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2019 Books

January 13th, 2020 by pladd

I read 315 books in 2019, so I’m going to just do one wrap up post instead of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of previous years. Here’s the genre breakdown:

Best Fiction: The Dead Queen’s Club by Hannah Capin

This is a modern day YA retelling of Henry VIII set in a high school and it goes so much harder than you would ever expect. PEOPLE DIE, okay. A lot more historical references than I expected; I loved it. I wasn’t the only one either: it made NPR’s Best of 2019 list!

Best Nonfiction: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

I read this book back in June, but I still think about it all the time. The medical chapters, especially, are infuriating, but I can see the evidence all around me.

Best Fantasy: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

Hard call between this and Return of the King, but I think I enjoyed this more because it was stories I didn’t already know. I read a lot of good fantasy this year, but it’s pretty hard to compete with the defining work of the genre. Plus, The Silmarillion has a surprising amount of badass lady stories.

Best Historical: The entire Clash of Eagles trilogy by Alan Smale

Is it cheating picking an alt history series for “best historical fiction”? I don’t even care; this was way more interesting and well-researched than any other historical novel I read this year. It takes place in the 1200s, when the Roman Empire, which never fell, tries to invade North America, and gets its ass handed to it by the Native Americans, specifically the Mississippian mound builders of Cahokia.

Best Cover: The Tea Dragon Society by Kate O’Neill

This book (and its sequel) are so adorable and imaginative! I love the art and, of course, all the tea.

Worst Cover: A Mermaid’s Kiss by Joey W. Hill

I read this for a book club whose theme was “terrible cover” and I found it by googling “romance novels with bad covers”. It was also a fairly ridiculous book, about an angel and a mermaid finding love despite what should be insurmountable physical and environmental problems. Luckily she can shape change. As you do. Steven refers to this as “the mermangel book” and it prompted me to go to book club in costume:

I would say that’s me set for Halloween, but you know I could never compile just ONE costume a year

Worst Book: Dying to Decorate by Cyndy Salzmann

This book definitely suffered from the expectations it built based on the cover and title. DYING to Decorate?? Clearly this is some kind of interior decorator-themed murder mystery, right? NO! NO ONE DIES! There isn’t even a mystery! A group of moms renovate an old house, remind each other about Civil War history facts, and debate whether the Underground Railroad was a good thing because “slavery was wrong, but so is disobeying the law”. BIG YIKES, Cyndy.

Anyway, it was a good year in books, overall. Here are some more charts because I keep a book spreadsheet that just spits them out for me anyway:

All the half-star spots are blank because I DON’T DO THINGS BY HALF MEASURES, okay

To the surprise of literally no one, the majority of my books come from the library. The “Free” category is mostly Project Gutenberg, and “Owned before 2019” is so popular because I specifically had to read at least one of those a month as part of my goals. Most of them were Steven’s about Ancient Rome.

I read a total of 4 books over 700 pages: a guidebook to Japan I got at the library book sale (904), The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon (827), The Histories by Herodotus (716), and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1474).

The percent of digital books seems high to me, but I suppose I usually have at least one checked out on Libby from the library for reading when I’m waiting somewhere.

I don’t know what happened in March, but the August-September lull is definitely when I was trying to finish A Suitable Boy, the nearly 1500-page monster.

I wasn’t especially trying to read mostly female authors, but I’m pleased with this result.

Excited for another year in books! If you too would like a bunch of ridic charts about your reading, check out Book Riot’s Reading spreadsheet. I’m never looking back.

Previously: 2018 in books

Tagged: 2019 books, books, charts

Posted in Book Reviews |

Theatrically Released Animated Disney Movies

February 25th, 2014 by pladd

For some reason, I found myself looking at Wikipedia’s list of all theatrically-released animated Disney movies the other day, and decided I needed to rank the ones I’d seen. There are 58 of them (and 47 more I haven’t seen), and I ranked them kind of haphazardly, by going through and asking for each “Okay, is this better than that?” until I’d made a list. Some of them are tricky, because the plot’s pretty crappy but the animation is beautiful or I really like the songs. Others I’m pretty sure have earned their spots only through nostalgia. Here’s the Top 10:

