Top Ten Popular Authors I've Never Read

Hosted by the Broke and Bookish

The topic for March 4: Top Ten Popular Authors I've Never Read. I am having a bit of trouble deciding if this means authors I haven't read that I plan to at some point or authors that I haven't and, unless someone pays me an obscenely large amount of money or blackmails me in some way, never will even if someone staples my eyes open. (This is a reference to Rita Ruder's movie rating system)

The official movie ratings are "General," "Parental Guidance," and "Restricted." I have my own ratings. They are "See at Movie Theater," "Wait for Video," and "Not Even If/When It Comes on Cable Someone Comes to My House and Staples My Eyes Open."
     Rita Rudner, Naked Beneath My Clothes:
     Tales of a Revealing Nature (1992)

And yes, I have read this book. It is pretty funny, but her standup routines are better. It helps if you can imagine her voice and delivery when you read the stories. Mostly remembering this book has made me infinitely glad that as much as my daughter loves dancing, I seriously doubt that she has any intention to try and become a professional ballerina.

So ... Top Ten Popular Authors I've Never Read ... that I might actually read someday. I am using the Amazon Most Popular Authors to decide who counts as popular.

1. Markus Zusak - one of these days I will get around to reading The Book Thief.  I am shooting for contention for the title, Last Person in the Blogosphere to Read The Book Thief.

2. Rick Riordan - I am assuming that one day my son (or eventually my daughter) might take to these books, at which point I will feel obligated to read them. So far that hasn't happened.

3. Diana Gabaldon - I have the feeling tribalism will eventually force me to at least read Outlander. I really don't think this is going to be my jam, but the drums are loud and with a live action version coming, I have a feeling I will have to give it a go just to say I did.

4. Jojo Moyes - I have an ebook of The Girl You Left Behind so eventually I will get around to reading it - I started it but wasn't in the mood. 

5. Barbara Kingsolver - I have wanted to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for a while now. Yes, I know she has other more famous books, but this is the one that interests me.

6. Jim Butcher - the Dresden Files gets talked about quite a bit and sounds vaguely interesting. I can see myself getting around to reading at least the first book at some point.

Eep!  I have a bit of a problem now.  I have run through their top hundred and am only at 6.  I need another source for what counts as popular.  Humm...  So now I have switched over to the List of Bestselling Authors on Wikipedia

7. Enid Blyton I am curious about ... I have seen some Noddy cartoons and have heard of The Famous Five. I know that these books play a large role in British culture, though there are some seriously problematic attitudes on display. I would be interested in reading some just to see what it is like. 

8. Someday when I retire I might finally get around to Leo Tolstoy.

Right, I have basically run out of options here too - I have either read at least one book by most of these authors, they are romance authors I am not interested in reading (not my jam, though at various points in my life I have been stranded and read a few of these authors, so I say not my jam from a position of actually having tried some of the books), are things I have no plans to read (I am way to old to read Babysitters Club or Goosebumps books at this point in my life, why should I read R. L. Stine when I was reading Stephen King as a teen?) or are authors who write in languages other than English and of whom I have never heard (I need to work on that - I find that I am interested in Jirō Akagawa's mysteries though I have no idea about availability in English.  I will have to look them up.) 

So now I have wandered over to Top Books and Authors at LibraryThing

Now I am looking at authors like Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez, which I was skipping because I am interested in reading them eventually, but at the moment I am afraid that they sound too much like homework from a literature class.

9. I have been wondering about Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

10. Ah - Khaled Hosseini - I want to read The Kite Runner

Hurray!  I made it to ten.  I am vaguely impressed by the number of authors on these lists I have read or at least tried to read. That is pretty cool.

That being said, there are several popular authors I have not read, nor have I any intention of doing so. For example: Stephenie Meyer, Barbara Cartland (actually I have this vague idea I might already have read one years ago when I was stuck in Wyoming with no reading material other than romances or horse journals), Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Dean Koontz (actually, now that I think about it, I might have read one of these too), or Clive Cussler (I know that I haven't read one of these at least!).  There is nothing like being a voracious reader stuck someplace where your choice is books by an author you don't really want to read or the back of cereal boxes. 

This was a really odd list to try to make.  I am really curious as to what other peoples' lists are going to be like.

It's Monday! What are You Reading? 3-3

The It's Monday! What are You Reading? meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

I finished The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (finally!) and Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger therefore I am feeling vaguely accomplished. 

