The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson

I started reading this book 3 times before I finished it. Not because it was bad, just because I kept finding something else. I really really really love the title of this book. Unfortunately, the book did not live up to the title, not to mention the title didn't really make sense. It wasn't really that she stopped swimming, it was just that she couldn't swim. I like it better when thinking of stopping swimming as a choice, more than a force. Anyway, the story is that this woman Laurel wakes up in the middle of the night because she sees a girl floating in her pool. At the beginning there is a big focus on her sleepwalking but then that never really comes up again. The girl is a friend of her adolescent daughter and she winds up drowning. The rest of the book is basically trying to find answers as to why she died. It somehow wasn't really a who-dunnit though. I wasn't a hue fan but once I got started, it was a pretty easy read. 3 stars.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I chose this book because it was highly recommended on the nest. It is a story about a woman obsessed with books, who writes biographies of the dead. She receives a letter from mysterious Vida Winter, who asks her to write her biography, even though she has never told anyone the truth about her past. Vida's story begins with her grandparents, then her mother, and then the story of two twin girls. The reader is led to believe that Vida is one of the twins. Somewhere towards the end of the book, there is talk of a ghost, which then leads to the discovery that there were 3 girls: the twins and a cousin that looked like them. Vida was the cousin. Another twist is that the twin that was saved from the fire was actually the wrong one. I think. I found the last quarter to be confusing. It was a good read, but not great, and quite frankly, I don't see what all the fuss was about. 3 stars

The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman

This was one of the books recommended to me on The Nest Book Club. I liked it in a way that I continued to read it hungrily but as I neared the end I realized what the problem was. There was a tremendous amount of sadness in the book, yet I really didn't feel all that sad reading it. So I suppose I was not really touched by it and that might be the problem. I enjoyed the time travel (in a strictly non sci-fi way) and the interconnectedness but I feel like if you weren't completely paying attention, you may have missed some of the connections. I may have missed some of them that I don't even know about. I may have liked it more if it went from the past to the present instead of the opposite way, but who knows. 3 stars.

Are you kidding me??

Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner

Acchhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! I don't even know what to say other than that. Another gem by Jennifer Weiner, as good as Good in Bed (it is the sequel to it in fact) but Achhhhh! 40 pages before the end of this 382 page book, something ridiculously tragic happens and it sort of changed the way I felt about the whole book. I still liked it a lot but geez! WTF?! 4 stars

Riding Lessons by Sara Gruen

Liked it, but maybe not as much as Flying Changes. I didn't like how the mom/grandma seemed like such a nice person in Flying Changes but such a bitch in this one. Not nearly as good as Water for Elephants and not really memorable in any way, but an enjoyable read. 4 stars

The Concrete Blond by Michael Connelly

Mystery, decent but not as good as Jonathan Kellerman. I was a little confused with names sometimes but maybe that's because I wasn't devoting enough attention to it. Liked it just fine. 3 stars

Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume edited by Jennifer O'Connell

Just awful. Completely hokey and "Judy Blume taught me to love myself" and "Deenie this and Deenie that" So contrived and so difficult to get through. 1 star

The Beginning - June 2008

So I have recently added reading 10,000 books to my list of things to do before I die. In order to do this, I need some way to keep track of the books I read. For this, I am using goodreads.com. I am not a huge fan of the site, so I am using this blog to actually keep track of the books I read and when I read them, as well as a review of sorts.

Using the Goodreads approach, I am using the following rating system:
5 stars : best of the best. A book I would want to read again.
4 stars: great book. really liked it and didn't want to put it down but will most likely not read it again.
3 stars: good book but lacking something.
2 stars: didn't like it but finished it anyway
1 star: despised it

So far in June I have read the following books:

Flying Changes by Sara Gruen
I picked this novel because I really liked Gruen's Water for Elephants. It took me a little while to get into it but once I did, I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I was 250 pages in before I discovered that this was the sequel to the other book I had taken out by Gruen. So I am reading the two books entirely out of order but I still like them. They are pretty fluffy but I don't want to put them down. I would give it a 4 out of 5 stars.

Naptime is the New Happy Hour by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor
I like everything about the concept of this book. However, I really felt that something was missing. I liked the style of her humor but I wasn't enraptured by the book. I felt it could have been a lot better. 3 stars

Places I Never Meant to Be Edited by Judy Blume
I am on a bit of a Judy Blume kick again because I discovered some books centering around her. I was not a fan of this one. I generally do not care for short stories because I feel like just when you start getting into the story, it is over. The stories in this book were not that gripping anyway. And I was really disturbed by the one at the end where a girl puts a ferret in a microwave. Yuck. 2 stars.