time in a while!
• Work holiday trip: My work does a holiday long weekend trip every year, and this year we went to Phoenix! I'd never been before and Drew and I had a fantastic time. Since we've got offices there, Las Vegas, and Reno, it's often the only time of year the entire company gets together and it's good to catch up with what's going on work-wise everywhere else and reinforce our social bonds.

One Thing

•  Being in my 30s, especially living in a dry climate, I've gotten much more aware of skincare lately. And no one does skincare like Koreans, who have a whole ten-step process to take care of your largest organ. A good place to start with K-beauty, if you're interested, are sheet masks, which are serum/essence soaked cotton masks you lay on your clean skin for about 15-30 minutes. The Soko Glam 7-Day Sheet Mask Challenge Set gives you a variety pack to experiment with and find favorites! This isn't an affiliate link or an advertisement of any sort, I just bought it and liked it and thought I'd share.

Gratuitous Pug Picture

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A Month In The Life: January 2017