The Monsters of Templeton was awesome. I mean really awesome. Great story. Great characters. Great monsters, some that weren’t monsters. And some monsters who were nice guys in disguise.
Stephen King liked the book and so did I. That should be enough for you – go grab it at your library or bookstore.
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I accidentally finished two more YA books last night which means two more books from my Printz Award Challenge are complete. Cool. I’m betting 2001 was a tough year to pick the winner. These books were good.
We started listening to The Body of Christopher Creed on audio and got about halfway through it and cassette number four wouldn’t play properly. That was frustrating. The story was really getting going. I kept forgetting to reserve the print version and was pleasantly surprised when I found it on the shelf during our Wednesday trip to the library.
So I picked it up and started in on Chapter 13 and before I knew it, it was 11pm and I’d finished it. It was good. Very good. Loved the characters. Loved the setting. Loved the storyline. Is he dead or is he hiding – building a new life somewhere?
Before that, I read Many Stones which was also good but incredibly depressing. Super short book, very quick read and very depressing. But I said that, right? I guess the murder of your sister when you’re a 16 year old and then facing apartheid can’t really be anything BUT depressing, right?
Two more YA and a Printz update Read More »
I didn’t expect to enjoy Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging but I did. I enjoyed it very much and I laughed out loud a lot. Now that I’m finished, I’m also anxious to know what happened with the Sex God.
I’m so glad that the books on my Printz challenge have been really good, not like a lot of books that make the adult awards short lists (or long lists, for that matter.)
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Ha. Butch Girls Can Fix Anything was amusing lesbian chick lit. And a little different from most lesbian chick lit. This time, there was a kid involved. A 9 year old who had to deal with the idea of “two moms”. And, the Asheville, NC setting was nice – lesbian bastion that it is. Heh.
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Kit’s Wilderness written by David Almond (author of the fantastic YA book Skellig) wrote this one and it was good but not quite as good as Skellig.
Creepy but maybe a little too creepy? Or maybe a little too “much”? I’m not sure what it was about Kit’s Wilderness that made it not quite as good as Skellig – but it was something.
I did love Grandpa and Allie and Kit and even John. It wasn’t the characters – it might have been the dream woman and the baby.
Yep, I finished it. Finally. I started Bridge of Sighs months ago and got about 50 pages into it and then it was due back at the library – with other holds on it so it could not be renewed. So, I took it back and then immediately added it to my reserve list again. It’s taken me awhile to get to it but I did. And then it took me a good long while to read it, because it’s been one hell of a long week, but I did finish.
And, I really enjoyed it. Another winner from Richard Russo.
Reaching for Sun is another great YA book. Written in prose, about a teenager with cerebral palsy. She has a mom and a grandmother and finally, a friend. Really nice story.
The House You Pass on the Way is a super-fast YA read. It’s also about inter-racial relationships and lesbians. It’s also about teens and growing up and sorting out where you came from.
Great book.
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Heh. Another book meme I’ve been saving, this one from Sassymonkey – the librarything books most likely to be marked unread:
These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.
Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of Cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things*
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Again with the book meme Read More »
I’m cleaning out my feedreader and trying to block out some really bad synchronized swimming music and I see I saved this post from kperfetto from ages ago… 100 most influential women in books meme. Weird that I don’t seem to have done this meme. I wonder why. Let’s do it now, just to kill time and block out the suck.
I found this meme at the wonderful the hidden side of a leaf. These are one-hundred of the most influential books written by women. Bold the books you’ve read; bold the author’s name if you’ve read something else by her (I added “TBR” – to be read — to books I want to read):
1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
2. Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
5. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
6. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
7. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
8. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
9. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
10. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
11. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
12. Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
13. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker
14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
15. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
16. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
17. Erica Jong, Fanny
18. Joy Kogawa, Obasan
19. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
20. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
21. Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing
22. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
23. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
24. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
25. Lore Segal, Her First American
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
28. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
29. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
30. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
31. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
32. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
33. Susan Fromberg Shaeffer, Anya
34. Cynthia Ozick, Trust
35. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
36. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife
37. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
38. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
39. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer
40. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
41. Mary McCarthy, The Group
42. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
43. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
44. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
45. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
46. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
47. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
48. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
49. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
50. Toni Morrison, Beloved
51. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
52. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot
53. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
54. Laura Riding, Progress of Stories
55. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
56. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
57. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
58. A.S. Byatt, Possession
59. Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
60. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
61. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
62. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
63. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca
64. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
65. Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
66. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
67. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
68. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
69. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
70. Nancy Willard, Things Invisible to See
71. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
72. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Disturbances in the Field
73. Rosellen Brown, Civil Wars
74. Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
75. Harriet Doerr, The Mountain Lion
76. Stevie Smith. Novel on Yellow Paper
77. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
78. Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
79. P.D. James, The Children of Men
80. Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River
81. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
82. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
83. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
84. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
85. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
86. Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy
87. Margaret Drabble, Realms of Gold
88. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall
89. Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King
90. Marilyn French, The Women’s Room
91. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
92. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
93. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
94. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
95. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
96. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
97. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
98. Alice Hoffman, The Drowning Season
99. Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
100. Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater
Have I done this meme? Read More »