1. Frozen (2013; Walt Disney)
2. Mulan (1998; Walt Disney)
3. Spirited Away (2002; Studio Ghibli)
4. Beauty and the Beast (1991; Walt Disney)
5. Emperor’s New Groove (2000; Walt Disney)
6. Aladdin (1992; Walt Disney)
7. Finding Nemo (2003; Pixar)
8. The Little Mermaid (1989; Walt Disney)
9. Hercules (1997; Walt Disney)
10. Howl’s Moving Castle (2005; Studio Ghibli)

It was interesting to me that a lot of them are from right around the same time period. Is that because Disney was the most skilled then? Or because I was the right age? Obviously there are outliers, like Frozen at #1 and the original Fantasia from 1940 ranking pretty high at #23 (see full list at the end). I made a graph scatter plotting release dates with my rankings and you can see most of the top ones are clustered in the post-1985 range, although that’s also when Disney increased their output, and acquired other studios like Pixar and Ghibli.

Interestingly, the worst ranked movie is from 1985

Here’s the bottom 10:

49. Sleeping Beauty (1959; Walt Disney)
50. Ponyo (2009; Studio Ghibli)
51. Dumbo (1941; Walt Disney)
52. A Goofy Movie (1995; DisneyToon)
53. Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1998; Hyperion)
54. Pinocchio (1940; Walt Disney)
55. Bambi (1942; Walt Disney)
56. Tarzan (1999; Walt Disney)
57. Doug’s First Movie (1999; DisneyToon)
58. The Black Cauldron (1985; Walt Disney)

If anything, it’s harder for me to decide the worst than the best, maybe because my reasons for disliking a movie are more varied. In the end, The Black Cauldron beat out all crappy contenders by having a lot of the same problems of plot, characters, and art style but also trying to cram 5 books into one movie. Five books that I kind of really like, especially at the time I first saw this film. You can imagine the disappointment. Child-Me had not yet come to terms with the fact that movie adaptions of books you like are often fraught with terribleness, but this movie helped teach her that lesson, I guess.

You might also notice that this bottom list is more varied in terms of studio responsible than the top list. I was interested in that too, and if there was a correlation between studio and quality. The comparison is a little unfair, of course, since Walt Disney Studios has produced 37 of the films on this list, while the next most prolific, Pixar, only has 10.

Films on this list produced by each studio

Still, I thought it would be illustrative, so here are the average rankings of each studio on the list (out of 58, remember)

The results aren’t surprising

DisneyToon makes a terrible showing, partly because there are only 2 films it produced, and both are on the bottom ten. Studio Ghibli is a clear winner, even with the terribleness of Ponyo weighing it down from #50. Walt Disney Studios, where the bulk of these are coming from, is sitting comfortably in the middle. Because, sure, it’s got its Frozen and Mulan, but it also has The Black Cauldron and Tarzan weighing it down.

Here’s the full list: Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: charts, disney, movies

Posted in lists |

November Apology

November 16th, 2012 by pladd

It’s time again for my annual November Apology for being bad at updating. I like to blame NaNoWriMo for this, but recent evidence suggests the problem goes further back. For instance, of the 14 years I’ve kept a journal, November is easily my least prolific month. May, the month during which I’ve written the most entries, has twice as many.

Of course I made a chart, do you even know me?

In fact, of the seven days on which I have never written a journal entry, 3 (or 43%) are in November:

Also a bunch of them are on the 6th for some reason.

So clearly this problem dates back to 1998, way before I ever heard of NaNoWriMo. Incidentally, since I know you’re curious, the date I’ve written the most journal entries (7) on, is a tie between February 6th and October 17th:

Anyway, this year is my 5th doing NaNoWriMo, so it’s a little less exciting. I write a lot, so I’m pretty good at churning out the required word limit every day. I decided to try to spice things up by writing a Pick Your Own Adventure novel, complete with so many grisly death scenes. This is more complicated and confusing, but actually makes it easier to write a lot of words. I’m already three days ahead.

The green bar is James

He was ahead of me, until the third day, and then never regained his lead. YOU CAN DO IT JAMES JUST GOTTA BELIEVE IN YOURSELF! In case you don’t remember why this is important:

Come on, James, if you can learn the Hoedown Throwdown, you can do this

Anyway, in the meantime, I managed to make a peach slump:

Peach and berry!

