Top Ten Tuedsay #21

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's TTT is a REWIND! (Pick from previous topics that you want to do again or may have missed)

BOOKS I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVEN'T READ YET

1984 by George Orwell

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Night by Elie Wiesel

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 

Friday Finds #21

Friday Finds is a blog meme hosted over at Should Be Reading that highlights the books you found and added to your To Be Read list, whether you found them online or in a bookstore and etc. They are not necessarily books that you purchased!

Here are the books I'm showcasing for this week!

Witch Finder by Ruth Warburton

The Circle Cast: The Lost Years of Morgan Le Fay by Alex Epstein

The Changed by A. Michael Marsh

Book Review: Rotters by Daniel Kraus

Title: Rotters

Author: Daniel Kraus

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Publication Date: April 5, 2011

Genre: Young Adult, Horror

Length: 448 pages
Format: Hardcover

Source: Borrowed

Goodreads | Amazon 

SYNOPSIS:

Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It's true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of nineteenth-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a sixteen-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey's life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school.

Everything changes when Joey's mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known, a strange, solitary man with unimaginable secrets. At first, Joey's father wants nothing to do with him, but once father and son come to terms with each other, Joey's life takes a turn both macabre and exhilarating.

Daniel Kraus's masterful plotting and unforgettable characters make Rotters a moving, terrifying, and unconventional epic about fathers and sons, complex family ties, taboos, and the ever-present specter of mortality.

MY THOUGHTS:

"He who digs a pit will fall into it." Proverbs 26:27

This book is morbid but I'm sure you got that from the title and cover.

The first sentence reads, 'This is the day my mother dies.'

After the death of his mother, Joey 'Crotch' Crouch leaves Chicago to live with his father in a small town. When things go south at school because he is the odd man out, he turns to figuring out his elusive fathers secrets. He jumps into his dads truck one night and finds himself outside of a cemetery. Then he takes a shovel and starts digging holes in the yard. I wasn't sure what motivated this kid to jump right into the same eerie hobby that his father had. He was a straight A student that played an instrument but by the end of the book he was digging up 'sleepers' on school nights, weekends, and holidays. He just embraced and ran with it.

This kid really have a bad life. Everything turned around for him in a very drastic way. After his mother's death, this kid's life just seems to take a nose dive. He starves, stinks, walks to school covered in mud and corpse stink, gets bullied by the majority of the school and teachers. When he finally does make a friend, it all goes wrong as well. Nothing works out well for this kid. It's like a storm started and though it peters out by the very end of the book, you know that he will always be one of those strange characters that don't quite fit the norm and who secretly have a storm brewing within them.

My 'dark side' - the part of me that loves ghost stories, E.A. Poe, and spooky old houses - really enjoyed the creepy vibe that this story gave off. It really made me think a little differently about the cemetery that I drive by so often. 

To be honest, it did take me a while to get through this book. I enjoyed the unique story but it did have some slow parts. 

I would not recommend to anyone who does not like horror, even light horror like this, and gets queasy at the mention of, well, the worst sort of things you'd find in coffins that have been in the ground for long. If you don't want to imagine corpses, then DON'T read this book! 

My Rating:
4.5 stars

BOOK TRAILER

What I'm Reading Wednesday #2

Currently Reading

The Companions 

(The Sundering Book 1)

by R.A. Salvatore

What I'm Reading Next

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
or

Matilda by Roald Dahl

I'm really not sure yet. 

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What are you currently reading? 

Top Ten Tuesday #20

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Reasons I Love Being A Blogger/Reader

Hmm. I haven't been blogging very long but I do enjoy it.

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I enjoy sharing my thoughts about books where others might read them.

I enjoy sharing the love of reading with so many amazing people. The book community is my life, basically, but I'm an introvert so I don't reach out as much as I could.

I love reading other blogger's reviews and opinions on books.

All the book recommendations!!!

My TBR list has skyrocketed into the thousands since I began blogging. It's going to take me 1,000 years to read all the books I want to read and the list will never end. I probably shouldn't enjoy that, but you can never have too many books.

I love all the challenges, read-a-thons, and read-a-longs there are in the book community.

I love seeing people get excited about books, whether it be in text or video. Some bloggers also have youtube accounts and I just love seeing people's faces light up when they talk a book they really want to read.

I really like doing the weekly 'memes'. Is that what they are called? Stacking The Shelves, Friday Reads, etc. I could talk about books all day.

Just having a place to escape to when I feel the need to get some book feels off my chest makes me very happy. 

I just love books, okay?

Love for Books Readathon

You still have time to sign up!

I just came across this today but I read more today than I have in over a month without knowing about this read-a-thon so I'm just going to go ahead and say I've been participating. I'm very behind on my goal for the month so I hope this can push me through at least 3-4 books.

FEB 17

 

I read 144 pages of The Companions by R.A. Salvatore

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Other Books I Might Read

Books, Music, and Movies: The Doors

THE BOOK
 

I came across 'The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison: Wilderness (Volume One)' at a thrift store and immediately recognized Jim Morrison on the cover. While the cover picture is faint and not the greatest, there were a few photos interspersed within and I can't help but say that Morrison was a handsome man. I planned on reading more non-fiction this year so I dug right into it. I admit that I didn't understand a lot of Morrison's poetry but then again, some of it was profoundly beautiful.
My favorite little bit was this: 

Today is blessed

The rest

remembered

There were a few other really good poems that stuck with me.

THE MUSIC

People Are Strange

Riders on the Storm

Listening to The Doors is pretty nostalgic for me. Actually, a lot of classic rock is nostalgic for me. My parents had what I consider to be great taste in music and it has influenced and shaped my life. My dad blasted Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Willy Nelson, and more on his stereo. My mom and stepdad were in a band that played lots of classic rock including Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and more. I grew up on Nirvana, Alanis Morissette,  Alice in Chains, System of A Down, and lots more. As I get older, modern rock seems to get just a little bit worse every year and I find myself listening to the good old classics more and more.

THE MOVIE

The movie, which just happens to currently be on Netflix, released in 1991 and starred Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison and Meg Ryan as his long time girlfriend. It was what anyone could expect a movie about a musician's life to be. Lots of music, gigs, drugs, alcohol, and sex. It was interesting to get a deeper look into his life through this film. 

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I always found it interesting that he was born in Florida (my home state) and died in Paris, France. My fiance and I had planned a trip to Paris last year mostly as a sort of mental vacation and one of my must-see stops was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery to see Jim Morrison's grave. That would be the coolest, in my opinion.
It is sad to know that most talented, poetic people (mostly musicians) die at such young ages. Jim Morrison was only 27, which is the age I am now. I can only imagine what his life and music might have become if he hadn't died so young.
 Overall, it was interesting to delve into Jim Morrison's world for a day.