2014

Wild Things

2014, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Queer /

My library’s website was down so I didn’t know which book I should read next — my decision is often based on which books need to go back sooner rather than later, can’t be renewed again, or probably can’t be renewed because of the overall popularity. Rather than starting the wrong book, I decided to go for a quick read from my stacks. But I broke my own From the Stacks goal by selecting something we just bought. That was dumb. Oh well, one less book for next year’s FtS challenge, hah.

Wild Things was … ok typical Karin Kallmaker. Lesbian chick lit. Not great, not horrid. Ho hum.

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Prisoner B-3087

2014, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Fiction /

Prisoner B-3087 wasn’t a bad book, it also wasn’t a great book. It covered too much ground, far too quickly – Jack Gruener’s story is amazing and hard to convey in a short middle grade fiction novel.

It was hard to feel a bond with Yanek though of course you feel all of the horror that comes with a story about a Jewish child in the Holocaust. I get it though, Yanek’s story is complex, really complex. Done properly, it would probably be a 3 book series so I see why the author took the course he did. It just made this book not great and only good. Hopefully kids who read this will go look for more information about Gruener.

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Pantomine

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Another Cybils shortlist book, Pantomine was… slow. It’s also trying to do a lot of things (slowly) and not necessarily succeeding with any of them.

I didn’t dislike the characters. The intersex/Kedi idea is interesting. The weird glass things are interesting but we didn’t get enough information about the world they’re living in to really understand why they were interesting, which made Micah/Gene’s connection to them less interesting than it might otherwise be. It’s ok to keep some of the story back, but giving us just a little bit more about why we should care, well, that would have been good.

I’m not sure I’ll read the next book, we’ll see.

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The Summer Prince

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The Summer Prince is from the Cybils shortlist. If it hadn’t been, I’d have never read it. I am not usually a fan of the summer prince storyline. I just… no. I don’t generally like the characters and I don’t particularly like this particular myth and books that use it tend to leave me cold.

This one… wasn’t bad. It was certainly better than others I’ve read, though I saw the ending coming from about 100 pages away.

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Two Audio Books

2014, Audiobooks, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

The second book in the His Fair Assassin series was on the Cybils shortlist but I hadn’t read the first book. So, I grabbed it on audio and we listened to it last month.

We enjoyed Grave Mercy. It’s definitely a YA book — there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff that makes me and TW roll our eyes but we definitely liked it.

The second book, Dark Triumph, oh boy. Sybella is a hot mess. Horrible horrible descriptions of horrible horrible acts – killing babies, creepy brother/sister sex stuff. A whole lot of violence. Then, of course, there’s a lot of flowery lovey-dovey stuff which makes me and TW roll our eyes, particularly after we’ve just heard some really disgusting stuff about dead babies and gah. It was good. We liked it. We just needed strong stomachs to get through it.

I need a bit of a break from the series before I can bring myself to listen to the third book. Maybe in the spring? lol

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Moon Cleveland

1 Comment / 2014, Books in Bed, Daily Dose, Family Funk, Kid Talk, Non-Fiction, Travel Log /

Here I am playing catch up with books — so out of order, let’s go with Moon Cleveland. RJ flipped through the book while she was home on mid-term break and picked out a bunch of places she thought she might like to check out while we were visiting for parents’ weekend.

I went through it after her and then planned our itinerary around her choices — and mine.

Saturday
– West Side Market was fantastic. Unplanned dash into Koffie Cafe — TW is still raving about her coffee.
– A visit to the A Christmas Story house/museum and that was awesome. Even if they over-booked their 12:15 tour and we had to wait in the cold for an extra half hour. Heh.
– Melt Bar and Grilled for lunch was a-freaking-mazing. Vegan chicken wings were excellent. All of our sandwiches were fabulous. I’m so glad I noticed they had vegan offerings because RJ was in heaven with her pierogie grilled cheese.
– Next, we headed to Cleveland Heights and wandered around the shops on Coventry Village. A used bookstore and Big Fun Toys were both big fun.
– We ran over to Eton something or other (a frou frou mall) for the Vegan Sweet Tooth and RJ was very pleased with her vegan baked good.
– A stop in Target for dorm supplies (and junk) rounded out a very full day.

Sunday
– The Root Cafe for breakfast — my huevos rancheros were good, RJ’s friend joined us and her egg & goat cheese sandwich looked excellent. RJ was very pleased with her vegan scramble.
– The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame visit was more fun than I expected. TW was the one who really wanted to go there but I definitely enjoyed it.
– The Free Stamp was on my list but A had to be back to Oberlin by 2 so we didn’t have time to walk over to see it. Luckily, we drove right past it on the way back so that was a lucky break!

All in all, a good trip. Oh, the Moon guide was fine. Not exceptional but it did the trick.

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Shadows

2014, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Oh look, another Cybils book that I wanted to love but couldn’t. Shadows turned out to be perfectly fine but not great. I don’t generally mind made up words or ordinary words turned into slang words but in this case — it was a struggle from beginning to end. Too much of it, not enough context and to make matters worse, there were Japanese words thrown in for fun. The struggle was real. Very real.

We also spent a whole lot of the beginning of the book listening to Maggie rant about her step-father and that took way too much time and used far too many made up/slang/Japanese words.

Once the story got beyond the hatred of Val the step-father, it was better. The author does a fabulous job with animals (the kind we know and the gruaa kind that we didn’t) and the use of origami throughout the book was fantastic. These last two things make the book worth reading. Mostly.

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Reading In October

2014, Books in Bed, Reading /

My numbers look better than it really was because I blogged so many of the August/September children’s books which means I didn’t count them in August/September and get to count them for October. And of course, it was a #readathon month. LOL. Lots of children’s fiction…

41 books total!

28 were from the Cybils shortlist (which is good because I had fallen way behind there.)
Only 1 was YA. Weird, but I read a lot of middle grade stuff, too.
11 non-fiction
2 graphic novels

You’ll notice no audio books — we did finish one audio book but I’m waiting til November to blog it because it’s related to another one we’re listening to now. Blogging them both together makes more sense.

Onward — I really need to finish the Cybils before the holiday season arrives. Wish me luck — I’m going to need it.

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Sidekicked

2014, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

I felt like I had already read Sidekicked but apparently not. So much of it seemed familiar. Weird, right?

I enjoyed it. I didn’t love love love it. Not sure I’ll read Minion but I might. We’ll see. Maybe.

I liked the sidekicks. I liked the way the Titan storyline developed (and ended.) I also liked the Fox/Silver Lynx story progression, though I would probably have liked it more if the story had been told through Jenna’s point of view. Not that I didn’t like Drew, I did. I just think it would have been a better story if Jenna was telling it.

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