Booking Through Thursday: Recent Finishes

BookingThroughThursday writes, "We haven't done anything like this for a while, so here goes..."

1. What are the last five books that you finished reading?
   
   Like I do with my knitting and crafting projects, I tend to flit from one book to another and am rarely faithful to one to the end. Consequently, I have a huge stack of books that are mid-read and only a few finished one so far this year. So, the last books I actually finished are Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan, Mother Tongue: English and How it got that way by Bill Bryson, Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, and Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto.





2. How long did it take you to read them?
   Both the non-fiction books, Leave Me Alone and Mother Tongue, took me quite a while (weeks? months?) since I would often read a chapter and then allow days to pass before picking the book back up again. Dogsbody, one of my favorite books and one that I frequently re-read, was read this time over the course of one evening into the wee hours of the morning. I picked it up to revisit a scene, flipped to the beginning, and found myself sniffling over the ending at 4am. Goodbye Tsugumi is a short novel that I started reading to distract myself after saying goodbye to I at the airport (I admit I first pick it up because of the beautiful cover). It kept me occupied on the BART metro ride away from the airport and I finished it the next day.



3. Did you enjoy reading these books? Why or why not?
   I really liked the perspective Maureen Corrigan provided on why we read and what she terms the “female extreme adventure novels.” Mother Tongue was entertainingly educational as all of Bill Bryson’s books are. Bryson just has an amazing way of injecting humor and excitement into the potentially driest of subjects. Since language evolution is anything but boring, you can imagine how much fun this book was. My feelings regarding Dogsbody don’t need further reiteration, I think, given my multiple re-readings of it. As for Goodbye Tsugumi, I’m still undecided as to how I feel about the book. Perhaps it is because of the translation, but I found the language of the book, particularly the dialogue, very stilted and awkward. It’s an odd mix of formal declarative statements mixed in with slang and conversational language. Often, I found the odd wording distracting. Occasionally the dialogue was just so unrealistic and embarrassingly clichéd that I had to skip on. And yet, the plot was interesting enough that I certainly wanted to get to the end to see happens. Hmm.