"The little village of Obscurity is remarkable only for its unremarkableness."

In order to clean up my TBR pile before my copy of the new Jasper Fforde novel (Shades of Grey) arrives this week, I decided to read his second Nursery Crime book, The Fourth Bear. This was a great follow-up story and I felt more invested while reading it than during the first book. This novel was balanced between character development and plot in a satisfying way.

Our hero, Detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division, faces up against domesticated bears, The Gingerbread Man and violent cucumber thieves all while being suspended for a debacle surrounding the Big Bad Wolf and his poor treatment of Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Add to this Jack's own domestic issues and some violent new neighbors, Punch and Judy, and this might be the hardest few weeks of his life.  Still, he's the best man for the job and might be the only hope for a peaceful and safe Reading.

I really enjoyed this book. I am still trying to balance my reading choices with more comedy and this was a great choice after a few dark and heavy reads. Jasper Fforde is such an incredibly smart writer and I'm hoping to get to his local appearance here on Friday night!

Licking the proverbial platter clean,
K


Support our site and buy The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime on Amazon or find it at your local library. We bought our own copy.

Starred Saturdays: week of December 27

We had a very mellow New Year's Eve this year even though Z was awake in his room until after eleven. He almost made it to the celebration. Now he's excited to head back to school this week -- mostly for recess! We've been cooped up and sick for a long time now.

The blogs were pretty quiet this week so I don't have many starred items ...

Here is a link to all of the translated fiction and poetry of 2009. I know that many bloggers have goals to read a certain amount of translated fiction so this is a great reference. (via The Millions)

Locus Online has interesting excerpts of an interview with Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic -- the full article is in the magazine. (via io9)

The books we can't make sense of, that knock us off-kilter, that we don't accept readily, will often be the books that matter most to the next generation. In fact, that's generally the sign of a really important book: it doesn't fit into our received expectations, it bothers us, it 'doesn't work.' Sometimes an ambitious failure is more worth having than a successful little novel that is perfectly well done.”

Jemima at The Reading Journey wants to start a feature with photos of unique library buildings and artwork. If you have an interesting library in your town, head over there and submit your photos to her! I can't wait for this feature to start.

Publishers Weekly has a list of classic literature titles that have been made into graphic novels in 2009 and coming in 2010. If you need a gateway to graphic novels, this could be the list for you! (via A Fuse #8 Production)

And most bloggers have posted their "Year in Review" posts which I'm loving! So I'll leave you to read the ones that are showing up in your Reader.

Happy 2010 and happy reading!
K

Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

We had a great 2009 here at WeBeReading!

K got through 147 books for a total of just over 46,000 pages. That's an average of about 125 pages a day which for me is about two hours of reading.

Only six of the books were non-fiction and I hope to improve upon that next year. I have 17 unread non-fiction titles on my shelves and 28 on my library list so I should be able to find at least a dozen interesting ones!

I marked nineteen books as "would not read again" which seems high but as a percentage of what I read for the year, it's not bad! In contrast, I had 79 books that I would definitely consider reading again.

I read 79 authors that were new to me this year. Many of these were review copies and challenge books and that is one of the main benefits of these activities. This also doesn't count all of the many fantastic picture book authors that we discovered this year!

I strangely had only one re-read this year -- The Shadow of the Wind. I definitely liked it as much the second time as the first.

And my final fun statistic is the number of books over 600 pages that I read this year -- seven! Bleak House (914), Drood (773), Stone's Fall (800), Inkspell (635), Inkdeath (663), God is An Englishman (634) and East Lynne (624).

Z added dozens of books to his home shelves and borrowed stacks of books from the library. Next year I hope to work him into basic chapter books. He's at the right reading level for them but his attention span isn't quite long enough!

This year we also hosted Poe Fridays which will end next month around Poe's birthday. We finished the Take a Chance Challenge and the 1% Well-Read Challenge. We also went a little bit berzerk on the R.I.P. IV Challenge. We started a new feature -- Starred Saturdays. And most of all, we had fun reading and sharing with all of you!

Have a very happy New Year!
K and Z

The Reviews of 2009

I had written one massive summary post to go up tomorrow but have decided to split off the list of reviews and post that today. After all, we wrote over 150 review posts this year!

