I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my book blog: iEATbooks.com, and I’ve kind of neglected this site.

In addition, I’ve been reading a lot.  Since my last post here about books, I’ve read a few more:

11. Rockstar’s Rainbow by Kevin Glavin

12. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

13. Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls – Book #2 in the Babysitter’s Club series

14. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl

In January I was kind of thinking of challenging myself to read 100 books this year, and now in March I’m aware that that is close to impossible.  One hundred books in a year is like 2 per week…and we’re in the 14th week of the year, and I’ve read only 14.

The picture above is of our new library that we’re putting together.

I just wrote my review of the 10th book I’ve read in 2010:

The Lifeguard by James Patterson.

I eat books now… I’ve been toying with the idea of making a book review website for a while now, and finally went through with it a few weeks ago.

iEATbooks.com.  Check it out.

It’s not just me.  There are about 9 people that review books.  Some writers are better than others…but whatever.

So I’m not going to bore WhatSomeWouldCallLies people with book reviews any more.  But I do want to keep count of the number of books I write…so I’ll keep posting just titles and maybe links to iEATbooks reviews here.

So I finished my 9th book of the year: Good Faith by Jane Smiley.  My iEATbooks review is here.

Daniel is in Vancouver at the Winter Olympics, so I’ve had a lot of time to myself.  I love the hell out of him…but I have to be honest and say that it’s been kind of nice.  Sure, I miss him.  But I’m a loner.  And I love getting lost in a book for two hours after work.  Needless to say, I’ve been reading them faster than I can blog about them.  So this post is about two books.

First up, I read Kristy’s Great Idea – the first in the Baby-sitters Club series.  I kind of love that this book is so timeless.  If I had cared about normal boy things in the 1980s, and just recently stumbled upon these books (and ignored the hideous clothes on the cover), it’s possible to not know what year these novels take place in.

I also love how Stacey is super-ashamed of her Diabetes.  And she tells all the girls that she’s on a diet.  And it wasn’t until they caught her in a lie and were ready to kick her out of The Baby-Sitters Club (no apostrophe) did she finally fess up.

It was a really quick read, and I’m not sure I’ll be blogging about each of them as I go through them.  I’m going to read 1 through 10…but I’m still missing #3.  I found it on Amazon for less than $1.00 – so it’s on the way.

When I was reading this book I had an odd sense of guilt.  When I was a little boy, I looked up to my sister a lot.  She’s four years older than me.  And I learned at an early age that I wasn’t supposed to like the things that she liked (even though I wanted to so badly).  I remember how fascinated my sister was with this series, and I remember secretly being fascinated too – even though I hadn’t ever read one.

It feels good to be an adult that can scratch some of my childhood itches…but we’ll leave the Corey Haim thing alone.

Moving on…I just finished Hide And Seek by James Patterson.  And can someone please remind me to avoid crime novels when Daniel goes out of town next time?  It’s not an exceptionally gory book, but there are a few murders in there and a little bit of suspense.  I’m used to his books being super fast.  This book (which if I’m not mistaken is one of his earlier books) is slow-paced.

The story here was about a soccer player & a singer that get married and fall in love.  But when the singer’s career works out better than the footballer’s, Victoria Beckham Maggie Bradford ends up murdering her husband and she writes this book to explain what happened.  If you like airport-books (Grisham, Kellerman, Patterson), you’ll like this one.  I’ll warn you that Maggie is no Alex Cross.  This book isn’t up to par with what I’ve come to expect from a Patterson novel – there were no clever police work or interesting twists.  It was just a somewhat interesting story about a woman that happened to kill a couple of her husbands.  Meh.

If you’re counting, this is the 7th and 8th book I’ve read in 2010.

I found Jane Smiley’s Good Faith at the book fair last weekend – and I knew her name because of A Thousand Acres.  I picked it up, and I’m going to give it a go.

We first met Bradley Dayton in Frank Anthony Polito’s first novel Band Fags, which I read and wrote about here.   This book isn’t exactly a sequel to Band Fags because the two main characters (the Band Fag and the Drama Queer) have a b.f.f. breakup and these books take place during that time when they weren’t super close and involved in one anothers lives.

When I read Marc Acito’s How I Paid For College and the “sequel” Attack of the Theater People I found myself bored and tempted to skip sections at a time.  “I don’t need to know all of Character A’s backstory…I just read it in your other book,” I thought to myself.

And to be honest, if Daniel hadn’t bought me Drama Queers for Christmas, the fear of repeat boring backstory might have stopped me from picking this book up.  Luckily, Polito was wise enough to write Drama Queers as a stand-alone that compliments or supplments his first book.  Knowing what I know about Jack, Brad’s best friend since the 7th grade, only helped me enjoy the second book more.

High School isn’t really easy for anyone, and as Polito’s stories accurately point out, figuring out you’re a F-A-G just complicates things.  As a former Band Fag and Drama Queer, this book was a nice throw-back to those days that I’m so glad are over.

The pace of this book was much better than Band Fags, and Polito seemed to get a lot of his impress-them-with-vast-early-80s-pop-culture-knowledge out of the way in the first book.

While I only slightly recommend Band Fags, I’d fully recommend you read Drama Queers.

My sister read them all when I was a kid, but I was never into them.  And I still think that maybe one day I’d like to write a young adult novel.  So I’m going to read the series.

I have almost all of the first 10 books – but I’m still in need of number 3 and number 9.  And doesn’t one of the baby sitters have diabetes?

This is the 6th book I’ve read in 2010.

