In listening to some podcasts a few weeks ago I heard an essay read by Marc Acito which prompted me to track down his novel at the library. How I Paid for College is about high school students, but any resemblance to the average young adult novel is shattered by the sex. A fun evening's read.
posted by kristin at 8:40 AM

Gideon Defoe's third book about The Pirates!, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists was a quick fun read, but not as fun as the first two. I'm not sure if it was really how the book was written or that the premise didn't hold up for me for a third book.
posted by kristin at 8:37 AM

Christopher Moore's You Suck was fun. It's a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends but would make enough sense without reading the first one. Vampires, San Francisco, smurf fetishes, and Emperor Norton. I did actually laugh out loud while reading this one. He's speaking tonight in Seattle and I'll be there.
posted by kristin at 8:35 AM

Hard Times did not make me a fan of Charles Dickens. I think that if I'd been trying to read it at home before bed, rather than keeping it in my purse for bus stops, restaurants, etc, I wouldn't have finished it.
posted by kristin at 8:33 AM

I finally made it to one of the 2006-2007 season events for the Seattle Arts & Lectures series. Tonight Edwidge Danticat was the featured author. Unlike the other authors I saw last season, she didn't do a prepared talk, but was instead interviewed on stage. The interview questions were the fairly typical sorts of questions: How did achieving success at writing at such a young age affect you? Do you write also in French or just English? and etc. Danticat was a much less polished speaker than the authors who I saw last year (especially Simon Winchester and Alexander McCall Smith), but I'm interested to read some of her books now. I picked up Krik? Krak! on Saturday in preparation but haven't started it yet.
posted by kristin at 10:15 PM

I just added 24 books to my list of books read. It feels like cheating since they were all picture books meant for kids. If you haven't guessed, I'm taking a book on library materials for children. If the list were primarily for counting how many books I read in a year I wouldn't have added them, but that's only a secondary purpose. The main purpose of keeping the list is so that I can go back and look to see what all I've read. For this class at least keeping track of the picture books makes sense, so on the list they go.

Edward Ardizzone's Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, Virginia Lee Burton's Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Laurent de Brunhoff's The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, Marjorie Flack's Angus and the Ducks, Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats, Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could, Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, H.A. Rey's Curious George, Gene Zion's Harry the Dirty Dog, John Burningham's Mr. Gumpy's Outing, Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Donald Crews' Freight Train, Don Freeman's Corduroy, Pat Hutchins Rosie's Walk, Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day, Steven Kellogg's Pinkerton, Behave!, Leo Lionni's Swimmy, William Steig's Slyvester and the Magic Pebble, Rosemary Wells' Morris's Disappearing Bag, Brian Wildsmith's Fishes and William's Doll by Charlotte Zolotow.

I remember a few of them from childhood (though think a few may have been later editions with different artwork) but definitely not all. Too bad I didn't start keeping a list 20 years earlier.
posted by kristin at 4:54 PM