57. Entre Nous, something something inner french girl

I read this book a long time ago, and there was a recipe I was trying to find, so I just re-read the whole thing. And that my friends, is why this "challenge is a total bust" I will do pretty much anything to just rack up a number. I have a huge stack of neglected magazines just rotting away, and I have even tried to devise a way to make them add up to a book somehow. Surely, my J. Peterman stack counts for at least 2 books.

I wanted to measure a year in books, and I still think that that is a wonderful idea. I remember my 11th year perfectly because my best friend Rhonda and I read the first 3 Dragonlance books. I have no idea how long it took to read them, but I remember laying on my couch in our dingy apartment above a store, pretending it was a tree house and that any minute I would set off for some big adventure. As a teenager, I read all of De Sade, The Decameron and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn all in the same year, a year that I was determined to seek after the seedier elements of my tiny southern town. At 21, I discovered my love of all things WASPY with The Secret History by Donna Tartt and Franny and Zooey by Salinger. My mid-twenties were consumed by Proust, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Against the Grain by Huysmans.

I was crazy to think that a year could be measure in the amount of books I read instead of the content of the books I read. When I look back on this time, I will remember that I read a few good books, Middlesex...I cant really think of any others of hand, but I know I read a few good ones in a row.