The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Title: The Name of the Rose

Author: Umberto Eco (translated by William Weaver)
Publisher:  Harcourt (1983)

Thank goodness for my ongoing partnership with Michael! For one, it's super fun and, for two, teaming up with Michael is always recommended. But, also, because without this ongoing series I would be completely out of the book blogging game these days. 

If that sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly what I said last month. Now, I'm still fully grateful for the joint fun Michael and I have every month with these posts but, my gosh, I'm so tired of the book slump I'm in. I discovered why I have been so quiet about books: It's hard to have anything to say when these are your results over the last few months. *sigh* I'm just not connecting with anything these days book-wise. And I'm very sorry to say, this book did not get me out of the slump.
 
For those that are new to our monthly series, this is when Michael reviews a film adapted from a book which gets a review here.

Click here for Michael's film review of The Name of the Rose

at It Rains... You Get Wet

Adso and his mentor, the monk William of Baskerville, have arrived at an unnamed Abbey in Italy as an envoy for the Emperor. Unknown to them, a monk has died at the abbey, and they will shortly be embroiled in an investigation of this and other deaths.

...I could argue endlessly about fine points of theology and morals.

The above quote should be applied liberally to any discussion of this title. It might be that you, dear reader, do not have the patience to read "endlessly about fine points of theology and morals" and so may have to pass on this one. (Also, they are specifically Christian theology and Christian inspired morals, not necessarily a broad treatment of either.) There is certainly a traditional murder mystery set-up with the attendant collection of suspects but that cannot be separated from the historical setting of the novel. Ye have been warned.

And if I felt the need to warn you it's probably a tip off that I found the setting tedious rather than intriguing. After reading for a while, I got the impression that Eco realized his historical expertise might not be appreciated by every reader. Each chapter has a concise, accurate (and sometimes funny) descriptor:

In which Cardinal del Poggetto arrives, with Bernard Gui and the other men of Avignon, and then each one does something different. 

or

In which there occurs a fraternal debate regarding the poverty of Jesus. 

Making it quite easy, if one so chooses, to simply skip the chapter and move on to another that might actually have something to do with the mystery. A well-paced thriller this is not.

Adso is telling this story in his old age. Adso the younger is not exactly the quickest of wits but his elder self happily comments on past behavior making for some interesting moments of self-reflection. William, being idolized by Adso the younger, comes off a little perfected but it rarely detracts from his earnest self-expression and delightful sense of humor. (Admittedly, said sense of humor ends up buried between pedantic moralizing but, hey, some people might like that.)

Along with the mystery, my favorite part of the novel was the labyrinth library and all the chatter about books. The Abbey runs one of the weirdest libraries I've ever encountered in fiction. The bizarre organization of books is only the start of this decidedly cultish library.

And the books are arranged according to the country of their origin, or the place where their authors were born, or, as in this instance, the place where they should have been born. The librarians told themselves Virgil the grammarian was born in Toulouse by mistake; he should have been born in the western islands. They corrected the errors of nature.

Despite being interested in whodunnit and just what the heck was going on in the library, I can't really recommend this title to anyone who does not have a very specific interest in Catholic doctrine and church politics from the 14th Century. There's a good book in here, it's just buried beneath the historical setting. It's quite a shocker to this fan (huge fan, actually) of historical fiction to have been so bored while reading but there it is. It happened.


Now about that movie... Don't forget to check out Michael's post.


rating: 2 of 5 stars




Click here for an index of the joint post series

Alan Rickman Reel: Robin Hood Prince of Thieves

My household are big fans of Alan Rickman. As such, we've decided to (continue) review(ing) his films from start to finish. Using IMDb, that puts us starting with...

Die Hard (DIE HARD!!!!) and continuing with...

January Man

Quigley Down Under 
Truly, Madly, Deeply

Closet Land (our review coming soon)

It doesn't matter that this movie is shitty. I can't help loving it!

Dr Musacha: So yeah, back in the Alan Rickman saddle again.  And what a movie to start with!

sgwordy: You want to be "in the Alan Rickman saddle?" Feels kind of overly familiar when we don't even know the guy.

Dr Musacha: Five blog posts in and I feel like he wouldn't mind.  So Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.  I remember this movie from my childhood...how about YOU?

sgwordy: Yes. Yes, I remember it from my childhood. And teenhood. And adulthood. All my hoods are totally cool with RH.

