december: 30, 31, & 32

to finish out 2014, i read three books, bringing this year's total to 32.  in the last three years i have read exactly 100 books…but there are so. many. more. books. to. read.  my amazon wishlist has 126 books on it and somehow that number never seems to go down.  how will one lifetime be enough?

in december i read:

transatlantic, by colum mccann (i loved his first book [let the great world spin], and bought this book with a gift certificate that a student gave me.  and it did not disappoint.  mccann uses words beautifully and weaves story lines together in a fantastic way.  he seems to like taking real events and telling them from the perspective of a fictional person who experienced them, and i'm intrigued by this.  this book is three transatlantic stories (first transatlantic flight between newfoundland and ireland; frederick douglass coming to ireland to promote his book; george mitchell coming to ireland to work on the northern irish peace process) that he tells, then goes back and tells about the life of a person in the background of each story.  interesting, right?  i really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it!)

speak, by laurie false anderson (my school is considering this book as an all-upper-school read for the summer, and i'm on the summer reading selection committee, so i read this as homework for the committee.  it's a young adult book about a girl who is sexually assaulted, though the assault takes up only a few pages of the book - the majority is about how her life changes.  a really compelling read…we'll see what the rest of the committee thinks.)

all the light we cannot see, by anthony doerr (joey was talking about reading this and then it was on some lists of best books of the year and then my book club wanted to read it - so all signs pointed to me needing to pick this book up.  i LOVED it.  it's the story of a blind french girl and the story of a german boy who is conscripted during world war two…their lives intersect in france near the end of the war.  i found both stories fascinating - sometimes when a book switches between a few narrators i find one less compelling and only want to hear from the others, but that wasn't the case at all here.  when i like a book i can't stop telling people that they must read it…i'm a book prosthelytizer.  and it's happening a lot right now with this one.)