1% Well Read challenge

I am fairly new to blogging and so I'm not sure how to post all the links and what not. I need to figure it out so I can add book covers and stuff to make this a bit more visually appealing.

Hopefully my link I put in under the title works. I'm going to do this challenge. I'm not sure which option, I think I will aim for 10, but maybe the 13 of the 1300 books. I actually have a few of these on my to be read list! Some I have already read, so those won't count.

I'm excited to see what great reads I find in there!

Okay, I had to edit because somehow the link didn't make it, but anyway here it is:
http://1morechapter.com/

This is by 3M, I need to add that blog to my blogroll! I really like that site!

Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston

I really enjoyed this book. To be honest I didn't even know the subject matter when I picked it up, it was on the discounted shelves at Borders. It was actually the audio version.

Imagine my surprise when the main topic was infertility and how it affects a marriage, in this case the husband turned to another woman.

Having first hand knowledge of infertility I understood a lot of the El's (the wife) feelings. Although she really had a lot of anger towards her husband. In the beginning I felt Ted was a jerk for having the affair, as it went on you could understand. I want to clarify, I understood, not condoned. I still thought it was a crappy thing to do, but when the relationship with his wife soured, his resistance was down.

It felt like Ms. Winston tried to make the mistress, Gina, a little more sympathetic by giving her a difficult child and bad ex boyfriends. I think it had the opposite effect for me. It never showed that she struggled with the morality of having an affair. Yes she said she knew it was wrong, but it never seemed to stop her or even make her hesitate.

That being said overall I really enjoyed the book. I did like that there was no happy ending. A lot of books that deal in any way with infertility have the ending where the couple somehow gets a baby. Real life is not always like that for a variety of reasons.

Booking through Thursday - Collectibles

Hardcover? Or paperback?
Illustrations? Or just text?
First editions? Or you don’t care?
Signed by the author? Or not?

Okay I am just getting into this blogging thing, but I saw this on some other websites and loved hearing all the responsess.

http://btt2.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/collectibles/

For me, I have a fair mixture of paperback and hardback. I like hardback for the way it looks on my shelves, but I like paperback to carry around reading. And since I am nuts for the barnes and noble clearance items, they offer a broad range of paperback and hardback. I really don't care about illustrations or not. I don't really care about the edition. If I could get them all signed by the author I would, but its not a big issue to me one way or the other.

I just like having books and lots of them. When I walk into a book store I feel a calm come over me. Its hard to explain. My only anxiety is when I have to make either or choices. I would love to walk in and say one of every fiction book please. I would also love to have the time to read them.

My question to anyone who might be reading this is, what do you do with a book your not liking? Do you continue reading to finish it or do you just stop reading?

I tend to do both depending on the book, but if it is really bad I just stop. I used to feel I had to power through, but I have learned that life is too short to waste time reading something I don't enjoy, and there are too many good books out there I could be reading.

Another start

This is another attempt at creating a blog about the book I read. I average about 2-3 books a week and quite frankly it gets hard to keep track of them all. I tried doing a blog with a posting on each book I read, but that was difficult because I felt like some books I really had nothing to say about.

I love to read pretty much everything except science fiction. I'm not real big on mysteries either, there are some I really like though. I like to try different types of books and I go through phases with them. I will read nothing but historical fiction for a while, then I switch to contemporary. I started reading with mostly romances, but that did get old after years of reading them. I currently have about 160 in my want to read list. I keep a running spreadsheet going of all of them and I also use the Visual Bookshelf on Facebook to keep track.

I'm also addicted to buying books. I have to force myself away from Barnes and Noble's website. Although they have a great selection under their clearance, especially during the month of January. I currently have 44 books waiting to be read at home. That should keep me for a few months! :)

This will probably just be a rambling, but oh well.

Tonight is my book club and I am quite excited as we haven't all met since November so we have three books to discuss!

The current months book is The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards. I will be honest that I wasn't looking forward to reading this book. The thought of the father just handing over his handicapped daughter and lying to his wife held no appeal to me at all. With that being said, once I started reading I really enjoyed it. I had it read in one day, yes I am a fast reader. I will say that the whole subject to me was reprehensible in thought. But once you start reading more the context of it, the era in which it happened, and his history with his sister you began to not condone, but understand.

We also will be discussing Grace by Richard Paul Evans. That was a fantastic book and I would definitely have to put this in my top 10 of all time. It was tragic but very well written.

The third book is Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Another book I really had no interest in reading but did enjoy when I was done. I actually listened to this book on CD. I really felt that it went very slow and was at times repetitive. It was one of those I wasn't really sure I liked while I was listening, but once it was done I really did like it overall.

So those are my book club books. I just finished on my own, The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. Man he is a fantastic writer. This book is definitely one my favorites as well. Its a long book, but worth every moment. It starts with Columbine and has me bawling for the victims, not just the ones who died, but for all the victims. I won't give anything away, but I also bawled at the end for the characters. I love the characters Wally creates because they are so realistic. They aren't heroes in the traditionally literary sense. His books have a sense that they could be biographies. There were times in this book I had to remind myself that I was reading fiction.

Yesterday I read Away: A Novel by Amy Bloom. It was a decent, quick read. I think it suffered in my eyes from my having just finished The Hour I First Believed. It was a decent book, but not really the right book to follow the other.

I am a voracious reader. I usually have three books going at any given time, an audio book in my car, a book at home and one going for lunch at the office. I'm currently only reading two, so I feel a bit behind. I am almost done with my audio book so I need to pick the next one at the library.

Well I guess that is enough for the first post.