The books of October 2011

Didn't I just write one of these things?! How is it Halloween? I mean, tomorrow it's NOVEMBER! Actually, quite a bit of last month was spent working on the blog I did to archive my pictures from Italy so I could remember the trip. If you missed that, and want to see lots of old and beautiful things (and no, I don't mean me), then you should check out Pictures from Italy 2011. The first post you see is the last, so scroll down if you want to read it in order, or, just scroll and look at stuff. The pictures make me really happy.

I also made a few crafts this month. A friend at work had a birthday and I worked with another friend to figure out what he says the most. This is what he ended up with:

Totally different from being tanorexic.

I made an imaginary friend for the Iron Craft challenge. Her name is Ms. Flora Petalsworth and she is very into mischief. I'm pretty sure she's the reason all my plans to clean my room have been thwarted.

She looks so sweet and innocent...

For another Iron Craft challenge, the topic was just Halloween. That's fairly broad, so I narrowed it down in my head to something my friend would like to have for her Halloween parties. I gave it to her on Saturday.

Stitching this candy corn did not drive me batty.

I think I only bought one book for myself this month...I'm still pretty sad about the no Borders situation. No wait...I bought two...and a couple of friends have lent books to me that I swear I'll get to as soon as I can! I got Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory (mainly because it has a spaceship AND a tentacle on the front cover) and The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan.  

This month I stuck mostly with library books again...and got a new, smaller stack before I came home tonight (because I need to read my friends' books). I finished The Host by Stephenie Meyer, aka The Worst Book Ever. I also read Beauty Queens by Libba Bray and books one, two, three, and five of Steve Berry's Cotton Malone series: The Templar Legacy, The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal, and The Paris Vendetta (I accidentally read book four, The Charlemagne Pursuit, while on vacation last month).

A quick sum up of The Host: it never got any better. Never. It was really a bad book, but I'd committed and refused to give up. As badly written (and still much beloved) as the Twilight books are, the sparkley vampires and faux wolves have a great story to tell. These characters? Not so much. The hosts are bodies taken to "host" new souls. I'm pretty sure most doctrines don't refer to the host/parasite relationship when discussing souls, but whatever. The main host can't get rid of the original soul inside the body, so she ends up falling in love with the girl's past and helping carve out a new future. I don't know if you see potential in that, but if you do, I'm telling you, don't bother. It went unfulfilled. It was just not a good read...and because it was so long, it felt like for-ev-er before I finished it. I was completely happy to move on to any other topic by that point.

The Cotton Malone series. I know I gushed about this last month...and some of you began reading and some see the awesome and some don't. That's cool. I think part of what I like about these books is that Berry discusses how he researched things and lived in those places to get the best out of himself for the book that he could. I think it shows. The Templar Knights have long been a fascination for me. I think many of you know how I feel about that medieval time period and knights in general. Get me started on King Arthur and I'll probably never stop typing! Anyway, this was about the lost templar treasury from when the knights were killed off by the king's (and church's) proclamation. We meet Cotton Malone, dragged into his first mystery by accident, while trying to help out his friend and former boss, Stephanie Nell. The old Danish guy, Henrik Thorvaldsen, and the woman who (sometimes) works for him, Cassiopeia Vitt (what a great name), also become involve and lay the groundwork for the next stories with their teamwork to (a) thwart danger, (b) solve the mystery, (c) kill the bad guys, and generally (d) save the day. It's really the framework for all the novels in this series, but since they're based with some true history, I am hooked. The Alexandria Link is about the library of Alexandria, supposedly lost, but apparently kept going by a very secretive group of guardians who need help from Cotton to keep their treasure safe. In this one we meet Cotton's son Gary and his ex-wife Pam (who he throws out of an airplane...which she didn't like, even though they had to jump). They get a little closure and a better relationship...oh, and save the day. In The Venetian Betrayal, we learn more about St. Mark and Alexander the Great and the links between them. The people working against them find the cure for AIDS (oddly, a bacteria that attacks and destroys the disease) and the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. The Paris Vendetta is centered on old family rivals of Napoleon and finding his lost millions. There are lots of twists and turns as always, but I was surprised (SPOILER) that one of the main characters thus far is killed off. A new one was introduced, but I don't know yet if he'll play an integral part to upcoming plots. I've got the next paperback, The Emperor's Tomb, sitting on the nightstand and I'm going to ask for The Jefferson Key (book 7) for Christmas. I know this may seem like not great, very formulaic reading, but because the adventures take place all over the world and include researched historical facts woven in with stories you learned long ago, they're just great fun to read. 

Beauty Queens is about teen beauty pageant contestants that survive a plane wreck and get completely, and utterly, screwed by the company sponsoring the pageant because it's run by a woman with aspirations that can not be stopped. She's planning dirty deals with embargoed nations for arms and oil while covertly covering up that there are surviving teen dreams on the island The Corporation owns. Her plan? Kill them off...pretty much everyone involved...to achieve her goal of becoming possibly the least informed president ever. A smile and a wave don't always solve the problem. The girls (and one near girl) become extremely self-sufficient and are able to bounce back once the evil plot is discovered. All this, and PIRATES. Seriously? This book is insane. It was kind of funny though. Not laugh out loud, but satirically funny, if that makes sense.

