So Many Books, So Little Time

My blogging has been pretty much non-existent since the April poetry challenge ended. I needed to recuperate. ;-)

But I wanted to give an update on the status of the book challenge. As far as I can tell, I'm on track. I've finished 37 books. On our camping trip last weekend, I read two books, started another, and got pretty far into a book on CD. The two books I started and finished were excellent. I didn't hang around outside or take walks or anything. I stayed in the camper and read my books because they were so good.

I read The Bone Garden, by mystery author Tess Gerritsen. It went back and forth in time, and spent more time in the past than in the present. It was almost a historical mystery. Normally I skip those--I'm not big into historical--but I loved it.

The other one was The Third Angel, by Alice Hoffman. I bought this one on faith. Hoffman is one of my favorite authors, but I didn't really like her last book, Skylight Confessions. But she totally redeemed herself in my mind with the new one. I picked it up midmorning, and I finished it later that same day. It was really excellent.

I also went ahead and bought into the hype. I picked up Twilight from Borders. Nothing I'd heard about it appealed to me until my teen writers started buzzing about Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire romance series. Then a teen whose recommendations I really value said she enjoyed the books. In fact, she went out and read everything Meyer has published. Andrew told me to watch the trailer for the upcoming movie (in December), and that clinched the deal.

Bella, the main character in Twilight, is very annoyingly selfish. And at a couple of points the romance got painful. It was like the really awful love scenes from Star Wars Eps. 2 and 3. But not all the way through. I just cringed a couple of times. Now I'm patiently waiting for the remaining books to come out in paperback so that they match my paperback copy of Twilight.

I'm still reading the seventh Dark Tower book, and struggling with Neil Gaiman's American Gods. If I wasn't conking out at 10 every night, I could probably get a lot more reading done. I've got 13 books to read by the end of June to reach the halfway point. I think I may pick up some shorter ones. ;-)