Here are almost all of our reviews for 2009 (except for a few library visits where I did quick children's book reviews). I have starred our favorite reads -- including East Lynne, The Age of Wonder and Un Lun Dun. If you started following us later in the year, we would love it if you visited some of our past reviews.

January
*Bleak House - Charles Dickens
The Reluctant Widow - Georgette Heyer
The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie (Poirot)
The Robe of Skulls - Vivian French ¹
People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks
Bonjour, Babar - Jean de Brunhoff ¹
The Tales of Beedle the Bard - J.K. Rowling ¹
Drood - Dan Simmons
The Rabbit and the Turtle - Eric Carle ¹
By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie (Tommy & Tuppence) ²
*The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey - Trenton Lee Stewart ¹
*The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman ¹

February
Revelation of Fire - Alla Avilova
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ²
The Conqueror - Georgette Heyer
The September Society - Charles Finch
Winter in Madrid - C.J. Sansom
*The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Library Mouse - Daniel Kirk ¹
Postern of Fate - Agatha Christie (Tommy & Tuppence)
*The Seance - John Harwood
The Spiderwick Chronicles - Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black ^{1 2}
The Kingmaking - Helen Hollick

March
Little Miss Spider - David Kirk ¹
*Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk - Boris Akunin
Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie (Poirot) ³
The Invention of Everything Else - Samantha Hunt
Swim Little Fish! and Dinosaur Stomp! - Paul Stickland ¹
*The Black Tower - Louis Bayard
*Vienna Blood - Frank Tallis
*The Last Dickens - Matthew Pearl

April
Lady Anne and the Howl in the Dark - Donna Lea Simpson
*Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ²
King's Fool - Margaret Campbell Barnes
*Maisie Dobbs - Jacqueline Winspear
Sherlock Holmes in America - ed. Martin Greenberg ³
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
*Mother of the Believers - Kamran Pasha
The Dead Beat - Marilyn Johnson ⁴
Mrs. McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie (Poirot)
The Crimes of Paris - Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler ⁴
*The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - Alan Bradley
The Man's Book - Thomas Fink ⁴
The Lying Tongue - Andrew Wilson

May
What Would Jane Austen Do? - Laurie Brown
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire - C.M. Mayo
Stone's Fall - Iain Pears
*Tanka Tanka Skunk! - Steve Webb ¹
*Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Why Shoot a Butler? - Georgette Heyer
The Unfinished Clue - Georgette Heyer
Behold, Here's Poison - Georgette Heyer
The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato
Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren ¹
A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy - Charlotte Greig

June
My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier
James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl ¹
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane - Katherine Howe
*The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
*Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Angel's Game - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Marriage Bureau for Rich People - Farahad Zama
Cousin Kate - Georgette Heyer
Night at the Museum - Milan Trenc ^{1 2}
The Rossetti Letter - Christi Phillips
*The Pet Dragon - Christoph Niemann ¹
Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic - Suzanne Weyn ⁵
*Un Lun Dun - China Miéville ⁵
The Devlin Diary - Christi Phillips
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type - Doreen Cronin ¹

July
Wicked Plants - Amy Stewart ⁴
The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett
The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal - Sean Dixon
Inkheart - Cornelia Funke ^{1 2}
Not A Box and Not a Stick - Antoinette Portis ¹
Hippolyte's Island - Barbara Hodgson
Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat - Lynne Jonell ¹
*Of Bees and Mist - Erick Setiawan
An Edible History of Humanity - Tom Standage ⁴

August
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Inkspell - Cornelia Funke ¹
Elephant and Piggie Series - Mo Willems ¹
*The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - John le Carré
Cowboy & Octopus - Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith ¹
The Game - Diana Wynne Jones ⁵
*The Entomological Tales of Augustus T. Percival: Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone - Dene Low ¹
Ice Land - Betsy Tobin
Inkdeath - Cornelia Funke ¹
The Puzzle King - Betsy Carter
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell

September
The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett
God Is an Englishman - R.F. Delderfield
The Composer is Dead - Lemony Snicket ¹
*The Somnambulist - Jonathan Barnes
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss - Claire Nouvian ⁴
The House at Midnight - Lucie Whitehouse
To Serve Them All My Days - R.F. Delderfield
The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau, Every Friday and New Pet - Dan Yaccarino ¹
Ghostwalk - Rebecca Stott
The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett
*The Green Knowe Series - L.M. Boston ¹
The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark ³

