The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge

When I was a kid I fell in love with the Mollie Fox series by Peter Nelson. I’m pretty sure it’s just a random series and I doubt anyone knows or remembers them, but Mollie was just so much cooler than Nancy Drew! And it was all so real and dangerous and completely dramatic. I loved them! The first book of the series, First to Die was one of the first books that absolutely got me excited. I just could not understand why my mother didn’t think it was the best book ever written. I should really get my hands on that series again…

The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge day #10

I’m pretty sure the first “real” novel I ever read was The Thorn Birds by Colleen Mcullough. Of course by “real” I mean “grown up”. I read lots of Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew etc etc but this was the first adult novel I read. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time. I remember being fascinated by the description of how the beads from her doll’s necklace had disappeared between the blades of grass. The books I read never went into that kind of detail!

The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge

Well you see now this kind of thing is a little silly. Because how should I know if a book was a bestseller or not? I have no idea! I suppose I could Google it…but I don’t want to.

So… I am going to go with “none of my friends know who William Kowalski is but I think he is really cool” and just leave it at that. I’ve chose South of Somewhere specifically because it has circus scenes in it. And I just happen to really like circus scenes…

The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge

I am going to have to go with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. I did this for one of my English Lit courses when I was studying. I think I might have gotten as far as page two. I then moved on to Spark Notes. Thank you God for people who like to put cheat things on the internet.

That said – have you ever tried to read The Illiad? It’s possibly a toss up. But at least The Illiad is a little more fun to read…

The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge Day #5

I absolutely loved The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I am also pretty sure that it is possibly the only non-fiction book I have ever finished reading…

…uh…

….yup…

Can’t think of a single other non-fiction book that I have ever finished reading…

The 30 Day Katalina Book Challenge Day #3

Oh look now I can say Twilight! I went through about a year and a half around my pregnancy where I barely read an email never mind a book. And when I returned from the land of no books I found that there was this Twilight thing going around that everyone was raving about. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them! They were supposed to be awesome. Like Harry Potter. But with vampires.

Well…there were vampires…

The biggest disappointment was that I was expecting something a little more sophisticated. I’m not sure exactly why I expected John Irving meets JK Rowling meets Interview with a Vampire.

I’ve started to adopt a different attitude though.  I have adopted the don’t-judge-a-fish-by-it’s-ability-to-climb-a-tree attitude. Perhaps that is daft but I have come to the conclusion that it is ok for things to be simply what they are. Sometimes they don’t live up to our expectations, or fit into the box that we pre-designed for them. But that is ok. It really is ok for something to just be what it is.

I do kind of wish I could have read these books with no pre-conceived ideas. It is hard even now to know exactly how I feel about them because the notions of others do tend to cloud our thoughts even when we think they don’t.

I have actually decided to read them all properly. If only to make sure that they will be suitable for my daughter to pick up in the next couple of years.

The Katalina 30 Day Book Challenge Day #2

So I might be running behind on my own book challenge. Luckily WordPress has this handy little function where you can choose your own date and totally cheat your way out of these sorts of problems. Yes – this post says it was written on the 2nd of September. But you know what? Today is really the 6th!

I’m not sure how you are supposed to choose a least favourite book. I am not one who is in the habit of finishing books if I don’t want to read them. Of course in school we had to do this. But let’s be honest – how many of those school books did we actually read properly? We all had friends who were around to tell us what happens!

I know just how easy it would be to choose something like Twilight here. I did read one and a half of the books from the series and didn’t really love them. But they have their place. Bitch and moan about the sparkly vampires if you must (I have done so myself) but you have to understand why they appeal to some.

For this exercise I am going to have to choose Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. This is one of those books that is supposed to be profound and original. I shall give it originality perhaps. But it ends there for me. I found this supposedly ground-breaking piece of literature to read like a long whining diary excerpt. Original to give the narrator no gender, but male or female, I personally would hate to have such a wimpy being pine over me. Every sentence irritated me! It wasn’t the writing – clearly the woman can write! – but the character who I wanted to throttle.

Simply put, it’s not a badly written book. It’s just so damn unpleasant to get through. You want to scream “Grow a spine, you insignificant whinging little snotface! You suck!”