A year ago I resolved to be more intentional about my reading. I made up a list of all the books I was going to read for the whole year, and I blogged about it and everything. Blogging about it makes it official.

Well, it's been a year. Obviously it's time to check in. How did Jen do on her 2010 reading assignments? Let's find out.




Here was my list:

1. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini. Read it, discussed it at book group. Not on my favorites list but a worthy read.

2. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert. Read it--a nice, light fun read. A chatty travelogue. Didn't care enough about it to go see the movie though.

3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, Shaffer and Burrows. Really enjoyed it! A sweet tale about a community banding together during WWII.

4. The Help, Stockett. Maybe my favorite read of the whole year. Tells the tale of four women in Mississippi during the early days of the civil rights movement. Engaging, funny, thought-provoking.

5. Humble Boy, Jones. Didn't read it.

6. Columbine, Cullen. Didn't read it.

7. Angry Conversations with God, Isaacs. Didn't read it.

8. One or more of the Jeeves books by P.G. Wodehouse. Didn't read it.

9. Churched, Turner. Didn't read it.

10. The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Read the first one (The Blade Itself) and liked it, but didn't love it. It's what I'd think of as a "masculine" fantasy. More swordfights and action than fairies and princesses. Haven't gotten to the next two books.

11. Crazy for God, Schaeffer. Didn't read it.

12. Founding Brothers, Ellis. Didn't read it. Heard from some others that it turned out to be very boring, so now I don't feel bad.

13. Welcome to the Departure Lounge, Meg Gederico. A bittersweet and humorous memoir about a woman coping with her aging parents. Enjoyed it.

14. Precious Bane, Mary Webb. An old book, about a woman growing up in a poor town in England who has a cleft lip (which at that time and place was often considered to be a mark of the devil). Good enough to keep my interest, but I wouldn't put it down as a favorite. The slow-paced and wordy writing style is true to the time it was written, but can be a somewhat jarring change of pace for modern readers used to fast, plot-driven books.

15. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver (already a favorite of mine, but I'll probably read it again). I don't think I did read it again. Still a favorite.

16. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich. A strange tale of a female priest on an Indian reservation in the early part of the 20th century. This one gets an OK from me. I read it all the way through, but it could have used some more character development.

17. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon. I love Michael Chabon. His books are completely original and I always enjoy them. This is a noir detective story set in an imagined reality where the Jewish home state was established not in their Middle Eastern homeland, but in...Alaska.

18. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson. An intelligent thriller, worthy of all the hype it's gotten, I think, but with some graphic content not everyone will enjoy.

19. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris. Funny, wry, as Sedaris always is; but more personal than some of his other story collections, with some very sad parts as well.

20. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak. Fantastic! It's a story of the Holocaust, but written from an unusual perspective and in an unusual way. Parts of it are in a very lyrical writing style that actually distracted and annoyed me a bit, but that's a minor quibble. I'd definitely recommend it.

21. The Seduction of Water, Carol Goodman. An interesting tale about a woman unraveling the secrets about her dead mother's past. I enjoyed it, but it won't go on my "greatest books" list.

22. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner. Yeah, still haven't read it. Still would like to.

23. Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon. And again! Why have I not read this one, since I like Chabon so much? And I actually have it on my shelf, since my husband (I think) bought it one time. Need to read it this year.

My score: 11.5 out of 23. Bad! Very bad, if you're scoring me based on reading everything on my list. That's only about 50 percent. I get an F.

However, let me plead my case a little. That list doesn't tell the whole story. I am in two book groups, one of which plans out all its reading a year in advance (and thus all those books were on my 2010 list) and one of which doesn't. So I did read lots of other books...just not the ones on my list.

Here's what else I read this year:

12. Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke. A kids' book about a girl whose father has the talent to bring characters in books to life with his golden voice. Sound great? Not as great as you might think, as the girl finds out. A good middle-grade kids' read, I'd say.

13. Odd and the Frost Giants, Gaiman. I really like Neil Gaiman. His fantasies are a little dark, a little creepy. This one, though, was a kids' book from him that seemed lesser than his other efforts. It didn't stick with me much at all.

14. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson. Sequel to the "Dragon Tattoo." Continues the interesting tale of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most unusual heroines in modern literature.  That reminds me...I ought to get my hands on the third one and find out what ever happened to Lisbeth.

