Good Reads, Goodreads

Do you read me?

Sometimes I think people who ‘read’ me — as in, they ‘get’ my thought processes and recognize life-plot twists as part of My Story — must be readers.¹

Not of my blog, necessarily. Nor of the same kinds of books I prefer. (Or even of books at all: perhaps they read comics or magazines or horoscopes or recipes or dating profiles or…)

But I think they probably read.

Because I think reading has taught me a lot about ‘reading’ — attitudes, reactions, motivations — and I bring that to bear – though likely subconsciously – in the way I approach nearly everything I do. (Or choose NOT to do.) And I assume the same to be true for many others.

Reading Me, Me: Reading

I’ve posted (above) the books I’ve read so far this year.

At 17 weeks into the year, I have completed 16 books. My reading goal this year is to finish 52 books. (Which, honestly, is kind of low. I started keeping track of my books on Goodreads² on January 1, 2017 — that year I completed 71.) I figure, with my schedule the way it is right now, averaging one book per week was a good way to approach goal-setting. I’m slightly behind, according to that calculation, but I am enjoying working my way through my TBR pile (and adding to it!), so I will just continue at approximately the pace I have been going for the next few weeks. And when summer arrives… Well, we’ll see.

Eleven of my 16 completed books so far this year have been mysteries. (No surprise there.) Four of those 11 were written by Agatha Christie. The Unexpected Guest could count as a fifth, since it was actually a Christie play (though the novelization was done by Charles Osborne). And the Harlequin book of short stories (by Christie) does not count, to my way of thinking, as a mystery title. It is… Peculiar. And while the stories within are not mysteries, they are still quite Christie.

…but a bit like Christie writing from the middle of a Hitchcock nightmare.

A n y w a y

Mysteries and Christie. No surprise.

One of the mystery books that took me by surprise this year was The Alienist by Caleb Carr. It’s set in turn-of-the-(previous)century New York and it’s… Well, it’s not a romanticized version of that era. I’ll put it that way.

One of the books I finally muddled through — not that it’s difficult to read; it’s written in lower-than-layman’s terms, honestly (which is perhaps one of the things that put me off) — was You Can Be Happy No Matter What. The title is a sentiment I share; happiness is intrinsic, and I believe it is a choice, so I’m often befuddled at why people who have had a not-difficult life³ are so unhappy all the time. It was in the spirit of trying to figure out why people are unhappy (especially when it makes no particular sense for them to be) that I read this book, and I have to say the author’s reasoning is sound. I wonder, though, if unhappy people would agree. (Or if any unhappy people even read the book!)

The book that has disappointed me the worst this year: Dashiell Hammett: A Life, by Diane Johnson. She could have saved hundreds of pages if she’d just gotten past the Good Years (when Dash was writing regularly) and said, “He spent the rest of his life drunk.” Because that’s essentially the story of his life. He moved west, he got TB, he was a Pinkerton detective, he was a terrible father, he wrote some good books, then he got drunk and pretty much stayed that way til he died. Oh, and he was a communist.

Ho, hum.

My TBR Pile

My husband teases me about my moat — I always have things piled about my bed, and those things always include a stack of books — a stack which currently contains The Quest, by Nelson DeMille, two Otto Penzler omnibuses I’ve started and one I have not, two Christie mysteries and a bio about her, and two books I picked up at an antique store with print dates at the beginning of the 1900s (one of which was written by an author from my hometown).

My To-Be-Read (TBR) pile includes my moat, as well as two full short double-shelf bookcases, a small pile on my kitchen island (about 8), a smaller pile (about 6) on my dining table, and a storage bench stuffed full of pulp. All together, my TBR titles number over 100. Together with my read-them-and-kept-them titles, I have at least 200 books on hand.

Which means — if I had the means (a girls’ gotta eat!) — that I could happily survive within the confines of my own home, given the reading entertainment available, for four years if necessary.

Not that I’m planning to isolate for that long.

But given the coronapocolypse, you never know.

I’m prepared.

How about you?

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¹The reverse, however, I do NOT find to be true. As in: if you are a reader, you will be able to read me. Nope. (Don’t get me started on my mother. *snort*)

²If you look in the sidebar, you will see I’ve figured out how to add my most recently-posted Goodreads reads there. Look —–>

³Difficulty is not an excuse for unhappiness, nor do I believe it is a cause for unhappiness. It’s all about how we respond to difficulty. But at least I understand better when the School of Hard Knocks produces an ‘injured’ pupil.