The 50 Book Challenge: #s 17-20

So I'm up to what, 20 now for the year? I finished The Second Summer of the Sisterhood and Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. Ann Brashares books are like the WB, only on the page. They're full of angst ridden but spicy teenagers who are strong willed and independent, but still tender and troubled. Perfect for a girl who can't seem to focus on the television but really misses One Tree Hill. Highly recommended girlie reading; I can't wait for the movie -- honestly.

I also finished J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, which I felt was not one of his better books. Coetzee's one of my favourite writers. One of the writers where I'll only read one of his books every couple of years because I'm afraid of running out and if I don't have his words in my life, it's just not the same. But this book was too heady, told from a very strange perspective and in a very odd manner -- not that his books have ever had a straight forward sense of narrative, but I just couldn't get into it at all.

Finally, I read a fabulous book yesterday called Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. It's a book that's doing gangbusters in the US, but I don't know if the buzz has carried its way up here yet or not. In tone it's kind of like Catcher in the Rye or, more recently, A Complicated Kindness, but it's not as well-written as Toews novel. It's an engaging story about a complex yet perfectly ordinary girl who pushes herself to attend boarding school. It's a coming of age tale that haunts you after you've finished reading, but only because you know some daft Hollywood producer's going to come along and decide they'll make a movie out of it and fail miserably.