Don't be Afraid of the Dork

I have to say, not one of my favorites of Pym's.  I've read 4 books by her and have loved two and felt pretty ambivalent about two.  I think my opinions are pretty tightly correlated with whether I like and relate to her female characters.  In this book, Prudence is so vain and borders on arrogant while Jane is annoyingly ineffectual and flaky.  Since Pym's book are so dependent on the characters, i.e. there is very little plot to speak of, if I find them annoying then it's hard to love the book.  

That said, she still displays her characteristic dry and sly wit and the books function as critical commentary of British society in the 1950s is well intact.  In fact, while I found Jane extremely annoying  - never learning, never adapting - it made me ask myself whether I would find her as annoying if she was living in an artist's garret, writing poetry or other books.  What she is bad at, and doesn't really care about, is filling the role of a Vicar's wife and why should I look down on her for that?  This ties into one of the major themes of the book which is women's roles especially in this time period when they are working more but still have a heavy pressure to wed.  

So I wrote half of this post yesterday, saved it as a draft and Tumblr must have eaten it. SO, it is with some vague annoyance and many fewer words that I list my favorite books of the year. These are books I read this year so they were not necessarily published this year.  I’m a backlist reader kind of gal mostly.  Also the list is in no particular order.

1) Pawn in Frankincense (Lymond Chronicles #4) by Dorothy Dunnett

I re-read this best-of-all-historical-fiction-series this year for the first time in 20 some years.  It was just as breathtaking and heart-stealing as it was the first go round.  Book 4, Pawn in Frankincense is my favorite.

2) Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith

Yep, I’m including series as one item, so sue me:).  I started this mystery series by J.K. Rowling’s alter ego and absolutely fell in love and proceeded to read all of them in quick fashion.  Now the wait.... My favorite in the series was the most recent, Career of Evil.

3) Lockwood and Co. Series by Jonathan Stroud

I flew through this middle-grade season about three young teens that fight ghosts in an alternate version of London.  I gave three out of the five books in the series 5 out of 5 stars.  It has great characters and relationships, mysterious and adventurous plots, a great sense of humor and terrific world building.  

4) The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

This was the biggest dark horse for me this year. I bought it on a whim when it was on sale on Audible and I hadn’t heard any chatter about it.  It utterly delighted me though.  It’s a mysterious, lightly speculative with psychic abilities and delightful clockwork, romantic and witty.  It reminded me a little bit of The Night Circus in tone and atmosphere. 

5) Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

I am a greedy reader and like when books do many genres well. This mystery is also a strangely lovely coming of age tale set in Minnesota in the 1950s.  The writing is beautiful and a lot of the sentiment really spoke to me.  I will definitely be reading more of Mr. Kruger’s books.

6) The Veronica Speedwell Series by Deanna Raybourn

This series, which currently only has 2 books, has been instrumental in my finding a new favorite author.  Deanna Raybourn’s blend of plot-heavy mystery/suspense with romamce is my catnip.  I love her characters and how she writes romance - slow-burn and secondary to fun plots.  She’s also great with the witty banter.  I can’t wait for the next book in this series!

7) Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

I loved Ms. West’s funny and unapologetic voice in this series of essays about being a woman in the world, especially one that doesn’t conform to societal norms, and being proud and comfortable in one’s skin.

8) Six of Crows series by Leigh Bardugo

I positively inhaled this duology series; I couldn’t put them down.  I absolutely adored all the characters and was thrilled by all the heisty goodness.  Definitely my favorite YA of the year!

9) All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells

This short but perfectly well-rounded science fiction novella had my favorite narrative voice I encountered this year.  That plus the fact that it was a neat and complete story in a short package made it one of the most satisfying reads of the year. SO glad this is going to be a series!

10) The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2) by Tana French

If characters are your thing than you can’t do much better than Tana French. Her mysteries are engrossing and unique story wise but it is the characters that put her books in a class of their own.  This book focuses on Cassie as she goes undercover, impersonating a dead girl who had stolen the identity of one of Cassie’s previous undercover personae.  The writing is also just beautiful.

