Making a List and Checking it Twice

I am busy this week writing in a notebook all of the books that I might want to read for the challenges that I signed up for.  I have a separate page for each challenge noting how many books I agreed to read but also how many I really expected to read when I signed up for each challenge. I lowballed my sign-ups since I didn't meet my required number of books in 2018. Hopefully, being more organized about my reading plans will help me get more reading done next year.

2019 Christian Reading Challenge

My Top 10 Books From 2018

Below is a list of the best books that I read in 2018.  Note that they may not have been published in 2018 but I read them in 2018.

10.  The Romanov Empress by C. W. Gortner

9.  The Masterpiece by Fiona Davis

8.  Deadly Cure by Lawrence Goldstone

7.  The Painter's Apprentice by Laura Morelli

6.  Story of a Sociopath by Julia Navarro

5.  The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

4.  Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

3.  Brazen, Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Penelope Bagieu

2.  Berlin by Jason Lutes

1. White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht

2018 Reading Statistics

I read 52 books this year, down from the 81 books that I read last year. I struggled hard with my reading this year and I don't know why.  Perhaps it is due to that unknown reason why I stopped reading entirely from my usual 120 books a year 5+ years ago. I never did figure that one out either.

2019 may be the last year of this blog before I change it to a genre specific blog. Historical fiction seems to be my primary interest so I may go that route.

While I still love graphic novels, I have caught up on the older books. I am now only reading certain authors that I like and they do not produce annual novels like traditional authors do. Mysteries, which had been my favorite genre ever since I began reading, just aren't catching my attention anymore. Part of the reason was that I read political and spy thriller subgenres. These novels are just too much like being on the job for me and I can't bear to read them. My 29 years in a government job has killed my love of these subgenres. I have lived through more on this job than has ever been written in a thriller and, no, I won't be writing about it.  I don't want to die.

On to 2019!

2019 Series Challenge

I have a couple of lengthy series that I need to work on. I am not sure that I will have time for more than one of them. Laura Joh Rowland's series on feudal Japan is a favorite and probably will be the one that I will read next year.  I believe there are 18 books in the series and I have only read 2 of them.  Ms. Rowland is no longer writing this series. She has begun another one set in the Victorian era.

The Sharon Kay Penman medieval fiction series is another option. Again, I have only read 2 of her books but there are many more for me to catch up on.

I have a 3rd option and it is a 6 book graphic novel series called Beardo. I have read the first 2 in the series but since there is only a 3 book minimum for the challenge of any genre this option will work.

2019 Library Love Reading Challenge

This challenge is new to me.  The challenge will be in its 3rd year in 2019. Since I am a big user of my public library it would be foolish for me not to enter this challenge. The requirement is to read a minimum of 12 library books of any genre in the 2019 calendar year.  Easy peasy! Of course, you can read more than 12 if you wish.  I am looking forward to meeting more bloggers through this challenge. 

Wrap Up of 2018 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

I read 18 books for the Historical Fiction challenge this year. I signed up to read 25 books so I fell short of my goal. Here us what I read:

The Court Dancer by Kyung Sook Shin
The Masterpiece by Fiona Davis
Deadly Cure by Lawrence Goldstone
Vita Brevis by Ruth Downie
The Abbot's Tale by Conn Iggulden
Death in St. Petersburg by Tasha Alexander
The Painter's Apprentice by Laura Morelli
City of Ink by Elsa Hart
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Heretics by Leonardo Padura
The Romanov Empress by C.W. Gortner
Death on Delos by Gary Corby
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
The White Mirror by Elsa Hart
Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford
City of Masks by S. D. Sykes

Favorite Book:  White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht

Second Favorite Book:  The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

Least Favorite Book:  Death in St. Petersburg by Tasha Alexander

Wrap Up of 11th Annual Manga/Graphic Novel Reading Challenge

I read 16 books for the 11th Annual Manga/Graphic Novel Reading Challenge.  I signed up to read 24 books at the Bronze Level so I fell short with this challenge.  Below is a list of the books that I read:

Portugal by Cyril Pedrosa
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
Berlin by Jason Lutes
The Arab of the Future 3 by Riad Sattouf
Leaving China by James McMullan
Zahra's Paradise by Amir Khalil
Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart
Brazen by Penelope Bagieu
Palestine by Joe Sacco
The Photographer by Didier Lefevre
March-Book 1 by John Lewis
March-Book 2 by John Lewis
March-Book 3 by John Lewis
Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle
Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly
Brew Harder by Dan Dougherty

Favorite Book:  Berlin by Jason Lutes.  This book is simply a masterpiece.  It tells the story of the fall of the Weimar Republic from 1928-1933.  The City of Berlin is the protagonist of the story.