OK. Happy Halloween and I'll be back next month!

The books of September 2011

September completely flew by, didn't it? It was a good month though. I mean, it's hard for a month to be bad when you spend half of it traveling in Italy.

Why aren't all of the ceilings like this everywhere?

Before I left, I finished up a couple of projects: my wrist-warmers (which have already been worn at work) and my friend's birthday present as mentioned last month.

The Happy Birthday Monster is coming to get you!

It was the last month of Borders bookstore...so sad! I picked up a few titles before they were gone for good: Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan, Once in a Blue Moon by Eileen Goudge, The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, and The Emperor's Tomb by Steve Berry.

I continued reading books from the library, but I needed to have things turned in before my vacation, so I took books I owned with me on the trip. Here's what I read in September: It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy by Laurie Notaro, The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan, Un Amico Italiano: Eat, Pray, Love in Rome by Luca Spaghetti, Once in a Blue Moon by Eileen Goudge, Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan, The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry, and part of The Host by Stephenie Meyer.

The Laurie Notaro was funny as always. I'm not a huge fan of her fiction works, but these essays on her life are hysterical every time. I recommend all of them. This one has a couple of appearances from Ambien Laurie who takes on a life of her own while regular Laurie is sleeping. Seriously, if you've not read her before, check out the first one from her, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life. I remember laughing out loud while having coffee somewhere quiet and everyone looking at me because of the disruption. If you like that one, you'll like the rest.

Dead-Tossed Waves is the second book in the Forest of Hands and Teeth series. (The library has the third one, so it will be coming soon to this blog.) This story focuses on the daughter of the main character from the first book. It turns out the story is much more complex than I originally thought...apparently the daughter is not hers biologically and she has a twin who's been gone for a long time, but was alive the last time the new male interest saw her. There are a lot of twists and turns in these books, but for a post-apocalyptic teen book, it's pretty intriguing. It's not the Hunger Games, but it's a different take on survival and you root for the characters who are pushing the story forward.

The Luca Spaghetti book wasn't that great. It did fill in any holes you may have thought existed in the Rome portion of the Eat, Pray, Love story. Luca Spaghetti is a real person and in this book he tells his story and writes in depth about his friendship with Liz and what it's all come to mean to him. Reading it while in Rome was the only thing that saved it for me because he gave a lot of history/background stories to many of the places we visited, so sometimes I would know a little more about it than if we'd just walked there and looked at it. I left it at the apartment in Rome for the next person in case it was of interest.

Once in a Blue Moon was definitely my vacation book. I've read a few of Goudge's books before...they tend to be about families and twists in lives and trying to piece it back together...generally with a few well-written sex scenes to glue it all together. This particular story was about two sisters, living with a horrible mother who ended up in jail while they were farmed out to foster care. One thrived; one repeated their mother's patterns. Once reunited, they were able to come to terms with the different hands life had dealt them and it all ends happily...after more ups and downs. It wasn't the best novel ever written, but it was engrossing and passed the time. I left it at the apartment in Positano.

Commencement is one I read about on Jen Lancaster's blog. It's four unlikely friends who go to an all female college and how their paths cross and uncross after college. It was really well done and I loved reading it. I couldn't believe what happened toward the end and that's pretty amazing to me. I started picking up on the twist, but I had never expected that particular thing to be the twist. She's a good writer, and now I totally want to read the other one by her, Maine. This one stayed in Positano too after being read almost completely while on the terrace.

I read Steve Berry's The Romanov Prophecy sometime a couple of years ago. I loved it so much that when I noticed The Charlemagne Pursuit out in paperback around the following Christmas, I asked for it. I didn't get around to reading it until I was on vacation. Apparently the Romanov one was a one-off and I plunged into the middle of a series when reading the Charlemagne one. But that's ok! The series is about the main character, Cotton Malone. There are several in the series (most all currently on loan to me from the library) and a couple more one-offs. I plan to read them all. In this book, Cotton Malone, retired justice agent, is pulled into a huge mess, simply by trying to figure out more about his father's death on a submarine that was never found. He got a classified report and it turns out, the mission of the sub was not what they'd been told and only one ship was ever sent to look for it. The mystery of this leads to a huge amount of killing, both in the states and in Europe. I could not put this book down. When it was time to do stuff, it was really hard for me...and I was in ITALY and it was BEAUTIFUL and I wanted to read about people getting killed over something that had happened like 40 years earlier. It was really, really good. I can't wait to read the rest...he's a very strong character.

When I got back, instead of heading to the library right away (just went today), I decided to read whatever was on top of the night stand. Unfortunately, that was The Host by Stephenie Meyer. I read the Twilight series. I always said it wasn't the best written, but the story was compelling, so I kept reading, and yes, I've seen all the movies so far and plan to see the other two from the last book. This one though, it's just, well, the same writing style (bad) with a story that I can't seem to follow and kind of don't want to. One friend said she liked it and others have all said it was bad. I'm determined to finish the thing since it's been a chore to read at all so far but it seems like it might be picking up a little (I'm about a third of the way through). I don't think it's going to turn out ok though...not like Anne Rice's The Queen of the Damned - the first half was the worst book I'd ever read and then all of the sudden, POW! Awesomeness! Not many authors can pull that off, and most shouldn't even try. I'll let you know how it goes next month.