I don’t know. I have been feeling like resurrecting this blog for a while. And yesterday was my birthday, so I sort of feel like it’s a time of starting new things. Or resuming old things. Whatever.

I just finished reading two books that were bestsellers, two books that would earn sneers from people who limit their reading to big-L Literature. I’m not going to name the books. I’m just going to say that one of them was chicklit, and one was a kind of thriller. I’m not naming them because one them was loaned to me by someone who doesn’t even read this site, but for various reasons, I don’t want to risk her thinking I’m a pompous ass.

The chicklit book was actually good, and I say this as someone who hates chicklit in general. (Yeah, okay, I can be snotty about the big-L literature people because they are often snotty about the mysteries and fantasy/sf stuff I like, but I draw my own lines, too.) I love romantic comedy movies, but for some reason I just don’t really like them as books.

Anyway, I happened to finish these two books at about the same time, and while I was reading them, I couldn’t help comparing them. Neither of them was intended to win a Nobel or anything, but the writer of the chicklit is clearly a good writer. The characters had dimension and individual voices and everything. I am sure I could tell who was speaking even if the names weren’t there in the dialogue. I had some issues with how things turned out at the end, because what I hate about chicklit is that the story always has to revolve around some goddamn man. But still. Decent book.

The writer of the thriller is a motherfucking moron. I cannot tell you how many times people’s eyes blazed. And every character is a kind of stick figure, stuttering around a big ol’ stage that the author is awfully proud of himself for setting up. God, it was painful. I kept reading sentences out loud to Chris, and a few times he even came over and checked because he didn’t believe me. So the thriller was clunky and ridiculous, had no decent characters, and didn’t even provide a compelling plot because it was clear pretty much from the beginning exactly what was going to happen. I know that millions—trust me, A LOT of people—love this dude’s books, but I just don’t see why.

I bet the chicklit writer could write the same book and it would pop and sparkle and be fun.

So . . . here is my big point. There’s “genre” and then there’s “shit,” and they are really, really, really not the same thing. Wooo! What an epiphany I just had.

I spent a lot of 2005 rereading books. It was a year of anxiety, and whenever I felt really overwhelmed–which was a lot of the time–I looked for comfortable entertainment in the form of mystery and fantasy books I’d read before.

2005 was the first full year I had this reading journal, and I meant to keep careful track of how many books I read just because I know I read a lot, but I have no idea about how much “a lot” is. I didn’t actually keep a very careful count, but I think I read at least 99 books. That does not count the books I read half of, or the books I skimmed while trying to write a master’s report. That’s books I read (or listened to) all the way through.

That is an average of 8.25 books a month. Hmm. That is a lot of books. It’s a lot fewer books if you take away the rereads, of which I think there were about 38. And the audiobooks, of which there were probably 22. So I think maybe I read 39 books on paper that I had not read before.

This is interesting to no one but me.

I did a little more rereading this month, finishing up my reread of the entire Lindsey Davis series with The Accusers and Scandal Takes a Holiday. I also reread Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it. Last time I read it, Chris went out and bought me a new copy, because my old copy was in pieces.

Aside from that stuff, August was a month of dutiful reading and listening. I trudged through I, Tituba for the TUS bookclub. I read The Great Gatsby because I’d never read it before (and I loved it). And I listened to all seven thousand hours of The Fortress of Solitude out of some loyalty to Lethem’s other books that I have liked.

I also finished up listening to the Tales of the Otori trilogy and got totally engrossed in a nonfiction book, which I haven’t done in a long time because my unhappy school reading made me want to avoid anything to do with history books.

So that’s seven new things to add to my count for the year, four of them audiobooks. Plus three more rereads.

This month, I read a lot of books while I was working on my master’s report. However, I did not read all of any of them, except for two by Madeleine L’Engle–the autobiographies A Circle of Quiet and Walking on Water. Since I also read a lot of articles and speeches by L’Engle, I got quite an overdose of her and will not be reviewing any of that stuff here because I will only be mean about it. There’s a lot of repetition of ideas, let’s say.

I read some new books this month: Kostova’s The Historian, two books by Terry Pratchett, and the new Harry Potter, plus The Jane Austen Book Club. Plus I got through the first two books in Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori series, but I will review those separately with the third one, when I finish it.

But mostly I still stuck to old, comfortable rereads: the fifth Harry Potter book, plus five of the Lindsey Davis / Ancient Rome mysteries.

So the total for this month is about 15 completed books, not counting all the ones I skimmed for the report. Six of them were rereads. Five of them were audiobooks.