The Home Stretch

My mom gave me Whoopi Goldberg's Is It Just Me?: Or is it nuts out there? book about how manners in our culture is almost extinct.  A quick and funny book, I got a kick out of it.  92/100

On a flight I read Samantha Baker's The Other Mothers' Club: A Novel because of the "I really, really loved it!" blurb on the cover from one of my favorite authors, Marian Keyes.  What I know now is that as good as a writer as she is, her blurbs are untrustworthy.  Her books are some of my favorites.  I particularly loved Rachel's Holiday. Not only was The Other Mothers' Club bad, it was almost unreadable. 93/100

I bought Your Best Birth: Know All Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices, and Take Back the Birth Experience by Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake for my BFF, who is expecting a bundle of joy later this winter.  Yes, the same BFF who just got married this March. I read this book after I had to spend 6 hours in the airport and finished the book I brought and had checked my other books.  Interesting, scary, informative, and also graphic, this book pulls no punches. 94/100

My brother gave me The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield for the holidays and I jumped right into it.  This book directs more than encourages, and it was a good resource.  Also a good motivator, though a lot of the book contained information I'd read in other books.  95/100

While at my sister's house, she asked how my book project was going and I told her I needed to finish out the year, so she (a new mom) gave me the fastest read ever, Jenny McCarthy's Belly Laughs: The Naked Truth about Pregnancy and Childbirth.  Each chapter was barely a page and it took me less than an hour to finish it.  96/100

I picked up Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude because I like to read spiritual books sometimes.  This was more like a spiritual book as written by Chicken Soup.  Not my favorite, but I do appreciate the power of gratitude. 97/100

From the library used book sale, I picked up Write to the Heart: Wit & Wisdom of Women Writers, a collection of quotes about women writers about process, writer's life, books, family, transformation, and more.  98/100

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is less a novel and more a series of related stories. Interesting and well written, this book isn't like any other I've read for some time. Lots of characters, jumps around in time a bit, and even contains a chapter written in PowerPoint. 99/100

I finished the year with Thich Nhat Hanh's True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart.  I knew it was good because as soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again. 100/100