A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Really fantastic. Each chapter is essentially a short story told from a different character's perspective, but all the characters are connected in some way. The book covers several decades and is a great look how time rolls along for each of the characters. Funny, engaging, creative story-telling. This book has it all!

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The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I grabbed this book after I saw an interview with Ravitch on The Daily Show last month. She writes about No Child Left Behind and the resulting focus on testing in reading and math. Her argument is that this focus (and all of the educational fads that came along with it) are taking the focus off of creating a full curriculum. The tests are also being used as the only measure of student, teach, and school success when they were only created to evaluate a single student skill. She looks at fascinating cases in San Diego and New York.

A fascinating read and an important one in this time of blaming teachers' unions for all of the problems in education.

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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thoroughly enjoyable. I love Flavia de Luce. Can't wait to read the next one.

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Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic conclusion to the three-volume biography. TR's frustration in his post-presidency years is palpable. Campaigns, Brazilian adventure, and World War I all figure largely during this time. I also appreciated Morris' quick overview of how public opinion about TR has changed over the last 90 years.

All three volumes are wonderful and I highly recommend them.

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My 2010 - Books, Movies, and Travel

For the last few years I have been reviewing my year of movies and books each January (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006).  I started a new job this year that involves quite a bit of travel.  Since travel has been taking up quite a bit of brain space, I'm going to include a few notes on that too.

TRAVEL

My travel notes probably aren't particularly interesting, but after a year full of it, I wanted to keep track of a couple statistics.

United States

States visited: 8

State capital cities visited: 5 (all within a couple months this Spring -- Olympia, Salem, Sacramento, Boise, and St. Paul).

National Park Properties visited: 5 (Glacier NP, Mt Rainier NP, Point Reyes National Seashore, and Lewis & Clark NHP, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial)

Washington State

Counties visited: 29 (out of 39)

State Parks visited: 13 (Cape Disappointment and Penrose Point were my favorites)

BOOKS AND MOVIES (books titles are underlined and only movies seen in the theater are included)

January

NINE

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Leap Year

It’s Complicated

The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

A Single Man

By the Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie

February

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

March

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter

The World to Come by Dara Horn

April

Brewing Up a Business: Adventures in Entrepreneurship from the Founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery by Sam Calagione

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner

Clash of the Titans

May

Date Night

Death at a Funeral

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

Iron Man 2

Oceans

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

June

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

July

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

TiMER

August

The City & The City by China Mieville

The Girl Who Plays with Fire

Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose

The Saints Go Dying by Erik Hanberg

September

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

October

The Social Network

All Other Nights by Dara Horn

Harbor by Lorraine Adams

November

Waiting for Superman

Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood by John Soennichsen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Morning Glory

December

The Best American Travel Writing 2009 Ed. Simon Winchester

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

The Gates by John Connolly

Black Swan

The King’s Speech

In Progress--Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

For the most part, I really enjoyed the books I read this year.  My favorite novels were Dara Horn's The World to Come and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin.  My favorite non-fiction books were The Good Rain (a great book about the Northwest), Bretz's Flood (about the Scablands of Eastern Washington and the man who figured out what they were), and A Jury of Her Peers (a complete history of American women's literature).

My favorite movies this year were A Single Man, Morning Glory, and The King's Speech.  But, yet again, I didn't see very many movies this year.  And, a couple of those were movies I had no interest in, but went to see with someone else (and, predictably, turned out to be stinkers...the movies, not the person).

The Gates: A Novel by John Connolly

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'll be honest, I only picked this one up because of the pretty cover. I didn't even realize that it was a YA book. I get what he's going for here and at times it was entertaining. But, for the most part, it didn't really hang together for me. He tries way too hard and it really isn't that funny.


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Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quick, entertaining read--I raced through it in one day. It is an odd mix of the everyday, mundane details of work in an hospital and a mafia tale. Somehow, Bazell gets this to work.

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