I decided to join the Take Control of Your TBR Pile March 2014 Challenge in a probably vain attempt to make the pile go down (or at least maintain numeric stasis) this month and give myself further encouragement to get some of my TBR goals moving forward.  I need to pick up pace with my nonfiction reading/reviewing, because that was actually supposed to be the primary point of this blog in the first place.

To that end I am currently reading Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy by Nancy A. Nichols and have also started The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

Dr. Tyson managed to seriously annoy me by starting his book with an ungrammatical sentence, sigh.  Just in case anyone is wondering, I had absolutely no trouble with the IAU vote that declared Pluto a dwarf planet. I teach Earth Science so I was already aware that historically what constitutes a planet has varied wildly over time and whenever I taught a section on planetary geology I kept using some variation of the phrase "except Pluto" so many times it was getting annoying. I am one of those odd people who was trying to explain why Pluto was so odd, therefore its 'loss of status' made sense.  Dr. Tyson's book is a bit of a historical trip through time that seeks to explain why Americans in general were so emotionally attached to Pluto as a planet.  I am only a couple of dozen pages in so I am not sure how I feel about the book, other than it is trying a bit too hard to be cool. 
 
Lake Effect is a personal examination of the connection between environmental pollution and rare forms of cancer.  I have already zoomed though 40+ pages and am reasonably impressed. So far this is a serious contender for being required reading in one of my classes. The fact that the book is about a former manufacturing center located on the shore of a Great Lake makes it particularly pertinent. This is a short book and well written so far.

I am also taking a look at a couple of biographies of Rachael Carson that I have On a Farther Shore by William Souder and The Gentle Subversive by Mark Hamilton Lytle to see which one of them I might before reading Silent Spring or if I am just going to go straight to Carson's most famous book.

Take Control of Your TBR Pile March 2014 Challenge

So, in a complete attack of cluelessness, I will take on the Take Control of Your TBR Pile March 2014 Challenge, albeit a day late (oops, sorry). I will try to take at least 5 books off of my TBR pile this month at least two of which need to be nonfiction. Lame goal but I seem to be having a terrible time with challenges that feel like a homework assignment. I did already complete one book that qualifies. I blasted though Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger yesterday. It was my reward for a lousy week and was on the top of my TBR pile. Perhaps a start like that will inspire me to do great things for my TBR pile. Well actually perhaps my goal should simply be to keep my pile from growing this month - I acquire new books like they were oxygen. So, if I pledge not to add anything until I have read something, that would in fact be an accomplishment for me.

According to the rules ... Beginning March 1st, 2014 and ending March 31, 2014 at midnight read books from your TBR pile ALL books must have been published before March 2014. Post a review. 

1. Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger 
2. Soulless by Gail Carriger
3. Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman (it may be a children's book but I am totally counting it. I won't enter it though.)
4. Lake Effect by Nancy A. Nichols  
5. Some Like it Hawk by Donna Andrews
6. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline  
7. Field Notes from A Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
8. Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple  

Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

Curtsies & Conspiracies
by Gail Carriger

Published:  Little Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group
Format: Hardback
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 310
Genre: Fiction - Steampunkish
Source: own book

 "Miss Temminnick. Miss Plumleigh-Teignmott. With me, ladies, please."

Sophronia glanced up from her household sums. She was glad of the distraction. She was convinced she was miscalculating the purchase of the three most deadly flower arrangements. Does one need four fully grown foxgloves for decorating a dinner table for six guests? Or is it six foxgloves to kill four fully grown guests?"

Curtsies & Conspiracies is the sequel to Etiquette & Espionage, and the second book in the Finishing School series, which is set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate books. Sophronia is back at Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality and the game is still afoot. The story opens with the debuts getting their six month review, but shortly that is the least of Sophorina's worries. Several plot lines from the previous book are picked up and there are more developments.

Once again, the story is quite fun, in the style of a comic romp. It took me basically a day to read. The world-building is on the whole, interesting and vivid. The plot is a bit deeper and darker than the previous one, as Sophronia is now confronted with the consequences of her actions. This is a good development as she starts to have greater depth as a character. In a somewhat odd twist, the details of the book are well-drawn, intricate, and quite fascinating, but the overarching plot is rather a mess though. The wrapup at the end of the book was a bit of a downer.

