shut up and let me see your jazz hands

So my goal for the year was to read 75 books and I did it, just barely, but in order to do so I had to stick to the very shortest books I could find. I read a lot of young adult books because not only do those tend to be shorter, but they also tend to be very quick reads. I avoided reading books over 300 pages if possible, and I avoided reading non-fiction for the most part because it tends to take me longer than fiction. I'm not happy with those decisions.

I did read 75 books that were on my shelf to be read, though, so it's not like I went out and found 75 short books and avoided books I really wanted to read. These were all books I wanted to read at some point. So I still made a great dent in my reading pile.

But. I'm setting a lower goal this year. Having that goal makes me anxious. If I set a lower goal and end up reading more, that's great. But when I think I have to meet a high goal, I find I just cannot bear to think about not making it.

So this year I'm going with a goal of 50 books. This will allow me to read more of the longer books on my shelf without stressing that it's taking too long.

You can see the full list of what I read this year, reviews included, on LibraryThing. Manga is counted separately because otherwise it overwhelms the list.

( 2009 stats & 2010 goals - books )

I also read 223 volumes of manga, and the LibraryThing list is here. That was without even making an effort, which is why I keep track of them separately and do not count manga in my general reading goal. XD Though I would like to aim for 250-300 this year, just to make a bigger dent in my "to read" folder.

( 2009 stats & 2010 goals - manga )

If you want, you can go over here and take a poll about what books and manga I read this year that you have also read.

Title: Shaman King
Author: Mitsui Hideki
Number of Pages: 220 pages
Book Number/Goal: 72/75 for 2009
My Rating: 1.5/5

Wow, what a waste of time this book was. It is basically a retelling of the early volumes of Shaman King with a tiny bit of new content tacked on at the end. Seriously, while the jacket flap promised a new character exclusive to the novelisation (which is why I bought it, because I only wanted to read it if it was an original story, not a retelling of the manga), it was only about the last twenty pages that contained any new content.

I'm not sure who would be a good audience for this book, because it ends with a "to be continued" sort of vibe that means you're going to have to go read the manga to find out what happens to Yoh and Amidamaru and Manta and Anna and Ren and the whole Shaman Fight thing, but when you do, you'll be retreading old ground if you start from the beginning of the manga. And yet as a fan of the manga, it's really redundant.

This is the third of these red-spine Jump books that I've read and all of them have been really not that great (though at least the Naruto and One Piece ones were novelisations of movies which I hadn't seen), so even if I see them on the dollar shelf, I think I'll be avoiding them from now on and sticking to the smaller manga-sized novels which seem to be actual original stories and not novelisations of anything (if the D.Gray-man Reverse books are anything to go by).

Title: Keeping You a Secret
Author: Julie Anne Peters
Number of Pages: 250 pages
Book Number/Goal: 70/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Holland is the student body president, on the swim team, a straight-A student, and has a great boyfriend who's also one of her best friends. Everyone thinks her life is perfect. But when she falls in love with Cece, a new girl at school, that all starts to change.

I read another book by Peters earlier this year and liked it a lot, so I was hoping this would be as good and it definitely was. It felt a little less textbooky than Luna, which I think has to do with the fact that the author is writing from personal experience here, where she wasn't with Luna. There's a subplot in this with Holland's stepsister Faith, who's a goth, and that part has the same "let me show you my research" feel to it that all the transgender stuff in Luna did.

Mooch from BookMooch.

Title: War Dances
Author: Sherman Alexie
Number of Pages: 256 pages
Book Number/Goal: 68/75 for 2009
My Rating: 2.5/5

This is a collection of short stories and poems linked mainly by the fact that they're about whiny guys. I don't know. I did like a couple of the stories (especially the last one, Salt, and the title story), but the ones that left a bad taste in my mouth really left a bad taste in my mouth and kind of overpower all the rest. The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless was just gross, and I get that he was supposed to be a gross asshat guy, but I don't really need to read a story about a guy who's just wallowing in his assholishness while going "wah, wah, poor me", you know? I could go anywhere on the internet and find a million of them.

Added to that the fact that I'm not a big fan of poetry and these poems didn't do anything to change my mind, and that the writing itself wasn't that great, this was just really not the book for me. I'm glad this wasn't the first thing of his I ever read, otherwise I'd probably write him off and never read anything of his again.

