The audiobook version of Forever in Blue had significantly fewer holds than the actual book, so I went with it instead. I've listened to every book in this series, and they are all well-done.

This one does exactly what it says on the tin, and I found it a highly satisfying end to the series. It was interesting, though, in that the characters I love & the characters who drive me crazy were reversed in this outing. Hmm.

The Fire's Stone is totally a comfort read for me, so I don't think I can be remotely objective about it. It's a standard fantasy quest plot, but the characters are charming & flawed and I couldn't put it down.

I hate to say it, but Princess on the Brink kind of drove me nuts. I'm invested, and so it'll take more than this one to kick me out of the series altogether, but Mia is starting to grate on my nerves, especially in regards to Michael.

Other than that, it's Cabot. You know what you're getting into.

On the bus this morning I finished Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, and I am very sorry to see it go. It's one of those books that I've known for years I should read, and somehow never managed to do, but finally someone mentioned it when I had the time to place an online hold and here we are. I didn't know the ballad going in (for which I am glad), and it made me desperately miss all the best parts of college (I too was an English major, a decision I have never regretted, though the world conspires to make me). And such a fantastic heroine! Yay. I'm going to have to invest in my own copy as soon as possible.

Last night, waiting for the movie to start, I finished The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret. Just in time, too, as it was due that day. I liked it better than The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God, a collection I picked up because it contains "Kneller's Happy Campers", the short story upon which Wristcutters: A Love Story is based, but both are worth the reading.

I haven't traditionally read a lot of short stories, which is funny all things considered, but last year I finally discovered Kelly Link, who I adored. So if anyone has recommendations I'd be happy to have them.

I switched over to Cheaper by the Dozen after totally and completely failing to get into listening to How to be Popular. I used to reread it all the time when I was a kid, and so I was duly horrified with the travesty that was the Steve Martin "version" came out.

My main quibble with the audiobook is that it used music at the start of chapters in a way that was unnecessary and distracting, I think because it went overlong. I didn't mind the music-slash-babel in Snow Crash, but there it was definitely in between segments and here the narrator was reading over it frequently. Bad move. Also, I'm really unimpressed with the voices she did for the children. But my longstanding Gilbreth Family love is pulling me through. I want to reread the sequels, now, but lord knows I won't seek out audio versions. Bah.

Recently I devoured the first season of the TV series "Dexter", and so when Darkly Dreaming Dexter crossed my path, I thought I would give it a listen. The first season is more or less based on this book, and the upcoming second is on the sequel. The narration is good, the story is well-told, but here's the thing. The TV show is better. I know, I know. Blasphemy. But it's -true-. The show took the bones of the novel, the essence of the characters, and enhanced and expanded both people and plot in a truly effective way. I can't believe I'm saying this, but give the book a pass and watch the series. The book is well-written, but if you read it first you'll spoil yourself for the show, and if you read if after, you'll feel like you're just flying past things you should be lingering on.

On the bus to work this morning I finished listening to Snow Crash, only about a year after I started it. That's not a reflection on the book, though, rather a reflection on the fact that my iPod ate it, I wasn't able to replace it until this winter, and it is a wicked-long audiobook.

And? It was fantastic. Funny and twisty and quite a ride, storytelling-wise. Also, the narration of the audiobook was excellent.

This weekend I finished Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham, which kind of broke my heart. It was just beautiful, which I suppose is to be expected of him. The story was told in three parts, during three distinct time periods, and with variations on three characters, with Walt Whitman tying them all together.

Is it flawed? Yes. Did I care? No. Not one bit. Especially not at 2am when I was up finishing it.

Last night I was up until 2 in the morning finishing Eat this book : a year of gorging and glory on the competitive eating circuit by Ryan Nerz, recommended to me by shinyredtype. I've been reading it in bits. Each chapter focuses on a different eater & a different competition, so it was really easy to pick up for a while each night and then set aside. And it was so interesting! Ever since I saw a cable documentary on the subject lo so many years ago, I have been totally fascinated by competitive eating, and this was a really accessible book on it. Nerz is totally a fanboy, though, so my next read on the subject will be Horsemen of the Esophagus, which apparently is a less biased perspective. Or differently biased.

My favorite gurgitators right now are the LeFevres, a retired couple. -Awesome-.

The Commitments is a bit of an oddity, as it's my go-to audio book right now until I track down my Anne tapes. I picked it up at the last SPL book sale for a buck, it's read by Aidan Gillen, and every time I am in between other audiobooks I listen to a side. Great story, great narration, and I'll probably listen to it several more times this year. Since this was the first time through, though, I'll count it.

Next up, an actual book: Wide Awake by David Levithan. There are two things I love about his writing. First, he has a fantastic vision of the near future, and second, he writes gorgeous, intimate prose about queer relationships. Boy Meets Boy showcased both of these, with a focus on the second, and Wide Awake emphasizes the first. The United States has just elected its first gay Jewish president ...until the governor of Kansas demands a recount. The narrator & his boyfriend join a bus trip down to Kansas to monitor the election proceedings, and the story follows strains on various relationships as well as the larger election story.

I love his hope, that we will keep on improving as people, that things will get worse but then they'll get a lot better, and that weapons of words like faith and decency will be reclaimed.

I had a whole string of titles in my text file for this journal, but it's a new year and a new go at this project, so I trashed them and started over. Ahh. That felt good.

Okay! First book finished this year is YA -and- audio, and I refuse to feel guilty about that, for it was Meg Cabot and therefore loads of fun. All-American Girl. She lives in DC! She's an artist! She stops an assassination attempt on the president, is hilarious, and worships Gwen Stefani. Candy for the brain, dude, and what's wrong with that? Nothing. I listened to it on CD, and I will have to pick it up somewhere else to give better attention to the last chapter, as the CD was skipping all over the place in some bits.

(Title links in this journal are going to be to WorldCat, where you can find the title in a library near you. One hopes. It was pretty sexy when I tried it -- it detected where I was and gave me the closest libraries first, along with direct links to the title in each one with a web catalog. Sweet!)

So, for a while I had an okay book blog going at librarinth_net, but it was a pain to keep up, and then it died of database error. In 2006 I created letterboxed, mainly to track my filmgoing, but thanks to the ease of maintaining a livejournal I managed to post about every movie & full season of television I watched in 2006. It has an ease of tagging, commenting, and spam management that I had missed over on WordPress. And so, here I am, hoping that the same things will help me do a better job of tracking my reading in 2007.

One of my goals for the new year is to get the website back up, however. Right now it is just a basic splash page for my various web presences: I seem to like dividing my life into little boxes, and it'll be good to have a way to collect them. I'm hoping, though, that once the structure is in place, I'll be able to do a little something more with it, even if that is only distilling and polishing writing and photos from elsewhere. It'd also be cool if I could figure out how to embed my various blogs, but hey. Linking is a-ok.

We shall see. Until then, welcome to the librarinth.