Update on my Reading Bingo Challenge

My reading challenge for 2014 is going pretty good so far. I tasked myself to read 52 books this year, one a week, which works well for me because that gives me a cushion if I end up having a string of DNFs. So far, I've read 13, eight (or nine, if I use my free space) of which I can mark off on my Reading Bingo Challenge.

The books/squares I can cross off:

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas – non-fiction

600 Hours of Edward by Craig Lancaster – Number in the title

Origin by Jennifer Armentrout – one-word title

Nor Iron Bars a Cage by Kaje Harper – heard about online

Vertigo by M.L. Rhodes – non-human characters

Picture This by Michelle L. Levigne – female author

Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 edited by Paula Guran – short stories

Rose, Exposed by Afton Locke – second book in a series

This Is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E. Smith –  free space

I wrote a review of A Three Dog Life after I read it, but the other real standout for me was Nor Iron Bars a Cage. I think Kaje is one of the most talented m/m authors publishing today, and this story is a long (over 100k), wonderful m/m high fantasy with some great world-building. Even better, it's a freebie so you have no excuses not to try it. She wrote it for a Goodreads giveaway, and it's stunning what she managed to accomplish in the short time she had to write it. Her prose is lyrical without losing accessibility, and the characters in this are three-dimensional and glorious. A real angsty, slow burn. Highly recommend.

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

One of the first books I finished this year as part of my annual reading challenge was a memoir from 2006 called A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. The title and blurb are misleading. It's not really about dogs, nor is it truly about her husband and the tragic, random accident that left him with severe brain trauma. This is about Abby, a woman with children and grandchildren, settled in her ways, learning how to live and cope with the reality of being married to a man she both recognizes and doesn't, how to cope with loss and change, without losing herself in the process.

It was stunning.

The prose is simple and clean, very fast and easy to read in that respect, and yet there are observations scattered throughout the book that made me both love and hate her ease with words. She writes in present tense, using a non-linear method that in many ways is indicative of the way her husband's brain works. His injuries have taken away his past, as well as made his behavior erratic, so without being able to remember anything for more than five minutes (seemingly, some incidents are startlingly  insightful and a little eerie), he lives in the now. The author recreates that in her voice, her anecdotes jumping around from then to now to when she got the second dog, the first.

It won't be everybody's cup of tea. The key is most likely that you have to like and identify with Abby just a little bit in order to appreciate it best. She is funny and sad and insightful and very, very human, which means she is also a little bit selfish and harshly honest about her own fallibility. It also doesn't ever really resolve much of anything, because let's face it, life doesn't do that most of the time.

But I didn't care. I loved it.        

Reading Bingo Challenge

I've been trying to be more diligent in getting through my TBR piles in the past couple years. Things like the reading challenge at GoodReads helped me a lot last year. I actually managed to hit my quota of 52 books for the whole year. That doesn't include the over 100 I started and didn't bother to finish because they weren't worth the time.

Random House created a Reading Bingo Challenge that looks like fun. Basically, it's a bingo card with various types of books in each of the squares.

There's a YA version, too, but I don't read nearly enough YA to warrant trying for it. And while they say you can use the same book to cover different squares, it'll be more challenging to make it 25 different books. Hell, the book from the bottom of my reading pile is going to give my OCD fits, lol

I get to cross one square off already, but I'll talk about that later this week. I'm writing a review on it. It blew me away.