It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

A weekly meme hosted by Sheila @ Book Journey.  I finally got around to using the new logo ;)

Well, it's back to work this week, though it will probably be slow-going as most teachers are refreshed from spring break and don't need time off.  Maybe a meeting or two will net me some work.  I have a few days booked ahead, so that's something to look forward to.

I had a great bookish week, buying a huge load of new titles at Book Depot & Chapters, and read 3 great books this week, with some fantastic looking ones ahead.

Books Read This Week (3)--click titles for reviews

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (A+)--fantastic must-read for all book lovers!

A is For Alibi (Kinsey Milhone series, #1) by Sue Grafton (A)--a re-read for the 1st in a Series challenge; very good, highly enjoyable mystery

Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (known as The Sorceror's Stone in the U.S., Harry Potter series, #1) (A+)--another re-read for the 1st in a Series challenge.  It's "spellbinding" (hee hee) :D  Simply amazing & even better than I remembered it.  I'm definitely going to finish off this series as soon as I can.  Review for this coming soon.

Currently Reading (2)

Misery- Stephen King--started reading this last night & it started off very eerily, and now it's building up tension; this should be a good one!

My Life- Bill Clinton--on hold for now

Next to Read

Rebecca- Daphne du Maurier--not for a challenge but I've waited long enough to dive into this book that everyone says to "read now!"

The Cider House Rules- John Irving--I loved Garp and Owen Meany so much that I'm psyched to start another of Irving's modern classics!


What are you reading this week?  Have a good one :)

Book & Blogging Quizzes

I spotted these @ Roof Beam Reader and The Eye of Loni's Storm.  I'm a bit dubious about the results of these type of quizzes but they're fun :)

You Are a Hardcover Book

When it comes to reading, you tend to stick to old and modern classics.  You are picky about what you read.  You probably anticipate certain books' releases, and you snatch them up the moment they're available.  You have been building a library of books that mean a lot to you. You carefully consider every book before deciding to add it to your collection.  You believe that if a book is worth reading, it's worth paying more to have it in hardcover.

Are You a Hardcover Book or a Paperback Book?

Blogthings: Take a Quiz. Annoy Your Friends.

You Are Mystery

You are a natural problem solver. You like figuring out the best way to do something.  You are very intuitive. You are good at picking up on people's moods and predicting the future.  You can't help but being a bit of a detective and a snoop. You always want to know what's going on.  And while you may have the scoop on everyone you know, you're not a gossip. You're a pro at keeping secrets.

What Kind of Book Are You?
Blogthings: We Have a Quiz for Almost Everything

Your Blogging Type is Confident and Insightful

You've got a ton of brain power, and you leverage it into brilliant blog.  Both creative and logical, you come up with amazing ideas and insights.  A total perfectionist, you find yourself revising and rewriting posts a lot of the time.  You blog for yourself - and you don't care how popular (or unpopular) your blog is!

What's Your Blogging Personality?
Blogthings: Discover the Parts of Your Personality that Have Been Hiding

You Are a Couplet



You're not much for words, so you write a little ditty.
It might not be a novel, but at least it is witty.

What Type of Poem Are You?
The First Rule of Blogthings Is: You Don't Talk About Blogthings

A is For Alibi- Sue Grafton (#1- Kinsey Millhone series)

Purchase:  Amazon | Chapters

Published:  1982
Pages:  308
ISBN:  9780312938994
Genre:  Mystery/Thriller

Start Date:  Mar. 16, 2011
Finished Date:  Mar. 18, 2011 (3 days)

Where Found:  Chapters-Indigo
Why Read:  Mostly for a reading challenge; was interested in re-reading it

Read for:  1st in a Series Challenge (3/6)
Previously Read:  For an American lit course with a hard-boiled mystery theme, previously reviewed here

Summary:  A private investigator simultanously investigates the potential innocence of a recent parolee convicted of murdering her husband that coincides with the similar death of an associate while continuing to look into a small claims case.
Review:

There isn't very much to add that I haven't written about this book before.  It's a solid mystery with a reliable, easy-to-like protagonist in Kinsey Millhone.  In this particular book, the first in the "alphabet" series (currently up to "U"), there are many suspects, keeping you guessing and leading to an electrifying ending.  Grafton makes the repetitive nature of Kinsey's job as a private investigator, especially the ongoing interviews with suspects and connections interesting.  She gives lots of interesting descriptions of interior and exterior locations, which may be annoying in any other book, but in a mystery with a P.I., this attention to detail adds to its charm.

In hindsight, I went a bit overboard with an A+ ranking, as it doesn't quite fit in the company of my 40-some odd other A+s.  I have read better books than A is For Alibi, but very few mysteries can top this one.  For more details, you can read my old review here.

Rank:  (A)- Very Good, Highly Recommend

Literary Blog Hop!

A biweekly meme hosted @ The Blue Bookcase.

This week's topic is from Debbie @ ReaderBuzz:

What one literary work must you read before you die?

