Reflections of August

Goodbye August!

You’ve been a lovely month full of sunshine and interesting rainstorms that cause power outages and the cancellation of an event at work. Both my sister and my dad celebrated their birthdays, I went home for the county fair, spent some time camping with my boyfriend amidst a burn ban (making s’mores over a propane burner is always interesting), started my classes up, painted a new (well, old, but new to me) bookshelf, and of course, read a lot.

Books I Read:

                                        

Yes, I am reading the Percy Jackson series for the very first time. Crazy. Also, I can’t believe it took me this long to discover the Lunar Chronicles, but perfect timing since Winter is coming out in a few months and I’m so very excited !!!

My standings for The Quest No. 1 are as follows:

1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe – Fannie Flagg
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
3. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
4. The Disciple by Stephen Koontz

And FGT takes the lead! This is such an exciting race.

Currently Reading:

Progress: 175/241

This is a very short book that is taking me a very long time to read. I have very conflicting feelings about it. You will see, my friends. Well, you will read. Soon, I promise!

Reviews:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Disciple by Stephen Coontz
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
Perfect Ruin by Lauren DeStefano

Tags and Things:

Top Ten Tuesdays:
My Most-Read Authors
Authors Whose Grocery Lists I’d Read
Top Ten Tuesday Time!

Other Stuff:

Where have the Young Adults gone?
Real People Read Reviews, Reviewers
New books new books! Mini Book Haul

Favorite Book of the Month:

I didn’t actually like Cress as a character at first, but she grew a lot in this book which I appreciated, since I very much disliked Scarlet in Scarlet, who did not grow. She may actually have shrank. Also, oh my when are Captain Thorne and Cress going to happen?! SO PRECIOUS.

Least Favorite Book of the Month:

Yeah…. just no.

That’s it for this month!

I’ll write again soon. Until then, keep reading.

J. Bookish

Perfect Ruin – Review

Title: Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles #1)
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Published: Published March 10th 2015 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Rating: 3.5/5

“On Internment you can be anything you dream – a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker… Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There’s only one rule: you don’t approach he edge. If you do, it’s already over.” 

How awesome is that quote? I was totally sold as soon as I read that. I chose this book for a Young Adult Literature class I took last year, and I read it so quickly that, fast-forward a year, and I could hardly remember what had happened. Then last weekend, my boyfriend and I were going camping and I was in the mood for a dystopian-type book, so I decided to re-read it. Again, I read it in a few hours!

Perfect Ruin is about a girl named Morgan I seriously just had to search through the book to find her name, I hope it’s written as sparingly as I think it is or else I’m losing it, guys! who lives on a piece of Earth that was banished to the sky (supposedly by a god but the real reason is never explained). Morgan’s brother was a jumper – a person who is so torturedly curious about the Earth below that they tried to jump off the edge. Morgan loves internment, and doesn’t question the way things are on her little chunk of earth – until she’s forced to.

New books new books! Mini Book Haul

I have a confession to make. I am just not strong enough. The books. They call to me.

I’ve read so many reviews in the past month (I’ve been blogging for a whole 12th of a year! Yay!) and added so many new books to my want-to-read shelf on Goodreads that I just couldn’t resist buying a few of them. Can you blame me? If you’re on this page, you probably understand the struggle.

So I am still continuing on The Quest, but as so many of the books on that list are pretty heavy, figuratively. Although a few of them actually are chunkers. I could do some weight-lifting with Team of Rivals. I’m going to start reading some lighter books in between. Shake things up a bit, ya know?

P.S. Books are speeensive. Unless you buy them on Amazon. Or second-hand. How do some bloggers buy like 10 books at a time?! But sometimes you just want to go hang out at a bookstore and bring home the physical copies, you know?

Real People Read Reviews, Reviewers

Hey guys,

This is going to be a bit of a tough topic to write about, but it fires me up so I’m just going to go for it.

