Junk Food

I was at Target today--which is having too many clearance sales, not a good economic sign--and decided to get my daughter a serial novel to jump start her into more big girl reading. She's six and has mad reading skills already, so in my drive to make her the Michael Phelps of reading :), I decided she should try to read a tween junk food novel over summer. She's obsessed with mermaids (Ariel, H2O), so I bought her The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler and a little book light for night reading. She was so excited!

In the same aisle, I found the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer and bought the first volume. I'm listening to her book, The Host, while quilting this month; it has an entertaining concept spread thin over many pages (or hours in audioland). I love listening to junk food novels. They're ideal for secondary entertainment. They're typically not very well edited and are written in a way that suggests their authors may have been paid by the word, so I don't even feel bad wandering out of the room periodically while they play on. We're headed to my in-laws for the 4th, so I thought I'd take Twilight along as a guilty pleasure. Apparently, these books are a teen subculture phenomenon for those whose hormones have taken them past Harry Potter (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?).

Plus, I need to get my sugar rush out of the way before I jump into the noble pursuit of award-winning fiction :)

Fresh Start: Book Awards Challenge 2

I'm starting this blog anew with the Book Awards Challenge 2. The challenge is to read 10 award winning books from at least 5 different awards lists from August to June (i.e., 10 months). I tried to scan the lists for books I already own . . . but are sitting unread on the shelf. So, here's my list of 10:

1) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Pulitzer Prize, 2005)
2) Ha Jin, Waiting (PEN/Faulkner, 2000)
3) Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (Costa/Whitbread, 1999)
4) Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Giller Prize, 1996)
5) Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (James Tait Black, 2002)
6) Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Pulitzer Prize, 2001)
7) Eudora Welty, Collected Stories (National Book Award, 1983)
8) Kate Christensen, The Great Man (PEN/Faulkner, 2008)
9) Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (PEN/Hemingway, 1995)
10) Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (Orange Prize, 2005)

I already own about half of these. Time to get my read on!!