JRR Tolkein, The Return of the King

This was absolutely the best in the trilogy! I loved every second of this book. I decided to take it with me on a business trip and read most of it on the plane. It was one of the fastest plane trips thanks to that book. My only disappointment was that I had been hoping there would be a little more explanation as to how Faramir and Eowyn fall in love, but such is life. It's still an amazing story.

And despite the fact that all my friends adore Aragorn the most, I have to say my favorite character is Faramir.

L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables

I never read this series growing up and I always wished I had. It was definitely worth it. Anne is a good-hearted girl who has a tendency to get into trouble. An orphan adopted by Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, she goes to school and makes her first friends in Avonlea. The first book of the Anne series covers ages 11-16, so it really covers a lot of growth for Anne as she goes from gangly child to pretty young woman. She learns how to properly behave while staying true to herself and her imagination. This is a beautiful coming of age story, and I'm so glad I finally had the chance to read it.

Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files & Turn Coat

This is one of my favorite series ever. I love the characters and how they develop over the course of the series. Butcher pulls in mythology and geekery everywhere he can, which enhances the story if you know it but doesn't ruin it if you miss it (and I probably miss a lot more than I catch). Butcher writes in a way that's easy to read and is very addictive. Reading the series over again has me reading deeper into the story and asking more questions.

Turn Coat:
I've finished Small Favor in October, so I had to wait about six months to read Turn Coat. There were things I thought I had figured out but I definitely didn't. I feel like I took two steps back in terms of figuring out what's going on. This was the saddest of the series so far, which leaves me wondering where Butcher is going to take it next. The characters actually disappointed me with their actions, which is purposeful on Butcher's part, and makes me hope that maybe they can redeem themselves during the rest of the series. Butcher also didn't bother with his usual introduction chapter. The first page opens with Morgan knocking on the door bloodied up and asking Harry to hide him from the Wardens.

I'm excited for the next one, but I'm not dying to read it like I was between Small Favor and Turn Coat. It may also take a little time before my impatience wears me to the point that I can't wait any longer for the next book.

My friend and I are trying to re-read all of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series before the 11th book comes out April 7. We're each working on the 3rd book right now (she's about 100 pages ahead of me though). It's a lot of fun trying to get through all these books. I absolutely love them. It does make it hard to get through the other books I'm reading too. Trying to break up my time between books turned out to be a really bad idea. I get caught up in one and read it until it's finished. So I'm partway through a total of six books right now:

John Eldredge, Wild at Heart
JRR Tolkein, The Return of the King
Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (vol. 1 of 2)
LM Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (audio book)

We'll see what order I manage to finish them!

JRR Tolkein, The Two Towers

I dragged through parts of this book. I started it already sold on Aragorn, so the first half of it was quite enjoyable. And I loved Treebeard - such a creative character and race. Then we got to Frodo and Sam. They're traveling toward Mordor with Gollum and I feel like not much is happening and it's just going on for chapters. I didn't understand how the little nuances could be character development and I didn't think much of these characters (except Gollum, but he's still a bit of a mystery) so I really lost a lot of my interest. I stopped at a point here for a week long break because I didn't want to try to push myself through it.

Turns out I just postponed dragging through it until this weekend. But! It got better when they met Faramir - he's an absolutely interesting character and I want to read more about him right away. And then Sam actually steps up at the very end Sam takes a big developmental step and I found myself actually cheering for him. It's a far more impressive step in the book, so I didn't really love it in the movie in past viewings.

So overall, I liked The Towers. Not my favorite book, but I'm certainly interested enough to finish the trilogy.

Sara Nelson, So Many Books So Little Time

This is the third time I've read Sara Nelson's year of reading through in the last two years. I absolutely love this book. Nelson has a chapter for each week of the year when she discusses not only the book she read and touches on several "rules" readers often create for themselves that she outright breaks, but she gets into why she chose to read each book that particular week. She relates it all to her life. While that's not my MO (at least not typically), I find it fairly interesting. I think it would be interesting to figure out why I choose to read the books I do, so I'm going to add that into the blurb that I write with each book.

I also find Nelson really easy to relate to, like she's my friend. The first time I read it, I stayed up all night to read it (I had intended to read the first chapter and just go to bed). It was like spending the night talking to a dear friend who understands even the weird qualities because she does it herself. That's likely why I keep coming back to the same book so many times.

The only downside is that now I need to add the books she talked about to my To Be Read list, which is already around 350 books long (and that's only the books I can find at the library).

Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Edition

Because my book club is reading The Lord of the Rings for book club over the first few months of 2009, we're discussing the book and then watching the corresponding movie (extended edition). Before reading the books, this was my favorite movie of the trilogy. It's beautiful and an exciting beginning of a quest. Having now read the book slowly and retained a lot of what I read, I'm surprised by how much Peter Jackson changed - I can understand why he made a lot of the changes though. Merry and Pippin became lighter entertainment rather than the intelligent characters they are in the book, etc. It makes it easier to sit down and watch for a few hours, and there are plenty of quotable lines. Overall, I still really like the movie. However, I'm far more interested in finding out how I see the other two movies after reading the books.