Fairweather flightless bird fan.

if they hadn't lost
i would spend the next six weeks
pretending to care

2015 reading challenge: quarter one.

I signed up for Goodreads' 2015 reading challenge and will be posting results here.  To avoid a ginormous list like this at the end of the year, I'll try to do this on a quarterly basis.

So!  Here are 1Q results...  A "*" means you should TOTALLY read this book.

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murikami) - as noted on the other list, I wanted to love this but I didn't, it was just too weird.
  
  
• You Suck: A Love Story (Christopher Moore) - a quick, amusing read.
  
  
• * Anthill (Edward O. Wilson) - Wilson is a biologist, not a novelist, and this really shows in the stark differences between parts one, two, and three of the novel.  Part one read like a Mark Twain story, part two was an absolutely FASCINATING view of life from an ant's perspective, and part three reverted to Dan Brown tactics.  If you read nothing else, read part two.  You'll never look at ants the same again.  (You'll still kill them when they invade your kitchen every spring, but you'll never look at them the same again.)
  
  
• * Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (Michael Pollan) - this really shouldn't count toward my reading goal.  It really shouldn't.  But I'm counting it.
  
  
• We Are Water (Wally Lamb) - sigh.  You know how sometimes, you do that ill-advised thing of watching an entire season of Dexter on a rainy Saturday, then you feel really sick about humanity afterward, and then you totally forget about it the next day? That's what every Wally Lamb novel has felt like to me...  I don't want my rainy Saturday back as much as I did after reading the others, so there's that.
  
  
• Hoot (Carl Hiaasen) - a friend recommended Hiaasen and this young adult novel just happened to be in the book exchange at our farmstay.  It was fun, quick, completely unbelievable and yet totally predictable at the same time.  I enjoyed it and I'll definitely be checking out some of his adult fiction.
  
  
• * My Story (Ingrid Bergman) - I LOVE THIS LADY.  That is all.
  
  
• * Mokoka'i (Alan Brennert) - another one for the "sorta true stories" file, since it's based on real events and several real people.  A young native girl is sent to a leper colony in Hawaii in the early 1900s.  This is her story of how she copes throughout the next seven decades.  I honestly could not put it down.
  
  

I'm still three books ahead of my goal so I'm taking a little hiatus to catch up on some movies.  Pee-wee's Big Adventure counts as research for our upcoming road trip, right?