I am stuffed, cousin; I cannot smell.

I've past the halfway mark of The Adventures of Augie March, which really isn't anything too special; I should have finished it long ago. It's a tricky book to figure out. I enjoy reading it, but when I put it down, I don't think I would be bothered if I never picked it up again. It's hard to explain, but it's like I'm interested in the argument, but not interested in the conclusion.

I can't think of any other books like this on the list so far. There are ones I have no desire to pick up again, but I also didn't enjoy reading them in the first place. Again, I enjoy reading this book, but it doesn't have a hold on me. It's like watching Jeopardy; you're interested in the current question/answer, but probably wouldn't lose sleep if you never saw who won that day.

The Best of 2013

Somebody asked me the other night what the best book I read in 2013 was. Admittedly, I was at a loss, as I hadn't really given it any thought. And after looking back at the 38 books I did read in 2013, I'm still struggling to find an answer.

To be honest, 2013 wasn't a very good reading year. Sure, there were some great books, but they were far out numbered by the duds. This may be the reason I only read 38 books, as it obviously goes slower when you aren't enjoying them.

But enough about the bad, this is supposed to be about the good. When I think of books I've read, I divide them into two categories; list books and non-list books. The non-list books are overwhelmingly non-fiction (27-2), but not exclusively, and in 2013 I read far more non-list books than list books (29-9). To separate the two, I've divided my best of 2013 into these two categories.

#70 - "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth

It's amazing how my reading pace can change from book to book. After a rather grueling time reading Possession, American Pastoral flew by. That's the difference in a book I really, really enjoyed versus one that was so-so, I guess. Philip Roth's second book from the list, and another Pulitzer Prize winner, was simply a great book.

Seymour Levov, known as "The Swede" to his classmates in high school, is the stereotypical big-man-on-campus. To those around him, he has it all; good looking, star football, baseball, and basketball player, and wealthy. His good fortune only continues as he graduates to adulthood, when he serves in the Marines at the tail end of World War II, inherits his father's successful glove business, and marries Miss New Jersey.

#69 - Possession by A.S. Byatt

This is a book I actually finished over two weeks ago. But after returning from Costa Rica, I got sick, which pushed everything back a couple of days, and then with Christmas and all, it's just a really busy time of year! But I have now finished 69 books from Time magazine list of 100 All-Time Novels. Soon to be 70, as I'm nearly finished American Pastoral as well.

This isn't the first time I've had difficulty deciding what I thought of a novel, but Possession might be one of the trickier books to pin down so far. For me it was kind of a tale of two novels, one of which I quite enjoyed, the other which I...didn't.

Returning from the Rich Coast

Well, I'm back from Costa Rica. Is there a better feeling than having breakfast with monkeys and iguanas in 30C heat, then dinner in -20C at a Wendy's drive-thru? (there's never anything to eat when you get back from vacation, and at 2 in the morning, there's nothing else opened!) Of course it always sucks coming back from vacation, regardless of where you've been, but such a huge temperature change seems to exacerbate the situation.

But, I digress, back to reading. I had planned to finish #69, Possession on the plane ride to Costa Rica, but since I was taking a red-eye to Toronto, then boarding a five hour flight to Liberia, I wasn't in the best reading mood. Quite frankly, I was too tired to read, so instead, I spent most of both flights drifting in and out of consciousness, never really asleep, but never really awake. However, although I didn't finish the book before getting to Costa Rica as planned, I did finish it the next day.

I'm still gathering my thoughts on it as I didn't really spend much of my vacation thinking about it. It was more one of those, "okay, it's done, let's move on" books, rather than a "wow, I need to discuss this with anybody who will listen" types. That doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad book, it's just that some books are more interesting to dissect than others.

Besides finishing Possession, I was also able to get some non-fiction reading done, as well as make a good dent in Philip Roth's second list book, American Pastoral. Hopefully a review for #70 can appear in the next week or so. As for my thoughts on Possession, I should be able to have something ready in the next two days.

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Have all his ventures fail'd?

I've failed my goal of finishing Possession by today. I had set this goal for a couple of reasons. First of all, and most importantly, I wanted to finish #69 from this list. But I also wanted to finish it by today because I'm heading to Costa Rica in a couple of hours.

It would have been nice to be starting #70 as I left for this vacation, but as I haven't finished, it comes along with me. And what will happen is I'll either finish it on the plane or at the latest on the first day I'm there; I do only have a 100 pages left, and nine hours of flying time.