outta mind outta site

Your Summer Reading List, As Put Together By Me, Somebody Who is About 3 Years Behind the Curve on Trendy and Important Books

Look, I love to read. But I’m not very good at keeping up with the hot new books. Some of this stems from realizing I was dropping like $100 a month on new books and then making a move to read only what the library had available on Kindle. (Can somebody explain to me why there are limited copies of Kindle books… can’t you just digitally make like 1 billion copies of a book… I don’t understand technology.) Some of this stems from just being lazy. Some of this stems from the fact I love crap books. (Crap meaning “not particularly literary and sort of embarrassing to admit you’ve read.”)

So it is with all of that authority that I give you Catherine’s Summer Reading List. None of these books are new or even new-ish (with the exception of one or two), or particularly “literary,” but, by my standards, they’re great for the pool, the beach, or the bus stop as you sweat endlessly into the day as you wait to go to your draining 9 to 5. Cheers!

(Cup of Jo had a good and current books round up here, by the way.)

My Favorite Books of 2015

Man, I only read 16 books in 2015. I may as well go throw myself in a dumpster fire. In 2014 I read 28 books! I mean, that's nothing grand, but 16 books feels pretty measly. It's like a book every three weeks. Curses. It's okay, though; I've got grand ambitions for 2016. Ambitions that I will inevitably fail to achieve, which will only make me feel more desperately frustrated with myself, thereby negating my original goal of being an accomplished and fulfilled person. Oh well. I think they refer to that as "life."

Anyways, I did read some books in 2015 that were pretty okay, and I'll talk about a few of them below. For an actual person who knows a lot about books and reads more than a human should be capable of, check out Jaclyn Day's Best Books of 2015 post. God, she reads literally like 11 books a week, and her reviews are great. My goal for 2016 is to read all the books she lists in that one post (there are just eight!) so by 2017 I will be totally caught up on 2015 hott books and life will be great. 

But so: 2015 books.

Looking back on my Goodreads data, it just seems like 2015 is the year I stopped caring if anything I read was "literary". I read the Veronica Mars books (they are EXCELLENT, by the way - just like longer versions of season 1 episodes), as well as a book that was a thinly-veiled fictionalized version of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' marriage and divorce (Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper, and it wasn't bad). I also read JK Rowling's Casual Vacancy, with a little bit of shame and trepidation, because Harry Potter author tries to go literary, and then, oh yeah, right, she wrote the MOST POPULAR BOOK SERIES OF ALL ETERNITY AND IS A BAZILLIONAIRE FOR A REASON, and the book was great. 

I also read a couple of thriller or pop culture books that I highly enjoyed. Nice and pulpy, nice and dumb. Ready Player One, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and I am Pilgrim - all sort of dumb but all recommended, especially as beach reads. Good times with those ones.

A couple of my normal all-stars disappointed me a little bit in 2015: Sarah Waters with The Paying Guests and Kate Atkinson with A God in Ruins. Waters - almost all her books are awesome fiction Victorian novels featuring lesbian protagonists (what a niche!). But this book -- oof. As I wrote, "Oh no, this book is not good. I normally love Sarah Waters but this book was not good. It's a lesbian love affair with murder and intrigue in 1920s England, and despite all of that it somehow manages to be very boring and insufferable."

A God in Ruins was much better, and still actually GOOD, but after Kate Atkinson's masterpiece of Life After Life, this companion piece just couldn't 100 percent live up to that novel. Still relatively recommended, though. But read Life After Life first.

My two favorite books of the year probably were by David Mitchell. I'd only ever read by him Cloud Atlas, and that was years ago. Black Swan Green was one of my very favorites: "Beautifully written, and entertaining, and poignant. CATHERINE TRIFECTA! Even though it was told from the point of view of a 13-year-old boy in England in 1982, a being so far removed from me as to have pretty much zero in common except being humans, I still did a lot of laughing, crying, and nodding. Great read."

His The Bone Clocks was a little more complicated for me it would seem: "I wavered between 3 and 4 stars for this one, but ultimately went with 4 because about 7/8ths of this book is some of my favorite writing I've ever read. However, the whole thing is nearly completely ruined towards the end with some fucking abracadabra mystical woo-woo sci-fi shit that is SOME OF THE WORST STUFF I HAVE EVER READ AND MY BODY WAS BURNING WITH ANGER DURING THAT CHAPTER. Because the rest is SO good. So unbelievably good. This would be one of my favorite books ever if an entire chapter weren't dedicated to mystical mind warriors that fight each other with their chakra eyes or whatever, o god David Mitchell why. Anyways I guess I recommend it."

UPDATE: Going against popular fashion, my LEAST favorite book was The Martian. My entire body shut down from boring and rage during the book. If you only like science, and hate interesting characters with real life motivation, or realistic and moving dialogue, you'd probably love it, though.

God, my Goodreads reviews have so much thought and skillful effort put into them.

What were your favorite books of 2015?

9-year-old girls

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. I've shamefully never read an Atwood book before, but am aiming to read more of her work in 2014. Cat's Eye was my first choice by default - it was the only one of hers available in the library's e-books section. Overall the book is about a woman, Elaine, in her 50s or 60s who's now a relatively prominent artist, reflecting back on her childhood and upbringing in post-war Toronto. But what it really digs into is her inability to connect with and understand women.

Normally, to this sort of trajectory I would yell something like, "HOGWASH!" (Does anybody ever actually yell that? Would be awesome.) I am pretty firmly in the camp that if you're a woman who doesn't have any female friends, and is proud of that fact, that you, in my mind, are suspicious. Women are great, and if you're discounting your own gender and half of humanity in your sweeping generalizations about friendship, that's pretty dubious.

Accomplishing 30 While 30: Read Two Books a Month

Heyo! You didn't think I'd make that gigantic list and then not update you on any of my progress, did you? Nope. You get to read about how my 30 While 30 list is going ALL YEAR LONG. At the very least it should make good fodder for my goal to blog twice a week. Anyways, where I've already had the most progress is in reading books, so I'll be updating this page with every book I read. Here we go...

>> See my full 30 While 30 goal list

30 While 30: Read More

Wondering what this is? I turn 30 on January 11th. Every day until then, I'm listing 30 goals I'd like to accomplish in my 30th year. If you have an idea for me, leave a comment!

#12: Read more books! I've been trying to keep the goals on this list of 30 While 30 as specific and as reasonable as possible. I've always found that when you make resolutions that are along the lines of "Be Happier!!!" or "Drink More Beer!!!" (CHECK!) that, well, that isn't really gonna work. Those are too broad of goals to make any sort of difference. Also unrealistic: Goals like "I will move to Italy and marry a millionaire this year!!!" Hence you get stuff like my list. I hope you are all finding it vaguely entertaining, but I must admit that some of the goals on it are rather staid. But that is purposeful. I want to achieve them, so I'm keeping them down-to-earth. 

The Complete Gift Guide to Buying Catherine a Really Awesome Gift

Recently my parents, because they are rather awesome parents, asked me to email them what I wanted for Christmas, just like I was 7 years old all over again and scrawling out a pleading note to Santa. Now, they do this every year, and nearly every year since I became a reasonable adult, I point out a couple of small things and say please don't buy me any more than that, even though they do.

But this year? Who knows, maybe it's the fact we're in a never-ending recession and I'm tired of scrimping, or maybe the fact that I am a greedy little whore, but I had a whole list of things ready. And these are those things. You'll notice that, due to my ever burgeoning outdoors obsession, a lot of them tend to the… outdoorsy. I told my parents to basically get me a gift card to REI. But maybe one of these items will come in useful for somebody you need to get a gift for.