Yay thanks to Stephanie for sending me this for my birthday, because she knew of my love for Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy.
This was SOOOO different than those books. And SOOOO GOOD. Such deeply written characters. Tangible emotions. Poignant. Sometimes funny. Very affecting.
As you move from section to section in this book, you get absolutely turned around. Fantastic.
Our challenge book for October. I can’t remember what led us to pick this book; I know we (or I) read about it somewhere.
We both LOVED it. It doesn’t hurt that we’re both South Pole/Antarctic junkies and have already read lots of books on the topic/subject/area (including great books by Sara Wheeler! “Terra Incognita” and “Cherry”).
Sym is so smart and fantastically imaginative. It’s one of those books that, rather than having an unreliable narrator, it’s a narrator who doesn’t know everything but as she figures it out, the revelations start coming out fast and crazy and the whole world changes before your eyes. Her obsession with Captain Titus Oates is both humorous and touching.
There’s some really sad stuff and some really amazing stuff and you are just ROOTING for certain things to happen…
Fantastic.
A(nother) series by the guy who writes Uglies, Pretties, whatevers. I had read his stand-alone Peeps (but not the Uglies, Pretties, whatevers).
1: The Secret Hour
2: Touching Darkness
3: Blue Noon
These books are great. Our world…but with an extra hour that happens at midnight that only a select few are “awake” in. A band of losers whose common ground is the midnight hour, when it turns out they have a few special skills of their own.
I really loved these. I loved the members of the group (particularly Dess). I LOVED all the wordplay (fantastic!). I loved how the slithers seemed related to something deeply dark and ancient. I loved the transformation of the group and how their relationships changed.
I am really going to regret that I read most of these from the library. Definitely buying up the set when I have income again!!
I read (and loved) The Kitchen Diaries. I’ve cooked from his books “Appetite” and “Nigel Slater’s Real Food”. (His “unctuous” potatoes are delicious.)
But I guess I wasn’t really prepared for the tone of this memoir. The bits about food are great. But some of the anecdotes made me really sad. And some were kinda creepy. He just put it all out there.
The ball aways hits me in the face or brings a shower of sand with it. My father sighs one of those almost imperceptible sighs that only fragile boys who regularly disappoint their father can hear.
It was brutally honest. I didn’t love it. But you might.
Let me just put it out there that I LOVE DICK FRANCIS. I do. I LOVE most of his books. I got completely addicted to them the summer I lived in the UK with my cousins and I’ve never stopped reading (and re-reading) them since. I know they’re all horse centered and I know some of the main characters are really similar and sometimes you really get the sensation of this just being one long ongoing story and I know they can be cheesy….
But I love his writing and I particularly LOVELOVELOVE “Bolt” and “Break In” and they are two of my very, very favorite all-time books….
But this book? “Even Money”? SUCKED. Worst Dick Francis I’ve ever read. I was sorely disappointed.
Read “Bolt” or “Break In” and know the love. Avoid this book like the plague.
CPL (Chicago Public Library) was recommending this on their web site one day when I was online reserving books, and then Steven King recommended it in one of his EW columns.
I did not think it was good. Seemed super predictable. And I didn’t find any of the characters interesting enough to care about. 🙁
A loaner from Anne, who’s been borrowing all my books!!! 😉 Hee hee just teasing. It came with the recommendation that it’s one of her all-time faves so I was excited to delve in.
Totally wicked modern sci fi basically detailing a (slightly into the future but mostly “our”) world falling into catastrophe set off by one tiny thing. It’s so freaking BECAUSE IT SO COULD HAPPEN. I mean really the entire time you’re reading it, you think “this is ENTIRELY plausible and it is FREAKING ME OUT!” Lots of characters in different storylines with loose connections; like the Robert Jordan books in that if you don’t like certain characters, you just hang in there because the ones you like will have another chapter shortly…
Really entertaining. Really scarily plausible.
Since I’ve already read the Twilight set (yup, this one also) and the Stackhouse books, it seemed I should read these also.
1: Book of Shadows
2: The Coven
3: Blood Witch
4: Dark Magick
5: Awakening
6: Spellbound
7: The Calling
8: Changeling
9: Strife
10: Seeker
11: Origins
12: Eclipse
13: Reckoning
14: Full Circle
15: Night’s Child
This series is focused on wicca, with no vampires!, so there are good witches and bad witches and it’s primarily about a teenager girl named Morgan who discovered she’s a blood witch and then becomes entangled in the magical world through successive boyfriends.
These were certainly entertaining and I really enjoyed the first 10 or so / I didn’t like some of the later ones as much, particularly the one from Hunter’s point of view…
But they had some of those same problems that a “YA series rushed out” tends to have. Too repetitious / too much explaining or “reminding” the reader of things that the reader JUST read like 20 pages ago, or in the previous book. Do YA editors think kids can’t remember things? Because if they explained about being each other’s mùirn beatha dàn (soul mate) one more fucking time, I was going to scream. [I enjoyed reading them anyway, but some of those things were really glaring, especially when you are reading so many of them one after the other.]
If you like reading about magic, and you like having that “all caught up in your emotions” teenage feeling again, then you will probably enjoy these! And if you are sick of vampires – they are vampire-free!! 🙂
Teenagers, just starting out. But dang you can really see [hear] some potential there. Some sassy well-done originals. Some great covers. (They killed on Joan Jett.) I’m excited to see where they go from here.
The lead singer is my friend’s niece. The dude who mixes their stuff is my other friend’s brother. Obviously I would probably not have heard of them otherwise. But I brought people to the show who didn’t have those connections and they saw the potential as well!
Of course if you’ve listened to his albums, you know this dude is multi-talented, can swing from style to style, can sing in various ranges, etc., etc…but hearing him live STILL blew my mind.
He made every song sound fresh and new, but not in that “I must sing this so it sounds nothing like it does on the album” way that some groups seem so intent on live. More in a “this song is a platform for me to show you a new creation” way.
All by himself up on stage but he filled the room with sound like he was a 10-piece band. So awesome.