October
Birds of a Feather - Jacqueline Winspear
*The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories - Joan Aiken ^{1 3}
*The Man in the Picture - Susan Hill
*The Magician's Elephant - Kate DiCamillo ¹
In A Glass Darkly - Sheridan Le Fanu ³
Wonderland - Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew ⁶
The House of Lost Souls - F.G. Cottam
The Monsterologist: A Memoir in Rhyme - Bobbi Katz and Adam McCauley ¹
*The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - Richard Holmes ⁴
Pretty Monsters - Kelly Link ^{3 5}
Half-Minute Horrors - editor Susan Rich ^{1 3}
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
The Cain Saga: Forgotten Juliet - Kaori Yuki ^{3 6}
*Spellbinder - Helen Stringer ¹
The Manual of Detection - Jedediah Berry
My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie - David Lubar ¹
The Unburied - Charles Palliser

November
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet - Reif Larsen
In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles - Chris Welles Feder ⁴
Toot and Puddle - Holly Hobbie ¹
Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffeneger
*Warbreaker - Brandon Sanderson
The London Eye Mystery - Siobhan Dowd ¹
The Handy Answer Book for Kids (and Parents) - Gina Misiroglu ^{1 4}
The Broken Teaglass - Emily Arsenault
No Wind of Blame - Georgette Heyer
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead ¹
Papier-Mâché Monsters - Dan Reeder ⁴
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time - Greg Mortenson ⁴
Mercury Falls - Robert Kroese
Ophie Out of Oz - Kathleen O'Dell ¹
The Simple Art of Murder - Raymond Chandler ³
The Old Capital - Yasunari Kawabata

December
Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook - Sarah Schmelling
Big Fish - Daniel Wallace ²
*East Lynne - Ellen Wood
Holiday Grind - Cleo Coyle
*The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma - Trenton Lee Stewart ¹
Death in the Stocks - Georgette Heyer
Albert - Lani Yamamoto ¹
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Runt Farm series - Amanda Lorenzo ¹
Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
43 Old Cemetery Road series - Kate Klise <sup>1

1</sup> - Children and/or youth book
² - Book v. Movie post
³ - Short stories
⁴ - Non-fiction
⁵ - YA book
⁶ - Graphic novel

Looking forward to another year at WeBeReading,
K and Z

A Youth Series to Die For

There seem to be a pretty high number of youth series that deal with the supernatural in different ways. I've just found a new series that is fun and different -- 42 Old Cemetery Road written by Kate Clise and illustrated by her sister, M. Sarah Klise. I read the first two books in the series yesterday.

The first book is 43 Old Cemetery Road: Dying to Meet You. Ignatius B. Grumply is a children's ghost story author who has had writer's block for twenty years. He decides to rent a house for the summer to finally write that next book in his series and chooses Spence Mansion in Ghastly, Illinois. The only problem is that he isn't told that the house is already inhabited by Seymour Hope, a young boy who has been abandoned by his parents, and Olive Spence, the builder of the home who has been dead for ninety-seven years. At first Seymour and Olive try to get rid of Grumply but eventually they see other options for co-existence in the house.

This book is told entirely through notes, letters and newspaper pages. It's an interesting way to tell the story and gives a definite "back and forth" feel to the book. I think that grade school kids would find this amusing and, as there is nothing actually scary in the book, it's appropriate for all kids. There has never been a sweeter ghost than Olive Spence -- she even cooks dinner!

The second in the series is 43 Old Cemetery Road: Over My Dead Body. This book continues the story with a busybody bureaucrat who thinks that Spence Mansion is not a proper home for young Seymour. Grumply gets hauled off to the mental institution for insisting that Olive exists and Seymour is taken to the orphanage. It's up to Olive to get them free and to make them all a real, legal family.

This book was written in the same way which wasn't bad for a second book but I'm not sure if I could read many more books in this format. It might get a bit boring. For now, though, I think these two books are cute! The sisters have worked together on other series and their work perfectly complements each other.

Already formulating my haunting plans,
K


Support our site and buy Dying to Meet You (Book One) and Over My Dead Body (Book Two) on Amazon or find them at your local library. We borrowed our copies from the library.

