One good thing about being sick (at least for me) is the time I get to read. When I’ve got a cold, all I want to do is lay around and sleep and read. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately. And just because I don’t comment on a book doesn’t mean I didn’t like it; it just means that I don’t have it in front of me to tell you much about it. I guess that means it was good but unmemorable.
- If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period – Gennifer Choldenko
- Threadbared: Decades of Don’ts from the Sewing and Crafting World – Mary Watkins and Kimberly Wrenn. This is a hilarious look at some of the ghastly fashions that proliferated in the how-to crochet/knitting/sewing magazines.
- Daemon Hall – Andrew Nance
- Silent Echoes – Carla Jablonski
- Defect – Will Weaver. I can’t praise this book enough. David, 15, lives with his foster parents on a hog farm in Minnesota. He has a physical abnormality that he has kept hidden from the world. But when circumstances reveal his secret to the world, he is faced with some truly difficult decisions. Awesome, awesome book.
- Girl at Sea – Maureen Johnson
- The Bermudez Triangle – Maureen Johnson. I learned about Maureen Johnson from Scott Westerfeld’s blog. This is a fantastic book!!! Three girls, very close friends, have a summer that leads to an unforgettable senior year of high school. One of the friends goes off to pre-college, and falls in love. The other two girls, left behind, end up falling in love–at least for a while–themselves, with each other. Johnson’s characters are believable, and you agonize with them as they’re exploring their inner selves.
- Truth or Dairy – Catherine Clark
- Freak – Marcella Pixley
- Angelmonster – Veronica Bennett. A quite good book about the relationship with Mary Shelley and her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and how the book Frankenstein came about.
- The White Darkness – Geraldine McCaughrean
- Lost It – Kristen Tracy
- Demons of the Ocean – Justin Somper. This is the first of the Vampirates books. I liked it okay. Enough to read any sequels? Possibly, but I doubt I’d go out of my way to find any. An orphaned brother and sister escape the town that wants to place them either as the pampered children of a rich childless couple or in the orphanage; a storm at sea knocks them out of their boat. The brother is rescued by a pirate ship, and the sister ends up on a ship of vampires. It’s an intriguing premise, and Somper does a good job with it.
- The Plain Janes – Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
- Good as Lily – Derek Kirk Kim & Jesse Ham
- The Christopher Killer: A Forensic Mystrery – Alane Ferguson
- The Garden of Eve – K.L. Going
- The Poison Apples – Lily Archer
- Dramarama – E. Lockhart
- Gatsby’s Girl – Caroline Preston. This book fictionalizes the life of Ginevra King, the first love of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the model of several of his characters, including Josephine of the Basil & Josephine stories. It was extremely well written, and Preston did a great job with the framework of the story. I do recommend it, particularly if you’re a fan of Fitzgerald or his works.
- The Sea of Monsters – Rick Riordan
- The Truth-Teller’s Tale – Sharon Shinn
- Abarat – Clive Barker. I fell in love with the Abarat books in no small part because of the glorious full-colour paintings Barker did. The characters are complex and the detail is rich. I really like the first two Abarat books, and am hoping for more!
- Days of Magic, Nights of War – Clive Barker
- Pucker – Melanie Gideon
- The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth – Jenny Bowden
- Life or Debt: A One-Week Plan for a Lifetime of Financial Freedom – Stacy Johnson
- Freak Show – James St. James. St. James wrote the novel that the film Party Monsters was based on. That should give you plenty of information about this book right there. A drag queen gets sent by his mother to live with his father in Florida, and goes to a very snobbish intolerant private school. Where some people might try to fly under the radar, Billy Bloom shows his fabulosity and nearly gets killed in the process.
- Return to Labyrinth – Jake T. Forbes. If you’ve seen Labyrinth with David Bowie’s drool-worthy performance as Jareth, the Goblin King, then you’ll be able to follow the story pretty easily. Toby, who was stolen as a baby by Jareth and then rescued by his teenage half-sister, is now a teenager himself, and something keeps calling him back to the Labyrinth. It’s a manga, and the illustrations are beautiful.
- Robot Dreams – Sara Varon. This is another manga, with little to no text, but it’s sweet and beautiful and sad and I really loved it.
- Erec Rex: The dragon’s Eye – Kaza Kingsley. Another excellent book. Erec gets cloudy premonitions, and his first in the book tells him to go to a certain hot dog stand to find his mother, who is lost. He won’t find her at the hot dog stand, but that’s where he has to go to begin looking. He ends up entering a world of magic, competing in some challenges designed to identify the 3 new rulers of this world, rescuing his mother, and finding out a bit about himself along the way. This is obviously the first volume of a series, and the end of the book doesn’t finish the story. It’s quite good, and it’s one that I will gladly seek out the sequels as they’re available.
- Stuck in the 70’s – D.L. Garfinkle. I wasn’t nuts about this one. A spoiled selfish obnoxious rich girl ends up being shipped back to the 1970s. She lands, to be specific, naked in a teenage boy’s bathtub. She is completely bewildered, having no idea how she got there, and all she wants to do is get back. At first.
- Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature– Robin Brande
- King Dork – Frank Portman. Another one I wasn’t too crazy about.
- The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World – E.L. Konigsburg. It’s reminiscent of The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, with quirky characters and an artistic find. I liked it, but not as much as some of Konigsburg’s other work.
that’s a lot of reading, miss! 🙂
i have one library book left. going to exchange them out monday.
Glad you liked Erec Rex Book 1!
I hope you get to enjoy Book 2.
Hope you feel better soon, and enjoy the holidays!!
Kaza Kingsley
Author of the Erec Rex series
http://www.erecrex.com