Dr Musacha: Sadly, much like Thundercats and G.I. Joe The Movie, I wish this one had stayed in my childhood.  Before we talk Rickman, how do you feel this movie holds up all these years later?

sgwordy: Oh it doesn't at all. It's terrible. I mean, really awful. But I can't seem to care. My younger selves keep rearing their heads with all my awesome younger self reactions and I just went with it. In the midst of being fully aware of how terrible the movie is, I was still loving it.

Dr Musacha: I guess nostalgia wasn't enough for me, because I was shocked at how terrible this film is.  Costner and Slater are "knock off renaissance fair" bad in this thing, and the dialog is really corny -

sgwordy: Wait! What????

"You came for me. You're alive!
I would die for you!" 

And you're saying that's corny? That's... it's just... hold on, I'm tearing up...

Dr Musacha laughs  I guess agree to disagree and all that, but yes the dialog is pretty terrible.  But this isn't a movie review, it's an Alan Rickman review. 

sgwordy: I don't know if I can quite agree yet. I mean, there's this -

Why a spoon, cousin?
Because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more.

That's pure genius. Ok, ok, yes, moving on. How about with -

Locksley, I'm gonna cut your heart out with a spoon!

Am I getting off track here?

Dr Musacha: Possibly, but I love it!  I've said before that Hans Gruber is my all time favorite action villain. How does Sheriff of Nottingham rank against that performance?

sgwordy: That's a tricky comparison because Gruber is a straight up badass villain and the Sheriff is a comic villain. Rickman does him perfectly but in a head to head with Gruber, Gruber is going to win because Gruber is just better.

Dr Musacha: Tipping my hand here, but I thought Rickman was easily the best thing about this film.  He was the only person who seemed to understand that the whole thing was ridiculous and inject enough camp into his performance to fit the bill. Agree?  Or did you feel he was taking this role seriously?

sgwordy: Totally agree. He does it right though. Performers can realize what they are in is ridiculous but still not commit. He is completely committed and it makes the performance winning rather than cringe worthy. (Can my 13yo self pipe up here and admit to loving him and Robin equally at that age? I didn't even notice Costner's terrible accent when I was that young.)

Dr Musacha: Speaking of younger selves, my younger self was not nearly as aware of how normalized this movie made violence against women seem.

sgwordy: So true. That trait was certainly not limited to this movie, but it's the one aspect of Rickman's character that is not campy but just plain creepy and genuinely scary. Though if we start in on these types of faults, it'll be a black hole of Robin Hood awfulness and we're here for the good bits of Rickman.

Dr Musacha: Agreed. What did you think of the outfits? How 'bout that hair? But, most importantly, did you miss the 'stache?

sgwordy: Rickman is rocking the best outfit of the whole cast and I love the flowing locks. They really work with the unintentional spittle he gets going in some scenes. Nobody could miss that 'stache.

Dr Musacha: I've said all I have to say on this one. Any final thoughts?

sgwordy: Just this.

Summary:

Rate the movie on a scale of 1 to 10:

Dr Musacha – 3

sgwordy – 3

Was Rickman the best thing about this movie?

Dr Musacha – Yes.

sgwordy – Without doubt.

In the context of his body of work, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate Rickman as Rickman?

Dr Musacha – 6

sgwordy – 9

Favorite Rickman quote from this movie?

Dr Musacha: That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans...

sgwordy: Locksley, I'm gonna cut your heart out with a spoon!

Quotable

'You're not upset, are you, Orr?' Brooke says, pouring wine into my glass.
'Merely sober. The symptoms are similar.'

The Bridge by Iain Banks

Reading Roundup

My reading still feels quite slumpish, with only brief jumps up into something that makes me want to read more than play Bejeweled 3. It's annoying to find it so easy to put down books. I sure could use a stretch of awesome reading. Any suggestions? Here are mine, for what they are worth right now...


currently reading
The Bridge by Iain Banks
The Infinite Air by Fiona Kidman
Predicament by Ronald Hugh Morrieson
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal)

recommended
The Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang
The Sisters of Sinai by Janet Martin Soskice
Quest for Origins by K.R. Howe
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman**

recommended with reservations
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (short stories)^^
The Writing Class by Stephanie Johnson
Devices and Desires by P.D. James
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr
Sounder by William H. Armstrong
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

not recommended/did not finish
Relative Strangers by Emma Neale
A Death in Calabria by Michele Guittari
The Floating Island by Elizabeth Haydon
The Truth About Ruby Valentine by Alison Bond
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Conspirator by C.J. Cherryh
Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt



** my only unqualified recommendation that is fiction and, honestly, i had to go back and read the blurb before i could even remember what it was about. i think that tells you just how barely above average even my enjoyable reads have been.

