2010 June 04 » Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

How to knock down your TBR pile

Posted by Anastasia on June 4, 2010 16 Responses »

Jun 042010

Step 1: Place all your TBR books in the same location, preferably in wobbly bookcases where the threat of collapse and eventual smothering looms over you each day.

Step 2: Having so many unread books in one place is scary! It’s better to deny, deny, deny. Ignore your TBR pile and go to the library. Check out a million books. Lug them all home in the heat and dust and BUGS flying in your FACE. Put them in neat stacks surrounding your bed, so you can trip over them whenever you try to actually use your sleeping area.

Step 3: Feel guilty to having so many new books when all these old books are still unread. Books that you SPENT MONEY ON. Oh, the guilt. Decide to ignore new library books in favor of old TBR books. Read. Feel accomplished.

Step 4: Refuse to a) read library books or b) lug library books back to library. TBR books have priority, but those mofos took a lot of work to bring home! Leave library books in their stacks around your bed, where you can see them, because it just wouldn’t do to lose a few in the living room somewhere (probably under the couch cushions) WOULD IT. Keep reading TBR books. Lament not being able to read library books, even though they’re RIGHT THERE. RIGHT. THERE.

Step 5: Keep renewing library books until there’s no more renewals left, then drag them all back to the library. Feel sad for not having read library books even though you dragged them around with you and took care of them for weeks. Decide to replace them with other library books. Repeat steps 2-4.

~~Step 6: ?~~

Step 7: Profit!

Follow these steps and soon your TBR pile will be down to 0! So far I am ON TRACK.

Review: The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E.L. Konigsburg

Posted by Anastasia on June 4, 2010 No Responses »

Jun 042010

108. The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E.L. Konigsburg
Publication: Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition (September 25, 2007) / ISBN 0743569083
Genre: Fiction, MG
Rating:
Read: April 21-27, 2010
Source: Borrowed
Summary from Amazon:

Amedeo Kaplan seems just like any other new kid who has moved into the town of St. Malo, Florida, a navy town where new faces are the norm. But Amedeo has a secret, a dream: More than anything in the world, he wants to discover something — a place, a process, even a fossil — some treasure that no one realizes is there until he finds it. And he would also like to discover a true friend to share these things with.

William Wilcox seems like an unlikely candidate for friendship: an aloof boy who is all edges and who owns silence the way other people own words. When Amedeo and William find themselves working together on a house sale for Amedeo’s eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Zender, Amedeo has an inkling that both his wishes may come true. For Mrs. Zender’s mansion is crammed with memorabilia of her long life, and there is a story to go with every piece. Soon the boys find themselves caught up in one particular story — a story that links a sketch, a young boy’s life, an old man’s reminiscence, and a painful secret dating back to the outrages of Nazi Germany. It’s a story that will take them to the edge of what they know about heroism and the mystery of the human heart.

Review

I love E.L. Konigsburg’s books– From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The View From Saturday are on my Best Books of All Time list for good reason– but The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World is definitely not on that list. It’s simultaneously the most boring ELK book I’ve ever and, surprisingly, the most heartbreaking, and I’m not sure what went wrong.

I’ve read slightly boring ELK books before (hi, Silent to the Bone), and probably some people think ALL her books are boring because they’re more quietly powerful than outrageously in-your-face about stuff. What I like about her books is that her characters are so real, and how she writes about ordinary things that are made extraordinary by virtue of her excellent writing skills. And I especially like how she slips in these little truths about people and the world we live in, like breadcrumbs on a path to better understanding ourselves. It’s good stuff!

Unfortunately, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World feels…half-done. I don’t think the narrator (I read the audiobook) helped, because he didn’t sound like anyone in the story and he made Mrs Zender sound like a drag queen (which she wasn’t, though I really wanted her to be by the end). He did good accents, but it was a lackluster narration and maybe that tipped the scale more towards “bad” than the book actually deserves. (Or maybe it’s just a bad book and I’m trying to make excuses for it. I don’t know.)
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