TOP TEN TUESDAY #2



Every Tuesday, The Broke and the Bookish hosts a meme called 'Top Ten Tuesday'

(To see more, click here.)

 

 

Last week was my first time participating on this blog and I misread the list of memes. I accidentally listed this week's meme last week. I don't know what else to do except do last week's meme this week. Bare with me! It won't happen again!

 

 

Here is this week's meme that I accidentally did last week:

WHEN YOU NEED SOMETHING LIGHT & FUN

 

 

and now for last week's meme.

 

Top Ten Words/Topics That Instantly Make Me Buy/Pick Up A Book

 

 

GHOSTS

I've always loved ghost stories. I read a ton of them as a kid (Mary Downing Hahn mostly) and it didn't stop there. I've continued to be enthralled by ghost stories. It helps that I've had a few experiences of my own. As an adult I read Susan Hill.

 

WITCHES

I especially love books about the 'Salem Witch Trials' similar to 'The Heretic's Daughter' by Kathleen Kent or anything at all where the story focuses on witches such as Anne Rice's 'The Witching Hour' trilogy.

 

MYTHOLOGY

Books with old Gods and mythical creatures tend to be REALLY interesting. I hate to say it, but Rick Riordan's 'The Percy Jackson and the Olympians' series really got me back into mythology as an adult even though they are for kids. Michael Scott's 'The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel' series were really fun to read as well.

 

DRAGONS

Let's face it. Any fantasy story with a dragon in it is just ten times better than any other. Sometimes dragons are the main theme such as in 'Seraphina' by Rachel Hartman and 'Eragon' by Christopher Paulini and sometimes they are just a small plot or part of books like 'A Song Of Ice and Fire Series' by George R. R. Martin or 'The Hobbit' by J.R.R. Tolkein.

 

WIZARDS, WARLOCKS, & OTHER MAGICAL PEOPLE

Yes, I'm talking about the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. I can't think of any more at the moment but there are tons of fantasy novels where wizards and sorcerers are prominent characters.

 

HISTORICAL FICTION

If it's set anywhere from the 1600's to the 1900's, I want to read it. It doesn't matter if it's an Alison Weir novel about the Tudor's (The Lady Elizabeth),  or  novels about plagues and graverobbers (The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman). I really love reading books set in past eras.

 

ARTHURIAN FICTION

Any book having to do with Merlin, King Arthur, etc. I think they were on of my favorite movie genres as a kid (The Sword in the Stone, Merlin starring Sam Neil, etc) and now as an adult, I just want to read about it. A couple of examples are 'Gwenhwyfar: The White Spirit' by Mercedes Lackey and 'Mordred, Bastard Son' by Douglas Clegg.

 

CASTLES

I was obsessing over castles even before Harry Potter was written and published. I can remember one of my childhood favorites being 'The Castle In The Attic' by Elizabeth Winthrop. Hogwarts fueled that love just as much as movies did. Still to this day, I want to live in or at least get to visit an English castle.

 

 

 

 

Is 8 enough? I was starting to get ideas for sub-categories of those that I listed so I decided to just stop there.

 

 

 

 

 

April Wrap Up

I've been meaning to do this for a couple of days now but it kept slipping my mind. I watch a lot of booktubers that do these but I'm not very comfortable with talking to a camera yet so I'd rather do mine here. I had a pretty great reading month in April but mostly because I was babysitting and pretty confined indoors. I made sure to visit my library during National Library Appreciation Week to check out lots of books and thank my librarians for what they do and picked up a ton of young-adult and graphic novels in the process.

