Satisfying List of Books

I keep a list of books I've read...below is what I've read so far in 2010.

I have a sense of accomplishment when I look at the list. This is a nice contrast to my usual feeling of frustration and feeling overwhelmed so often at work. There so many books that I haven't read and there are so many books that I want to read and I know I cannot get to all of them.

Yet I have gotten to these...

The Murderer's Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers
The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
Cowboy and Wills by Monica Holloway
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger
One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Impatient With Desire by Gabrielle Burton
Imperfect Endings by Zoe Fitzgerald Carter
Tweak by Nic Sheff
Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato
I Want to be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Divine Misfortune by A. Lee Martinez
Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
The Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry
Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa
Every Last One by Anna Quindlen
Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Some of the books on the list didn't really do it for me...The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Impatient With Desire, Even the Dogs, and even The Elegance of the Hedgehog...evidently just not the right books for me.

Others were fairly forgettable...Secrets of Eden, One Amazing Thing...

Some I really enjoyed reading...Every Last One (her descriptions of being a mother are spot on), The Map of True Places, Eternal on the Water (there were some flaws in the book, but I really liked the main characters), Mathilda Savitch (I really liked Mathilda, though I've talked to others who didn't...it's so personal)...

And many were lovely, even luminous...The Last Chinese Chef (the descriptions of food!), Making Rounds With Oscar (describing living with someone with dementia, though maybe it resonated for me because I was one of those people), A Reliable Wife (luminous in a creepy sort of disturbing way)...

Right now I'm reading The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard, which is really enjoyable. It opens with Jody Linder in bed in the middle of the day. She's in bed with her (sort of) boyfriend. Her three uncles drive up to the house, which does not bode well, not only because she's in bed with a boyfriend that they don't know about, but the uncles, being ranchers, are rarely together in the middle of the day. In addition, they are dressed up, which is another bad sign. They've come to tell her that Billy Crosby, the man who killed her parents when she was 3 years old, has been released from prison and is coming back to their small town in Kansas.

Scent of the Missing by Susannah Charleson is what I'll be reading next. That was my St. George's Day present from my sweetie. The subtitle is Love and Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog. This will hopefully be a partial dog fix until we can get a dog of our own.

Read on!