It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

(It's a very good possibility I am getting addicted to meme's, real entry by weeks end)

Courtesy of Book Journey

Last week I only read one book. I am a little ashamed of myself. I am blaming crocheting and Ravenwood Fair on facebook for my laziness. I made up for it, because at least I read If I Stay by Gayle Forman. I threw the book across the room the minute I finished reading it. IT JUST ENDS! Why do books keep doing that? Real review later in the week.

This week I have great big intentions, I'll read 2 out of these 3 books... 

What are you reading?

Random Things I Find Interesting

History: The Ultimate Fandom

Librian with book in bed, Scandalous!

And from one of my favorites... The Effing Librarian: Save America. Close Your Library. Read the article, you kind of have to admit, he has a point. People would spend a whole bunch of money if we weren't around.

And always a popular topic to debate: Sex in YA courtesy of YA Highway.

Waiting on Wednesday...

Breaking the Spine

Today has to be perfect.

Magic.
I look at the clock.
10:14 AM.

Ten fourteen. One plus one is two plus four is six plus ten is sixteen minus one is fifteen minus two is thirteen. OK.

I turn from the clock and walk into the hallway. "Ready."

Saturday will be the third state soccer champion­ship in a row for Jake Martin. Three. A good number. Prime. With Jake on the field, Carson City High can't lose because Jake has the magic: a self-created protection generated by his obsession with prime numbers. It's the magic that has every top soccer university recruiting Jake, the magic that keeps his family safe, and the magic that suppresses his anxiety attacks. But the magic is Jake's prison, because sustaining it means his compulsions take over nearly every aspect of his life.

Jake's convinced the magic will be permanent after Saturday, the perfect day, when every prime has converged. Once the game is over, he won't have to rely on his sister to concoct excuses for his odd rituals. His dad will stop treating him like he is some freak. Maybe he'll even make a friend other than Luc.

But what if the magic doesn't stay?

What if the numbers never leave?

I usually enjoy books that are about mental disease. I don't know how to justify that statement so I'll end it there.... I'll be looking forward to this one when it comes out on May 3. 

Review: If I Stay

If I Stay 

(April 19, 2011)

This was another book I threw across the room when I finished it. I guess I have a habit of doing that. 

I think that if I hadn't just ordered the next in the series for my library the other day... If I was just a normal reader the way this book ended would have annoyed me. IT JUST ENDS! 

I didn't find myself being very emotionally linked with this novel. After all the reviews I've read about this title, I thought I would be on an emotional roller coaster and I wasn't. Not to say I was disappointed. It was a beautiful novel. The characters were all likable and I found their story to be endearing. I was just set up for more, I guess. 

On the other hand, I'm looking forward to Where She Went...

Waiting on Wednesday

From Breaking the Spine

There are only two adult series I really follow, this is coming out next month and I can't wait to see how it is. The last one was disappointing, so I have high hopes for this one.

With her knack for being in trouble's way, Sookie witnesses the firebombing of Merlotte's, the bar where she works. Since Sam Merlotte is now known to be two-natured, suspicion falls immediately on the anti-shifters in the area. Sookie suspects otherwise, but her attention is divided when she realizes that her lover Eric Northman and his "child" Pam are plotting to kill the vampire who is now their master. Gradually, Sookie is drawn into the plot-which is much more complicated than she knows...

What I've Been Watching

I believe that teenagers receive their newsfeed (Facebook pun intended) from all sorts of sources. The internet, friends in school, television, magazines and then once in a while, books. In a small way, I am trying to view the world through a teenagers eyes, I am failing, of course, because my taste in television tends to differ. But I think I'll start tracking what I do watch, just to see how it relates. And, to stalk myself.

Because I am addicted to Netflix streaming on my Wii, I have access to what feels like an endless supply of entertainment. In the last month I have watched:

Teen Stuff (aka my guilty pleasures)
The last 2 seasons of Greek (some how they had the current season streaming!). I liked the story, it's a lot of friend drama, a little family drama and most of all, it's just fun. It was the last season, I'll miss it.

2 seasons of The Secret Life of the American Teen I have ranted about this show before. Haven't decided if I'll continue to watch it.

Currently I am watching Veronica Mars. For the 100th time. I want to be a teenage spy. Seriously.

Other Stuff
6 seasons of Weeds. I have watched them all before, but the boyfriend hadn't. I can watch them over and over again and not be sick of them. The new season will start this summer and for the first time ever, I don't have Showtime to watch it. Sad!

The 6th season of Grey's Anatomy, for the second time. I watched it weekly last year. Still love this show.

The first season of  Californication. When we finished Weeds I felt like I needed to fill the void in my heart, somehow.

We've also watched many documentaries lately. Mostly about food. FoodMatters was good, but Food Inc was better. It was an excellent documentary on how our food is processed. Kinda makes me want to move out to a farm and grow all of my own food. We also watched Beer Wars. Boyfriend has a wish to be a brewer when he grows up. Seriously entertaining depiction about how certain beer companies are taking over the market, while those fabulous micro brews are put out of the spotlight. And off the food topic... I watched a Hugh Hefner Documentary earlier. He's kinda great. Also, The One Percent was so good I actually put my laptop away. Pretty much, the rich keep getting richer and they don't feel bad about it. Great views of the rich families in America.

It's official, I watch too much TV. Or, I have no life.

What I've Been Reading

I'd Tell You I Love You But Then i'd Have to Kill You

The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women lives up to its name. Not only does this exclusive boarding school teach advanced language skills and correct deportment; its students also master the arts of tapping phones, hacking into computers, and spying in public places. At school, second-generation Gallagher Girl Cammie Morgan has impeccable credentials: She is fluent in 14 languages and able to kill an assailant in seven different ways. But recently life has dealt Cammie a card that she never anticipated: She has fallen in love with an ordinary boy who knows nothing about her exotic double life. A truly covert romance.