                            WHAT I READ IN APRIL                             

  

1. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl  
2. Delirium by Lauren Oliver
3. Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver
4. Requiem by Lauren Oliver
5. The Arrival by Shaun Tan
6. Maus: Vol 1 by Art Spiegelman
7. Maus: Vol 2 by Art Spiegelman
8. The Prince Of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
9. Howl's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynn Jones
10. Free Four: Tobias Tells the Divergent Story by Veronica Roth 
11. Hana (Delirium #1.5) by Lauren Oliver
12. Raven (Delirium #2.5) by Lauren Oliver
13. Annabel (Delirium #0.5) by Lauren Oliver    
14. Harry Potter: The Prequel by J.K. Rowling
15. Jellico Road by Melina Marchetta
16. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
17. The New Hunger (Warm Bodies #0.5) by Isaac Marion
18. Monster by Walter Dean Myers
19. Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce
20. Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 by David Petersen
21. Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 by David Petersen
22. Changeling by Delia Sherman
23. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

 

 

TO BE READ: MAY 2013



This is not a set list. It's just a few books that I hope to get around to this month.

 

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
• The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (and the two that come after it)
• The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan
• and more or less

 

 

 

 

 

READ-A-THON!!! (May 13th-19th)

 

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda @ On a Book Bender and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 13th and runs through Sunday, May 19th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure, and the only reading competition is between you and your usual number of books read in a week. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 7.0 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. – From the Bout of Books team





Want to learn more or join yourself? Click Here! 

This will be my very first Read-a-thon. I really don't even know why I am going to put this kind of pressure on myself because I signed up for an online writing class on Coursera.com that starts on the same exact day. It lasts for 5 weeks and I've never done anything like it before so I don't even know what to expect. Will it take up an hour of my time or 5 hours of my time each day? I have no idea. I really hope it isn't 5 hours! That would be horrible! So adding a read-a-thon onto it might be a bit much. I don't know yet.

 

Anyway, I saw LittleBookOwl from Youtube talk about a 24 hour read-a-thon that she had participated in and while this particular read-a-thon lasts an entire week, I still think it's a good idea and I really want to try it. So I don't know yet how much time I will be able to dedicate to reading non-stop during this week, but I will try to knock my MT. TBR down a few inches at least.

I don't know what I want my ultimate goal to be yet since I don't know if I'll be finished with the books I'm reading now or if I'll have started a book a day or two before the read-a-thon. I do have a short stack of books on the skinny side that I have set aside for this, though. I am hoping to be able to read at least 1 book per day. I've also been thinking about reading some of my many unread middle-grade fantasy books throughout one specific month but I just couldn't get myself to do it in the past so maybe it would work to set aside one week to get through them. I'll think on it and update this as I figure things out.

 

I will have to deny myself internet access while I do this read-a-thon, too, otherwise I probably won't get as much reading done as I should.

 



MONDAY                                                  
What I've Read Today:
Total Number Of Books I've Read:
On Page __ of __ :
Reviews:
Thoughts:

I borrowed the above sample of keeping track from Harley Bear Book Blog. I'm glad I found her post because I think it is a great way to keep track of how much reading I will do. I'll add all seven days as I go. :)
  

Book Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

(The Chemical Garden Trilogy)

BOOK 1

Genre:

Young-Adult 

Published:

 March 22nd 2011
 Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Literary Awards:
ALA Teens' Top Ten Nominee (2012)

My Rating:

 ☆☆

SYNOPSIS:

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children. When Rhine is kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement. Her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next, and Rhine is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?

Together with one of Linden's servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?

MY THOUGHTS:

I wasn't too thrilled to start this book because I had heard some things about it that I knew I wasn't going to like. At the same time, everyone was saying how good it was, so I gave it a chance.

One thing I did like about it is that the world Stefano created is actually believable. I can actually see women and young girls being subjected to the whims of men. I can see men legally being able to snatch girls off the street, choose a few (or several) brides and killing off the ones that didn't make the cut. That is the type of world we live in already and the book may be a little more extreme but not too far from reality. It hits closer to home than 'The Hunger Games' or 'Divergent' does, actually.

