Books in 2012 and a look ahead

Phew...2012 is minutes from being over and I just finished book number 63. Back in January, I realized I was on pace for 60 books instead of the 52 I had challenged myself to read, but I didn't think I'd get to 60. Life takes over and January is slow after the holiday and with the ugly West Coast weather. But then I ended up in some intense physio for my knee which gave me a solid hour of uninterrupted reading time two or three times a week for three months. And that helped. Looking at the numbers by month, it's interesting that in some periods of high stress, I barely read at all and other times when the stress was high, I was obviously escaping it through books.

So, whats the goal for 2013? I made it past my 52 book goal, so should I go for 100? Maybe one day, but that not realistic for 2013. My goal for 2013 is 24 books. Yes, I know, that's down to two books a month, but I have my reasons. My goal is split. For the first four months, I'd like to try and average a book a week, or 16 books to the end of April. That works with my current reading pace.

Come May, I will be thrilled if I am able to make it through one book a month. And that would be because of the baby that is due to arrive at the end of April.

So a modest 24 books for 2013 it is. I better get to bed so I can get cracking on book number 1 in the morning!

Oh, and my other goal? To get my books posted within a week of finishing them...before the plot and the things I liked/disliked melt away into my mommy brain. I'm tired of saying things like, oh yeah, I really liked (disliked) that book, but I have no idea if it was historical fiction or about zombies or a mystery.

Happy end of 2012 everyone. May your 2013 be full of wonderful words!

A few little stats from my 2012 reads:

How many books read in 2012? 63

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio? 59:4

Male/Female authors? 12 male, 19 female but 29 books were written by women, 34 by men and 1 was co-authored by a man and woman...I just happened to read multiple books by the same authors

Favourite book read? There were a BUNCH of books I liked a lot: the Falvia deLuce books, the Nicholas Flamel series, the Swedish crime books, but I think I'd go with The Book Thief as my favourite this year.

Least favourite? Tough...maybe A Secret Kept. It definitely wasn't as good as Sarah's Key. And then there was The Gods of Gotham. There wasn't really one I HATED though.

Oldest book read? Goodnight Mister Tom (1981)

Newest book read? I think that The Casual Vacancy wins this one. I did read a number of books published in 2012.

Longest book title? No competition here, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Demigod Files: A Survival Guide to Greek Gods and Monsters (78 characters, not including spaces)

Shortest book title? Cool Water (9 characters, not including spaces)

How many re-reads? 2

Books in translation? 10

Most books read by one author this year? 8 - Rick Riordan (and there were also a number of authors tied at 6)

How many books were borrowed from the library? 51

Name a book you've read this year which was recommended by a blogger: I don't think there was one - the ones that were recommendations came from friends and family. Some I picked up just because they looked good and some I picked up because I read an interesting review somewhere.

The Hidden Child

So after plodding through The Casual Vacancy, I flew through The Hidden Child. I have really been enjoying the Camilla Läckberg books, so this didn't really surprise me!

The book starts with Patrik starting paternity leave and Erica returning to work...although Patrik doesn't really stop working. Erica is supposed to be writing another book, but instead starts researching her mother's past and discovers a number of interesting things. The police investigate (with some assistance from Patrik and Maja) the murder of an elderly historian, who Erica had approached to ask for assistance identifying an old Nazi medal she found in her mothers belongings.

Of course there are all kinds of twists and turns and somehow the two things are related. Once again, I didn't have it figured out until it was spelled out to me, but I suspected bits and pieces of the puzzle.

I was glad to see Erica play a bigger role in the book - I missed her while she was on maternity leave. The personal goings-on at the police station were entertaining as always...although Läckberg does seem to have baby fever - this book involved two babies and no fewer than four pregnancies.

I have the last book (the next one isn't due out until spring) waiting to be read right now. It's due back at the library by Monday and there's a hold on it so I can't renew it, so I better get cracking!

Teaser Tuesday - The Hidden Child

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I finally finished The Casual Vacancy this weekend and moved on to something from my pile...so, my teaser is:

The cutlery clinked against their plates as they ate. All three of them tried not to look at the empty chair at the dining room table, but they couldn't help themselves.

The Hidden Child, Camilla Läckberg, page 87

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT at Should Be Reading with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your 2 ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

The Casual Vacancy

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh….that is the sound of me, sighing, because I FINALLY finished this book and I can move on to something else.

And you know, as much as I complained and complained some more about this book, it wasn’t that bad. It was just slow.

Barry Fairbrother, a resident of Pagford, drops dead one night and leaves a vacancy on the Pagford council. Of course there are two groups on council who want to fill the vacant seat with someone sympathetic to their own interests. And there are multiple families in Pagford somehow tied to Barry Fairbrother. The stories of these families unwind and intersect and eventually culminate in unhappiness for many of them.

