nomadreader

2014 was quite a year. I had a baby . And I kept reading (it's possible! It wasn't even hard!) I somehow managed to read 139 books this year (and no, that doesn't count any of the children's books I read to Hawthorne.) I read (significantly) more books in 2014 than I did in any other year in which I've kept track of my reading. In September, I hit 100 books . I've spent a lot of time thinking about why  I managed to read so many books this year, and I think it comes down to making reading more of a priority. I didn't watch nearly as much television in 2014 as I did before. And I didn't even see as many movies. I read. If a book wasn't working for me, I set it down and picked up another one. Sometimes I picked it back up again, but sometimes I didn't. And I gave up review obligations. I still read plenty of books from publishers, but I didn't commit to reviewing them on specific days. When I picked up a book, it was because I wanted to read it...

The backstory: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has been longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize . It also won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Prize. The basics: Narrated by Rosemary, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves  is the story of her family: her academic psychologist father, mother, brother Lowell, and sister Fern. Rosemary slowly tells their secrets, but we learn early on she hasn't seen Lowell in ten years and Fern disappeared seventeen years ago. My thoughts: Rosemary is the best kind of unreliable narrator. She's quite honest with the reader about how she's telling this story--out of order. But despite knowing she's not telling a linear story (although it's easy to follow and even enhanced by its structure), she still managed to surprise me more than once with key details she waits to share. She doesn't lie, but she does omit at times. She even tells the reader she's doing it in a beautiful way: "The beauty, the utility of this story is i...