^^ with a title like "this is how you lose her" i shouldn't have been so surprised at how depressing these stories were but that's why the 'with reservations.'



So, that's it! Every title I've read/sampled in 2014 so far. Is it any wonder saving butterflies has been more appealing than reading lately?

It's good to be an adult

Linky Link

Too good not to share!



hat tip: Jed

Quotable

Merle doesn't really want to depress them. It's a balance between unrealistic expectations and utter hopelessness.

The Writing Class by Stephanie Johnson

"What's Your Name Again?"

Watching this video was joyful. Like watching folks reunite at the airport; it was equal parts surprising, awkward, funny and smile-inducing!

 )

"It's not a literary question."

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Title: I Am Legend

Author: Richard Matheson
Publisher:  Gollancz (2007); originally published in 1954

 
Thank goodness for my ongoing partnership with Michael! For one, it's super fun and, for two, teaming up with Michael is always recommended. But, also, because without this ongoing series I would be completely out of the book blogging game these days. I suppose it's a quiet period for me and book blogging, but I don't want to give it up so many thanks to Michael for keeping me going during this quiet time. Now, this month's pick was mine and I had no idea this title is considered scifi/horror. My first horror pick! What a surprise. I usually leave horror to Michael. I'm really excited to see what he thought of I Am Legend.
 
For those that are new to our monthly series, this is when Michael reviews a film adapted from a book which gets a review here.

Click here for Michael's film review of I Am Legend

at It Rains... You Get Wet

I just checked the back cover for spelling of the protagonist's name and now the blurb is all I can think of so I'm just going to quote the backcopy for a synopsis: "Robert Neville may well be the only survivor of an incurable plague that has mutated every other man, woman and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures* who are determined to destroy him. By day he scavenges for food and supplies, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. But all the while the infected lurk in the shadows, watching his every move, waiting for him to make a mistake..."

*not sure why the word vampires isn't used here because the creatures straight up are vampires and vamps are all the rage right now so why not capitalize??


I chose this title because of my continued interest in the film (despite that unfortunate ending) and I admit that my view of this story is heavily influenced by the film. So much so that I think my comparisons between the two depictions started at about page three and never let up. I'm sorry to say, the novella did not do so well in those comparisons. (It's been not quite three years since we queued up another Matheson title and I'm wondering if he's just not the author for me.)

Film Neville is so vastly superior to Novella Neville (ha! I like that, Novella Neville) that I was never able to take NovNev seriously as a survivor. Exhibit A is in the first few sentences when we learn that he can't be bothered to calculate sunset! The creatures that come out at night WILL KILL HIM and yet he can't be bothered to calculate sunset?? "On those cloudy days... sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days."  Hey, I won't blame ya for sticking close to your safe zone but, seriously? I'm supposed to believe you are possibly the only survivor of a heinous plague and you can't be bothered to do a simple calculation that might save your life? Uh, yeah, you lost me.

Ok, so, NovNev lost me but there's no reason Matheson couldn't keep this story moving in such a way that I could mostly ignore the ridiculous aspects of NovNev's character (necrophilia, much?) except he doesn't quite have the follow-through that I require of a writer. This title has a great set-up (and the end is friggin' awesome but I'm not gonna ruin that for anyone because, if you manage to slog your way through, you should at least be rewarded with the cool ending) but the writing undercuts it constantly. For instance, its internal chronology is not chronological. I thought I was messing it up due to skimming but when I checked over dates and the description of passing months/years it doesn't add up. This shit matters because you're building a world for me to believe in. You're telling me this character has changed dramatically between Time Zero, Time + Six Months, and Time + Two Years. If you get the chronology wrong it's more than just irritating, it undermines the development of the character in response to his experiences. Worse, it poofs some experiences right out of existence.

"Deep in his body, the knotting heat began again, and he pressed his lips together until they were white. He knew the feeling well and it enraged him that he couldn't combat it." The feeling and it are horniness for women he considers dead. (Um, yuck!) When you start working out the timeline (as best as one ever can in this title) he's squirming around with his bitter enraged horniness only six months after Plague Problems. I understand that some folks really need it bad but I'd think his self-professed revulsion at the Undead outside his door (and some, shall we say, Self Care) would at least keep the Horny Toads at bay for 6 months! His constant anger at "lewdly" posing (undead) women never rings very true and around the halfway mark this bit is thrown at the reader: "Sex was fast losing its meaning without the endless prodding of mass hypnosis." Mass hypnosis was responsible for his initial, uncontrollable attraction to undead women? He goes on to say he had mostly just tried to adjust to his belief "that he was actually the only one left in the world" and, again, I have to say that totally undermines why we spent the first quarter of the book hearing him whine on about his unwanted attraction to almost any adult female body he encountered.