I had a hard time at the beginning keeping the various people straight – who belonged to which family, which family had ties (good or bad) to which other families – and I probably would have been smart to make a map of the families, but about 200 pages or so in, I got them figured out.

I don’t know what my problem with the book was – I found it slow reading…I don’t think the book was paced particularly slowly, I just felt like it took forever to read. I tried to forget about who wrote the book and that helped somewhat. When I was a teenager, I read A Long And Fatal Love Chase, written by Louisa May Alcott under the pen name A. M. Barnard. I knew that and I had a hard time reading the book until I ignored who wrote it…It was very different from Little Women. I knew this book was not going to be a grown up Harry Potter, but something about it stumped me.

So, I’m kind of torn by this book – the stories were interesting and the way they intertwined was believable because Pagford is a small town, but it was such a sluggish read…I am intrigued by the BBC series that was announced this week though.

The Dogs of Riga

I’m not reading the Henning Mankell books as quickly as the Camilla Läckberg books, but I’m still enjoying them!

In The Dogs of Riga, Kurt Wallander investigates two bodies that wash up on the Swedish coastline in a life raft. The police determine the bodies are Latvian and Major Liepa fromthe Riga police force comes to Sweden to work on the investigation. The Swedish part of the case is closed and he returns to Latvia to finish his investigation, but the night he returns, he is murdered. The Riga police request Wallander’s help in Riga and Wallander gets involved in some crazy business in a country just coming out from under Soviet rule. There are spies everywhere, bribes are normal and he can’t trust anyone. The book has a few crazy twists and surprises, but in the end things work out, sort of…

I’m excited to read the next book – there were a few inconsistencies that bothered my editors brain – I’m not sure if they were inconsistencies in the story or the translation – the glaring one was the Peugeot Wallander traded in for a Nissan at the end of Faceless Killers had morphed back into a Peugeot. There were a few others – the use of the word “mean” when describing someone cheap and the favourite Swedish expression, “blind alley,” which I feel is more British and I’d be more likely to use “dead end,” but hey, I don’t speak Swedish and I’m by no means a translator.

Teaser Tuesday - The Casual Vacancy...still

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I'm stuck. This book is taking FOREVER...I'm looking forward to it ending...I have a big pile of books that all came off hold at the library on the same day and they are far more appealing for some reason.

The family PC was set up in a corner of the sitting room, where Simon could keep an eye on it, and make sure nobody was running up large bills behind his back. Ruth relinquished her grip on the phone and hurried to the keyboard.

The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling, page 281

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT at Should Be Reading with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your 2 ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!

Faceless Killers

More Swedish thillers/crime novels. My dad introduced me to Henning Mankell last time I was in Kelowna and I came home with a suitcase full of books – all of the Henning Mankell we could find in the house (he thinks there are more, we just didn’t know where to look). I enjoyed the Stieg Larsson books (only the last one made it on here – I started them before I started this blog) and I’ve been devouring the Camilla Läckberg books, so it made sense to read “Sweden’s greatest living mystery writer” as well.

An elderly farmer and his wife are brutally murdered by unknown assailants. The wife last word is “foreign” and she says it more than once. There isn’t a lot of evidence and there are a some strange twists that in the end are only peripherally related to the crime, but the plot focuses on the divisive debate about immigration and asylum seeking in Sweden. The book was published over twenty years ago but some of the problems and hesitations in the books echo what we’re hearing in Canada today.

If you like Larsson or Läckberg, I’d recommend Mankell for sure. Kurt Wallander is a detective I’m enjoying following.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Demigod Files: A Survival Guide to Greek Gods and Monsters

Hey, you, remember the note-to-self yesterday? Yeah? Well here’s another example for you.

Quick read anyone? Less than an hour! This was fun. And that’s that!

Cool Water

(Note to self: stop using your phone to take pictures. Your camera that is just a camera works SOOOOO much better!)

Hello December…will I ever get caught up? This is still an October read and I still have the month of November to get through too…Fingers crossed! My pile of to-reads is going to grow soon too…Christmas is coming!

Cool Water. This book was a gift from my parents for Christmas? my birthday? a couple of years ago (oddly it’s not written in…that never happens in my family). It sat on the dresser and gathered dust, but as I’ve been unofficially on the book diet again, I’m slowly getting through that pile.

Cool Water follows some of the townsfolk in Juliet, Saskatchewan around for a day. There are some real characters in Juliet, but Dianne Warren describes their lives in such a way that they are fully believable. For a couple of nights after finishing Cool Water, I still dreamed about the characters in the book, mostly Vicki and Lee. It doesn’t happen often that I dream about characters from a book, but they seemed so real.

I was disappointed when the book ended because I wanted to know more (to me, a sign of a good book!). What happened to Vicki’s family? What happened to Lee and the horse and the postcards? What about Jodi and her trip to Alberta? What about Lila and the hard conversation(s) with Rachelle? So many questions…maybe that’s why I dreamed about them…maybe I was giving myself the endings I wanted…