44 / 50 (88.0%)

I really thought I'd have more than this by now, but c'est la vie...

Book #42 was Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown

From the Publisher:

Now Rita Mae Brown, author of the bestselling classic Rubyfruit Jungle, returns with her most wonderfully irreverent and thoroughly entertaining novel yet. What happens when a wildly successful Southern belle inadvertently tells the truth about her life to her family, her friends, her lover, and herself? At thirty-five, Mary Frazier Armstrong, called "Frazier" by friends and enemies alike, is a sophisticated green-eyed blonde with a thriving art gallery, a healthy bank balance, and an enviable social position. In fact, she has everything to live for, but she's lying in a hospital bed with a morphine drip in her arm and a life expectancy measured in hours. "Don't die a stranger" Mandy Eisenhart, her assistant at the gallery, says on her last hospital visit. "Tell the people you love who you are, or write them." And so, as her last act here on earth, Frazier writes letters to her closest family and friends, telling them exactly what she thinks of them and, since she will be dead by the time they receive the letters, the truth about herself: She's gay. The letters are sent. Then the manure hits the fan in Charlottesville, Virginia ... because Frazier Armstrong wakes up the next morning to hear her doctor explaining that it's all been a mistake. Frazier can look forward to a long, happy life. But if this formerly dutiful daughter isn't dying, she certainly seems to be facing a descent into hell: Her mother, Libby, committee woman extraordinaire,is throwing a hissy fit; her best friend, the gay hunk Billy Cicero, is cutting her dead; her former lover, Ann, is having hysterics now that "everyone is going to know"; and her gorgeous, charming brother Carter whose two favorite activities are getting drunk and getting laid, is gleefully spreading the word that his can-do-no-wrong sister is a dyke. Yet Frazier soon realizes she's spent her whole life steeling herself against people, and hiding - and not just because she is gay.

Book #43 was The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in Nineteenth Century America  by Martha Hodes

From the Publisher:

Hodes reconstructs the intriguing and unusual life of Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly. a mill laborer in mid-19th-century New England who went South with her husband to seek their fortune; homesick, even as her husband fought for the Confederacy, she returned to New Hampshire, where she was reduced to working as a washerwoman. The only thing that brought an impoverished Eunice respectability was her white skin. But then she heard of her husband's death, and in 1869, mystifying some of her relatives, Connolly put that respectability at risk, too, marrying a well-to-do black sea captain from Grand Cayman Island and moving there with him. Hodes, a historian at NYU (White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South), relies on a rich cache of Connolly's letters, which are housed at Duke University. Unfortunately, the letters don't reveal how Connolly met her second husband or explain in depth why she decided to marry him. Hodes's prose, though sometimes a bit affected ("In place of fiction, I offer the craft of history, assisted by the art of speculation"), is lucid and her account is engaging, though for readers steeped in the subject not pathbreaking; what Hodes has to tell us about the 19th century-that race was socially constructed and complicated, for example-is nothing new. 


Book #44 was Survivor by Chuck Palahnuik

From the Publisher:

From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor.
"A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --Newsday
"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.
Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak. 

OMG funny. Funny funny funny. This made me laugh harder than anything I'd read in a very long time. It's dark, and snarky, and not for the easily offended. Fortunately, as a scholar of religion, I love religious satire. If you take your faith life too seriously, this is probably not a book for you. But if you want a quick read that will keep you giggling until the final page, this is your book. I loved the fact that the pages are reverse numbered, counting down Tender Branson's story until the last page, Page 1. Tender's voice is believeable, not necessarily likeable, but believable. No matter how bizarre the shit he's telling you, you buy it -- because he's so genuine and deadpan. This is my first Palahniuk novel, and I'm going back for more.