Second Favorite Book:  Brazen, Rebel Ladies who Rocked the World by Penelope Bagieu.  This book was very inspirational to me.  It contains mini biographies of 30 women from antiquity to the present who changed their society.

Least Favorite Book:  Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart.  This book was too depressing for me. It did give an accurate depiction of parental grief over the death of a child but having never been through the experience, it was too dark.

Wrap Up of My Kind of Mystery 2018

I read 15 books for the My Kind of Mystery challenge this year.  Below is a list of the books that I read:

City of Ink by Elsa Hart
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Origin by Dan Brown
Plum Tea Crazy by Laura Childs
Shot in the Dark by Cleo Coyle
Death on Delos by Gary Corby
The First Family by Daniel Palmer
The Demon Crown by Dan Silva
I've Got My Eyes on You by Mary Higgins Clark
Beyond the Ice Limit by Preston and Child
Queen Anne's Lace by Susan Wittig Albert
Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford
City of Masks by S. D. Sykes
Story of a Sociopath by Julia Navarro
The Vineyard Victims by Ellen Crosby

Favorite Book:  Story of a Sociopath by Julia Navarro.  She gets the sociopath down right!

Second Favorite Book:  Death in Delos by Gary Corby. Each successive book in his Ancient Greece series is better than the one before it.

Least Favorite Book:  I think there is a 3 way tie for this award. I did not like Origin, The Essex Serpent and Plum Tea Crazy. It is unusual for me to not like a mystery but it happened often this year.  Dan Brown's Origin was not his usual treasure hunt and it seemed like he didn't write it himself. Plum Tea Crazy is part of a long series by Laura Childs where the last several books were very similar. She is publishing 3 books a year for 3 different series and the writing is suffering.  The Essex Serpent was a slow moving story with a small plot.

Wrap Up of 2018 Creativity Reading Challenge

I read 5 books for the Creativity Reading Challenge in 2018. Below is a list of the books that I read:

Introduction to Tesselations
The Art and Craft of Poetry
The Ultimate Guide to Colored Pencil
The Painter's Apprentice
Kaffe Fassett's Bold Blooms

Favorite Book:  I cannot choose a favorite.  It would either be The Painter's Apprentice by Laura Morelli or The Art and Craft of Poetry by Michael Bugeja.

Least Favorite Book:  None!  They were all good.

I liked this challenge and will be repeating it next year.

The Court Dancer

The Court Dancer is the story of Yi Jin who spent her childhood in the Korean  royal palace in the mid 1800s. She worked both in the royal embroidery studio and as a court dancer from the age of 6 until the age of 23. When the French legate to Korea, Victor Collin de Plancy, announced that he had been ordered back to France, the King gave him Yi Jin as a gift, one that he could take back to France as a wife.

The story opens with Yi Jin and Victor at the harbor boarding the ship that will take them to France.  It then returns back to Jin as a child and tells how she came to the palace, learned her embroidery and dance skills, and her friendships with best friends Soa and Yeon and a friendship with a French missionary.  When Victor meets her he falls madly in love with her. Jin falls in love with his library. The story forwards again to Jin in Paris where she is always the center of attraction due to her asian looks. She continues with her love of books by translating Korean books into French. However, she ultimately has too many adjustment problems and Victor takes her back to Korea. 

This is a slow moving story. While the author has painted rich details of Korean royal court life, I feel that it could have been written in fewer pages. It seemed to me that it would take 4 or 5 pages to tell what could have been told in one page. I quickly got bored with the book, then action occurred and I got interested again, and then bored again. This repeated for me throughout the book.

I was somewhat disappointed with the book. While I looked forward to what would happen next, the story moved too slow for me. Interest in the plot kept me reading though.

3 out of 5 stars!

The Masterpiece

The Masterpiece alternates chapters between the late 1920s and the mid 1970s.  In the 1920s illustrator Clara Darden arrives in New York City from Arizona as an art student at the Grand Central School of the Art located in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.  She is a promising student and is quickly promoted to class monitor. When a teacher fails to show up for the second semester, Clara is given the class to teach.  While she teaches, she prepares her illustrations for a faculty show as well as for presentation to magazines such as Vogue.  At the school she meets and befriends fellow teacher Levon Zakarian. Levon becomes both her mentor and her downfall.  

