Get Lost in Literature

"He couldn't have pulled back the lock, they couldn't simply have climbed over the sides of the stall in all of three seconds, because those weren't the rules of the game. Theirs was the intoxication of the hunter, his the terror of the prey. Once they had actually captured him the fun was over and the punishment more of a duty that had to be carried out. If he gave up too early there was a chance they would put more of their energy into the punishment instead of the hunt." --Let the Right One In At school, twelve year old Oskar is a target for bullies and is ostracized. At home, his greatest pleasures involve scrapbooking about serial killers and imagining what it is like to be one. When he isn't being hunted, he's pretending to be the hunter. When a boy Oskar's age is found murdered in the woods, it's all he can think about until he meets his new neighbor... Eli -- a strange, sickly girl, who lives with what Oskar assumes is an abusive alc...

My picks for the Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by  The Broke and Bookish . Today's theme, the Top Ten Things On My Bookish Bucket List ( could be blogging related, book related etc. -- meeting authors, reading x many books per year, finishing a daunting book, etc .) made me have to think. I suppose finishing  my To-be-read-list, an improbable task, because the list keeps growing. I would love to meet JK Rowling...but I think I'd panic, forget what to ask/say her, and just stare at her and make her uncomfortable. I'd also like to meet John Ajvide Lindqvist because he made me love horror. I want to read Watership Down and Jurassic Park ...but for some odd reason I keep putting them off. I would like to have my copy of Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiars, signed. I'd like to have at least one of my own stories published... ...and see it on a Best-seller list ;-) I want to know how the Kingkiller Chronicles ends, which mean Patrick Rothfuss would have to ...

The year is 2071 and everyone is being watched. A revolution is taking place and Spurious a state worker for Tisia, is on a mission to find out the truth after the love of his life, Lana, gets into trouble. Obi is the leader of TDU, a rebel army trying to bring down Tisia at any cost. Then there is Alexander Augustus and Tinus, leaders of Tisia and Tisia's Knights (a squad of elite military enforcers). I think this story had a decent concept idea--a futuristic society under heavy government surveillance, after a nuclear war over a newly discovered fuel. The choices the characters had to make were moral quagmire in a good way; naive State-workers must choose between staying loyal to a dictatorship, or supporting the TDU who aren't any better than terrorists. The TDU had to struggle with cost of collateral damage that came with trying to achieve their end game, while the villainous Knights had to commit horrible acts on orders from above or have their loyalty questioned. Mea...

“Viktor had been very sad about their grandfather's death, but Flora had intuited that it was less the person he grieved for than the fact of death itself. Death meant that people actually disappeared. That everyone was going to disappear.” ― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead Residents of Stockholm are experiencing an abundance of strange phenomenon. First the oppressive weather begins triggering headaches, followed by unusual power surges that trigger electronics to malfunction. Shortly after, the newly deceased wake up in morgues, dig themselves out of their graves, and try to return home... Gustav Mahler's life ended the day his grandson died. Now he sees the possibility to take back what he's lost and make everything right. Flora's grandmother sacrificed years of her life to a catatonic husband. His death was a relief and she wants nothing to do with his afterlife. David wants everything back to the way it was before. He doesn't want to explain to...

My picks for the Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by  The Broke and Bookish .Today's theme is Top Ten Books On My Spring 2014 TBR List ( to be read list ) and these books are listed in no particular order because let's face it, my reading habits bounce about dependent on mood. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward Awake by Elizabeth Graver Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson Frankenstein by Mary Shelly The Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett Dune by Frank Herbert The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier City at the End of Time by Greg Bear Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

Have a happy one!  Drink responsibly, designate a driver, wear green, and enjoy your meal!

Sorry, lol, I did a silly thing. I forgot to send the bill in, that reminds the internet provider to keep broadcasting the internet. They're real sticklers about paying on time. So far, I'm loving Palimpsest . CMV loves her imagery; no sentence left un-beautified. I'm not as far in as I'd like to be, but if you gave The Night Circus a good rating you'll probably like this. It's a little more erotic than The Night Circus though, its about a fantasy world that can only be accessed by having sex with someone  whose already been there... "Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint." Quotable Thursday originally brought to you by  Bookshelf Fantasies .

“Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see. To be the playthings of tyrants. But you...you were born to fight tyranny.” I was really surprised by this book; fact and fiction blend seamlessly together as Seth Grahame Smith tells the story of Abraham Lincoln from childhood to his assassination: a lawyer, politician, family man and vampire hunter. Things I liked: The Intro -- To my surprise, the story does not start with our 16th president's birth... Instead, it starts with modern day times and a failed novelist. The Horror -- These vampires aren't nice, they don't want to be your friend, and they certainly don't want to carry on an epic romance with teenage girls. But the horror is introduced artfully, first as an unseen foe Abraham struggles to name, and then growing more violent and more cunning over the years. The Dreams  -- In novels, you don't need to docu...

My picks for the Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by  The Broke and Bookish . Today's theme was a Top Ten You Pick The Genre, and given that choice I will always choose Fantasy. 1. Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. 2.  Children of Hurin by JRR Tolkien edited by Christopher Tolkien. (Really, I love all the Tolkien stories, but this was my favorite.) 3. The Wicked Years series by Gregory Maguire 4.  The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern 5.  The Little Country by Charles de Lint 6.  The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini 7. Enchantment by Orson Scott Card 8. The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly 9. The Flying Dutchman series by Brian Jacques 10.  The Telling Pool by David Clement-Davies

This entry isn't about books, but it is about a bit of great writing, so I'm thinking it counts. Every great movie starts as a screenplay, every screenplay had to be written by a human-being-- Some of whom are more clever than others. Now I hardly take my nose out of books long enough to notice what's happening in the world around me, so maybe you've already heard of the Marble Hornets ; that's highly probable as the movie's got over 1 million followers. Which makes me feel so silly for not hearing about it sooner. But for anyone who doesn't know what Marble Hornets is, let me tell you. It's a movie/webisode series on YouTube, based on the horror monster known as  "The Slenderman". And for those who've never heard of The Slenderman, he is the product of a horror-buff-forum-thread where users were invited to create their own monsters. Someone submitted two black and white photos of children, altered to have a tall, ominous, faceless, ...

This week for Quotable Thursday I'm reading Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente...I actually just started this book this morning, so today, you're getting the opening lines of Palimpsest. "On the corner of 16th street and Hieratica a factory sings and sighs. Look: its thin spires flash green, and spit long loops of white flame into the night. Casmira owns this place, as did her father and her grandmother and probably her most distant progenitor. It is pleasant to imagine them, curling and uncurling their proboscis fingers against machines of stick and bone..." Quotable Thursday originally brought to you by Bookshelf Fantasies .

Bianca's life in Montefiore is interrupted, when her father is sent on a quest for an ancient relic, abandoning her to the care of Lucrezia Borgia. Gregory Maguire, as always, has intriguing ideas on how fairy-tales could have gone. But I admit to being disappointed with this story,because the villain does not narrate this tale as with the bulk of his fairy-tale rewrites, instead this story has many narrators. And that is one area where it could have been improved on. While the transitions between 3rd person and first person were seamless enough to not detract from the story too much, the story would have benefited more if 3rd person had been maintained throughout. The switching viewpoints made the story chaotic and it made connecting to the characters harder than it had to be. I found the dwarves to be a bit confusing, although the lack of detail surrounding those characters may have been a convoluted attempt to maintain the mystery around them. I admit to being disappointed...

My picks for the Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by  The Broke and Bookish . Today's theme, Top Ten Popular Authors I've Never Read, was surprisingly easy; I'm the kind of person who 9 times out of 10, will read the opposite of what everybody else is reading. Here are ten popular authors whose books I've never read. EL James Suzanne Collins Jane Austen Cassandra Clare Jodi Picoult George RR Martin Nicholas Sparks John Grisham PC Cast JR Ward