april: 9, 10, 11, 12, & 13

i ran across this quotation recently and loved it - particularly the last line:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
--franz kafka, 1904

that said, this month's total is higher than normal, as i thought it would be - some of these books i'd been working on for several months.  in april i finished:

maus: a survivor's tale (II - and here my troubles began), by art spiegelman (just as good, just as moving, just as sad as the first book.  and a quick read!  i highly recommend it.)

looking for alaska, by john green (better, i think, than the previous john green book that i read - and i really enjoyed that book.  if you're into young adult fiction AT ALL, you should read some john green!  up next is fault in our stars, which i have been warned is SAD TIMES, but these books are so good i can't stop reading them.)

a study in scarlet and the sign of four, by sir arthur conan doyle (two sherlock holmes books!  [they are short ones, so i'm counting them together as one book.]  for 99 cents amazon.com organized all the sherlock holmes stories into chronological order and allows you to download them to your kindle all at once - for free you can download individual books and stories, but i felt that this was 99 cents well spent.  there are some tedious parts of these two books, but they have great premises and plots.  i recently watched the first season of the  BBC show sherlock, which does a GREAT job of modernizing these stories - so there's a tv recommendation for you, too.)

kindle singles: i'm starved for you, by margaret atwood and an unexpected twist, by andy borowitz and basic training by kurt vonnegut and a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again, by david foster wallace (okay, so i went on a tear through some kindle singles.  the premise of kindle singles is that they are stories too short for book form, so they're sold individually in the price range of $0.99-$2.99.  some are written specifically as kindle singles [the first two on this list] and some are just short stories being sold individually.  i am eating them up.  i'm starved for you is some excellent margaret atwood, if you like her, and an unexpected twist is HILARIOUS.  basic training is a vonnegut story that was published posthumously and is...pretty good.  a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again is about david foster wallace's first vacation on a cruise and it is also SO FUNNY and SO TRUE and THE BEST TITLE OF A STORY EVER.  i've never read anything by him and it made me want to read more - hat tip to nora for recommending this story to me.  [got any more david foster wallace recommendations?]  in short: if you have a kindle you should buy some kindle shorts.  they are quick and fun little reads.)

the happiness project, by gretchen rubin (if you want to read a book where someone overanalyzes happiness to such an extent that it can no longer POSSIBLY make anyone happy, this book is for you. yes, she's got some great ideas about how to make yourself happier, but she goes about this project [trying different happiness-boosting techniques every month of the year] in such a clinical way that i quickly wanted to punch her as she analyzed and overanalyzed her life and the lives of others.  her tone was "i am a sage and let me tell you how you can be like me, something you should clearly want."  perhaps i should have known that a 300 page book on happiness would be too many pages on this topic, but i didn't.  and in retrospect, i'm a pretty happy person - so why did i want to read this book in the first place?  unless you feel like you need to make real changes in your life, leave this book on the shelf.)