I thought I was doing a pretty good job making sure I was reading and getting books crossed off all my various lists, but then I looked again. I made a goal to read 20 books from my 94-book challenge and 20 books that aren't a part of the challenge this year, and as of a couple weeks ago I'd read 6 books from my 94-book challenge and 8 books that aren't...in case you're as bad at math as me, that means as of a couple weeks ago I had read 14 books out of the 40 I had wanted to read. And it's May. That's not really looking promising. It's important to point out that I went into this goal of 40 books this year knowing that it was a complete shot in the dark; I had no idea what a reasonable goal for me was, and I didn't want to set the bar too low. So I want to be realistic and it's not necessary to kill myself to reach my own goal...but let's be serious. I can up my game a little bit. I choose TV a lot when I could very easily choose a book instead. So that's what I'm trying to do. Also, I sat down and wrote out specific books I want to read during the rest of the year, making the blueprint just a little bit easier to follow. Again, not set in stone and I want to be realistic about all my expectations, but this is helping already.
Now that all of that's out of the way...I read a book this weekend.
The next book in James Patterson's Middle School series, My Brother is a Big, Fat, Liar, is told by a different character than the others. Author, artist, and narrator of the first two books, The Worst Years of My Life and Get Me Out of Here, is Rafe Khatchedorian, trouble-maker and prankster, but this third book is written by his little sister Georgia. She's entering middle school as a sixth grader, and despite the fact that she has a life-long record of straight As and being the perfect student, all her teachers and principals give up on her once they hear she's Rafe's sister. Her typical sixth grade struggle to find new friends and find her way with newer, tougher classes is made so much harder by having to live up to her brother's choices instead of her own. Meanwhile, the clique of "princesses" that rule the social ladder of the school go out of their way to tease her publicly. It seems that no matter what she does or how hard she tries to prove herself, she just proves everyone right instead.
It's really fun to get a different perspective in this series; you still get Rafe as a main character, but told through the eyes of his little sister who thinks he's a smelly bully. Patterson thinks outside the box a little and it's really cute. I also think it was a smart choice to potentially bring some girls into the genre of diary-style books, since they seem to be pretty boy-heavy. Other than that, I have a lot of the same kinds of things to say about it as the others: cute, super easy read, witty and charming and mildly surprising at times.
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