I still quite like Sophronia, but she develops into a fully-blown Mary Sue in this book and there were too many instances of other characters doing something or being somewhere just so Sophronia could get what she needed. That got really annoying. I really hope that in the next book we are less beaten over the head by exactly how amazing and perfect Sophronia is and that Dimity and the others get more of a chance to contribute something better. I find ensemble work much more interesting.

The major down side to in this book that made it significantly less fun for me is that the author has started constructing a "love" triangle. WHY???  Why is it so impossible for books to have girls and boys be friends?  WHY?  That was the thing I was enjoying the most in the first book.  Several friendships developed and grew.  It was a welcome thing. Now for some bizarre reason we have a completely unlikely love triangle involving 15 year-olds. ARGH!!!  Unnecessary, majorly awkward and just plain creepy in many, many ways.  Being friends with a boy does not automatically mean that you suddenly MUST have romance developing. ARGH!!! again.

I still liked the story and am looking forward to the next book Waistcoats & Weaponry which will hopefully be released towards the end of the year. I didn't like how what was a fairly original story dovetailed so suddenly into standard YA tropes but I remain hopeful. Three and a half claws this time.

Warning   -   Smallish SPOILER  AHEAD   -      -      -     -     -    -     -      -     -     -     




The vampire stuff in particular started to annoy me when I began thinking about it.

So -  According to the story, queens are stuck inside their hives/homes. New queens can only be made by an existing queen, so do they end up in the same hive? Logic says no, based both on the analogies being used and the way the hives are described.  Is there a swarm as the new queen suddenly moves across London with a pack of drones and start a new hive?  Turning is apparently difficult but there are roves around that had to be turned by a queen - they get turned in some hive but then have some kind of tether to somewhere.  How are the tether points decided ?  There are some other aspects to how vampire society works that also don't make sense if you think too much about them.

Yes, I know that Sophronia is asking the same kinds of questions, so theoretically the answers will be related to future developments in the plot, but I am already having trouble with how this could possibly make any sense. 





 END   -   SPOILER     -      -      -     -     -    -     -      -     -     -     

February Wrap-up

Huraay! February is over. Perhaps winter will eventually end.  It almost seems warm today since it is supposed to get above freezing for a while.

This is only my second month of doing this, so I am happily surprised at how much I wrote. I have seven book reviews - I hope to get better at these, at the moment I think they are pretty uneven in quality.  I put together twelve environmental news posts, a few of which I am quite proud.  I also have been playing with memes - 19 posts - too many to sustain I am sure. Eventually I will probably pick a couple that I really like and try to do those weekly.  Then there were four posts that didn't fit into any of those categories. 

Book Reviews

• Goth Girl and the Ghost of A Mouse by Chris Riddell
• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker 
• Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger 
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken 
• Digger by Ursula Vernon - Updated 
• Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
• The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

 

Environmental News posts

• An explosion at Tonawanda Coke on January 31st sho...
• The Aral Sea isn't the only disappearing body of w... 
• Travels of a Tee-Shirt in the Global Economy 
• Tonawanda Coke update - contradictions continue 
• Coal Ash Spill into the Dan River, North Carolina 
• Three injuries now confirmed at Tonawanda Coke 
• Historic weather = historic problems
• The view from space ... 
• New Leak of Radioactive Water at Fukushima Site
• Winter in the Northeast my have been cold but ...
• Great Lakes Ice Cover
• 13 (or more) workers exposed to radation at WIPP 

 

Meme Posts

• Sunday Post 1
• It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 3
• Top Ten Books That Will Make You Cry
• Wondrous Words Wednesday 1 
• A peak into Etiquette & Espionage and The Disappea...
• It's Monday! What Are You Reading 2/10?
• Top Ten Books That Will Make You Swoon
• Wonderous Word Wednesday 2
• Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts 1
• A peak into Emilie & the Hollow World and a last l...
• It's Monday! What Are You Reading 2-17
• Wonderous Word Wednesday 3 
• Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts 2
• A peak into Murder with Peacocks and Uranium: War,...
• Sunday Post 2
• It's Monday! What are You Reading? 2-24
• Top Ten Tuesday REWIND! Childhood Favorites  
• Wonderous Word Wednesday 4
• A peak into Curtsies & Conspiracies and Jewels: A ...

 

Other Stuff 

• Color Coded Reading Challenge 2014
• Happy Valentine's Day !
• Since the weather outside is again/still frightful...
• My hundred and first post !