Meanwhile, in 1974 Virginia Clay tries to obtain a job as legal secretary with no experience but is fired after the first day.  She is fresh off a divorce from a corporate attorney and thought that she had picked up enough information from listening to his conversations over the two decades that they were married to be able to do the job.  Her temp agency places her in the information booth at Grand Central Terminal tidying up, getting coffee for the others and refilling the stacks of timetables as needed.  While trying to find the bathroom on her first day on the job Virginia stumbles upon the Grand Central School of the Art which had closed during World War II and never reopened.  The space was never rented again and she was able to enter and look at some of the artwork that was left over from the students.

The Grand Central Terminal is the center of a big lawsuit to determine whether is should receive landmark status or be demolished and replaced with a high-rise building.  Virginia becomes enamored with the Terminal as she begins to see what the building was like when it was built. She also returns to the art school and sees an unsigned illustration that she likes and takes it.  Virginia then begins a quest to find out who the artist is. 

I loved this novel!  In fact, I read it in one sitting.  The pace was fast and the characters, all of them, were captivating, especially Clara Darden.  You could not help but feel emotion for a woman who left her family as a teenager, traveled across the entire country by herself, and entered art school as a serious student.  Most female students were looking for husbands but Clara wanted to be a working artist and an illustrator specifically.  Illustration was not considered art at the time. It was considered commercial.  She runs into strong male characters and holds her own.  Her boss at the school, Mr. Lorette, wanted to fire her as a teacher after the first semester and hid her illustrations at the faculty show because he disapproved of illustration as art. He did his best to quash her attempts to be a working artist. Levon Zakarian was both a competitor and a lover but Clara was able to understand him well enough to maneuver his movements.  

Virginia Clay was another strong woman and one that I was familiar with in the 1970s.  Divorce was just beginning to be common at the time and many new divorcees had no education or training for a job. These women had to take whatever job they could find and support their children on whatever amount of money they made. These women always made ends meet.  I don't know how they did it because it does not always happen to these women in the twenty first century. 

There is much to learn here about illustration as an art form.  You see it when it was popular in magazines and in advertisements before photography was used.  It was replaced by photography and had a renaissance in later decades but that history was not part of the book.  In the book almost all of the  working illustrators were men.  Women just were not given opportunities for this type of work. Clara Darden was an exception. I enjoyed reading about this part of art history. 

The Masterpiece was an entertaining  historical mystery novel and I rate it 5 out of 5 stars!

Deadly Cure

Deadly Cure is the first book by Lawrence Goldstone that I have read. It is both a historical mystery and a medical mystery novel.  It takes place in 1893 in New York City.

Physician Noah Whitestone is called to a rich neighbor's home to urgently care for their 5 year old son, Willard Anschutz, as his regular physician, Dr. Frias, was not available.  Noah finds the boy exhibiting the symptoms of morphia toxicity, with leg tremors, a rancid odor, extreme perspiration and dilated pupils.  Noah asked the boy's mother, Mildred Anzchutz, if he had taken any patent medications which were not regulated and were known to have morphine as an ingredient.  She said that he hadn't taken any but that he had been taking a blue pill prescribed by Dr. Frias for a cough. Noah doesn't believe that Willard was not on any patent medications but has to take her word so he gives the boy 2 drops of laudanum and leaves to see 2 more patients. When he returned to the house later that night, the boy had died. However, he was able to get 2 of the blue pills that Willard was taking.

The next day Noah stops by the Anschutz home to pay his respects to the family. Here he finds himself accused of wrongdoing in the boy's death.  After leaving the house he goes to the local hospital lab to do tests on the blue pill to determine what it is made of. Dr. Frias finds out he is testing the pill and threatens to yank his license.  Noah later meets a radical working for a newspaper who tells him the paper is trying to break the Patent Medicine Trust. This radical/reporter knew about Willard's death and the death of other children from patent medications. Noah wants to get involved with research for the publication in order to clear his name but knows there is a risk with being associated with communists.  He does it anyway.

Deadly Cure was spellbinding!  I was hooked from the first page and could not put this book down.  The book had a fast pace, fascinating characters and an intricate plot. However, what I found most interesting was how aspirin and heroin were initially introduced in the U. S. as patent medications. In their beginning forms these drugs killed people. Various German companies worked on what eventually became known as aspirin and heroin and while their products were not healthy they were marketed to the public by physicians who became wealthy by prescribing them.  This history was expertly woven into the story by the author.

5 out of 5 stars!