I thought this book would be a nice break from all the dystopianness. I am usually not a fan of girlly books, but I sincerely tried. I got to the last 30 pages or so before I kind of just wanted to give up. I thought it was going to be a big time girl power spy book. But then the minute she meets a boy, she kind of wants to give up all the spy stuff to sneak around. 


I felt the characters were one dimensional. Cammie was too much of a girlie girl and while watching a girl fall in love for the first time is always heart warming, I found it a little self deprecating. It was told in first person so we got to know her pretty well. On the other hand she had the tough friend, Bex and the smart friend, Liz. Macey, the new girl was the only stand-out, but mostly because she was trying to be a mean girl.


I know this is a series. I think that it probably has redeeming qualities as you read more, so I would still recommend it as an easy quick read for any girl. I would recommend Gossip Girl to the same type :-). 

The Water and the Wilds

When Bee woke up, there was a girl standing in her room. "You are me," the girl said. Then she was gone.

I am a thirteen-year-old double Gemini. I get bad grades, write poetry with my left hand, dance in my room, surf the net. I Google images of the tattoos my mom won't let me get. . . .

But my world belongs to someone else. Someone who lives below the concrete of Los Angeles, someone with wild eyes and twigs in her hair.

And I think she wants her life back.

Quotable Francesca: 

"How do I know right from wrong? I come from a place where it isn't the same."

"Under the ground where the roots take hold and everything end but also begins" 

 As per usual, I loved every word. I read this book in about an hour. I remember reading Weetzie Bat about 16 years ago at the same speed. That's what I love about Francesca Lia Block. No matter how old I am still amazed by her words. And I feel like I should be on a first name basis with her, mostly because I am her friend on facebook. I will re-read this, because she always uncover the story little by little, doesn't really make complete sense until the end.

The characters are beautifully written, completely complimentary to one another and all necessary in each other's life. It is a character driven story, more than a plot driven story. It is a snippet out of someone's life that we are chosen to be able to view. It would make any outcast feel like there is hope. And everyone who dream of fairies and doppledangers believe that the could indeed exist.

This book is hard to recommend at my particular library. They're in to graphic novels, urban fiction and fantasy. I know that this is considered fantasy, but... it is bit too wordy in the world of graphic novels.

Waiting on Wednesday...

Courtesy of Breaking the Spine

I found this book while looking at books for my April order. It looks so different (from what is out now) that it peaked my interest, and (hopefully the interest of my teens!)

Rotters by Daniel Krauss

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 makeRotters a moving, terrifying, and unconventional epic about fathers and sons, complex family ties, taboos, and the ever-present specter of mortality.

It's Friday, Friday, Friday!

For your musical pleasure: Most obnoxious Friday song ever.

The Hunger Games

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival.

So I finished Hunger Games. Yes I know I am the last one on earth. I literally went from disliking this book so much I didn't want to read the whole thing, (much less the series) to reading the whole thing in 24 hours. I just finished it and threw it across my living room because it just ends! Thank god I can go get the sequel tomorrow, but those people who had to wait, I feel for them.

I liked Katniss. She was strong, stupidly stubborn and smart. I felt like she played the martyr card a lot, but not so much so that it was annoying. Peeta was humble and kind of dreamy, understated. I wish Katniss would just open her eyes and see him. Stupid loveless girl. I have a crush on Peeta by the way.

This is a good examply of dystopian lit. I feel like I am reading only in this genre and it has a lot of competitors. They lived in a truly cruel world, in which no one is left unscathed. Children die and their parents mourn. That is scarier than big brother. Bad example of dystopian lit is XVI, I tried to read it again and just couldn't do it. I was forced into this weirdo world with nothing explained to me. 

The Goddess Test

Every girl who has taken the test has died.

Now it's Kate's turn.
It's always been just Kate and her mom--and now her mother is dying. Her last wish? To move back to her childhood home. So Kate's going to start at a new school with no friends, no other family and the fear her mother won't live past the fall.
Then she meets Henry. Dark. Tortured. And mesmerizing. He claims to be Hades, god of the Underworld--and if she accepts his bargain, he'll keep her mother alive while Kate tries to pass seven tests.
 Kate is sure he's crazy--until she sees him bring a girl back from the dead. Now saving her mother seems crazily possible. If she succeeds, she'll become Henry's future bride, and a goddess.
 If she fails...

I read this early courtesy of NetGalley. It will be released April 19. I absolutely loved it. I needed the break from dystopia and this was the perfect brain candy.

Kate was a very well rounded character, Henry was dreamy. And Aimee Carter wove in mythology very well. It didn't seem over done or under explained. I can't wait for the next one! (I think I liked this book too much, can barely give it a proper review!)

Another Challenge

Challenge courtesy of A Few More Pages

Guidelines for the 1st in a Series Challenge 2011

1. Anyone can join. You don't need a blog to participate. If you're not a blogger, leave your information in the comments.

2. There are four levels for this challenge:

• Series Novice: Read 3 books that are the first in any series.
• Series Lover: Read 6 books that are the first in any series.
• Series Expert: Read 12 books that are the first in any series.
• Series Fanatic: Read 20 books that are the first in any series.

You can list your books in advance or just put them in a wrap up post. If you list them, feel free to change them as the mood takes you. Any genre counts.

3. The challenge runs from January 1 through December 31, 2011.

4. You can join anytime between now and December 31, 2011.

5. If you're a blogger, write up a sign-up post that includes the URL to this post so that others can join in. Feel free to use the button above. When you sign up in the Linky, put the direct link to your1st in a Series Challenge sign-up post.


I am going to go for the Series Expert level and read 12 books.