"Not so tiny any more, that's a fact."

I received Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy for Christmas last year and ended up saving it to read this year due to its holiday setting. This is the story of the adult Timothy Cratchit, a.k.a. "Tiny Tim" from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Things have changed for Tim -- his parents are both dead as are some of his siblings, he no longer has a cane and braces but only walks with a slight limp and, perhaps saddest of all, he turns out to have never been the pious, optimistic child that we saw through Dickens' eyes.

Timothy is homeless right after his father's funeral but ends up with a room in a brothel. He doesn't patronize the business but rather helps the madam learn to read. Things are relatively comfortable for Tim until one day when he sees a young girl dead in the street a few blocks from his home. As Tim passes by the scene, he notices a strange brand on her arm -- a G with demonic eyes in the middle. As he dredges the Thames with an old sailor friend, Gully, looking for bodies worth money to grieving families and medical colleges, they bring up another girl with the same brand and appearance. Eventually, Tim feels compelled to investigate and find out what is happening to these girls. Joined by a street urchin named Colin and a frightened young Italian girl named Philomela, Timothy works to rid London of a horrific evil and also to exorcise his own demons of guilt and self-doubt.

Published in 2003, this is Bayard's first historical mystery and while it didn't have the same polish as his others (The Pale Blue Eye starring a young Edgar Allan Poe and The Black Tower about the missing Dauphin in Paris), this book easily transported me back to Victorian London. There were characters like the kind-hearted and optimistic Gully who could have been penned by Dickens himself. My only real issue with this novel was my decision to read it at Christmas time. Though it is based on A Christmas Carol, it is a dark and sometimes gut-wrenching story that was difficult to read in a time of happiness. Still, i enjoyed it and Mr. Bayard remains one of my authors to follow.

Appreciating comfort and joy,
K


Support our site and buy Mr. Timothy on Amazon or find it at your local library. We bought our own copy.

Gifts of Books Galore (or As The TBR Pile Teeters)

One of the best parts of book blogging is getting to share what books we acquire (and seeing the same from each of you). Here are the ridiculous number of books that we now need get to read.


Z now has a couple more easy readers and a comic, a Santa book, a book about the periodic table of elements (not pictured), The Lorax, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Henry Huggins, Stuart Little a Disney-Pixar story book and the latest from They Might Be Giants, Kids Go!, which comes with a DVD and is a book that promotes being active. I'm not quite sure how you read and jump at the same time but we're willing to learn!




K now owns
The Witch's Boy by Michael Gruber (a youth or YA fantasy)
The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (for the next RIP Challenge?)
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Matchless: A Christmas Story by Gregory Maguire
The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet by Arturo Perez-Reverte (the latest Captain Alatriste novel)
The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes (set in the same world as The Somnambulist)
A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd (first in a new mystery series)
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

I also had a gift certificate to the Oxford University Press shop so the following books are on their way --
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James

And I might have spent a little of an Amazon gift certificate this morning on --
The Professor's House by Willa Cather
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (and I didn't realize the silliness of those two titles in the same order until just this moment!)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel by Boris Akunin (next in a series)

It looks like it's going to be a Dickens of a year for my TBR pile (insert groan at my bad pun here). I can't wait to dive in to all of these fabulous new books. This is going to be a year of reading off of my own shelves as much as possible and now I'm assured that they are well-stocked. And Z is going to have some great bedtime stories in the coming months. I hope the books on his shelves are ones that he will enjoy for years to come!

Now it's your turn. Share in the comments what books came into your home this season or post a link. We're curious!

Building a book fort,
K and Z

Starred Saturdays: week of December 20

We're a bit tired from the holiday yesterday. My sister had to be taken to the airport at 4am and Z stayed up late to spend some final time with her so we're having a quiet day today. Let's keep this short and fun ...

Have some leftover fresh cranberries? Joy the Baker has a solution! Make some Honey Cranberry Cornmeal Quick Bread.

Didn't receive the right book? Why not read Lee Jackson's latest crime novel for free? (via author R.N. Morris)

Just need something to veg out and watch? How about an undersea volcano eruption? (via io9)



Now we're off to watch DVDs, read books, eat leftover pie and nap. I love December 26th!

Bobbing along in the wake of a happy day,
K and Z