October 2012 books

I think I might need to start breaking up these monthly posts into bi-weekly ones or something. I read a lot this month!

A Modern Witch by Deborah Geary
This was a Kindle deal of the day and, honestly, I just bought it because the rest of the series is in the Kindle lending library and I can never find stuff I want to read in there. I’ve checked out one book in the seven or eight months I’ve had Prime. I figured if the series was decent, I’d at least be getting something out of it. 

Unfortunately, the book was a little too "magic is real guys, we draw our power from the earth, wind, and fire, like this." Like most people, I think, I enjoy Harry Potter, A Discovery of Witches, and the like, but I don't actually believe in magic. Too much time was spent trying to convince us this magic was totally plausible. If I skipped over the chanting spells, though, I did enjoy the personal relationships and will probably read more of the series because I like the characters.

From Dead to Worse (Sookie Stackhouse #8) by Charlaine Harris

I flew through the first five or so Sookie Stackhouse books, but they’re really dragging now. This took me a month and a half to finish. I only finally did because it was a library book I couldn’t renew anymore and I hate not finishing books, even boring ones. You’d think werewolf wars and vampire takeovers would be interesting, but…snooze.

Will I read more Sookie books? Yes. Someone needs to figure out how to make me stop reading when series..es (serieses? Is that a word?) lose their way. I have a compulsive need to finish not just books, but all available books in a series. See also: TV. I’m still doggedly watching the West Wing even though I don’t think it’s very interesting. (Updated to say I wrote this when I finished the book early in the month and I actually love the West Wing now! Sometimes persistence pays off.)

Office Crush

Next, I won Shalini's beta reader contest and got to read the Office Crush book! You guys. This book is GOOD. Really good. I couldn’t put it down. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out the Office Crush blog. The book follows the same general storyline, but is much more detailed (and you have to buy it when it comes out!)

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and
American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Reveiwed here.

Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstrach
I don't even do most of the cooking in our house and I loved this. I read it more like a novel and enjoyed the story of how her family evolved through the years. I checked this out from the library, but am considering buying it because there were a bunch of recipes I wanted to try.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

I very rarely want to re-read a book immediately after finishing, but I started over with this as soon as I reached the end. It's of those books I can't say a lot about, not because I'd give anything away but because it's hard to describe. The best advice I can give is to really immerse yourself in it. There's not a lot of plot; it's about the experience. Knowing that going in helped me to not get impatient with it. Also, save this for kid-free time, because trying to read it with screeching children around was rather pointless.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

This was absolutely beautiful. It's another one you have to really get into, mood-wise, but it puts you in a different world. I spent one lunch break in my car sobbing while reading this.

The Essential Enneagram by David N. Daniels and Virginia A. Price

The Everything Enneagram Book by Susan Reynolds

Maggie sucked me into the world of enneagrams and I ended up checking out tons of books. These are the two I ‘read’ completely enough to count toward my reading goal. The first one was the one on the left and I recommend you skip it. Everything in the book is on the Enneagram Institute's website and the personality "test" is just nine paragraphs summarizing each type and asking you to pick the one that sounds the closest.

In the second one, the text is ok, not great, but the personality test at the beginning was the best Enneagram test I've come across so far. (I’ve only looked at four books and one website, though, so I’m sure you can find similar ones other places.)

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

The ‘disturbing factor’ of this book almost seemed overdone. It was creepy for sure, but by the end it seemed Flynn was throwing everything she had and turning it into a full-on Halloween thriller. (Holly compared it to a bad Lifetime movie.) I read a review somewhere (might have been the book jacket, actually) saying it sneaks up on you then keeps you up at night, but I didn’t find that to be the case. By the end, everything was so out there it was a caricature of a nightmare, not a real one. Could this have really happened? I suppose so, yes. Is it something to stay up at night worrying about? No.

I’m not saying I was disappointed it took a turn for the “…what?” because I don’t want to be kept up at night. It didn’t make for a better book, though.

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Sometimes you just need a nice little nostalgia read. I got this free on the Kindle a while ago and felt like reading it recently. It turned out, even though I haven't read this for years, I remembered too much about the story to really get into the mystery, but that's ok.

(This post contains Amazon affiliate links.)