Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Guess What I've Been Doing All This Time?
Let's just say my husband and friends were not thrilled to carry thirty boxes of books into a truck, then out of a truck and up the stairs to their new shelves. Oops.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
For True Jane Austen Fans
I've been Pinteresting a lot of Pride and Prejudice funnies lately, so I tried to find some Emma or Northanger Abbey funnies, and found...nothing. Zip! It's like 90% of "Jane Austen"-related conversations are about Pride and Prejudice. Well, true Jane Austen fans know that she wrote other great books! So I bring you this meme in honor of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Review of The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey
What is a starred review? Seriously, aren't they all "starred"? I don't know a single book review site that allows you to give a book a 0 star rating. So by definition, all the reviews are starred. The back of this book though, Rick Yancey's The Infinite Sea, features three "starred reviews" that praise the first book in this seriously awesome series, The 5th Wave. "Amazing!" "Gripping!" "A Sure Thing!"
And okay, they do not lie. This is a damned good series so far. I don't have any free time (really, I don't), but I just sat down with this book and read it in about five hours. Should I have spent five hours reading? Probably not.
Definitely not.
Could I have stopped?
Not a chance.
The Infinite Sea is the second book in an absolutely must-read YA sci-fi series. You will not be disappointed. Aliens, mind games, twists, unforgettable characters - it's all there. And you know how second books in a series tend to feel a little disappointing? Like, it's good, but it's not as good as the first book . . . wrong! The Infinite Sea is just as good as The 5th Wave. It even answers some questions we've had since the beginning, some really important questions - which second books in series rarely do. Second books often feel like watered-down bridges that are just getting you to the third book, in which the real important stuff happens. Not The Infinite Sea. There's a considerable amount of progress, many questions get answered, many things are discovered - but don't worry! There's still plenty left over for the third book. Not everything adds up yet. You still need to know what happens next.
I still need to know what happens next.
Excellent work, Mr. Yancey.
Consider this a 5-starred review.
And okay, they do not lie. This is a damned good series so far. I don't have any free time (really, I don't), but I just sat down with this book and read it in about five hours. Should I have spent five hours reading? Probably not.
Definitely not.
Could I have stopped?
Not a chance.
The Infinite Sea is the second book in an absolutely must-read YA sci-fi series. You will not be disappointed. Aliens, mind games, twists, unforgettable characters - it's all there. And you know how second books in a series tend to feel a little disappointing? Like, it's good, but it's not as good as the first book . . . wrong! The Infinite Sea is just as good as The 5th Wave. It even answers some questions we've had since the beginning, some really important questions - which second books in series rarely do. Second books often feel like watered-down bridges that are just getting you to the third book, in which the real important stuff happens. Not The Infinite Sea. There's a considerable amount of progress, many questions get answered, many things are discovered - but don't worry! There's still plenty left over for the third book. Not everything adds up yet. You still need to know what happens next.
I still need to know what happens next.
Excellent work, Mr. Yancey.
Consider this a 5-starred review.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
I'm Not Getting Any Younger: A Reading Challenge
When you go to the bookstore, or the library, or browse books online, are there certain books you notice over and over again and keep saying "Wow, I really need to read this, it's a classic! Everyone else has read this! It's supposed to be amazing! I really need to remember to read it this year"? I do this all the time. I majored in English in college, and even though I graduated two years ago, I still feel like it's my duty to read all the great classics. Well, all the interesting-looking ones anyway (aka all the ones not written by Charles Dickens, whose Great Expectations almost destroyed my love for reading in the 9th grade).
I just feel like I'm missing out on something big. So I'm making a list of all the major classics I want to read, and I vow to read at least 5 of them per year. Yes, I know, that's a very modest goal, but I have two jobs and am a stay-at-home mom, so cut me some slack! I'm being realistic.
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Watership Down by Richard Adams
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in Spanish)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (!!! No, I haven't read it!)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Into the Wild by John Krakauer
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
How many of these classics have you read? Are any of these also on your TBR list?