Slumps are kind of weird. I like that they don’t require an oven, and therefore seem like less work, but the way the biscuit topping is steamed in the pot on top of the fruit instead of baked gives it a weird consistency that Steven hated and I was just kind of meh about. Probably will not be slumping it again!

Also, this is the tree outside my window right now!!!

Fall!!! I love you!!!

So, yeah, I have stuff going on. Expect reports on how I am still MASTER OF MY OWN THANKSGIVING soon!

Tagged: archivery, baking, charts, James Fox, journals, nanowrimo

Posted in Food, Let Me Tell You About My Life |

Ten Years of Journals

June 7th, 2012 by pladd

I’ve kept a journal semi-regularly since 1998. Well, except for most of 2001, whose absence I can’t really explain:

Of course I have a spreadsheet about this, why would you even ask?

They’re kind of a weird resource, because they’re definitely biased towards the bad parts of life. It’s way more cathartic to vent about why you’re mad or sad than record in loving detail funny conversations with your friends, so I really think anyone reading them through would probably think I was manic depressive and really unpleasant to be around. Which is totally not the case, right?

I started the project of transcribing them into searchable word documents December 27, 2004. I know the exact date because, duh, I wrote this in my journal:

12/27/04: I’ve begun typing in my journals starting with sixth grade and have decided that I was pretty much an idiot.

Harsh, High School Patricia. I mean, look at this:

5/26/99: . Lisa is a BUTT! She stole my new birthday pen and wrote on the wall with it. Then she tried to put it in her trapper and messed up the feathers. I found it in math. It didn’t work because part of the paint got stuck in it or something.

Trapper keepers, feathered pens, AND calling someone a butt in all caps? Sometimes I just can’t take how awesome I have always been.

Anyway, now that I’ve completed transcribing about 10 years and 12 journals worth, I decided to make some exciting charts! Simply counting the number of times a word appears isn’t really accurate since some journals are a lot longer than others, so all these figures are based on the average number of instances of the word per page per journal. Steven’s overall total was 0.6 mentions per page, which is pretty good since I only met him in Journal 7.

Apparently I briefly knew another Steven in middle school

Looks like I was in the worst mood in 2004. I wonder how many of those are just “I hate college applications” over and over. Journal 8 was during the first year of college, so I’m sure that’s all “I love college! None of my professors take attendance!” or “OMG diary, I love the servery so much, I’m sure I will never get sick of amazing recycled cereal dessert it is THE BEST!”

Like any period of change and excitement, first year of college also marks a dramatic increase in uncertainty and stress:

“I will maybe probably have no friends 🙁 I’m really worried about it”

The sharp climb in worry at Journal 12 represents the 2 months I spent at home before going to Scotland for study abroad. It’s also the time period I was most prolific, since I didn’t have much to do but write pages every day about how freaked out I was to be going, how being gone for a semester would probably mean I would lose all my friends, and how–I kid you not–I was probably going to freeze to death.

1/24/08: I don’t know who Rachel and I will live with next year! How am I supposed to figure this out an ocean away? Whatever, I guess it won’t matter when I freeze to death walking to Scottish class. And then there’ll just be all these guys in kilts laughing at me while I can’t move because I’m encased in a solid block of ice, at the mercy of the harsh highland yeti bears.

Yeah, Scotland totally did not live up to these expectations. Unfortunately. Because I would love to get a picture with a Highland Yeti Bear.

In the midst of tracking instances of worry and stress, I also recorded what category of thing I was freaking out about to make this colorful pie chart:

High school Patricia really threw off this curve where “school” is concerned

Three journals from now “the future” will be dwarfing the other pie slices, just wait.

And, since this is the kind of thing I do, here is a wordle made from the transcripts of all 12 journals:

It’s weird to me that “French” is almost as big as “English”

Although now that I think about it, most high school drama I recorded probably went down in French class, so that makes sense. Individual journal wordles after the cut: Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: charts, High School Patricia, journals, Middle School, Rice, wordle

Posted in Uncategorized |