The Stranger Beside Me

The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 627 


This book was about Ted Bundy, written by a former coworker, and close acquaintance, Ann Rule. Spoiler alert, he's guilty. What I found most interesting about this book is that Ann Rule was a crime writer before she met Bundy, and was hired to write this book before it came out that Bundy was a suspect. Now, I don't know how I feel about it. I feel like the technical sections in this book were more tedious than in Moby Dick. And it seems like a common problem for me in all Ann Rule books that I try to ignore (because it isn't her fault, it's mine), but all the victims run together. There is just a bunch of women's names in close connection, with not much to identify them with, so when they are mentioned later in the book, I find myself flipping back to see which was which. Also, I guess why I didn't like this as much as her other books was there was no suspense. Even the things about Bundy I didn't know before were told in the first couple of chapters. I am sure at the time it was written everyone knew all about him and his escapes and his trials because they had watched them on the news, but the book was written four years before I was born. All I had heard about him were short little snippets here and there. But it was interesting to see the interaction between the two of them, and that unique perspective gives this book something that can't be recreated.

So now, 1,542 pages in 11.5 days. 134 pages per day, I am still ahead of schedule.

1. Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256 
2. Moby Dick; or The Whale - Herman Melville; 870
3. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 1,542 
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick; 1,773
5. Duma Key - Stephen King; 2,384
6. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - Alan Alda; 2,608 
7. Greenwich Killing Time - Kinky Friedman; 2,774
8. Murder in the White House - Margaret Truman; 3,009
9. Dexter in the Dark - Jeff Lindsay; 3,312
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 4,080 
11. The Taking - Dean Koontz; 4,544
12. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; 4,753
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris; 5,025 
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot; 5,761
15. Beloved - Toni Morrison;6,036
16. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne; 6,228
17. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle; 6,368
18. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath; 6,612
19. Gadsby - Ernest Vincent Wright; 6,768
20. Pulp Fiction Selections - L. Ron Hubbard; 7,456
21. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible - James Frey; 7,856
22. Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night -Lewis Grizzard; 8,125
23. The Greek - Pierre Rey; 8,573
24. The Pleasure of my Company - Steve Martin; 8,736
25. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins; 9,200 
26. Possible Side Effects - Augusten Burroughs; 9,504
27. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote; 9,847
28. The Daybreakers - Louis L'Amour; 10,000

Swine Not? and Moby Dick

I will do my best to report on each book as it is read. That being said, the first week of the summer I spent computerless in a cabin in New Mexico, so I am going to do a little catch up and do the first two books finished in this single post.

Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256


First, I have to say I was a little disappointed, because I was hoping a book about a pig would be sillier. In  actuality, it was a book about a normal, single soccer mom raising her two kids and their pet pig. The chapters alternated between the point of view of the pig and one of the children. But it was just a normal family, and fairly normal situations. Not quite what I was expecting. Towards the end of the book the pig teamed up with some pigeons and it started to feel like the book I was hoping for, but it was too little too late.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville; 614


This book was also nothing that I expected, but in a good way. I thought it would be incredibly heavy and boring, an exhausting chore to get through. Not the case.

My high school English teacher once said her dark secret was she got all the way through with a masters in English having never read Moby Dick in its entirety, and I suppose that tainted my view on the book. She talked of how the long anatomical descriptions of whale anatomy and dissection were just too boring and tedious and she never got through them. I never found them to be too much, and plus each chapter is extremely short, so if you get to a part that doesn't particularly interest you, it is over soon. I suppose there are long stretches in it of no action, but I found the descriptions and that kind of thing in it very interesting. And as a bonus, I had heard from different sources that Ahab won and that the whale won, and luckily for me, I couldn't remember which source was credible and which one was my friend who claimed to have read it being a liar, so the suspense was still there.

Averaging 124 pages a day, I am in great shape to finish this list on time. 7 days in, 870 pages down.

1. Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256 
2. Moby Dick; or The Whale - Herman Melville; 870
3. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 1,542 
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick; 1,773
5. Duma Key - Stephen King; 2,384
6. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - Alan Alda; 2,608 
7. Greenwich Killing Time - Kinky Friedman; 2,774
8. Murder in the White House - Margaret Truman; 3,009
9. Dexter in the Dark - Jeff Lindsay; 3,312
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 4,080 
11. The Taking - Dean Koontz; 4,544
12. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; 4,753
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris; 5,025 
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot; 5,761
15. Beloved - Toni Morrison;6,036
16. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne; 6,228
17. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle; 6,368
18. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath; 6,612
19. Gadsby - Ernest Vincent Wright; 6,768
20. Pulp Fiction Selections - L. Ron Hubbard; 7,456
21. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible - James Frey; 7,856
22. Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night -Lewis Grizzard; 8,125
23. The Greek - Pierre Rey; 8,573
24. The Pleasure of my Company - Steve Martin; 8,736
25. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins; 9,200 
26. Possible Side Effects - Augusten Burroughs; 9,504
27. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote; 9,847
28. The Daybreakers - Louis L'Amour; 10,000

256 Pagers

Not much explanation needed, I just noticed a lot of books were 256 pages long, wanted to see if I could make a whole list of them, with the exception of one book being 272 to make it hit the 10,000 page mark. You know, math.

Don't forget my official 10,000 Pages of Summer list can be found on the April 30 post.

256 Pagers

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky 256

The Stickwick Staplers – Bernie Douglas 256

I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! – Bob Newhart 256

Forrest Gump – Winston Groom 256

Gump & Co. –Winston Groom 256

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead – David Shields 256

The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith 256

When Tomorrow Comes – Janette Oke 256

Damned – Chuck Palahniuk 256

Eternals – Neil Gaiman 256

The Songs of Distant – Arthur C. Clarke 256

Folly and Glory – Larry McMurtry 256

A Hole in Juan – Gillian Roberts 256

The Prosecution – Dudley W. Buffa 256

Gonville – Peter Birkenhead 256

Caravan to Vaccares – Alistair MacLean 256

Gunsights – Elmore Leonard 256

Monkey Shrines – Michael Stewart 256

King of the Holly Hop – Les Roberts 256

The Gunslinger – Stephen King 256

The Final Reflection – John M. Ford 256

The Ghost Horse – Les Savage, Jr. 256

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking 256

Elephants Can Remember – Agatha Christie 256

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John LeCarre 256

Code Name Kill Zone – William W. Johnstone 256

A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest J. Gaines 256

All Shots – Susan Conant 256

The Chocolate Pirate Plot – Joanna Carl 256

Butcher Bird – Richard Kadrey 256

The Outcast – Luke Cypher 256

Lord of the Flies – William Golding 256

Holly – Jude Deveraux 256

Mindshadow - J.M. Dillard 256

Tricky Business – Dave Barry 256

The Darwin Awards II – Wendy Northcutt 256

The Final Warning – James Patterson 256

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffery Eugenides 256

The Choice – Nicholas Sparks 256+16

The Short List

Now, keep in mind, these new lists are not my summer reading list, but just various examples I came up with of other reading lists of exactly 10,000 pages, in hopes of others joining in on the project.

This list maybe shouldn't be called the short list, because almost all of these books are long as jank, but the list is short. My goal was to get the 10,000 pages in as few books as possible, this is what I came up with.

Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 1488

Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 1376

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 1408

Battlefield Earth – L. Ron Hubbard 1050

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand 1200

It – Stephen King 1138

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes 1024

Shogun – James Clavell 1152

The Broken Gun – Louis L’Amour 164

Nine books. Not bad! I really wanted to do it with all the books in the list over 1,000 pages, but I couldn't get the numbers to work. Oh well.