As The Blue Bookcase pointed out, you could interpret this question two ways & I'm going to answer both:

What must I read before I die?

I definitely need to read at least one book by Ernest Hemingway and one by John Steinbeck, two authors I've completely neglected and never read in school.

What must you read before you die?

This is very general as I wouldn't know your particular brand of reading material and very limited scope compared to the numerous books that get recommended every day, but I would very strongly suggest you read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, one of the most unique books I've ever read.  It's incredibly informative about one of the most prevalent type of minds we encounter often today: autistic.  For that matter, any book that informs us about important issues (social, political, physical, personal) should be read before we no longer have to worry about them.


I'd love to hear what you chose for this week's topic!

Friday Blog Hop!

A weekly meme hosted by Jennifer @ Crazy For Books.

This week's topic is from Somer @ A Bird's Eye Review:

 

Do you read only one book at a time, or do you have several going at once?

 

Usually, I only read one book at a time as I like to give all my attention to a single story.  Every so often, I'll dip into a second book if the first one is slow-going or if I'm particuarly psyched to start a book waiting on the shelf.

 

What about you:  are you a one-book-at-a-time reader or one of varying attention span?

 

Have a great weekend :)

 

 

Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury

Purchase:  Amazon | Chapters

Published:  1953 (my copy is the 50th anniversary edition pictured above)
Pages:  190 (with Afterword, Coda, and a Q&A)
ISBN:  0345342968
Genre:  Sci-Fi/Classic

Start Date:  Mar. 13, 2011
Finished Date:  Mar. 15, 2011 (3 days)

Where Found:  Chapters-Indigo
Why Read:  On my TBR list

Read for:  What's in a Name 4 Challenge- Book With a Number (3/6)

Summary:  In a future America where books are illegal to read, a fireman responsible for burning any books found is influenced by a precocious young girl to resist what he has always known and escape the monotony of his life.

Review:

I never thought I would find a writer who can create more suspense than Stephen King.  And in so few words!  Ray Bradbury creates a terrifying, almost believable future in which people are discouraged from venturing outdoors, are entertained through wall-to-wall TVs in which they become part of the repetitious, soap opera-type shows, and are forbidden from reading books.  The anti-hero protagonist, Guy Montag, is getting pretty sick and tired of this life, despite stepping into the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him as a firefighter, who in a bizarre reversal, does not put out fires, but starts them on books some resistors have kept hidden.

Bradbury's style is vintage science fiction: choppy sentences that should be read quickly, action slowly building from the beginning to a frenetic pace by midway and coasting to the end, and mechanical technologies only vaguely recognizable at the original time of printing, but much more conceivable now.  People watch TV on wall-sized screens, listen to music and converse via tiny "seashell" earbuds, and are highly desensitized to human emotion, escaping through TV shows with paper-thin plots and vague characters.  You feel Guy's pain from beginning to end, wanting to give his doped-up wife, Mildred, a firm shake by the shoulders, and sic the Mechanical Hound, a grotesque watchdog who euthanizes "criminals" that fight against authority, on Beatty, the head fireman whose past is sympathetic, but his actions are unjustifiable.

The 50th anniversary edition comes with an interesting afterword written by Bradbury with fascinating anecdotes about the book (for example, did you know that the characters Montag and Beatty are named after brands of paper and pencil [respectively] and that Bradbury wrote the novel on a pay typewriter that charged a dime per half hour?).  Bradbury also reflects on the stage and film adaptations of the book (both pleasing to the author) and a subsequent scene that he contemplated adding to the book's later editions in which Beatty's motives are further represented.  This is followed by a fiercely written Coda that criticizes backstabbing editors who censored Bradbury's numerous works for the purposes of pleasing particular social groups, which makes one feel a tad uncomfortable at first (some may find comments borderline racist), but has a point nonetheless about artists: no one can fully please everyone and no one's work should be "edited" in an attempt to do so.  The book ends with a 50th anniversary Q&A between Bradbury (now 90) and Ballantine Books, the publishers of this edition, with a contemporary slant, including comments on how the book can be compared to today's digital age and its envitable comparison to other sci-fi classics, such as George Orwell's 1984.

If you are a book lover, you must read this book, which will no doubt terrify you, but make you even more grateful for the freedoms of expression, thought, and literacy that we all share.

Rank:  (A+)- Outstanding, A Must-Read!

Top 10 Tuesday- Literary Family

A weekly meme hosted @ The Broke and the Bookish.

Oooh....this was too good a topic to pass up this week :)  My odd, wild literary family would consist of:

1)  Father--Jules Tonnerre from The Diviners by Margaret Laurence for his music, his legendary stories, and his adventures.

2)  Mother--Kate Gulderson from One True Thing by Anna Quindlen for her unconditional kindness, her talent in arts & crafts (she could teach me a thing or two!), and her strength.

3)  Brothers--I'd love to have two:  Hassan from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini for his loyalty, generosity, and love; and Christopher from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon for his knowledge, his curiosity, and his challenges.

