Sassymonkey sent me an ARC copy of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry …. so long ago that I can’t remember. Years. YEARS!
I’ve had it on my TBR THIS MONTH< DARN IT, list a good half dozen times and never managed to read it. What the hell took me so long? It was a great book. Really great book with an awesome ending. I wouldn't have changed a single thing.
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I have no idea how I ended up with The Luck of the Buttons. It’s not on the Cybils list and we never wander into the YA area of our library any more, much less the “juvenile” section. This is also not the type of book that ends up on the “New Arrivals” shelves at our library.
It’s a mystery.
I’m guessing a blogger of some sort mentioned reading it, so I reserved it.
Thankfully, it was a super short read because it’s not a book I really loved. I didn’t hate it either. It’s just one of those books adults like children to read but children (mostly) hate reading them. And those kinds of books make it hard for me to enjoy them, because my inner 8 year old is rolling her eyes mightily.
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The Other Typist is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. A little slow (surprisingly so) but otherwise, excellent.
Twisty, turny, and throw in some girl crush for good measure.
Now…. who did it? Rose or Odalie?
I love Joe Hill. He’s so much better than his dad.
NOS4A2 was creepy — Christmasland, ugh. That’s some freaky stuff that can give a person nightmares if she spends too much thinking about it.
I loved Vic and Lou and Wayne and also Maggie and Tabitha (though I do find it disconcerting when authors give characters names of family members — I kept picturing Tabitha King, which didn’t work very well for this Tabitha.)
I was a little worried about the end but was happy with it when it was all over and done with. The ornament removal ending was the right ending. (The Acknowledgements and About the Font pages were also good. Don’t skip those and find yourself on the naughty list.)
It’s moments like that I really wonder about how and why some books are turned into movies while others are not. I’m not talking about the obvious huge selling books, their move(s) to the big screen make sense.
I’m talking about obscure coming of age novels like Goats. (Hard as hell to find this book on Amazon because if you search for Goats, you get a ton of non-fiction about goat tending, sheesh.)
Written in 2002 — first novel by a short story writer — it’s… different.
Not great, not horrible. Just different.
There were moments of genius and moments that caused eyerolling and overall, I liked it. I might even be glad I found this on the list of books turned movies (for my books turned movies challenge.) I can’t wait to watch the movie…
Well. I finally read 50 Shades of Grey. Y’all are right, it’s not a great work of literature. It’s also not a great work of erotica. In fact, it’s pretty bad all around.
But.
I’ve read worse. I’ve enjoyed worse. And, I kind of want to know what happens next. Gah.
Aye. It took me a week to read Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker – I thought it would be a fast read. Ha. I liked it, mostly, but slow, slow, slow read. Not enough action. I wanted less of Mrs. Lincoln and more dressmaker. Elizabeth Keckley is cool (So is Mary Todd Lincoln), but I was hoping for … more.
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I really enjoyed Speaking From Among the Bones — Flavia is fabulous, as usual. But, I’m a little troubled by the direction this is taking.
The house is in jeopardy, as usual.
Flavia learns more about her mother. Confusing things. Good things. Interesting things.
Flavia solves the crime.
Something happens that might save the house, but instead it just helps the family hold on a little longer.
Book ends.
At least that’s pretty much the formula we saw in the first four books. This one, a little different. All of those things happen except…. we don’t find out what happens to the thing that could save the house (but probably won’t.) Instead, we get a much, much, much bigger cliffhanger. The cliffhanger of cliffhangers.
And I don’t think I like it.
Certainly I was ready for that thing to begin to occur, but I don’t like the messing of the formula of the series. I don’t like the thing that occurred to have occurred as a cliffhanger. Unnecessary. Unwelcome. Nope, didn’t like it. But yea, I’m dying for the next book.
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I read Nevermore because TW said it was good. Also because while she was reading it she asked me weird questions about Davy Crockett and Edgar Allen Poe and also because we listened to the Davy Crockett song about 15 times while she was reading. I couldn’t pass it up.
And damn, I’m glad I read it.
I chuckled all of the way through it. I like Poe. I like Crockett. I like Poe and Crockett together. They should have a TV series. Maybe also fight zombies together. It would be awesome. This book was awesome. (Except the creepy parts where Poe was crushing on his cousin… I know, I know… still creepy and really especially so in this book. Thankfully it didn’t happen so often that I had to throw the book across the room.)
Thanks to Liz Rizzo, I was reminded that we had fallen behind on the Sandman Slim books and I ran and reserved Devil Said Bang because Sandman Slim is awesome (and Liz is right, these need to be movies.)
TW said she didn’t like this one as much as the others, so I was worried and I stayed worried for much of the beginning of the book, when Sandman Slim was stuck in hell. I like the chapters about hell but I don’t love the characters down there nearly as much as I like the characters in LA (and for awhile, I really couldn’t figure out how the hell he was going to get out of hell, so yay for making me read to find out rather than figuring it out for myself, which is what happens with a lot of books.)
And, I actually LOVED the ending. (Which so rarely happens.)
Only weird thing was that I dreamed about Sandman Slim — a mashup with BlogHerCon, and that was scary as HELL (pun sort of intended.) I don’t ever want to have that kind of dream again.