I mentioned that I had to go on maternity leave for my reading jobs, so my On Reading posts will no longer mean that I read a book for work. I could be a stickler for consistency and just stop doing them, but they’re just too much fun–especially when I catch the fever for a really great meme like the one accidentally started by the Accidental Novelist, and picked up by Poodlerat. Here are 13 opening lines (or two) to books that are beloved by…
Synopsis: 100 young men begin a walk that will not end until there is only one survivor, who will win everything he wants for the rest of his life. Review: I’ve read The Long Walk a bunch of times. It’s one of the best of the books Stephen King wrote under the name of Richard Bachman, a short, tight novella that contains a universe of human drama. The other one worth reading is, of course The Running Man, made into that great rainy Saturday movie…
Synopsis: 3 young women meet in the typing pool at Fabian Publishing, 1952, hoping for love and finding that life has more to offer than they ever imagined. Review: I haven’t done much rereading since starting this blog, mostly thanks to the TBR tsunami that Bookmooch yielded out of a few boxes of discarded books my mom cleaned out of her house and sent to me. My reading life has been consumed by a tyranny of the new, but sometimes an old friend is just…
Synopsis: To fulfill an ancient prophecy, dark magic is woven around a baby girl so that she will appear to be a boy, but the cost is the life and soul of her twin brother whose ghost now violently haunts the castle. Review: For some reason I thought The Bone Doll’s Twin was a one-off, so towards the end I got impatient when I realized that the story wasn’t going to wrap up anytime soon. I wasn’t in the mood to commit to a new…
Happy Booking Through Thursday, everyone! Today’s suggestion is from Cereal Box Reader: I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why? I just abandoned a book the other day… Marge Piercy’s Vida. See, I finally got around to…
Synopsis: Fearful of her husband’s sexual advances, a young mother falls into a spectacular case of hysteria–that might not be all in her head. Review: Angelica is yet another neo-Gothic tale, set in a Victorian England conjured more from literature than from history. It has all of the elements you’d want: repressed sexuality, midnight visions, hysteria and a spiritualist, all rendered in gorgeous, sumptuous prose from four different points of view.
I was one of the prize donors for Dewey’s recent Read-a-Thon. I offered 2 Bookmooch points–one for the winner, and one to be given to the Bookmooch charity of the winner’s choosing. The winner was Debi with a limerick about Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Tree: Tom Skelton and friends took quite a trip, Through space and time, they did fly and flip, Learning much about night, And things that cause fright, And in the end, they saved their friend Pip. Since Debi is not a Bookmoocher,…
Synopsis: Having grown up with a controlling, secret-keeping mother, a young man yearns to know his family’s history and meet his letter-writing lover in person, but his journey takes him face to face with madness and murder. Review: Thank you, thank you, thank you to Eva for recommending this book! The Ghost Writer is a straight up Gothic tale, no revisionism here, thank you very much. It’s a tangled labyrinth of memories, letters, and unfinished stories that builds to a creepy, frightening climax that draws…
The 24-hour read-a-thon is up and running, and I’m sending out good reading vibes to all the participants: 1 More Chapter A Patchwork of Books A Striped Armchair Aquatique Bebo Author Becky's Books Book Glutton Bookgirl's Nightstand Dog's Eye View Ed's Thread Eliza Tucker Errant Dreams Jason Erik Lundberg Joystory Just Another Musing Keeper of the Snails Life Naked Without Books Nothing of Importance OCD Man Pages Turned S.M.S. Book Reviews So Many Books So Many Books, So Little Time Teen Book Review The Armenian…
This week’s meme: You may or may not have seen my post at Punctuality Rules Tuesday, about a book I recently bought that had the actual TITLE misspelled on the spine of the book. A glaring typographical error that really (really!) should have been caught. So, using that as a springboard, today’s question: What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book? I have two huge pet peeves that sometimes make it into published books: using “loose” for “lose” and “phased”…