4)  Sisters--I'd love have two:  Anne from Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery for her imagination, her literary sense, and her ability to see the world for all its beauty; and Bridget Jones from Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding for her humour, her self-acceptance (for the most part), and her boyfriend, Mark Darcy, who we will envitably fight over :D

5)  Grandfather--Jacob Jankowski from Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen.  His stories of the circus will leave me spellbound.  I have to admit that I saw this on many top 10 posts today & couldn't resist "borrowing" him :)

6)  Grandmother--Marilla Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.  Even though she's an adoptive mother, I see her as a grandmother figure with her no-nonsense attitude, heart of gold, and acceptance of others' differences.

7)  Uncle--Will from About a Boy by Nick Hornby for his carefree ways, his laidback habits, and his spoiling of young children in his life :D

8)  Aunt--Muriel Pritchett from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler for her quirkiness, her love of animals, and her awesome clothes!

9)  Cousin--Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, because she doesn't have a family of her own and would need a person & place to turn to when she's in trouble.  You know, besides Mikael ;)

10)  Pet--this was a great suggestion for a family member by Anne @ My Head is Full of Books!  I would choose Marley the dog from Marley & Me by John Grogan, who would ruin the house but be a lot of fun, and Flaubert's parrot from Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, who is a stuffed bird but has a fascinating history behind him :)

What a wild & crazy family that would be!

Major Book Shopping Haul!

Boy did I ever sleep in this morning!  And it's no wonder after a full day out.  The Book Depot was pretty awesome.  They only had 2 of my challenge books that I wanted to get but I was pleasantly, overwhelmingly surprised by the availability of so many books on my must-read list.  I ended up with an overstuffed box of....57!

Here are the photos I snapped of them all & their titles.  Sorry if the glare of the flash obscures some parts.

LEFT COLUMN:
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold- John le Carré
Moonlight Mile- Dennis Lehane
By Myself & Then Some- Lauren Bacall
The First Wives Club- Olivia Goldsmith
Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography- Andrew Morton
A Lotus Grows in the Mud- Goldie Hawn
The Age of Innocence- Edith Wharton
Brideshead Revisited- Evelyn Waugh
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits- Ayelet Waldman
Living History- Hillary Rodham Clinton
U2 by U2- Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullens
Great Expectations- Charles Dickens
Reservation Road- John Burnham Schwartz
Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself- Alan Alda
Patchwork Planet- Anne Tyler

RIGHT COLUMN:
Blessings- Anna Quindlen
All the King's Men- Robert Penn Warren
Middlemarch- George Eliot
The Evening Star- Larry McMurtry
The Poseidon Adventure- Paul Gallico
Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
American on Purpose- Craig Ferguson
The Birthing House- Christopher Ransom
Kate Remembered- A. Scott Berg
Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn- William J. Mann
Gulliver's Travels- Jonathan Swift
L.A. Confidential- James Ellroy
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood- Rebecca Wells
The Stone Diaries- Carol Shields

VERY BOTTOM:
The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison

LEFT COLUMN (from left to right, top to bottom):
Angela's Ashes- Frank McCourt
The Awakening- Kate Chopin
My Antonia- Willa Cather
Vanity Fair- William Makepeace Thackeray
If I Only Knew Then- Charles Grodin
Profiles in Courage- John F. Kennedy

RIGHT COLUMN:
Film Flam- Larry McMurtry
Our Town- Thornton Wilder
Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland- Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass- Lewis Carroll
The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Far From the Madding Crowd- Thomas Hardy
Shameless Explotation in Pursuit of the Common Good- Paul Newman & A.E. Hotchner
Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
We Were the Mulvaneys- Joyce Carol Oates
Get Shorty- Elmore Leonard
Terms of Endearment- Larry McMurtry
The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
Mutiny on the Bounty-
A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens
Their Eyes Were Watching God- Zora Neale Hurston
Cry, the Beloved Country- Alan Paton
Native Son- Richard Wright
Hannibal- Thomas Harris


But, the adventure didn't end there!  I thought to myself that I should venture forth and get the challenge books I was seeking in the first place...and a couple of others the Book Depot didn't have ;)  So, I ended up getting 10 more books at Chapters:

Pet Sematary- Stephen King
Night Shift- Stephen King
Misery- Stephen King
The Cider House Rules- John Irving
On the Road- Jack Kerouac
Back When We Were Grownups- Anne Tyler
The Reader- Bernhard Schlink
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter- Carson McCullers
Night- Elie Wiesel
A Short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson

So, the grand total from my book haul is 67 books.  I was lucky to squeeze some on my shelves and get all the others in one box for the closet.  Space is dwindling with every book buying trip...you know how it is :)  All in all, I'd say my TBR shelf is pretty full for now!

On a challenge-related note, I cannot seem to find Cujo by Stephen King for the Stephen King Challenge, so I'll be swapping in Pet Sematary instead.

Have you been on any book-buying sprees lately?