hopping on zankoku_zen's bandwagon

[2eclipse]

there's this neat community 50bookchallenge that helps challenge people to keep track of what they read and make sure they do it. the challenge is to make 50 books in a year or 15000 pages. i probably easily make 50 books/year, but i've never bothered to keep track before. so far this is what i've got. i am resorting to keeping track here, because it is too difficult to find my old posts on their website.

1. oracle - mike resnick (2 stars) 244 pages
2. the knight - gene wolf (3 stars)432 pages
3. the wizard - gene wolf (3 stars)480 pages
4-9. the dark is rising series - susan cooper (5 books total) (4 stars) 1148 pages
10. the bone setter's daughter - amy tan (3 stars) 416 pages
11. ella enchanged - gail carson levine (4 stars) 240 pages
12. the left hand of darkness - ursula leguin (5 stars) 304 pages
13. feast of souls - c.s. freidman (4 stars) 464 pages
14. a thread of grace - mary doria russell (4 stars) 464 pages
15. compass rose - gail dayton (1 stars) 464 pages
16. the other wind - ursula leguin (4 stars) 224 pages
17. the parable of the sower - octavia butler 304 pages
18. fire upon the deep - verner vinge (3 stars) 613 pages
19. wild seed - octavia butler (4 stars)279 pages
20. a deepness in the sky - verner vinge (4 stars) 704 pages

comes to 6,540 pages. i am currently 1/4 way through foucaults pendulum by umberto eco. i am really enjoying it.

6,540 / 150,000 (43.6%)

20 / 50 (40.0%)

Comments

[dimfuture.livejournal.com]

Foucault's Pendulum, awesome. A very formative book for me.

And I just got Feast of Souls in the mail. Any good?

Was it you or momentarrallee who was talking about Kite Runner? Because I just read it and loved it.

[2eclipse.livejournal.com]

i have not read the kite runner (although i think it might be on my bookshelf). my mom really liked it and i know she recommended it to me.
foucault's pendulum is the first eco i've ever read and i'm beginning to see what all the fuss is about. he has a brilliant way of dropping compelling philosophy and ideas into his work in such a way that it is part of the story and the thoughts of the characters and he does it so frequently that you wind up putting the book down a lot just to sit and think about those ideas. very stimulating. i've never read much about the templars before and it is interesting to get a history on them. i feel compelled to find out if the history he tells is fiction or historical.
part of what makes this book so compelling to me is that i get the references in a lot of the name-dropping he does. gotta love my great books school education.

[dimfuture.livejournal.com]

You pretty much summed up my feelings on it as well. It's very dense, almost a research project if you don't know a lot about Kabbalah or mysticism or the Templars (as I didn't at the time).

I've yet to meet its match, really.

[2eclipse.livejournal.com]

feast of souls rocks.
i am a big c.s. friedman fan, but i like her sf more than i like her fantasy. this is fantasy, but darker than her gerald terrant books. i like how her stories (as a whole at least) always twist in a way i don't expect, contain more than i supposed...i've read so much science fiction and fantasy that i get bored with stuff that doesn't have complex characters (mostly ones that aren't flawed enough) or that have plot lines that are too predictable.

[dimfuture.livejournal.com]

Good to hear it. I got it from the Sci-Fi Book Club because I forgot to send back my card, and I was afraid it would be another suckfest.

[cuddlejunkie1.livejournal.com]

Did you hear that The Dark is Rising is being made into a movie?

two things

[zankoku-zen.livejournal.com]

1) foucault's pendulum rocks and it's the book that the davinci code wishes it could be.

2) it's 150,000 pages. I wish it were 15,000. I'd be done in no snap. They are actually two different challenges. I'm just doing them at the same time. Which reminds me, I need to post a review up for Neal Stephenson's books that I've been reading.

[spiralshell.livejournal.com]

I have been terrible about reading lately -- the synapses just aren't firing right. I think the problem is that I keep buying all this nonfiction, and then I park it on my shelf. And then I feel guilty about not having read it yet, so I feel like I can't go buy some nice lovely fiction. And so I putter on the computer instead.
Yeah, lame, I know.
So I joined the 50 book community. That might motivate me to actually pick up a danged book! I used to read so much -- 50 books in 52 weeks, no problem.
Anyway,
My first book (started on Sunday): Jane Austen "Sense and Sensibility". Been meaning to read this for a while. I've read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Persuasion", but never any of her other books.