Continuing in my quest to get into a cool story, I tried to focus on the vampires. There are a couple types (I guess) and those types are even explained but I was never able to really get the distinction. It's implied that some of the infected are genuine vampires and some are psychological vampires. I actually thought that was a clever way to justify the idiot vampires that hung around Neville's house every damn night but even this explanation was inconsistently applied.

The final straw comes when Neville encounters another survivor. BEGIN SPOILER (highlight if interested): This is years after the initial infection so anyone who is still out and about at this point knows what the fuck is up. I'll admit that Neville is not the sharpest tool in the box but he has some grip on what it takes to survive. If you encounter a survivor who "wore a wrinkled and dirty white dress" and the "skirt of her dress whipped against the grass, holding her back" that survivor is obviously not to be trusted because nobody who could live in this new world would be stupid enough to wear such useless, unsurviving clothes! END SPOILER. Come on, NovNev, even you can't be this dumb. Ugh!

Ugh, ugh, UGH!!!!

When it comes down to it, this novella is a good idea with a cool ending but not much else. My suggestion is to stick with the movie because it smartly smartens Neville up, keeps and/or improves the best elements of the story, and is quite a good time. I know, I know, the ending... I'll have more to say regarding the film's ending over at the film review. Don't forget to check out Michael's post.

Note: While it's coming clear to me that perhaps Matheson and I don't mesh well, he's certainly beloved of many and I wanted to link this article published at the time of his death.




rating: 2 of 5 stars




Click here for an index of the joint post series

A Good Read

This is my life, after all. Who could possibly know more about it than me?

According to the internet, the answer to this question is, “anyone with an internet connection and the means to communicate their thoughts to me.”

I cannot tell you how many times in the last week alone I’ve been interrupted whilst talking about my own lived experiences by white people who “just want to share their opinions”. Everyone, it seems, has opinions to share about my life and whether or not I’ve truly experienced it the way I say I have.

Read the full article here.

More Quotable

It is important for scientists to be aware of what our discoveries mean, socially and politically. It's a noble goal that science should be apolitical, acultural, and asocial, but it can't be, because it's done by people who are all those things.

-- Dr. Mae Jemison

Quotable

"You're just doing this to get laid." Oh, son. You know what I do to get laid? I treat women as humans while being super smart and attractive. This is a trick that works really well, so I've kept doing it solely for my wife's benefit.

Seen here. 
(And I highly recommend the post linked in the first paragraph.)

Truth in Headlines...

Would be a refreshing thing.

Check out this funny link for what that might look like.


hat tip: Dr M

Women Like Each Other

Many people (and esp. the folks in my former writers' group) have heard my endless harping on the lack of female relationships being depicted, well, any damn where and there's a reason for it! Women like each other and you'd hardly know it from the majority of popular media images.

Women are loyal friends and we regularly work and rely on one another, yet it’s a rare treat to see women publicly portrayed as working together for the common good and embraced for doing so – in movies or in news.

That quote is from this very good article that you should definitely read.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Title: The Right Stuff
Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher:  Bantam Books (1979)

  It's a brand new year, and time for Michael and me to come back from the holiday break to restart our books-into-films fun. I am definitely looking forward to it as this is a movie that I haven't seen. As soon as I'm done here, I'm off to watch what Hollywood has to say about America's first astronauts. But first, the book. While reading I had Many Thoughts and had even sketched out two separate (but complimentary) posts in my mind for this month's selection. Then beautiful weather struck and I was outside in all my spare moments enjoying sunshine and horses so I'm falling back on AW's trusty review format to try and include an abbreviated version of my conflicting thoughts on The Right Stuff.
 
For those that are new to our monthly series, this is when Michael reviews a film adapted from a book which gets a review here.

Click here for Michael's film review of The Right Stuff

at It Rains... You Get Wet

Premise:
From the author's website: "Men first flew into space in 1961, but until The Right Stuff was first published in 1979 few people had a sense of the most engrossing side of that adventure: namely, the perceptions and goals of the astronauts themselves, aloft and during certain remarkable odysseys on earth.

