20 Ways to Draw a Cat and 44 Other Awesome Animals and 20 Ways to Draw a Tree and 44 Other Nifty Things From Nature are fun books. I just wish I’d had more time to play with them before they had to go back to the library. The whole series looks pretty cool. I might have to check one out every month and really make myself take time to doodle. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?
A Couple of Sketchbooks for Doodlers Read More »
Total chick lit. Driving with the Top Down was fun, if a little far-fetched. The way Colleen and Tamara found Bitty. The way it ended for Bitty. Huge reach but it worked and it was fun. (If you read it, just skip the prologue, it’s dumb and unnecessary. It’s short but whatever, it caused me to roll my eyes.)
Driving with the Top Down Read More »
I finally found some time to read Joyland and I really enjoyed it. I liked the setting and the characters. I even liked the way it ended. Since this is a “crime” novel and not a horror novel, we didn’t get the really creepy Stephen King and that’s cool. Nice change from scary clowns with just enough creepyness to make it a fun read.
We listened to Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time on our trip to/from Oberlin and finally finished it up a couple of days ago. This book was a hot mess, which you would expect because it’s a Jodi Picoult book. But, it might be the biggest hot mess of all of her hot messes. I figured out the big issue long before it actually happened and… oh boy. The look on TW’s face when it happened. Hahahahaha. She might kill me if I ever force her to listen to another Jodi Picoult novel. hahaha. And that’s all I’m gonna say about this one because I don’t want to ruin it (hahaha) for Picoult fans.
When we headed to Oberlin, I made sure another audiobook was in the car, in case Leaving Time was short and we needed another audio book… TW took one look at that and said, “You’re kidding me. Are you trying to punish me? First Picoult, then this?” I laughed and said “What? It’s a Cybils book. It sounds like fun!” And then she put the first disc in and my head almost exploded. I couldn’t handle more than the intro before I told her to turn it off. I returned it.
I don’t think I’ve ever NOT finished a book from the Cybils shortlist before. So this is a first for me. I feel a little bad about that — but not bad enough to sit through William Shakespear’s Star Wars. I’m sure it’s fabulous, if you like that sort of thing. I absolutely do not and I am NOT even gonna pretend.
Two Audio Books — Sort Of Read More »
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.
Best Sarah Waters book in a very long time. I loved The Paying Guests. Every character was perfect. The story line was terrific (though of course you had to know that Frances and Lilian were going to end up in that kind of mess.) Perfect ending. I loved every darn thing about it.
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.
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.
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.
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