15. A Painted House, John Grisham. I think John Grisham is a better writer than people give him credit for. I liked this story about a farm boy growing up in the South in the 50s. I loved the descriptions of the way things were then--you could tell it was real, that either Grisham's own relatives or people he know had probably had lives like this. But I didn't like the ending. It didn't feel like there was an
ending. Instead of wrapping things up, it just kind of trailed off. I finished it not quite satisfied.

16. Nurtureshock, Bronson and Merryman. A *very* interesting collection of research surrounding parenting, and the truths that parents believe about raising kids that aren't true at all. I'd recommend it to any parent, or to people who like well-written, well-researched nonfiction.


17. The Dark Tower I, Steven King. Another popular author who gets a bad rap in literary circles. Roland and his quest and the boy he meets were a good tale...though not good enough to make me go out and find the next six books in this series and read them right away. Though I would like to eventually.

18. American Gods, Gaiman. Another dark fantasy--though this is really almost magical realism, not fantasy. Everything in this book seems like it could really happen...if all the ancient mythological gods actually existed and were still intervening in human affairs. I liked the blending of myth and reality, and the reminder that in classical mythology, a lot of the gods were really not that nice. Also an interesting perspective on what our modern "gods" are.

19. Manhood for Amateurs, Chabon. A very honest parenting memoir. Some of his sentences rung so true with me--his description of the casual sympathy he fakes when his toddler comes up to him crying over yet another boo-boo is so spot-on--that probes not just the daily life of parenting, but the way it changes you as a person, too. He and his wife's choices about certain things are different than mine, but there are some things about parenting that are just universal and put you all together in the same big boat.

20. East of Eden, John Steinbeck. Everything else I've read or attempted to read by Steinbeck I found very disappointing. Maybe I'm just too low-brow for a literary giant like Steinbeck, I thought. But I actually liked this book. Is it terrible to say that I found Cathy, the evil villain, to be the best character?


21. The Tangible Kingdom, Halter. A great book about the nature of the modern evangelical church, and ideas about what Christianity should or could look like in today's world. I thought his criticisms were spot-on, but his solutions were vague and seemed a little too simple. I don't think he was trying to write a how-to manual, though, so I won't hold that against him.


22. The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Pearson. Thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking novel about bio-ethics. How far should medicine really go to save a life? What is it about a person that makes each soul a unique human? Pearson will get you pondering these things.

23. The Mockingjay trilogy, Collins. Loved "The Hunger Games," liked "Catching Fire," was disappointed in the conclusion, "Mockingjay." Although I don't have a better idea about how *I* would have ended it.

24. One Day, Nichols. Really liked this intelligent romance novel about a couple whose paths cross over the years. Their friendship and the way their relationship morphed over time was very realistic, and it had fun flashes of humor throughout. At first I thought the one-day story-telling device (the chronology advances a year at a time, checking in with the characters on June 15th of each year) was gimmicky--and maybe it is--but I got over it.

25. Star Island, Hiasson. Would not recommend this one about a trashy Hollywood starlet and her downfall.


26. First Comes Love, then Comes Malaria, Brown-Waite. Written in a funny, chatty, self-deprecating style, this is a memoir of the author's experiences in the Peace Corps. It sort of made me want to join the Peace Corps. A good read.


27. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Barbery. I had heard such good things about this book and then I really didn't like it at all. The point was supposed to be anti-elitist, that even a low-level household servant can be an intelligent, elegant woman; and yet I sort of felt like the protagonists were all snobbish in a different way. Like no one is good enough for them unless they enjoy Japanese cinema and other high-brow culture. Plus, I hated the ending.

28. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen. I feel like I really can't recommend this book because there was certain content in one or two spots that really crossed the lines of decency and good taste. That said: it was a good book. The characters weren't just realistic--they seemed real. Like I had known them, or people just like them. The book was very masterfully crafted, and though I am not sure I would call it the greatest novel of the century or whatever it's been hyped as, it was a very, very good book. I went into it kind of prepared to hate it, but I couldn't. It was nearly 600 pages long and I read it in a week. I really wanted to know what happened to these people.

So, there you go. I actually read 28 books this year. They may not have been the ones I set out to read, which kind of defeats the point of being intentional in my reading. So maybe I still get an F in that department. But, I did read a lot--2.3 per month! There was a time, when I was a child, when I would read that much in an afternoon. But since I no longer have the freedom to spend entire days lying in the couch, like I did when I was 12, I'm going to give myself at least an A for effort for making it through that many.

Next post...I'm going to make a list for 2011. Recommendation time! What have you read that absolutely needs to go on my list?