It is this, the inner world of the early astronauts, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and their confreres, that Tom Wolfe describes with his extraordinary powers of empathy. He shows us the bidden olympus to which all ambitious combat and test pilots aspired, the top of the pyramid of the right stuff. And we learn the nature of the ineffable pilot's grace without which all else meant nothing."


Title:
It was either this or Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving.
(Or, when this book brings out my more cynical side, The White Manly Stuff.)


What Works:
Well, the subject, obviously! What can be more exciting than scientific, engineering and human limits being tested? Tom Wolfe was specifically interested in the personality of pilots who, with a 23% chance of catastrophic accident, "were willing - willing? delighted! - to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero." Wolfe, for all the sarcastic language he employs, clearly fans out for what he describes as the right stuff. I wasn't quite so into this aspect of Wolfe's fascination but there's no doubt these pilots were on the technological edge and it makes for gripping reading.

Even so, why was the press aroused to create instant heroes out of these seven men? ... The forgotten term, left behind in the superstitious past, was single combat.

The single combat warrior analogy was brilliant. As a reader of historical fiction, I've had ample opportunity to mull over the absurdity of single combat determinism and applying this very old tradition to the space race hit the nail on the head perfectly. Also, it's nice to know the press has a tradition of insta-history. I thought it was a new thing but apparently there is nothing new under the sun.

The details Wolfe was able to include really add to the intimate portrayal of how the first seven came to be astronauts, and just what they had to go through along the path to space travel and, no pun intended, beyond. Seeing how personalities clashed and clicked can be just as engaging as descriptions of the progressively more advanced space capsules ships. (Equally fascinating but very depressing were details of the training the chimpanzees received for the first test flights.) These details also, accidentally I think, led Wolfe to the minor but crucial difference between test pilots and astronauts. If I had to summarize it, test pilots need more freedom to break stuff (and I don't just mean aircraft:).


What Doesn't:
This book reads a heck of a lot like a second draft. Apologies to Wolfe (and authors everywhere really) as writing a book (and certainly one of this magnitude) is a huge undertaking but the writing was just off at times. New people would show up like you ought to know who they are and what they've done (and sometimes they would disappear as quickly with no explanation) but there was no set up for them. Certain phrases and themes were so over-used I started to feel brain bludgeoned by them (and holy shit does this man love italics). The book finishes rather than ends. I read that the original plan was to write the story up until the moon landing but then Wolfe changed his mind. It reads a lot like he changed his mind right in the middle of writing. And speaking of that finish, it was badly done. The note it finishes on highlights one of the biggest problems I had with this book.

To Wolfe, "the right stuff" is an amalgam of stamina, guts, fast neural synapses and old-fashioned hell raising."

Wolfe goes on (and on and on) about the right stuff.

Yet there it was. Manliness, manhood, manly courage... there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff...

...manly courage in the face of physical danger. When they met someone who had it, they wanted to establish a relationship with that righteous stuff.

They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh...

I think you see where I'm going here. I found it embarrassing for Wolfe that he would write a book specifically about the type of people who would be willing (willing? delighted!) to participate in such extreme limits but didn't include anything about opportunity. There's your basic opportunity-stuff like smarts, good health, good eyesight etc. but there's no doubt that being an astronaut did not rely only on Wolfe's right stuff. These astronauts were going to be white males because test pilots were white males.

Much was made about combat being a part of the right stuff and not getting left behind. Combat was a proving ground and some pilots even despaired of coming out of their training when opportunities for combat were not available. It's no secret how hard Black American pilots had to lobby just to be able to serve their country during WWII and women weren't even allowed in combat until after 1991. This post can't begin to address the number of groups who are full of people with the right stuff but most certainly without the opportunity to prove it in the 50s and 60s.

Wolfe briefly mentions that a couple of the wives featured in the novel were pilots (might they have had the right stuff?) but women were just as often encapsulated by such lovely anecdotes as "the most marvelous lively young cookies were materializing also, and they were just there, waiting beside the motel pools, when one arrived, young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs and conformations so taut..." Sorry, I had to stop typing. Cuz, really? Yuck! That's women, folks. Part of the United Home Front or Have Jugs Will Juice.

But the crowning moment for Wolfe's blind spot comes during the book's finale where he heavily implies that Yeager was obsessed with a particular test craft because he was just so fucking fed up with affirmative action. Yeager, who, lest we forget, is set up from the very beginning of this book as the test pilot's test pilot. Up for anything, will fly with broken ribs, the essence of the right stuff. Yeah, it's so surprising he'd be excited for a new aircraft to try out. It so happens that test flight in this craft led to a nasty accident after which he never tried to break another record. Just what are you implying, Wolfe?

