two hundredth book

On the 10th of February 2007 I broke the hundred book mark for "Currently Reading" books, today I reached my second hundred (okay, technically I broke it yesterday morning, but I actually wanted to read my 200th book first so that I could blog about it)...

The title that marks 200 books is Peter Pan (which I went searching for back at the beginning of July, thanks to the First Tuesday Book Club)... I think that I was expecting something with a little more oomph to it after hearing what they had to say on FTBC... It's sweet and all, but a little anachronistic (as you would expect for a book written nearly a century ago) and therefore a little difficult to read in spots. I have to say that the 2003 movie version sticks fairly close to the novel for the most part (the beginning and ending probably moreso than the centre section), so I didn't really feel like I was getting that much more of an expanded story. The whole thing is sweet (and if ever there was a slightly lackluster adjective, there it is), and the ending is actually a little on the sad side (and where they obviously extracted the entire setup of the plot for Hook), but, yeah... I didn't find it anywhere near as engaging and affecting as I thought I might have.

But if you compare that to my 199th book, in something of a similar vein (in that it's also a children's book, features an element of fantasy and has been made into a movie that I've seen), Bridge to Terabithia was a much better experience... and although it was also a little anachronistic too (having been written in 1977 when a dollar went a long way), I was more emotionally invested in that book and found myself tearing up in the same place that I did in the movie (whether it was because of the memory of tearing up at that point in the movie or not, I don't know).

Now... talking a little more randomly about the last 100 book...

Nearly 40% of the books in this montage are from the Discworld series... I'd been plotting and planning to read the entire series all the way through for months, and when I was having Book Angst back in January I predicted that because it was a 30+ book series (36 as it turns out, because I got a couple more of the series while I was in the process of reading it) it would take me until "April or May, at the earliest" (which would have made it about four months)... yeah, right... try six and a half months... I started reading the first book at the very end of January, and finished the last one last Friday...

At least this time around I didn't try to orchestrate things so that the most recent Discworld book just happened to be Book 200...

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole series, don't get me wrong (especially the later ones that I'd only read once before, or hadn't read at all), it's not like reading a series that's all about one group of characters, the series flips between four or five major groups of characters and there are also independent books that almost stand on their own, so it never feels like a chore (okay, it kind of did when I got to about the three quarters mark, but only briefly)... but if I ever suggest reading the whole Discworld series again, somebody please slap me upside the head and make me lie down until the desire to tackle the series goes away...

It's also a little disheartening to discover that Terry Pratchett (author of the Discworld books) has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's Disease... although according to him, he has a variant that's apparently "a good one to have" (as far as these things go obviously). And while I know that it's never good when somebody has Alzheimer's, I kinda think it's doubly sad in his case because he's such a talented and witty writer, that it could be stripped away from him is tragic.

I'm also very thankful that I was introduced to LibraryThing (thanks to Tom) the day after the first 100 books... I still don't use it like a normal person (and I haven't listed all of my books under another username), but I did upgrade to "Lifetime Member" recently... not a bad deal at $25...

And yes, anybody being particularly sharp-eyed (and, some would say, obsessive compulsive) will notice that there are some repeats between the first and second hundred books... the Harry Potter series for one, and a couple of the Discworld books... but I said 200 books, not 200 unique titles...

Now we start the third hundred with some Dexter action...

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