2012 Book Challenge

This year I arbitrarily decided to set my sights high for the 2012 book challenge. Last year I did 25 books and barely made it.

This year I have decided to try and read one book a week.

It isn't the reading pace that worries me. I'm quite sure I can read at least 600 pages easily in a week. These are things that worry me:

1. Having 52 books on hand that interest me enough to read them fully. I'm a terrible reader in that I like what I like and don't appreciate EVERYTHING for the sake of it being so. I have personal taste which makes me a very bad reader indeed. Good readers have open minds and are willing to read anything and can appreciate a book for, if nothing more, than being a full book.
2. When I read I'm likely to let everything else fall to the wayside: exercising, socializing, sleeping, eating, etc. I'm known to reading-binge and not sleep for two days to get a particularly long book done. I usually don't allow myself to read much because I need a life beyond books.
3. I don't have a lot of money. So I'll need to start making serious friends with the nearest library.

Aside from those worries, I have a terrible habit of forgetting something as soon as I'm done reading it. I can keep in my brain a thousand useless facts about germs, weddings, the origins of pomelos, yet once I'm done with a book or movie, I'm done.

To help fight against this I have decided to write a small something about each book each week. Even if a 5 word impression of it. I will write SOMETHING.

Last week's book: The People of Paper by Salvador Plasencia

I'm always a fan of magical realism. I'm also a fan of Latin America. This mix between coming of age, metafiction, love, mexican-americans and the identity issues of being anything-american (Other than just american-american), and magical realism seemed like the perfect pot to brew for me.

It told the story of bed-wetting and self mutilating, love-losing Federico de la Fe (who seems a little schizo in the beginning) and his daughter Little Merced. But it mostly tells the story of lost love in general and the obsession it can bring. The way it changes lives. This isn't a new theme for novels by any means. But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

It was an interesting read for it's use of columns and scratch-outs and different voices. (I also love books with changing narrators). 

But for the most part it was just a book I mildly liked, not one I loved. It had all the right ingredients but failed to really entice me. It wasn't BORING and it wasn't BAD. It just didn't have the pull of being a FAVORITE. 

I think I'd still read something else written by Plasencia but I definitely wouldn't seek it out.

This weeks book: The Colony of Unrequited Dreams