So that’s my top ten! There are, of course, a few others that got really close which I’ve listed below. It was a good, if not terribly profound, reading year!

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

The City of Mirrors (The Passage #3) by Justin Cronin

The Seven Realms Series by Cinda Williams Chima

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

Here’s what I’ve read:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Last night, I was really craving some comfy down time.  I desperately wanted simple food loaded with fat and calories, a big soft blanket and a movie I could just sink into and feel like all was right with the world.  So, I dug out my VHS video tape (it’s not available on Netflix or Hulu and costs money on Amazon Prime) of Ever After starring Drew Barrymore, Dougray Scott, and Anjelica Huston.

I LOVE this movie y’all. So much.  I mean the acting is a little questionable at times and Drew Barrymore puts on what must be the WORST British accent of all time which is odd since the movie takes place in France so why did she have to put on a fake, not French accent?  Probably because Dougray Scott was British and it would’ve seemed weird if she had a different accent and, you know, England’s closer to France so more authentic or something.  ANYhoo. Also the story is riddled with cliches and tropes and silliness (Leonardo DaVinci plays the “fairy godmother”).  But as soon as I lose myself in its cozy folds all of that fades to unimportance.  

In my opinion, Drew Barrymore was generally killing it in this era.  I’m also a big fan of (and own) Never Been Kissed (1999) which features Drew as a big dork who must go back to high school on an undercover reporting gig.  Both movies feature an ordinary, overlooked woman, finding her power and getting the guy and in both cases the guy is very dreamy (Michael Vartan in Never Been Kissed). The combination of female empowerment and romance is at the heart of why these movies speak to me.  

Ever After has the added bonus of being a fairy tale retelling which I am a BIG fan of and it is of one of my favorite fairy tales.  It  is ridiculously feel good and so sweetly romantic.  It is also beautiful, from the costumes to the lush scenery and cinematography.  Anjelica Huston is terrific as the wicked stepmother and the film manages to give her some nuance while still making her wicked enough that the scene where she gets her comeuppance in the end is punch-the-air cheer worthy.  

It also has one of my favorite awkward-sweet romantic exchanges...

Every week the lovely folks at The Broke and the Bookish host the Top Ten Tuesday bookish meme. It’s a delight for those of us who love both books and making lists of things.  

1) The Fairyland Series by Cathrynne M. Valente

They are, in order: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All The Way Home 

They double as book title and short descriptor of the action while also having a fun Victorian flair.  

2) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

In the same vein as the above (both title and short descriptor of the plot) and I also like thinking about a grumpy celestial body.

3) The Kopp Sisters series by Amy Stewart

They are as follows: Girl Waits With Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. The first two in particular deliberately read like a newspaper headline because Stewart has actually based these awesome historical mysteries on actual newspaper articles about the on of the first female deputies. 

4) The Richard Jury Mysteries by Martha Grimes

Too numerous to list them all but they are all named after particularly charming British pubs.  For example, the first book in the series is The Man With A Load of Mischief.  They make me smile.

5) A Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLean

A love a silly play on words and Sarah MacLean is the MISTRESS SUPREME of this.  In fact, All of her titles are glorious.  One of my other favorites is Nine Rules To Break When Romancing a Rake just for the lovely rhythm of it:). 

6) Mary Roach’s Books

There are actually lots of non-fiction with unique titles (Liar, Temptress Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris as a few quick examples) but for me Mary Roach’s one word titles are the best. They hint at the topic in such a simple yet oblique way.  There’s Stiff (about corpses), Gulp (about the digestive system), Bonk (about sex research), Spook (about he afterlife), Grunt (about warfare) and here one departure from the one word title Packing for Mars (about the less noble logistics of space travel). 

7) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

A Date! That’s fun. 

8)The Old Kingdom Series by Garth Nix

The books in this fantastic YA series are all unique words that are the main character’s name or title.  Along with the beautiful cover illustrations, the names draw you in, wondering what’s behind the them.  Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, and Clariel.