The books of April 2012

Another month has completely flown by me! I realize that there are still most of today and all of tomorrow left in April, but I decided that today would be reading optional, so time to blog.

I saw some more movies. I checked and it looks like I'm planning to see a movie every weekend from now through mid-August, minus one. Everything looks so entertaining! This month I saw Wrath of the Titans (sadly not awesome), Cabin in the Woods (best horror genre movie ever!), Wild and Weird with the Alloy Orchestra playing for all the silent shorts at Ebertfest, and John Cusack's latest, The Raven (better than I expected and it made me want to re-read all of Poe's stories).

I managed to squeeze in some crafts. First up was another custom item I asked weelittlestitches to design for a friend's birthday. She loves Romy and Michele, so I thought maybe she should be able to see them every day:

Let's fold scarves!

One of my BFFs made a request for a cross-stitch. I found the pattern in an old book I had and then stitched up the saying she wanted:

Remember to put the key where you can find it.

The IronCraft challenges this month were good. Challenge 7 was "Freshen Up". I took it a little outside the box between their description and what I had just made for BFF. I decided to put a favorite saying to stitch and found (in that same book) something I could make for myself so I look at it every day as a way to think differently about my life:

A cute reminder not to be a dud.

Challenge 8, "Love Your Mother...Earth" was a recycle challenge. I went back to Erica Domesek's P.S. - I Made This book and followed the instructions for the fringe t-shirt scarf:

This scarf is a good idea, but I'll probably never wear it.

Lastly, I was commissioned to make two of the following:

Does this even need a caption?

In book news, I bought one mini-book for $0.99 on the Kindle this month...and downloaded lots of free books. But I didn't buy a physical book.

This month I read Sizzling Sixteen, Smokin' Seventeen, and Explosive Eighteen all by Janet Evanovich. I also read: Good Christian Bitches by Kim Gatlin, Beauty and the Werewolf by Mercedes Lackey, The Garden Intrigue by Lauren Willig, The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A. S. Byatt, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Secret Rage by Charlaine Harris. (Also, this new layout for composition from Blogger? Totally not user friendly.)

All three Evanovich books were the same as the other fifteen. Stephanie Plum gets bonds cases, can't figure out which man she wants to be with the most (Morelli or Ranger), deals with her crazy family, and generally bungles cases with Lula until she accidentally solves those cases. Always fun reads. Whenever nineteen comes out, I see me sitting on the balcony, reading with my sunglasses on until it's too dark to be outside reading.

I read GCB because I read that it's the inspiration for the show on ABC. It's extremely, loosely based on the book. I don't know...I didn't really enjoy the book, possibly because the characters had already been developed very differently for me by the TV show. It wasn't bad; I just think you have to choose which one you prefer...I prefer the show with Kristin Chenoweth and Annie Potts.


Beauty and the Werewolf was another book in Mercedes Lackey's 500 Kingdoms series. I really like this series because it takes the same fairy tale you've heard a million times and messes with it. Because it's a series, there's a driving force called "The Tradition" that's constantly trying to push people into the story characters. Each kingdom falls under the realm of a fairy godmother (some more powerful than others) and she has to work to keep the magic contained and the people unharmed as much as possible. This new take on Beauty and the Beast has the girl attacked by the werewolf so they can be thrown together. She soon learns that the werewolf thing is a curse and the guy wasn't born that way. So while she's falling for him, that doesn't break the curse. He's also scholarly and has turned to learn about magic, so he's a lower-level wizard...she learns from him and her local godmother and is on her way to becoming a sorceress. It was a very different take on the story...as are all of these books in the series. And, there are always little jokes on pop culture in Lackey's books of this series that I enjoy finding. If you want to read this, I'd point you to The Fairy Godmother first since it's book one of the series and kind of explains how things will work throughout the series. All of these books are good.

The latest installment from Lauren Willig has our current day graduate student researching one of the Pink Carnation's male spies...the poet who appears in a few other books. He ends up working with an American to find out that Napoleon has hired Robert Fulton to create a new weapon for him to attack England. Of course, the American and the poet fall for each other while working on a horrible masque/play for Napoleon's house. In current time, the grad student and her British boyfriend have problems with his family and a film crew at his home. Turns out, there's a treasure that his uncle/cousin has been after the whole time to add more intrigue to the story. As always, as soon as I was done, I wanted to read another one. She's going to need to start writing faster!

The two Philippa Gregory books are part of the Cousin's War series. Last month I read The White Queen about Elizabeth Woodville. The Red Queen was about Margaret Beaufort of the House of Lancaster. I did not like her at all. She was constantly harping on things being her God-given right...one husband even pointed out how nice it must be that God supported each of her hair-brained schemes. She wanted her son on the throne as he was the Tudor heir. She and her one-time brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, fought valiantly to put her son on the throne. It was pretty much a chore to read because she was so very unsympathetic. The Lady of the Rivers was about Jacquetta, Elizabeth's Woodville's mother. She was French and had briefly been friends with Joan of Arc while her family held her for the French, knowing that once the matriarch died, her uncle would hand Joan to the English to be killed. Jacquetta had a bit of "the sight" and sometimes she could see people's futures, but not always in a way she could understand, despite her first husband's training. This one was more interesting because Jacquetta was full of life and took her fate into her own hands and didn't rely on others to do her bidding. I think there's a fourth book for the series coming out this summer. If you like this time period, read the first and third books, but skip The Red Queen. That one was far too irritating.

Ragnarok was a good book! I've found Byatt to be hit or miss with me, but this was definitely an interesting one. A child in England during the second world war finds a book about the fall of the Norse gods and uses her reading to deal with the pain and loss of war. The imagery was pretty amazing. It was hard to put this small book down.

I read The Secret Garden so long ago, that I could barely remember it all. I downloaded it on to the Kindle since it was free and let it be my first venture into reading on an electronic device. Turns out, I still love books, but I'm also pretty happy with this device as well. It definitely cuts back on the clutter issue. Anyway, I don't remember my original reactions to this story, but I did like it this time around. It ended up happily and neatly, with everything fixed...you know, except for the gardener still having back pains and the family of fourteen (!) still being poor. Despite the garden descriptions, it didn't make me look forward to going outside in the summer. Shocking, I know.

I found Secret Rage on the shelf at the library while looking for something else. I like Charlaine Harris's Sookie books, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was a short, brutal read about a series of rapes in a town in Tennessee. The characters were very interesting and I always love a good southern story. I could've done without some of the fine details, but I knew it was a "ripped from the headlines" type of story so I was prepared. All that was missing were the Law and Order gong sounds at the end of each chapter. 

I've got a lot on my plate for May, so I might not be reading as much. But I'll definitely have some movies to talk about and some other stuff. Have a good rest of April!