Title: Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet
Author: Sherri L. Smith
Number of Pages: 167 pages
Book Number/Goal: 66/75 for 2009
My Rating: 3/5

When a pipe bursts during Ana Shen's middle school graduation, flooding the field and cutting the ceremony short, it doesn't seem like things could get any worse. Then comes the announcement that the gym is flooded, too, and the graduation dance is cancelled. The dance was going to be Ana's big chance to tell Jamie Tabata she likes him before they go their separate ways for high school, but when her best friend Chelsea ends up inviting Jamie and his family over to Ana's for a graduation dinner, it looks like there might be hope after all. Assuming Ana can keep her grandmothers' rivalry from ruining everything.

I'd seen several reviews for this on 50books_poc and wasn't really that interested, but after reading and loving Flygirl, I decided to give some of Smith's other books a try. This...is definitely no Flygirl. It's cute enough, and it's nice to see a biracial main character (or any character!) who isn't half white, but I wasn't wowed or anything.

I really think the book could have used a lot more editing. Most of it is fine, but it starts to fall apart at the ending, which seems really rushed, plus has a couple of chapters that don't really fit. At one point her grandfather starts telling a story and instead of just making it quick or summarising, we actually get a random flashback chapter in his POV about the event he's relating. We also get a few paragraphs in one of the grandmothers' POV towards the end, in a story that has otherwise been very tight third person with only one POV. It just seemed sloppy.

Also I was really excited about the story being set in LA at first, but it ended up being more frustrating than anything because the author gave all sorts of conflicting details. The kids have gone to school together since kindergarten, yet for some reason they all go to an elementary school in a totally different zone than where they live. (One person going to a far away public school might have some excuse, but not a whole class.) Then the high school mentioned is not the high school that middle school feeds into. Neither is it the high school she would actually be going to for where she's supposed to live. Which being less than a mile from the beach would be Santa Monica and she'd go to SaMoHi, not Uni (also everyone keeps saying University High and I'm sorry but I have never heard anyone call it that; it's Uni). Plus the author gives a freeway exit that they're supposed to live near, which is not less than a mile from the beach, either.

I really don't know what she was thinking. The jacket flap says she lives in LA, so it's not just that she didn't know what she was talking about. It's like she wanted to use real names of stuff, but didn't want to be specific, so she ended up taking bits from all over. If you don't want to be specific, then either be vague or make up names of school and stuff. But if you're going to be specific then you have to get your facts right!

Of course most of the people reading aren't going to know or care, but it really took a lot of fun out of it for me.

Title: Bones of Faerie
Author: Janni Lee Simner
Number of Pages: 247 pages
Book Number/Goal: 64/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Before Liza was born there was a war, and humans were attacked by the faerie, magical creatures no one had known existed. Now the faerie are gone, but the world is changed. Animals and plants have been infected with magic and now hunt humans. Children are being born with magic powers, including Liza's little sister. When her father leaves the baby out in the night for wild animals to devour, it sets in motion a chain of events that will cause Liza to question everything she's been told about magic and the faerie.

This was really awesome. I picked it up a while ago because it sounded interesting, but by the time I read it, all I remembered was the bit about the baby being left out to die, so I had no idea this was a post-apocalyptic Earth and not just a random fantasy world. I love the idea of a magic apocalypse and this is really well done. It's a fast read and really hard to put down.

I wish we'd learned more of the backstory about the war, but maybe she'll write about that in future books. There's apparently a sequel planned for 2011. There's also a short story set in the same universe, though it kind of retreads a lot of the same ground as the novel, just with different characters in a different setting. (I wonder if perhaps it was the basis for the novel.)

Anyway, like so much fantasy, this book is thoughtlessly white. Apparently no people of color survived the apocalypse. :p But that's pretty much my only complaint. This was very cool.



I wish I'd read this before yuletide nominations. And that, you know, I'd known I could participate so I could actually nominate stuff, because this has so much room to explore. She's created such a neat world, but we only get hints about the war and what happened in the years since, both of which are things that interest me more than Liza's story itself.

Title: Derby Girl
Author: Shauna Cross
Number of Pages: 234 pages
Book Number/Goal: 62/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

Sixteen-year-old Bliss hates her smalltown life, especially the part where her mom is trying to live out her dreams of becoming a beauty queen through Bliss. Then one day she sees a poster for a roller derby match and the next thing she knows she's trying out for the team.

I really enjoyed this book. It's written in that first-person chatty style that is all the rage with YA and chicklit these days, but despite being a bit exposition-heavy in the early chapters (having read more in these genres lately, I have come to dread the "let me pause the story so I can give you my entire history" bit that usually comes in chapter two), I really enjoyed the narrator's voice and liked Bliss a lot.