I already read Frank Anthony Politio’s book Band Fags, and when I blogged about it, I mentioned that I kind of liked the protaganist’s b.f.f. better than the protaganist.  And Polito’s second book Drama Queers! is told from the perspective of the b.f.f. Bradley Dayton.

I think that Polito has a Google Alert set up for his name and his book titles because every time I mention him he responds in the comments (Hi Frank!).  It was actually Polito’s comment here that convinced me to give Drama Queers a try.

This was the 5th book I’ve read in 2010.

I don’t remember why I put Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air on my Amazon.com Wishlist.  Maybe I saw him on a talk show, or saw the title on one of those books-you-must-read lists.  Whatever the reason, I got the book from Daniel’s sister for xmas, and was a bit surprised by how much I liked it.

I’m surprised that I enjoyed a non-fiction novel…I’m no fan of reality.

This story is Krakauer’s version of what happened in 1996 when he climbed Mt. Everest.  Many of his fellow mountaineers never made it off the mountain, and it’s an interesting look into the seductive control this mountain has over people.

I would only make two changes about this book.  The first thing I didn’t like about this book, which can’t really be changed, is that there were way too many characters to keep track of.  During the 1996 voyage there were four other groups of people climbing Mt. Everest at the same time as Krakauer’s team…so that made for a long list of characters.  And I guess since Krakauer was trying to accurately tell his story, he couldn’t cut anyone.

The second thing that that made this story hard to read was the way that Krakauer used first names and last names to refer to people.  Rob Hall, for example is called “Rob” in one paragraph and “Hall” in the next.  It made it difficult to follow the million characters in the book.

If I needed another reason to like this story, Krakauer quoted Joan Didion from The White Album.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

If you’re keeping track, this is the 4th book I’ve read in 2010.

I was going to read  A Streetcar Named Desire a few weeks ago, but in all of the boxes and piles of books that have come with moving I wasn’t able to find it.  But now I’ve located the book and I’m going to give it a read.

I was going to read A Streetcar Named Desire but in the chaos brought on by the recent move, I can’t seem to locate the book.  So instead I read James Patterson’s Witch & Wizard.

Patterson is one of my guilty pleasures.  He writes airport book – books that you can always find in an airport gift shop and will be able to finish before you arrive at your destination.  I love the Alex Cross series, and I often breeze through one of his books as a pallet cleanser between “serious” novels.

Witch & Wizard is the first in a young adult series that Patterson is writing.  It’s about two kids (Witsy and Whit) that are kidnapped by the New Order, a form of government that has taken over the world.  In captivity they discover that they have magical powers and that is the reason they are a threat to the N.O.

While I like a good dystopian, end-of-the-word-as-we-know-it, kind of novel (Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) I’m not a huge fan of the novel series.  Too often, you just get a rushed, watered down story because the author has book four or five in mind.

This book actually started out with promise; I was excited to see that I was reading a book that could possible rival some of those mentioned in the previous paragraph – and then we learn that the world’s political system collapsed literally overnight and was replaced by the New Order (lame).  And then the two main characters run in and out of other worldly dimensions (lame).

I got a “This is a new Harry Potter” feeling when I was reading this book, and quite frankly if it wasn’t written by James Patterson I would never pick up book two…but I’m going to give this series one more opportunity to woo me.

For Christmas, Jennifer gave me Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.  It was on my Amazon.com wish list.  I read about the book in Time magazine, and threw it on my list sometime in 2008, I think.

This is the 3rd book I’ve read in 2010.

I really thought that I was going to be joining the Nick Hornby fan club when I picked up How To Be Good. I’ve never read anything by him, but from what I’ve heard, I thought that he was going to be someone I would read thoroughly and often.  Instead, I think that this book should be re-named to How to Waste a Week Of Your Life.  I was really disappointed.  After all of the to-do about About a Boy and High Fidelity I was expecting so much more out of this.

This book started out with promise.  What happens when the crankiest man in the world becomes generous, caring and kind?  Spoiler alert…nothing, because Hornby was too lazy to write an adequate ending.

It’s a story of annoying characters that just get more and more annoying you get deeper and deeper into the book.  Do not waste your time.

If I never read another Nick Hornby book, fine by me.

For those of you keeping count: This is the 2nd book I’ve read in 2010.

This is been on my list for some time now, and I got it for Christmas from Daniel, so I’m finally going to get to it.

I’m not knocking it…but the entire time I was reading Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, I couldn’t help but think that this book would be perfect for the older mom demo.  I mean come on – a creepy neighbor rapes and kills a little girl, and then the girl walks her family through the grieving process from heaven.  FROM HEAVEN.

I’m not well-read enough to say “this is an entirely unique idea” or “Sebold ripped the narrator-in-heaven idea from…” but I will say that it was a clever hook that kept my interest enough to breeze through the book in a week or so.

And y’all know that I’m a sucker for a good opening line, and this one got me right away: My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer.

I really wanted to read this book before seeing the movie which is in theaters now, but I really don’t have any interest in paying to go sit and watch a story I just read.  So I may just wait until I can rent it, or I might forget about it and never actually see the movie.  Who knows.

On a side note, I was reading this blog and was tempted to try to read 100 books in 2010.  Do you think that goal is too lofty?

People I respect love the hell out of Nick Hornby, but I’ve never really been too interested in picking him up.  I saw High Fidelity the movie, but never read any of Hornby’s novels.  I know that I have all of those books I got for Christmas, but because of moving they are all in a box and I had to stop at Barnes & Noble and use the gift card to buy this one.