I almost forgot I’d checked Yummy out from the library – that’s what happens when I hand a book to Elly before I’ve had a chance to read it… another Cybils shortlist graphic novel and this one is excellent. So sad – Robert Sandifer, sad sad sad. Using a well drawn (and written) graphic novel to tell the story is such a great idea. Love. All kids (and adults) should read it.
Aye yi yi. The Absolute Value of -1 is what happens when you don’t find out what a book is about before you add it to your reserve list after seeing it mentioned on a blog. I should stop doing that.
Then again, if I had looked at the Amazon reviews, I wouldn’t have gotten much help – pretty much everyone loves it and nobody bothers to talk about the Suzanne/Simon problem. And oh boy was that a problem.
I don’t get it. Don’t find it believable, not based on the stories told by Lily, Noah, or Simon. Ditch that whole part and would Simon have been the same guy – yea, I think he would have been, which is why I don’t find the Suzanne/Simon attraction believable. The rest of the book (which is really most of it) is excellent.
But dude, Suzanne/Simon – the relationship… told in that way, too weird and just not right. Not at all right. Weird. Weird. Weird.
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Oh. I almost forgot – I read Caleb’s Crossing for the BlogHer Book Club. I liked it but not as much as I’ve liked some of her other books… I also got to gripe about the patriarchy so that’s cool. You can never grip about the patriarchy too often, can you?
I saw A Blue So Dark mentioned on a blog (of course I can’t remember which one) and decided to grab it. Oy. Sad, sad, sad. Depressing. Schizophrenia is such a horribly difficult disease. I loved Aura and her mom and her grandmother. All the characters really – even the jerk of a father who walked out. Good, sad, DARK, book. (And yes, #YASaves)
We love to listen to The Ladies #1 Detective Agency books on audio – and the timing of BlogHer Food ’11 and the latest book in the series, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party was perfect. Until we hit the mountains of NC – when the disc started to skip.
TW cleaned the disk as best she could and put it in again – still skipping a little but we kept trying to listen to it until it skipped a lot. TW tried to clean the disk again but it was no use. We had to give up close to the end of the second to last disk. It was very sad.
When we got home, I used one of those disk cleaner thingies to clean all of the disks and kept my fingers crossed as we tried again. It worked! Well it still skipped a little on the last disk but not enough to worry about – and we made it all of the way through.
Thank goodness because the marriage of Grace and Phuti is important and we needed to know what happened to the shoes… and the tiny white van… and the horrible person who harmed the good Botswana cattle!
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Liz Henry has been recommending Tooth & Claw to me for AGES. I didn’t ignore her, exactly. I just don’t really like books about dragons (all you Ann McAffrey fans can feel free to yell at me now, I’m used to it.)
When she recommended it again last month, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.
I read a chapter and put it down. I don’t like dragon books.
I read another chapter and put it down. Nope, still don’t like dragon books.
I read a few more chapters and put it down. Yawn… dragon books.
I finished it last night and while I still don’t like dragon books, I found myself chuckling through the last half of the book. The dragons grew on me. Or maybe it was the narrator. The proposals and deaths and confessions – funny. Very funny.
Victorian romance-y thing but with dragons. Heh. OK I’m chuckling again.
TW read The Dry Grass of August last week and said it was excellent… I don’t always listen to her when she says these things but for some reason… I had a good feeling about this book. I’m damn glad I read it – excellent book. Southern family … with a black maid… in the 50’s. You know horrible things are going to happen, and they do, but most of the characters are pretty darn likeable and real.
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I’m not one of those fanatical Laura Ingalls Wilder fans. I liked the books well enough but I don’t think I’ve read any of them more than once – not like Nancy Drews that I’ve read a million times or the Little Women books that I’ve also read a million times. The books are nice. Laura is nice. The TV, different from the books, also nice enough. But no, I’m not a Laura fangirl.
I’m not sure why I read Melissa Gilbert and Alison Arngrim’s books this year – probably because I saw them on Zandria’s reading list and decided they’d be fun… and they were. I grabbed The Wilder Life because it sounded like it would be even more fun… and when it started slowly and I found myself struggling to finish the first chapter, I got worried.
I think it started slowly because I started it right before the trip to BlogHer Food, Anderson and Gainesville. Not the right time to start such a book. Once I was home, things moved more quickly and I was a lot more interested in the trip Wendy McClure was taking. I kind of thought she was nuts – or I would have if I hadn’t immediately realized what she was looking for in the first place.
What’s really scary is that by the time McClure got to De Smet, I was ready to embark on my only little Laura tour. OK maybe not a whole tour but looking for leeches in Plum Creek and visiting the Ingall’s homestead in South Dakota would be awesome. So awesome that I’m trying to figure out how to make the trip… I really NEED to sleep in a covered wagon.
I love a book with a great cover and The Book of Tomorrow’s cover is awesome. Also, it had a bookmark ribbon. I like that. There should be more books with bookmark ribbons. As for the book itself – I liked it but I wish there’d been a bit more about the magic of the diary. That thing played a big role and it was never really given much attention. Tamara was a great character. So was Sister Ignatius. Heck, Rose was good too – in an evil sort of way. I’m not sure I liked the summary at the end, which explains how Rose got to be who she was. I like a nice wrap up but I don’t think this chapter worked quite as well as the rest of the book.
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Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly was cute but not as cute as the first book. Probably because the Piggly Wiggly isn’t the Piggly Wiggly any longer so it’s not quite the same, ya know? I’ll still read the third book but I kind of hope there aren’t any more after that – unless the Piggly Wiggly reopens as a Piggly Wiggly. But I doubt that’s going to happen.
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