BUT

 I had a ton of issues with this book. I tried to find something to like in it since everyone told me it was so good and that I was going to love it, but it never happened. I could not find one single redeeming thing to like about this book. I hated the weak-willed characters. I hated the setting. In what futuristic world are there going to be snowdrifts higher than a person's head in FLORIDA?!!! I feel as if the author didn't know the first thing about the place she set her story in. Even if this story was set 100-200 years in the future I cannot imagine Florida being a 'Winter Wonderland' or summer nights being so cold that one must wear a jacket. Ugh! I just didn't like this book at all. I already had the second and third book ready to be read after this in case I liked it but now I am pretty sure I am not going to continue this trilogy.

If your dreams consist of being locked away in a mansion, forced into marriage as long as you're being pampered, and enjoy being manipulated and and/or being beat into submission, this book is probably for you. I, on the other hand, prefer my characters, and women in general, to be a hell of a lot stronger and more self-respecting than that.

[And now for my rants about the setting]
I couldn't help but be frustrated with this book because it is set in Florida and I've lived in Florida my entire life. There was just so many outrageous moments that I ranted about while reading it. There were the parts where Rhine has to put on a jacket/sweater to go outside (and because of other bits of plot I figured that the parts with the jacket are set in the summer time.) Let me just tell you that it stays hot at night in the summer, too. It's not like the desert or anything...
Another part I ranted about was that the 'first hurricane of the season' takes place in October in this book and is a category three hurricane! Ok, maybe I can understand that in the future the weather patterns might be different, but the first hurricane of the season being in October is a bit 'out there'. Our tropical storms and hurricanes span from June/July - October/November.
Third is the mention of the leaves changing colors (Rhine mentions fingertips being as red as the falling leaves). Unless you have a Japanese Maple, the leaves here don't turn red. You might find an occasional red leaf every now and then from a specific type of tree but Florida is full of oaks and pine trees and they just turn brown between Dec. & Jan. There is no beautiful change of colors like up North. The closest I've seen is on Sycamore trees which will turn a yellow or orangish color before the leaves fall.

Worst of all, there is mention of snow. Snow? In Florida? I'm not going to say that it never happens, but when it does, it's usually sleet, and it melts before it even  touches the ground and never snows for more than maybe an hour at the very most. In almost 30 years I've only heard of it snowing in Florida twice and those were in specific places closer to Georgia. I wanted to throw this book across the room when it got to the part about the 'snow drifts being higher than her head'. A Winter Wonderland in Florida? When hell freezes over, maybe?!!!

I'm just going to pretend that the position of the equator changed due to people curing cancer in this book.

[Rant Over]

Stacking The Shelves #1





Stacking the Shelves is a  weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews that features the books we bought, borrowed, were gifted, and were given for review. 

I will probably be doing these on Saturdays from now on as long as I have something new to share. :)

First off, I'm going to explain that there are absolutely no bookstores anywhere near where I live. I also cannot purchase books online right now. So my resources are limited to thrift stores and Wal-Mart. (*sarcastic 'Yay'*). I also do not own a physical e-reader but I have recently downloaded the free Kindle For PC to my computer and even though I cannot purchase ebooks, there are tons of free books to choose from and I have also discovered the online ebook library that my local library offers through Overdrive. So where do I get my books? The majority of them come from thrift stores. I'm okay with that because secondhand books need love, too. :)

BOOKS FROM THE THRIFT STORE

(5 for $1)

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' Vol. 3
• The Ghosts of Kerfol by Deborah Noyes
• Witch Child by Celia Rees
• Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane (book 2) by Suzanne Collins

BRAND NEW PURCHASE

(This was a gift from my fiancé last night. He really wants to see the movie and I refuse to see any movies without reading the book first! I had it on hold at the library but it was taking forever!)

WORLD WAR Z by MAX BROOKS

ARC EBOOK FOR REVIEW

I just received this one in my email this morning via the author and LibraryThing and am excited to read it and will probably do so after I read World War Z.

