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: When Mystical Creatures Attack! won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and is 2014 New York Times Notable book . The basics:  "Told through high school class assignments, letters, emails, private journal entries, school literary magazine submissions, advice column blog posts, and psychiatric wellness reports, the 25 linked stories in this debut collection beautifully sketch the lives of residents of a small South Texas town."- Publishers Weekly My thoughts: First: whoever called this book a short story collection has a very, very narrow view of what a novel is. To me, linked stories may share characters and settings, either across some stories or all. When Mystical Creatures Attack! has three main characters, and one of each is the main character in each story (I would say chapter.) It's certainly not a traditional novel, as the description indicates. It doesn't unfold in a chronological narrative. But, to me, it's definitely a novel, even if man...