#37 "Sisterhood Everlasting" by Ann Brashares

What? No really. What?

If you've read even the first five pages of this book you will understand how sincerely disappointed I am in these characters for letting things get to such a point. For repeating the same mistakes again and again. For giving up on so many things.

But I'm stopping now because I refuse to write spoilers.

All in all I enjoyed this book the most of all of them on this read through. Though I should clarify that with the term "enjoyed" I am not denying the possibility that I cried through most of the second half and am successfully not in need of make-up remover tonight. Like the first four books I don't think the ending is any more realistic, it's still too full of youthful day dreams. But certain aspects of the character's internal dialogues as they tried to get back on path did resonate.

#36 "Forever in Blue" by Ann Brashares

I'm almost done. But the writing isn't getting any more mature. There's one book left in the series that was published in 2011 and I've never read. But man oh man, I'm not sure if I can handle another 24 hours of only Ann Brashares.

These books used to feel really good, and now I just feel too old for them.

#35 "Girls in Pants" by Ann Brashares

Maybe it's just been too much Sisterhood too fast, but this used to be my favorite book in the series and I got bored with it half way through. Bee and Eric used to be my ideal. Okay, I was 14, but still. Now they seem so young. He thinks if he can make her happy he'll be happy, that seems like a really unhealthy foundation for a long distance relationship.

There's a newer fifth book that I haven't ever read, so I'll suffer through the fourth book to get to it. I do hope these characters grow up.

#34 "The Second Summer of the Sisterhood" by Ann Brashares

You can see where my week is going.

Once again a quick read, and a repeat. But there were whole sections that I had didn't remember at all and lots of pieces that I remembered incorrectly.

I would imagine that tonight I will be joyously reading Bee and Eric stories from the third book.

#33 "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" by Ann Brashares

I read these books 20 times in middle school. They were the perfect combination of over-emotional teenage years and relateable family drama to lean on. My copies of the first and the third book were so bent out of shape from reading in bed until 3 am. The pages are all dog-eared at my favorite parts.

I found the first book as an audio book, available for instant download, just waiting for me, yesterday when I went out for my walk. At only 7 hours it took just one walk and a morning of putzing to make it through.

Certainly it's not the most stimulating reading. But it's been really nice to take a 24 hour break from computer screens and German books. Also there's nothing quite as soothing as having someone read aloud to you.

#32 "Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen" by J.K. Rowling

It took me longer than is completely reasonable, but I finally read a real, proper, full length book in German. Yes, it's Harry Potter but come on, this is my second language and with 4 years of language classes in high school and 7 months of living here I've finally gotten to the point where I can pick up any book or print media and read it (rather slowly and occasionally with some vocab help) and comprehend it! This is very exciting for me folks!

#31 "Life, the Universe, and Everything" by Douglas Adams

What? Just what? If you thought the first book was funny and the second book was confusing, neither makes less sense or more random jokes than this one. Though the only reason I can see to continue reading is that I really want to know what the question is. Only, with the last character, Prat, I'm fairly certain that the answer and the question are mutually exclusive.

#30 "Terminal Man" by Michael Crichton

Another Crichton book, this one the earliest work I could find legally. This book has a solid theme: it's about a man, Henry, who has brain legions which are causing seizures which are triggering psychotic episodes. These episodes turn him senselessly violent. At the time of surgery he's already brought three people to the brink of death, but of course even a successful surgery doesn't deal with the underlying issue.

While the topic of this book was more clear than Congo, the writing and subject matter are no where near as interesting or engaging as Jurassic Park. Crichton simply wasn't matured in his writing at this point in his career.

The next Crichton book on the list is Micro the novel he never had the chance to finish which has been finished and published posthumously. Hopefully for your sake and mine I'll make it through the other 7 books I'm currently at least 100 pages into before picking that up.

#29 "Fantastic Mr. Fox" by Roald Dahl

This is a crazy short book. Like the movie, which I loved, it's not quite kid-appropriate, but I love the twisted logic of the whole thing. Dahl of course is a slightly insane and thoroughly enjoyable author. And at 56 pages Fox provides a solid half hour of humor and humankind's expense.

#28 "Congo" by Michael Crichton

I was pleased to find that the library has several Crichton books available as eBooks. Congo had the highest rating of them, so it was the one I chose first.

For the first half to two-thirds of the novel I was certainly as engaged with it as with both Jurassic titles. However in the last third it becomes clear that this is one of Crichton's early works. The focus of the novel, the balance of good and evil, the objective of characters shifts suddenly and without seeming reason. What was an ecological fiction becomes a story of war and ancient civilization, a lesson in geology and for a few pages of speech, like Gaul taking over the radio broadcast, the world is lectured to about nuclear warfare. But I suppose it was the cold war, and such a shift in theme may have been expected and contemporary.

I think reading Crichton chronologically would be interesting, especially since it's not his prose but his content that is flawed in this earlier work. But then again, if it means reading 10 novels that annoy you for 100 pages instead of focusing on the last 7... I can't quite decide. Harry Potter in German it is.

#27 "In a Land of Plenty" by Tim Pears

This was a book I bought on a whim in London while standing in a 1£ bookshop. Not half an hour later, sitting alone, surrounded by other whovians in a movie theatre the man who sat down next to me exclaimed "Oh that's a wonderful book I just couldn't put it down" (I maybe should have taken it as a sign that he also fell asleep during the Day of the Doctor).

While I love Pears' prose, he changes style so subtly that you get a creepy feeling something is going to happen without a disruption to your reading rhythm, the plot was so drawn out and occasionally non-existent that it took me 2 months to get through the 673 pages. If you asked me what this book was about I still couldn't tell you anything more than it's about the lives of the Freeman family through the 20th Century. Unlike Gone with the Wind and A Woman of Substance, and even Roots, other family sagas, there's not a theme that binds this family together, that gives the book a coherent purpose. It's just about the lives of these people from beginning to end.

I think before picking up Pears' other book I'll work on finishing that list of 1,000 titles everyone should read.

#26 "Dreaming of You" by Lisa Kleypas

I may have gone even farther down hill. I was reading YA Lit, and I seem to have down graded into airplane books. It's not that Dreaming of You was particularly bad (it wasn't particularly good either) but it holds no value in my life. It encourages no kind of thought beyond the words in the sentence that you are reading right this moment. Also the author confuses me: a former Miss Massachusetts with a degree in PoliSci becomes a serial historical romance novelist how exactly?

I have no answers as to my life or hers.