On the upper reaches of the great ziggurat the subject of race had never been introduced before. The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn't, no other variables mattered.

Within the same paragraph that that quote is pulled Wolfe goes on to try for some sort of explanation about how the astronauts all just happened to be white.

It was typical of career military officers generally. Throughout the world, for that matter, career officers came from "native" or "old settler" stock.

I'm not even sure what this means. Is he trying to imply that American Whites of northern European descent were native to the US but not other Americans? The pilot featured in this section was of African descent. The first Africans came to the eastern US in the early 17th century. How Wolfe can imply that this does not qualify as "old settler" stock completely escapes me.

And, by the way, the subject of race had come up: one of the first seven astronauts had an entire stand-up routine about a "Cowardly Astronaut" which was a vile and racist portrayal of a Mexican immigrant (Technically, some more "old settlers" as obviously white Europeans were not the only "settlers" and vast swaths of the western US used to be Mexico.).

The idea that the first seven astronauts just happened to be white males is a statement that can only be made by someone willfully ignorant of US history.


Overall:
This book is a fascinating look at the creation of the space program and astronauts. There will be times at which you can't stop turning pages and you will just yearn to be racing down a beach in a fast car or sitting in a capsule waiting for the countdown (but hopefully not peeing in your suit:). However, there will be times you want to throw the book at the wall. Going in with eyes wide open will make for a much better reading experience.




So about the movie...  don't forget to check out Michael's post.


rating: 3 of 5 stars



Click here for an index of the joint post series

Litmetrics

Sabermetrics: not just for baseball anymore...

Compiling a few totals for that Reading Report inspired me to finally update my BooksRead file. And I should say a quick thank you to goodreads because if their year end list could have been viewed by anyone I might have abandoned the file for good. But I'm so glad I didn't because you never know what you'll get when you mix this scientist with a spreadsheet/database. Perhaps a four year reading comparison expressed graphically??? How did you guess?

Random notes:

• I wish I had not included mystery/thriller within 'fiction.'
• I seem to jump all over my genre designations from year to year.
• I very rarely read memoirs, poetry, short stories, or travel books.
• If I had managed to finish the Janet Frame book of short stories I started last year I would have had 10 different genres in my reading list for every year (2013 had only 9).
• I define 'historical fantasy' as fantasy stories set in recognizable locales and time points in history.
• It's pretty clear that I think most books I read are average (or 3 stars).

Whilst updating, compiling, and bar graphing I decided to create a reading metric.

And that metric is Good over Bad or GoB. It reflects the ratio of above average to below average books I read in a year. So, the higher the GoB the fewer bad books I had to slog through to get to the really good ones.

Now, the interesting thing about this (yes, I did just type that with a straight face) is that if you had asked me before I started working on this to name the worst reading year I've had in the last four I would have emphatically answered 2013. Much to my surprise, GoB clearly shows that 2011 was my worst reading year in the last four. As I'm sure you can see from the data, GoB's weakness is that it doesn't take into account that a reader might feel it's worth it to slog through a lot of crap to experience more good books. 2012 shows just that situation. GoB-wise, it looks like the second weakest year, but it was the year I had the highest percentage of above average books as compared to total books read.



What's the lesson in all this?
(Besides don't leave sgwordy alone too long with a spreadsheet.)
If your year gets back loaded with crap books (as mine did in 2013) you just might think it's been a bad year for reading but, on the whole, you might have had more reading fun than you thought.

Reading Report

I think I'm in the midst of the longest reading slump of recent memory (my recent memory, not general world living memory or anything). Here are some stats:

24 - Books started in the last three months
 8  - Of those 24 books not worth finishing
 3  - Of those 24 I would describe as good but pretty forgettable*
 2 - Of those 24 I would describe as very good but deeply flawed
 3 - Of those 24 I enjoyed enough to actually recommend but one with reservations (see previous deeply flawed bit)
 2 - Of those 24 I quite enjoyed but they were re-reads

*we've all been there. you're reading/watching something, totally content, but 2 days later (hell, sometimes even 2 hours) you can't manage to dredge up the title.


So I'm sitting here after 3 months with 3 out of 22 books that were new reads for which I will actually remember the titles and am likely to recommend to other readers. Shown another way, that's 13.6% books read and enjoyed. Maybe I should call this a reading fail rather than a reading slump. I just want out already! Any suggestions?

Equal Parts Fascinating and Creepy

So True!

Comics can be funny and insightful. :)