Book: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story by Annabelle Gurwitch, Jeff Kahn

While the other book I read about relationships, Love is a Four Letter Word, made me feel optimistic, this book made me feel depressed. I'm not really sure what spurred the authors to write a book about their lives, but I didn't really learn much other than some people are hard to live with and won't change and you'll never ceased to be annoyed by it. Maybe that was the lesson.

Goodreads

Book count: 22
Movie count: 11
Other media: 9

Book: Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts by Michael Taeckens

I really liked this collection of stories. I like collections of stories. Not usually themed collections, but this was good. I think themed collections work better for nonfiction than fiction. Which apparently is called a collection of essays, not stories, despite the title of this book.

Goodreads

Book count: 22
Movie count: 11
Other media: 9

Other media: Webcomic: Oglaf

I've been seeing Oglaf strips all over for a while now and so I finally decided to sit down and read through all of the archives. Time well spent.

 http://oglaf.com/


Book count: 21
Movie count: 11
Other media: 9

Book: A Dog's Purpose

I mostly read this book out of obligation because it was bought for me. The Help excluded, I usually try to avoid books that are on the best seller shelf at grocery stores. I thought that the writing of this book was rather cheesy, but this book can claim to be the only thing I've read that's made me bawl, so I guess the cheese works.

I found a few things problematic with this book, but I think the main one is the author's interpretation of reincarnation. After being reincarnated the dog has all of its memories from its past lives, however when it's born the first time it has no memories. I don't understand where it came from the first time, since if reincarnation exists, surely there is no shortage of dogs to reincarnate. Also, apparently the dog continues to be reincarnated until it achieves its purpose, which is not to save people as a police dog, but to bring happiness to one specific person. That's pretty specific. What are the odds that the dog is reborn in the same area? Dogs are all over the world, how does this dog keep being born in America? That seems like a weird way for reincarnation to work. I think it would have been a really interesting story for the dog to be reborn all over the world and to explore how dogs are treated in different cultures. Or different time periods; maybe the dog could have started in the Wild West and ended in the current time. I'd read that.

Goodreads

Book count: 21
Movie count: 11
Other media: 8

Book: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

This book was really long. I would have never been able to read it if not for ebook format!
I liked this book, as I enjoy all of Murakami's. I think that the plot complexity was a perfect balance between being too complex and hard to keep up with and being complex enough to keep the story going and my attention for the whole book.

Goodreads

Book count: 20
Movie count: 11
Other media: 8

Book: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

I thought this book was great, although at times, or maybe throughout the entire book, it was very one-sided. Obviously a book about introverts is going to mention scientific finding that say that introversion is perfectly acceptable and even superior. However, I feel like a lot of the book could have been written for extroverts too, complete with scientific studies proclaiming extroversion to be superior. Also, I would have much preferred footnotes or superscripts to indicate references or something like that instead of putting all the references for one chapter together. There were definitely studies mentioned that I would have liked to know more about that I couldn't find in the endnotes, which bothered me a bit.

Goodreads


Book count: 19
Movie count: 11
Other media: 8

Other: Daria seasons 1-5

I love Daria. I had seen a lot of Daria episodes on cable tv in high school, but I hadn't realized that I had watched almost every episode of every season. Even though it was my second time seeing most episodes, I still found them all very enjoyable. If only my high school experience was a great as Daria's.
I'm counting each season as one entity for my 'other media' tally.

imdb

Book count: 18
Movie count: 11
Other media: 8

Movie: Young Adult

I heard a lot about this movie from a lot of sources saying how great it was, so I think maybe I had my expectations too high. Or also I think that maybe I'm a few years too young to appreciate the story. Also, I read an article about how this movie was very successful at including a lot of product placements, which I'm not really a fan of, so that maybe contributed to my not really liking this movie.

imdb

Book count: 18
Movie count: 11
Other media: 3