To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

Other than reading this not long after re-reading Catcher in the Rye and feeling like there was a similarity in crappy dispositions and a tendency to get hung up on stuff... I didn't get this book. Help. Can you explain it to me?

My 2014 Reading Recap

Here's a look at all the books I encountered in 2014. It feels pretty good! It was my first year really embracing audiobooks, and it shows--I only read a small handful of the books pictured.

Top picks of the year
1. Ready Player One (audio)
2. The Goldfinch (hardcover)
3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy (audio)
4. Mansfield Park (e-book)
5. Beautiful Ruins (paperback)

Most disappointing books
1. Havisham (audio)
2. Death Comes to Pemberly (audio)
3. Anne of Green Gables (audio)
4. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour (e-book)

Best new-to-me author
Chuck Palahniuk (audio)
 
Best know-nothing pick
Out Stealing Horses (paperback)

Guiltiest Pleasure
All The Cat Who... books (audio)

Jane Austen and blogland

I follow this blog, Bookshelf (https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/), which produces a lot of bookish stuff. It's mostly something I get notifications about, see in my feed, and occasionally save an email alert if I really want to go back. I definitely don't read or click through often enough.

One post I'd been sitting on is "The Best Books About Jane Austen." This morning I decided to look quick, copy the titles into my Goodreads to-read list, and go about my day. Holy cow! This isn't a quick list, this is practically a bibliography of what to read about Jane Austen (over 30 titles). From biographies to annotated editions to etiquette books, it's quite the list! If you're a fan of Austen I suggest you check it out. And if you just like books, give the blog a test drive.

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

I'm heading to India for vacation a week from today. It's so surreal! In light of the trip, the first book I finished in 2015 is A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. I liked the book, and thought it was more eventful than I anticipated. More eventful, definitely, than Howard's End, which I listened not more than three months ago but cannot remember. As I tend to feel about most books, I wish I had studied this in school. The echo, wasp, and caves were all recurring and had obvious secondary meaning as symbols and motifs, but I didn't quite get them on my own. The version of the book I read even had all the wasp passages highlighted and I couldn't quite find the meaning. This book may entice me to check out SparkNotes.

I also found some of the writing really quite lovely in terms of the ideas and how they are presented. Here are four of the passages I flagged. Even though they're old ideas, there's something so new about them. Maybe they're just easier to connect with this way.

If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation--one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. (201)

The annual helter-skelter of April, when irritability and lust spread like a canker, is one of her comments on the orderly hopes of humanity. (204)

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality. (248)

He had built his life on a mistake, but he had built it. (296)

I wish I had read this book faster, because I would have so enjoyed the opportunity to compare British-Indian affairs in this with those in my favorite mystery, The Moonstone. Alas, I am slow, and the Wilkie's work is long, and I do not want to abandon my book on the trip, so I will not be reading it right away. I've packed some others that I don't mind setting free if I need more room in my luggage. (Yes, yes, that's what e-readers are for, I know. But I don't want to hassle with all the cords and conundrums of technology while traveling in a country where my first priority is packing toilet paper.)

As a final note, totally love this cover of the book! Definitely better than the edition I read.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not the edition I read, but it's my favorite cover!

Well, what can I say: Baz's movie's debut last year naturally prompted me to read the book before the film hit theaters. For only a second time, in fact. I liked it more this time, but I do have to admit to not exactly enjoying the book. The characters are flawed and there aren't many redeeming qualities in any of them. And the story sort of goes on... then ends. Just like that. A little tragic, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a fitting, nicely wrapped ending. 

That being said, it's a Fitzgerald book. For me the book is never about the story (or lack of one) being told, but the writing and the depiction of a fascinating period of time. Mostly, it's the writing. I love how he says things. Below, you'll find the text I highlighted. That brilliant writing and some of my random musings.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been running over in my mind ever since. (1) 
Perhaps among the most famous opening lines of literature.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (4)

…one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. (6)

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. (6)
I love this idea of being rich as a thing to do

And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. (17)
Oh, Daisy

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque  gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (23)

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. (23)
Don't those eyes sure get a lot of attention when the book is taught

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (35)
Totally, bro, I feel ya

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. (39)

I believe that one the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. (41)

… I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. (42)
Quite true about my social life in 2014, not just that gilded age

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. (48)

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible inside. (57)

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. (58)

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (136)

…and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. (137)

I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window’—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” (159)
Outside the window was the Doctor's eyes! Gasp! Is he God?

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (177)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (180)

2015 Read Harder Challenge

Trolling the interwebs this morning, I came across Book Riot's 2015 Read Harder Challenge.

What a delight! I have set some of my own big reading goals for my 28th year of life--reading more hefty classics and reading e-books--but I like this a lot. Part of the reason I recently started volunteering for my local library's home delivery program is because I get to encounter other readers who have different interests than me. My patron, in particular, likes WWII and non-fiction. So not my jam. But, I really like the diversity this challenge encourages. And it breaks down to about two tasks per month, fairly doable. Perhaps I can make it happen!

Here's a recap of the breakdown
(You should really check it out on the website, though.)

1. written by someone when they were under the age of 25
2. written by someone when they were over the age of 65
3. short story collection
4. indie press publication
5. LGBTQ view
6. written by a person whose gender is different from your own
7. that takes place in Asia
8. with an African author
9. written by/about someone from an indigenous culture
10. in the microhistory genre
11. in the YA genre
12. in the sci-fi genre
    The Handmaid's Tale - Jan 2015
13. in the romance genre
14. that won the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize in the last decade
15. that is a retells a classic story
16. on audiobook
17. collection of poetry
18. recommended by a friend
19. originally published in another language
20. in the graphic novel genre
21. a guilty pleasure
22. a book published before 1850
23. book published this year
24. self-improvement book

Oh, and if you decide to play along, make sure to use #ReadHarder on social media!

Penguin Shared My Photo for #SeasonsReadings

I posted on Instagram. I posted on Facebook. Now, I'm boasting posting here.

Penguin shared my #SeasonsReadings post from Instagram today!

The theme, "It's a Mystery!" is one I've been looking forward to since the start. I adore mystery novels, but this book selection in particular is special to me. For starters, my love of Charles Dickens means I'm also fascinated with Wilkie Collins. Then, there's the fact that I studied this book in college during one of the courses that really opened my eyes to literary studies. That class is the only reason I even have the slight obsession with Wilkie and Charles. And let's not overlook the fact that this is one of those easy-to-covet mystery green Penguin paperbacks.

And can we just talk about the use of #bookporn? Gawd, I love Penguin.