January Reading

With the start of 2012 began my quest to complete 52 books for the year.

That's a book a week, for anyone that's interested.

One month in, I have found it isn't too difficult, just as long as I have the books lined up that I'm going to read.

We'll see how I'm doing come March, though.

Really, outlining enough books isn't too difficult. There are enough that I have interest in reading and then belonging to two book clubs allows for even more fodder.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
I really, really liked this book. In fact, I believe I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads, which I rarely dole out these days.
The book is about society in the future. One where our present government has been violently overthrown and people live under strict codes, dictated as moral by one extreme group.
It wouldn't be for everyone, but I really enjoyed her perspective on this extreme society. She didn't seem to be espousing one political view over another. She obviously felt that such a society would be a horrible thing, but you understand the underlying motives and feelings of almost every type of person in the book.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
I was surprised by how much I really liked this book.
Being that it is a non-fiction medical book, I assumed it would be dry and difficult to navigate. While I had some moments of halting, overall it was a breezy read and easily understandable -- not to mention super interesting.

Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland
Another good book (I started the month off with some excellent recommendations), though not as good as the previous two.
This is an historical-fiction novel and I love those.
Based on letters from a lead artist in the Tiffany glass company, it told how Mr. Tiffany (the son of the Tiffany jeweler) employed more women than other glass companies and the trials and obstacles faced by that department and those women. Great personal story with history.

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
A good book. I was surprised how much a came to like this book.
It was a very predictable book. But it was an interesting re-telling of a Grimm fairytale.
This was a book for one of my book clubs, but I might have ended up picking it up for middle-of-the-night nursing reading material, as I categorize it as one of those books in my life.
Easy to read, but entertaining and one of 4 in a series, it makes for an excellent please-keep-me-awake-as-I-nurse-at-2a.m. book.
I will most likely get the other 3 and read those when this new little bean comes (Lane still can't settle on a name).

Austenland by Shannon Hale
The other book for my other book club. It just so happened that they both chose the same author this month.
This one was just OK. Which surprised me, seeing how much I love Jane Austen.  I mean, not horrible, but there are few who would get it as a recommendation from me.
It's about a woman who visits some kind of Jane-Austen farm in England in a search to rid her life of her Mr. Darcy fantasy.
While I, like many women I know, can relate to the love of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, I felt like she was just trying to retell all of Jane Austen's books and her characters tried desperately (and basically unsuccessfully) to be one character or another from her books.
I understand this theory has been done before (Bridget Jones' Diary), but in those cases, I felt the novel was the author's own. I only felt like the book was really the author's in the last 20 pages. What really made me peeved was when she started incorporating Jane Eyre and other Bronte-sister novel heroines. Not that she confuses these heroines as Jane Austen's, but still, it was annoying.
On the plus side, it's only like 130 pages long and took less than 2 hours to read, so if you really wanted to give it a whack, you wouldn't be in a mediocre book for the long-haul.