I talked about how I had failed myself in 2012 by only reading 16 books. And then I came across another blogger who attempted the 52 book challenge…which, for those of you who DIDN’T know, is a book a week.

So I’m trying it. And it’s HARD. And admittedly, two of these books I read just before 2013 started, but I decided I needed a buffer zone in case shit hits the fan at some point. Because it will.

Since starting this challenge, I’ve become a completely obsessive reader again. It’s glorious. In fact, when I type “g” in my browser URL bar these days, it takes me to Goodreads immediately instead of Gmail. Awesome.

Here’s what I read from the last week of December until the end of January.

Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking — Aoibheann Sweeney

Quick Summary

Miranda Donnal is an infant when her parents move from New York City to a remote island off the coast of Maine so her father can complete a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When her mother takes a boat to town and never returns, Miranda is raised by her reclusive father. After Miranda graduates from high school, her father arranges for her to return to New York to work in the classical-studies library that he helped establish years before her birth. It is here that Miranda begins unraveling the mysteries of her father’s past.

Three-line book review

There’s nothing remarkable about the storyline, and Miranda is an infuriating character, but you can’t help but love her in the end. I didn’t think such socially awkward people existed.

Quote

“It is astonishing, in the end, how difficult it is to know the things you know. What I mean is that all I had discovered was everything I knew all along. I don’t know when we’d ever told each other how much we loved each other, but suddenly I couldn’t see why I had ever doubted it.”

***/****

Buy Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, feed me.

The Imposter Bride – Nancy Richler

Quick Summary

When a young, enigmatic woman arrives in post-war Montreal, it is immediately clear that she is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters as she disappears, leaving a new husband and baby daughter, and a host of unanswered questions. Who is she really and what happened to the young woman whose identity she has stolen? Why has she left and where did she go?

Three-line book review

Gorgeous, heartbreaking writing, but the plot moves at a snail’s pace. Sometimes you want to shake Lily until she has brain damage. The ending was weird, but satisfying.

****/*****

Buy Imposter Bride, feed me.

Anya – Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

Quick Summary

Anya Karinsky’s beautiful life seemed like one long and perfect dream that would spin on forever. But her wonderful world of dances, travel, medical school, and her beloved family ended one day late in the summer of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland. The bombs that leveled her Warsaw home that day marked the beginning of her soul-stirring odyssey of endurance and escape, through years of horror and Holocaust.

Three-line book review

Can’t say I enjoyed this book. The first two Chapters are devoted to household descriptions alone…and while I understand the premise for all this — to set up everything that was lost — it was extremely hard to get through. And I’ve read a LOT of Holocaust books.

**/*****

Buy Anya, feed me.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? – Mindy Kaling

Quick Summary

Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?” Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood

Three-line book review

I want Mindy Kaling to be my friend. She’s hilarious, and real. And this book is purely for entertainment value, so pick it up.

****/*****

Buy Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), feed me.

Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi

Quick Summary

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Three-line book review

Not the book I thought it’d be. I’d rather read books than read books about reading books, know what I’m sayin’? Don’t read this if you any of the books discussed are on your reading list. Spoiler alert.

Favourite quote

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.”

***/*****

Read Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, feed me.

Hints to Lady Travellers – Lillias Campbell Davidson

Quick Summary

Combines archive material from a book of the same name first published in 1889 with anecdotes from well-known modern female travelers to offer a fascinating insight into the way that travel has changed for women over the last century

Three-line book review

An amazingly insightful, crazily in-depth guide for travelling women of the Victorian era. Includes such advice as “how to pick a portable bath tub” and “tips for tricycling tours.” And I thought I was a heavy packer.

Favourite quote

On the use of the”eye-stone”…the bone of a fish used to clean your eyeballs during the summer months. “The eye-stone is slightly moistened, the lower eyelid drawn a little down, and it is inserted within. Almost immediately it begins to work its way slowly around the eyeball…” and then apparently falls out of your eyeball with all that summer dust and gunk still attached to it. Um, no thanks.

****/*****

Buy Hints to Lady Travellers: At Home and Abroad, feed me.

Wow, that was a long-winded post. The next one will be much shorter, I swear. My favourite? Mindy Kaling’s book. Her new television series is pretty rad also. No life changing reads in January, sadly. And more than my share of fluff for one month.

What have you been reading?