Last year on January 1st, I gave you all a list of the books I read the previous year. Well guess what? It’s January 1st once again, same day, different year, and I’ve read quite the bounty of novels. So let’s begin.

• Survivor by Chuck Palahnuik
  I’ll just quote what I’ve written in the past about Survivor:

  …it’s about one of the last surviving members of a old religious cult whose members have been slowly committing suicide (in normal cult fashion). As one of the last members, the book follows his life outside of the cult in the real world, where people are brainwashed by media and the want for quick everything: food, cars, salvation. It’s interesting to see what happens to the main character as the book progresses, because, you know, he was a weirdo cult guy. There is a lot of dark humor in the novel, which is good because some of the situations are kind of outlandish, and any author trying to pull off some of the things in the book in a serious manner would just be silly.

• The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
  Again, excerpt from an old post:

  The Virgin Suicides is simply about five girls who end their own lives. Don’t worry, I’m not spoiling a thing; the first page gives this information straight out. You know it’s going to happen the entire way through. The more complex view is that it’s almost not about the girls at all, but about everything that surrounds them…I won’t delve any further into discussion about the book in case you wanted to read it (and you should). I will say this, though, that on the whole I enjoyed Middlesex better, but I would recommend this novel to anyone as well.

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I haven’t really discussed novels here since the start of Pressed & Bound many months ago, but I’m reading something right now that’s so freaking great that I can’t wait to discuss it on the show. Bone isn’t a normal novel for me either. It’s actually what some would call a “comic book” or “graphic novel.” I’ve never really been into comics, and as a kid I honestly can’t remember reading anything that was a comic book. After this, however, I’m pretty sure that I could start.

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I’m probably the only person to do this, but I like to keep a record of how many novels I’ve read in terms of pages. After this weekend – upon finishing Blindness – I have, for this year, read and finished sixteen novels:

• Survivor
• Virgin Suicides
• The Jungle
• Snow Crash
• Day Watch
• Blue Like Jazz
• Twilight Watch
• Snow
• Battle Royale
• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• Ishmael
• Winkie
• Choke
• The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
• Blindness

I’m very happy that most of the books I’ve read this year I’ve really enjoyed. Some I absolutely abhorred, but overall, I’m pleased that I didn’t waste much money. The Night Watch series is awesome, everyone should read it (that includes Day Watch and Twilight Watch, of course). Snow, Blindness, Battle Royale, and Kavalier & Clay are probably my favorites out of the whole set. Definitely check those out.

Those sixteen novels contained 5,985 pages. Last year, the total with twenty novels came to 8,493; both together: 14,478. Fun times. Total pages read in text books so far this school year: 0.

It’s been a while since I’ve detailed anything that I’ve read here. Pressed & Bound makes it so that I don’t do much writing and more talking, but that’s besides the point. It’s been almost a month since I’ve picked up a new book to read for fun, and the feeling of diving into something is pretty nice. You never know how much you miss something until it’s gone, right? Well, that happens with reading too, apparently.

Tonight I spent a few dollars on three novels, only one of which I’ll describe here. The one I’m going to read first is called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. Since reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a couple of months ago, Chabon has firmly rooted his existence on my author’s map. You can see more of what I think about that novel here, but for now just know that Kavalier & Clay is amazing. The back cover of Pittsburgh likens it to Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. We’ll see about that, but if the clerk at Borders is to be respected, it’s a “damned fine book.”

I’ll go ahead and add this here since I haven’t discussed it: As you may have noticed, I’ve recently added a book plugin to the site that shows what I’m currently reading. That’s a very obvious observation, I know, but I just wanted to point it out. I like it. It’s pretty customizable as well; the default look of the output looks slightly different than what you see here, as it had ratings and a little different formatting, but luckily it’s all written is such a way that allows you to do whatever you’d like with it. In my case I put the text to the side because I’m awesome.

Again, I find myself struggling to understand how I come across such good novels to read. I haven’t read many books in the last two years that I didn’t really like, and this one, like Snow, reads so well that before you know it, it’s over.

This is Khaled Housseini’s second novel, and like The Kite Runner, its setting is in Afghanistan during tumultuous times. A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two Afghan women through their lives in a country that, for lack of better words, fails to provide its people with much stability to fall back on. No one person or group of people have power in the country for any long stretch of time, creating a shifting political landscape that can one day provide hope with the next instilling hardened fear. It’s a world that we, as uppity Americans, will probably never see in our lifetimes.

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If you’ve been keeping up with my book reviews over the past year, you’ll notice that I rarely say bad things about books. It’s not that I don’t have the courage to debase someone’s work (see my thoughts on Red Steel), but I do have a certain respect for people who write novels. It’s hard for me to say anything negative because I know how hard it is to sit down and write something, much less write something of worth that other people enjoy. I’ve kind of set this up to be a negative review, but it’s not going to be. I just wanted to note that if you – for whatever reason – think that I should be a little more critical of what I read, thus making these things more of a “review,” then you’re bound to be disappointed by reading this. This is going to be another time when I sit and pour praises on a novel I really enjoyed.

Not to be confused with Snow Crash, Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, tells the story of an exiled poet finding his way back to his homeland. You know what, come to think of it, maybe I just have luck in not reading assy books because, damn, I liked the hell out of this thing.

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Religion. Anyone who knows me well knows that generally I find religion to be a topic I’d rather skirt than anything else, although I’ll get into a debate here and there just for fun. Organized or otherwise, I can’t seem to find any religion that speaks to me as something I need to invest my time in because due to my logic or how most churches seem entirely fake or whatever it may be, I have problems with saying I’m a “This-tian” or practice “Whatever-ity.” Some of the problems I face with much religious thought are brought up in Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. He’s a Christian, yes, but a lot of the hypocrisies I find in religion he faced as well, so I found the book easier to digest as an outsider looking in.

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