The story is cute and female friendship is front and center. While there is the stereotypical mean girls that kind of made me roll my eyes at how cliched they were (one at school and one on the opposing roller derby team), it's balanced out by the fact that there are a ton of supportive (female) friends, so it doesn't come off as "girls are bitches" like so many stories do. There's a romance subplot, but it takes a backseat to friendships, too.

The one thing I really disliked about the book was how white it was. Aside from Bliss's best friend and possibly one of the roller derby girls whose derby nickname is Juana, everyone is white. And this takes place in Texas! But aside from that one girl, there weren't even any incidental characters with Spanish names. And her best friend Pash is mentioned as being Arab-American, but that's all we get. No actual country to give her any sort of specific heritage. It's just like Arabs are a big mob who come from Arabvania or something. And aside from the initial introduction (where she's mentioned as having exotic good looks, gag) and one or two mentions of kids at school being racist, she might as well have been white.

Still, it was really cute and I can't wait to see Whip It. I also really, really want to write and read fic for this fandom, especially Malice/Bliss.

Title: Naruto: Takigakure no Shitou Ore ga Eiyuu Datteba yo!
Author: Kusakabe Masatoshi
Number of Pages: 222 pages
Book Number/Goal: 60/75 for 2009
My Rating: 1.5/5

Naruto and the gang are on a mission to escort the head of Takigakure Village back home, but not long after they arrive, the village falls under attack. Kakashi has been called back to Konoha, so it's up to Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura to save the day.

I'm a big fan of Naruto, but this was really boring. Part of my problem was that this was set really early on and so it felt weird going back to when they were younger. I forgot how clueless Naruto was about everything and how annoying Sakura was with her Sasuke obsession (though unsurprisingly, she hardly had any role in the story, especially once the fighting got going). But mostly it was just a boring story that didn't need to be 200 pages long. :p

I read it in Japanese, but it's also been released in English under the title Mission: Protect the Waterfall Village! (The link above goes to the English version on Amazon.)


Mooch from BookMooch.

Title: Wizard and Glass
Author: Stephen King
Number of Pages: 672 pages
Book Number/Goal: 58/75 for 2009
My Rating: 4/5

I had hoped that this would be the year I finally finished reading The Dark Tower. That's...obviously not going to happen. But at least it's the year I finally finish rereading the books I read years ago, so that I can finally read the final three.

I read Wizard and Glass not long after it came out, so it's been a while. I found there was a lot I didn't remember, though I still remembered the gist of things. I wasn't quite as annoyed by the detour this time around, since I have the final three right here, whereas the first time I read it, I'd been waiting years and years for a new book in the series and then instead of furthering the plot, it was all backstory.

Still, I didn't like this as much as the first three books. Which is weird, because usually I love backstory and flashbacks and reveals and all that sort of stuff, but I just find the story of Roland's time in Hambry really dull. I mean, obviously I still liked the book, since I gave it a four, but really. Especially anything to do with Roland and Susan was just beyond tedious. Someone needs to sit Stephen King down and tell him not to write romance, because it's really not his strong suit.

I won't be starting Wolves of the Calla right yet, because it's super long and would take most of the rest of the year to read. Instead I'll read short books to try and get closer to my goal. XD Then Wolves of the Calla will probably be one of the first books I read in 2010. :)

Title: V for Vendetta
Author: Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Number of Pages: 288 pages
Book Number/Goal: 56/75 for 2009
My Rating: 5/5

In the post-apocalyptic "future" of the late 1990s, Britain is under totalitarian rule, but a mysterious man known only as V is about to change all that.

This is pretty much right up my alley storywise. The art...well, it was bearable to get the story. I would have much preferred it as a novel, though, because the art definitely didn't add anything to me. I'm not a fan of most western comic styles and this seemed worse than most in that it was so dark and everyone's faces were half in shadows all the time, so I had real trouble distinguishing characters (especially since aside from V and Evey, they were pretty much all Generic White Guy With Short Hair). But as with many less-than-stellarly-drawn manga, it's well worth it for the story.

I kind of feel frazzled at the moment, so I don't really have much to say beyond that, though there were definitely things that didn't sit well with me, most notably the fact that while it makes sense for the government as set up here, having all the people of color and queers sent away to concentration camps sure makes for a convenient excuse to tell a story about only straight white people (except for that one tragic lesbian whose tragic life and death is nothing more than a tool to cause straight people to change). I wasn't too thrilled with the portrayal of women here, either.