And I have no idea why I said long as jank. I know that isn't a real phrase, they aren't even all real words. My apologies.

Don't forget to check the April 30 post for the list I will be tackling this summer.

Classic Women

Well, after I completed my list of 10,000 pages, I thought it would be a neat idea if I came up with various other lists of 10,000 pages worth of books, and then other people of different interests could join in the 10,000 pages of summer without have to figure out the page count or whatever. It probably isn't a neat idea. So, the first list I made was classic books by women authors. Now, I formatted this list a little differently than my main one, I don't know why. It seems so much more confusing this way, but I divided it by author, but the individual page count of each book, and then put a page count for the author, then the running page count. Except the Bronte's, I put a total page count for all Bronte books, not a page count per author. And the last author, the last author I listed two books, but you only have to read one. If you read them both you will go over your page count. I just thought I would be nice and give you a choice. Well, it doesn't doesn't matter I guess, just trust me, it adds up to 10,000.

Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility - 368

Pride and Prejudice - 424

Mansfield Park - 464

Emma - 462

Northanger Abbey - 254

Persuasion - 288

-2260

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre - 624

Shirley - 624

Villette - 672

The Professor - 266

Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights - 412

Anne Bronte

Agnes Grey - 180

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - 496

-3274

*5534

Maria Susanna Cummins

The Lamplighter - 496

*6030

Kate Chopin

The Awakening - 128

*6158

George Eliot

Adam Bede - 346

The Mill on the Floss - 560

Silas Marner - 248

Romola - 648

Felix Holt, the Radical - 308

Middlemarch - 800

Daniel Deronda - 484

-3394

*9,552

M. E. Braddon

The Golden Calf

Or

Birds of Prey 448

10,000

I think most, if not all, of these are in public domain, so you can find them for free online or on your e-reader.

And don't forget you can see my finalized list on the April 30 entry. 

Little Changes

Those of you who were wondering (a.k.a. none of you) if the lack of updates on this page meant I had abandoned it, rest assured, no. That is stupid. This is a page about reading a list of books in the summer. The list was completed and the summer isn't here, there is no reason to post.

That being said, here is a new post. I am removing two books from the list, and adding five, but keeping the page count the same. The first three books are off of the required reading list for the masters program I am starting. (I started the 10,000 Pages of Summer before being accepted into the program, btw.) It just seemed so silly to have this massive reading list that I am supposed to be familiar with, and not including any of it (besides Moby Dick) in this undertaking. The fourth book is there because it is relevant to the direction I would like to take my individual graduate research, and the last book is simply the only book that fit the page counted I needed to keep it at 10,000 that I had actually heard of. 

To add the new books, I had to remove two from the list, Les Miserables and A Collection of H.P. Lovecraft Short Stories. The Lovecraft had to go because when I made the list, I did not realize that it was only available as an eBook, and Doug don't play that game. I mean, I sit in front of electronics almost all day every day. I read books to get away from it. The last thing I want to do is bring electronics into book reading. And Les Mis, I know it is a book I will read one day, but there are two reasons to take it off this list. First, I see absolutely no way I am going to enjoy the book as much as Adam Gibbs says I will. It just sounds so boring. And maybe I am being unfair to the book, but I have read the synopsis, I know the plot and themes, and it is just not the kind of thing I can see myself taking interest in. Second, when I got home with my copy of it, I noticed the title page contained the word "abridged." And if I was already dreading having to devote my time and attention to the book in my hand, I couldn't imagine having an unabridged, longer version in my hand and having to read that.


And last thing, this is another one of those weird times where instead of looking for the version of the book with the biggest page count, I actually went for the smallest one. I actually could have grabbed these five books at over 600 more pages, but I couldn't make the numbers on the first four come out to exactly the page count to keep with the 10,000 (even though I did come within five pages of it), so I went with the smallest page count for each one to have enough pages left over to add a decent book to the list to keep the 10,000 pages. 


