First, I've had serious internal conflict about whether I should keep numbering my books or start again with the new year. Ultimately, I've decided to start again. However, I shall record the total number for 2013 here so that when I'm 109 I can get one of my great-great-grandchildren to add all of the numbers from each year of my life together and tell me that I read a lot.
2013 book total = 29
The first book I finished in 2014 is Under the Banner of Heaven. This is my third Krakauer book, as I previously read Into Thin Air and Into the Wild long ago in 2013. I loved those books. This one was good for like 150 pages, and then I loathed it more and more as I read.
This is part where I was going to link to my notes on the other two books, but when I went to find them on my blog I couldn't, which means I don't think I counted them, which means I didn't count all my books, which means when I'm 109 my great-great-grandchildren will be dealing with inaccurate numbers. Crap.
Anyway, Under the Banner of Heaven advertises itself quite dramatically: "On July 24, 1984, a woman and her infant daughter were murdered by two brothers who believed they were ordered to kill by God. The roots of their crime lie deep in the history of an American religion practiced by millions..."
Sounds all murdery and suspenseful, right?
Since I love a good murder book, one linked to something so crazy as "God said to" seemed awesome. But this book was about 15% murder and 85% history of Mormondom. It was interesting for about 150 pages. Then I was bored, but I was too far in to put the book down, so I plowed through like the dedicated reader that I am, complaining about it all the while. In early 2013 I read The 19th Wife, which is sort-of-fiction-sort-of-not, so I already knew a lot of the Mormon scandal stuff and was not intrigued for too long when I read all about it again in this book.
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