What I've read and what I'm Reading

Last night I finished reading Stardust by Neil Gaiman. This was the third book I've read of his and I really enjoyed it. He has such a great imagination. Stardust is about Tristran Thorn, a teenager who's in love with a girl named Victoria Forester. One night, as they are talking, a star falls from the sky and Victoria tells Tristran that he can have anything he wants from her (a kiss or marriage) if he can manage to capture that very star for her. So Tristran sets out on a quest to find the star and he ends up in a magical land called Fairie. There he encounters ghosts and witches and other magical characters, and of course they are numerous conflicts for him to overcome.

Stardust was the perfect book to read along with another book I'm currently reading: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Safran Foer is the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close(I read this last year and gave it five stars) and Everything is Illuminated, which is on my TBR list. As far as I know, Eating Animals is his first non-fiction work. In it he describes, in great detail, the evils of factory farming. He doesn't gloss over anything; he's very explicit about exactly how cruelly animals are treated and ultimately slaughtered. I knew most of the facts he points out but I was shocked to find out what happens to male chickens that are not used for meat. I would have to say that if I hadn't become a vegetarian two years ago I'd become one now, and I'm only on page 73. The book is so intense and upsetting that I can't read it for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time and that's why it helps to read something lighter and less depressing at the same time.

This morning I started reading a book called Anthropology of An American Girl by Hillary Thayer Hamann. The book was originally self-published in 2003 and supposedly had a "cult following." It was recently revised and re-edited and now has been published by Random House. It's a coming of age novel that takes place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The heroine of the novel is only two or three years older than me and is supposedly filled with cultural references, so for me it will be like taking a trip back in time to when I was a teenager. I wonder if I will identify with her. I've only read the first 28 pages but so far it seems like I'll like it.