14. Middlemarch - George Eliot (736 pgs) There are only two things I know about this book. 1.) It is on my required reading list. 2.) Despite being named George, the author is a woman. And not named George.

15. Beloved - Toni Morrison (275 pgs) Again, I just have basic knowledge of this book besides the fact that it is required reading and written by a woman.

16. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne (192 pgs)  It feels weird that this book is on the required reading list for my masters degree, and it was also required reading when I was a sophomore in high school. But, despite that, I am not breaking my "no reading a book I have already read" rule, because in high school, I just read the Cliffs Notes.

17. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle (140 pgs) Planning on doing my independent research on the Robin Hood legend, and I can't really compare the old stuff to the latter if I haven't read the latter.

18. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (244 pgs) I am actually somewhat familiar with Plath. Having said that, I know her life story and I know of her poetry. But when it comes to the content of this book, I really don't know much. That being said, if it is not literally about a jar full of bells, I am going to throw a hiss fit.


And what I am pretty sure is the final reading list....


1. Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256 
2. Moby Dick; or The Whale - Herman Melville; 870
3. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 1,542 
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick; 1,773
5. Duma Key - Stephen King; 2,384
6. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - Alan Alda; 2,608 
7. Greenwich Killing Time - Kinky Friedman; 2,774
8. Murder in the White House - Margaret Truman; 3,009
9. Dexter in the Dark - Jeff Lindsay; 3,312
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 4,080 
11. The Taking - Dean Koontz; 4,544
12. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; 4,753
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris; 5,025 
14. Middlemarch - George Eliot; 5,761
15. Beloved - Toni Morrison;6,036
16. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne; 6,228
17. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle; 6,368
18. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath; 6,612
19. Gadsby - Ernest Vincent Wright; 6,768
20. Pulp Fiction Selections - L. Ron Hubbard; 7,456
21. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible - James Frey; 7,856
22. Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night -Lewis Grizzard; 8,125
23. The Greek - Pierre Rey; 8,573
24. The Pleasure of my Company - Steve Martin; 8,736
25. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins; 9,200 
26. Possible Side Effects - Augusten Burroughs; 9,504
27. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote; 9,847
28. The Daybreakers - Louis L'Amour; 10,000

First Change

Adam Gibbs dropped his recommendation of The Sound and the Fury, so I am dropping it from the list. Mainly, because he said it might be a low point of my summer, and he is still insisting that I will love Les Miserables. So, I am replacing it with a Dean Koontz book. Well, I didn't have a lot of choices, as I had to choose a book with the same page count. Never read Koontz before, hoping it will be fast read and really keep my attention.

The corrected list:

1. Swine Not? - Jimmy Buffett; 256
2. Moby Dick; or The Whale - Herman Melville; 870
3. The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule; 1,542 
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick; 1,773
5. Duma Key - Stephen King; 2,384
6. Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - Alan Alda; 2,608 
7. Greenwich Killing Time - Kinky Friedman; 2,774
8. Murder in the White House - Margaret Truman; 3,009
9. Dexter in the Dark - Jeff Lindsay; 3,312
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky; 4,080
11. The Taking - Dean Koontz; 4,544
12. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe; 4,753
13. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris; 5,025
14. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo; 6,401
15. A Collection of H.P. Lovecraft Short Stories - H.P. Lovecraft; 6,612 
16. Gadsby - Ernest Vincent Wright; 6,768
17. Pulp Fiction Selections - L. Ron Hubbard; 7,456
18. The Final Testament of the Holy Bible - James Frey; 7,856
19. Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night -Lewis Grizzard; 8,125
20. The Greek - Pierre Rey; 8,573
21. The Pleasure of my Company - Steve Martin; 8,736
22. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Tom Robbins; 9,200
23. Possible Side Effects - Augusten Burroughs; 9,504
24. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote; 9,847
25. The Daybreakers - Louis L'Amour; 10,000