Last week, I was minding my own business, wandering through the eternal maze that is Goodreads. I was looking for reviewers to follow, so I checked out a few of my favorite books and the reviews people had written to try and find like-minded people who would most likely enjoy the same books as me.

Top Ten Tuesday Time!

Hello Friends!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created by The Broke and the Bookish! This week’s topic is: Top Ten Books that Would Be on Your Syllabus if You Taught “X” 101. So I have a confession to make. I’m apparently not very good at thinking of 10 books that fit any list. But I also can’t just leave the list at less than 10. Less than 10 = Less than finished = sleepless nights. So I keep morphing these things to allow me to finish the lists. I hope I’m not disappointing the lovely folks over at The Broke and the Bookish. I’m sorry for letting you down. *glistening tear*.

Come and get some Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe – Review

Title: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Author: Fannie Flagg
Published: McGraw-Hill 1988
Rating: 5/5

“It’s funny, most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened; but Ruth knew the very second it happened to her. When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart.”

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which will now be called FGT because holy cow long title) absolutely blew me away. I expected it to be a charming novel about a quaint cafe in the south, and it was, but it was also so much more. The thing I loved most about it was that it touched on so many issues – the Great Depression, feminism, abuse, racism, alcoholism, disability, vagrancy, a lesbian relationship in the early 1900’s – and yet it isn’t about any of them. It’s about life. This was very refreshing to me. It seems that these days, addressing issues without focusing on them as a problem or a central theme seems to be impossibly rare. FGT is about human resilience and the ability to weather any storm and continue on.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors whose grocery lists I’d read

Happy Tuesday!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created by The Broke and the Bookish.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic how’s that for alliteration iiiiiiis: Top 10 Auto-Buy Authors. Which, in my opinion, is remarkably similar to last week’s Most-Read Authors, because if you would read any book that an author published, they’re most likely your most-read as well…but because this is only my second week participating, I’ll be a good little girl and play along. I did my best to use different authors for this challenge than I did for the last one, although there is still some overlap. So, here we go!

Great Expectations – Review

Title: Great Expectations
Author: Charles Dickens
Published by: Sterling Children’s Books, Inc. (Originally published 1861)
Rating: 3/5

“We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintances were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was to the last aspect a rather common one.”

Great Expectations is the story of Pip (pip, cheerio), and his Great Expectations. Essentially, his unyielding hope that he can gain the love of a beezy who is completely unworthy of his love. It is his financial rise and fall, and his eventual growth to the realization that there are more important things than money. Which he couldn’t manage even when he had it. Pip is a rather boring narrator, and the story is peppered with much more interesting if unlikable characters, as well as a few lovely folks whom he takes for granted until he learns his final lesson.

Friday Wrap-Up!

Hello again!

I’ve decided to start a Friday Wrap-Up instead of writing updates the day after I finish a book, because this week the day after I finished my review on The Disciple was a Tuesday and I wanted to post my Top 10 Tuesday.. and then it was Wednesday and it felt weird to post the update two whole days later so I just decided to wait and make a mashed up week-long update! Hope that’s cool with you guys. If it’s not…. well… I’m gonna do it anyway so let’s just hope it is. As if you actually really care what day I post my rambling updates. Pshhh come on J, they have lives. Unlike you, apparently.

Top Ten Tuesday: My Most-Read Authors…kind of.

Hello All!

As posted last week, I’ve decided to begin participating in Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly feature created by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week, the challenge is: Top Ten Authors I’ve Read The Most Books From! Aaaaand I’m immediately going to begin cheating. Okay, so here’s the deal. I have made my list with 5 authors I have read the most books from and 5 authors I would like to read the most more books from. I just had so many authors that I had read 2 or 3 books from, I couldn’t decide which ones to include. So I decided only to use those who I had read more than 3 books from, and that list was decidedly shorter because apparently I am an author flake. I also included my favorite book from each author. So, here we go!