So, at my last weigh-in, Sunday morning, I wasn’t anywhere near the 20lb weight loss goal I’d originally set at the start of the year. I’ve lost about 10lbs from the starting weight I had at the beginning of 2013, and while that’s not as good as I hoped for, it’s certainly better than it could’ve gone.
On the other hand, I managed to meet my book reading goal (see reviews for books #19 and #20, below). So, the 20 books – YES. The 20 lbs – NO. Do I feel like a failure? Not so much. Do I feel like a winner? Um…not that, either.
How was I able to meet one goal and not the other? Well, without putting apples and oranges in the same basket, I can say that I just went after the reading goal with more gusto. Sure, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses – there was that awful spell where I was slogging through Salman Rushdie because I felt compelled to finish “Midnight’s Children”, and I can say there were some late nights trying to make headway in any of a number of books…and probably far too many night’s for dh’s taste where I’d come to bed at some fairly late hour and then flip on my book light. So, it’s not like there weren’t sacrifices. However, staying up to read books isn’t as hard – for me – as finding awake time in the day to go to the gym or the willpower to turn down ice cream.
It’s not like I don’t know why I haven’t taken off more weight; I just need to find the strength to take off the weight the same way that I managed to get through the 20 books..but somehow doing this in a way that keeps me from feeling like I’m giving up things that compromise my quality of life. I haven’t figured out yet what my goals for 2014 will be – but I do know that if I set a weight goal, it’ll be aiming for more like a 10lb weight loss. Slow and steady wins the race. I’ve long associated myself with turtles, and they’ve brought me good luck in the past. Slow and steady wins the race.
And so, with that, I bring you books 19 and 20…and the winning part of my year’s challenge. Overall, I read some authors that I now want to read A LOT more of (like Warren Ellis) and I’m probably swearing off Salman Rushdie indefinitely. I’m now reaffirmed in my desire to get through some more classics, so perhaps next year’s challenge will be about going through some number of books on the banned book list. That ought to get a bunch of classics – and likely quite good ones – out of the way. Ah..the germ of an idea forms in my head…
Book #19: “The Best of Sherlock Holmes” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
{note: the version I link to above is a newer printing of the one I read; odds are, there are even newer, bigger compendiums worth chasing down}
I would suspect that there are likely any number of “Best of” compendiums of Sherlock Holmes stories, and it’s probably shocking to say – but it’s true! – that this was the first Sherlock Holmes I’ve ever read. After so many years of knowing about Holmes as a mythological figure, the penultimate detective, it seems amazing that I would now finally get around to reading any stories of his exploits. The book in question is a small paperback dh had lying around, with six stories: “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, “Silver Blaze”, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”, “The Final Problem”, and “The Adventure of the Empty House”.
These being short stories, I found them all very clipped – almost vignettes of stories, and that tempered my enjoyment somewhat. I realize it’s probably some kind of heresy to say that they weren’t as good as I expected, but I rarely ever find short stories to be as satisfying as long-form stories, primarily because they don’t have the time for sufficient character development, dropping of necessary clues, etc. Out of necessity, speed and efficiency are of utmost importance, and so the things that Holmes may call out as OH WATSON HOW DID YOU NOT SEE THAT THIS WAS THUS AND SO makes less sense to me without having seen it with my own two eyes. In this way, the 44-minute detective TV show works a little better (clues are often displayed and meant to be easily overlooked or discovered).
Even so, I enjoyed the stories; I just didn’t find that I’m a fan of the short-form as much as the longer-form that supposedly also exists. Perhaps as I get deeper into looking for really new things to read, I’ll aim for something that’s a deeper dive into the world of Holmes and Watson.
Book #20: “Odd and the Frost Giants” by Neil Gaiman
Having been a fan of Gaiman’s for years, and having read his latest novel “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” earlier this year, I was searching for something fun to read to polish off the year when dh handed me this from our library. I tend to do arm sweeps at our local bookstore, picking out stacks of books at a time and then sometimes forgetting that I have them in the library before I ever get around to reading them. This isn’t a knock on the writers; when you have the mother’s affliction of the attention span of a housefly, this is a standard issue problem.
This short novel is Gaiman’s imagining of the story of a young Norwegian boy, Odd, who was lamed by an injury to his leg when he was younger. His father died at sea, and his mother – a spoil of a raid by his Viking father – has remarried someone with little sense of humor where Odd is concerned. Odd decides to retreat to a cabin once owned by his father, and it’s there that he meets up with three animals – a fox, a bear, and an eagle – claiming to be (respectively) Loki, Thor and Odin. The trio of gods was enchanted by a frost giant who overtook Asgard and evicted them from their seat of power, and the gods enlist Odd to assist them in their quest to retake it.
I’ve read more Greek and Roman mythology than Norse, but Gaiman has spent quite a bit of time bringing in the Norse pantheon in prior novels (such as “American Gods”
It was a sweet end to a year of reading probably more books than I’ve ever packed into a single year (bearing in mind that some of the books I read are so chewy and long that they make it next to impossible to get through 20 of them). We’ll see what next year brings…