That's all, folks! :)

Book Review: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A MONSTER CALLS by PATRICK NESS

Illustrated by:

Jim Kay

Genre:

Juvenile/ Young Adult

Low Fantasy

Published:

September 27th 2011 by Walker Books

Literary Awards:

Kate Greenaway Medal (2012)

Galaxy British Book Awards for Children's Book of the Year (2011)

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Young Adult Literature (2011)

Red House Children's Book Award (2012)

ALA Teen's Top Ten Nominee (2012)

Carnegie Medal in Literature (2012)

The Inky Awards Nominee for Silver Inky (2012)

Galaxy National Book Awards for Children's Book of the Year (2011)

Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of the Year (2011)

Grampian Children's Book Award Nominee (2013)

YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults (Top Ten) (2012)

My Rating:

☆☆☆☆☆

SYNOPSIS:

The monster showed up after midnight. As they do.

But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming...

This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.

It wants the truth.

________________________

Here's a really awesome book trailer!

_____________________________

MY THOUGHTS:

Let me just start by informing you that the original idea for this book was thought up by Siobhan Dowd before she passed away from breast cancer. Patrick Ness was asked to write the story and though I haven't read anything of Siobhan Dowd's and wouldn't know how she would have portrayed this story, I think Ness did an outstanding job.

Here is some art from the book to give you an idea of how dark and nightmarish this book is. 

I happen to LOVE dark sketchy nightmarish art like this. Jim Kay was the perfect illustrator for this novel. The above illustration was probably one of my favorite in the book. The only thing iffy about it is that this is considered a children's book and I'm sure that some younger kids might find these illustrations to be rather scary. To be honest, though, when I was very young, let's say around 8 years old, I couldn't get enough scary books to quench my thirst (Thank you, R.L. Stein for writing so many Goosebumps and Fear Street books!).

Because this book has more of a theme than plot, I don't feel I can give this a very lengthy review without throwing in some spoilers. If I do happen to spoil something, I apologize. I've read a few other reviews on this book that went into lengthy detail about every single little part of the book and even though I could write all day on the psychological aspects of this book, I'm just going to try my hardest to keep it short. Instead, I can talk about how I think it could resonate with almost any and every age group instead of just children. This novel covers the theme of death and shows how easy it is to confuse fact from fiction while dealing with such horrible circumstances. Because of this, I thought there was an understandable amount of character development going on.
 Agh! I feel like I can't even write anything without getting straight to the point which I will do below but please do not read on if you do not want to read any spoilers.

[QUICK SPOILER REVIEW]
[This is a story about a boy whose mother is dying of cancer and how he calls forth the monster within himself which he sees as a nightmare.]

Alright. I'm just going to leave it at that. I have so many feelings about this book that I cannot coherently type out. Maybe I will try again when the words come to me.

Notable quotes from 'A Monster Calls'

 "Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect."

“Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.”  



Wish List Wednesday (#1)



'Wish List Wednesday' is a book blog meme created by Pen To Paper.

 

The 'rules' of this meme are to choose one book from your wishlist and feature it on your blog. I think I'm going to bend the rules a little bit and list 2 or 3 books from my wishlist.

 

Also, instead of choosing three random books, I'm going to choose the first three on my actual Amazon wishlist, which just happen to be from the same author.

 

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by NEIL GAIMAN

 

 

I have read this book before but I loved it and would love to have it on my shelves to read again any time I choose. This is the story of a boy named Nobody, 'Bod, for short, that is raised by ghosts and other macabre creatures in a cemetery.

UNNATURAL CREATURES by ASSORTED AUTHORS, selected by NEIL GAIMAN

 

 

I'm a huge fan of Neil Gaiman and trust his opinions on good stories. This collection includes short stories from Dianna Wynn Jones, E. Nesbit, and Neil Gaiman himself. And just look at that cover! How could I not want that on my shelf?!

 

 

 

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE by NEIL GAIMAN

 



 

I can't help but be excited for this to release on June 18, 2013. As I said, I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan and trust that every single one of his novels will be amazing. He has such a unique way of telling a story that I haven't found with any other authors. I truthfully don't even know what this one is about but I STILL want to read it so bad. OK, I just read the synopsis, and WOW. Another dark tale that I know I will love. 

       _____________________________

What's on your wishlist this week? Let me know in the comments!