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Review of The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle
The Accident Season
by Moira Fowley-Doyle
Release date: August 18, 2015
Kathy Dawson Books, 304 pages
Source: Penguin's First to Read eGalley
The short of it:
Buried beneath a haze of magic and mystery lies a secret story that too many people know all too well. Spooky and sensual, The Accident Season is a must-read not just for lovers of the paranormal, but also for readers of contemporary YA fiction.
The long of it:
The Accident Season has something I don't see a lot in YA Lit: magical realism. While the novel was a pleasure to read as a supernatural mystery, what really bumped it an extra .5 stars for me was that underneath all the magic was the kernel of an ugly, all-too-real, truth. I won't say anything more, as slowly figuring out this truth was even more interesting to me as a reader than trying to figure out if the magic was real or if Cara was crazy.
The Accident Season is spooky and magical at every turn; somehow even the rhythm of the words is haunting, reminiscent of a chant. Main character Cara's life seems to exist outside everyone else's reality, replete with changelings, witches, Tarot cards, secrets collected by girls everyone forgets, red buttons in haunted houses, and of course, accidents that may not be accidents at all.
For US readers, the foreign Irish setting will lend a certain allure to the novel, and complement the feeling that magic is just at the edges of your vision, lurking in the shadows of the trees and the whispering of the river.
I think one of the things that really intrigued me about The Accident Season is that it didn't come out and say it's a paranormal mystery, but instead sort of danced around the subject, leaving so many possibilities open as to the origin of the accident season. I couldn't tell if "haunting" meant it was going to be a ghost story, because the accidents sounded like a fairy thing, and maybe there were witches too - and then I realized that it didn't matter to me what creature was responsible, because the story already appealed to me.
My rating? 4.5 out of 5 stars
by Moira Fowley-Doyle
Release date: August 18, 2015
Kathy Dawson Books, 304 pages
Source: Penguin's First to Read eGalley
"For fans of We Were Liars and How I Live Now comes a haunting, sexy, magically realistic debut
about a famiy caught between a violent history, a taboo romance, and the mysteries lurking in their own backyard.
Every October Cara and her family become inexplicably and unavoidably accident-prone. Some years it's bad, like the season when her father died, and some years it's just a lot of cuts and scrapes. This accident season--when Cara, her ex-stepbrother, Sam, and her best friend, Bea, are 17--is going to be a bad one. But not for the reasons they think.
Cara is about to learn that not all the scars left by the accident season are physical: There's a long-hidden family secret underneath the bumps and bruises. This is the year Cara will finally fall desperately in love, when she'll start discovering the painful truth about the adults in her life, and when she'll uncover the dark origins of the accident season--whether she’s ready or not."- from Goodreads.com
The short of it:
Buried beneath a haze of magic and mystery lies a secret story that too many people know all too well. Spooky and sensual, The Accident Season is a must-read not just for lovers of the paranormal, but also for readers of contemporary YA fiction.
The long of it:
The Accident Season has something I don't see a lot in YA Lit: magical realism. While the novel was a pleasure to read as a supernatural mystery, what really bumped it an extra .5 stars for me was that underneath all the magic was the kernel of an ugly, all-too-real, truth. I won't say anything more, as slowly figuring out this truth was even more interesting to me as a reader than trying to figure out if the magic was real or if Cara was crazy.
The Accident Season is spooky and magical at every turn; somehow even the rhythm of the words is haunting, reminiscent of a chant. Main character Cara's life seems to exist outside everyone else's reality, replete with changelings, witches, Tarot cards, secrets collected by girls everyone forgets, red buttons in haunted houses, and of course, accidents that may not be accidents at all.
For US readers, the foreign Irish setting will lend a certain allure to the novel, and complement the feeling that magic is just at the edges of your vision, lurking in the shadows of the trees and the whispering of the river.
I think one of the things that really intrigued me about The Accident Season is that it didn't come out and say it's a paranormal mystery, but instead sort of danced around the subject, leaving so many possibilities open as to the origin of the accident season. I couldn't tell if "haunting" meant it was going to be a ghost story, because the accidents sounded like a fairy thing, and maybe there were witches too - and then I realized that it didn't matter to me what creature was responsible, because the story already appealed to me.
My rating? 4.5 out of 5 stars
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