Shorts.

I’m back! Pardon the unexpected hiatus — it’s been a busy, busy week month year and I’m still catching up on my blogging.

And I thought the holiday stress was bad! I could barely read last December (at least until after Christmas), so aside from finishing all my trivia books for the year end, my December reads were mostly short kidlit that I unearthed from the annals of my TBR: Pippi Longstocking, A House of Tailors, The Key Collection, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, Catwings, The Cybil War, and The Great Mom Swap. These make books 199-205 for 2010, and after this I owe you one more (for a total of 206; apparently I overlooked one book), and then will proceed to my 2011 reviews.

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Another trivia roundup


I run through trivia books like other girls run through, say, a tube of lipstick.

At any given time, in between the novels I read, I thumb through five to eight trivia books simultaneously and all over the house — in bed, in the bathroom, in the den, in the kitchen. As I’ve said before, they make great palate cleansers, especially when I’ve been reading text-heavy narratives, plus they contain snippets that can be read and digested easily, not to mention the convenience of being able to stop at any point of the book and pick it up days or weeks later and just keep on reading. The trivia junkie that I am, these useless bits of information do come in handy from time to time during the weekly quiz nights and the monthly geek fights that I attend.

I finish a batch of trivia books several times in a year, hence the trivia book roundups. Here’s the last bunch from last year, which includes Say Chic; The Bathroom Trivia Book; Be Safe!; Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets; Kiss and Tell; A Year in High Heels; From Altoids to Zima; The TV Guide Book of Lists; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs. These are books 189-198 for 2010, which means I only owe you 6 more book reviews in my 2010 backlog. Hopefully I have the remaining six up by next week so I can move on to my January reads (12 and counting) as well as a surprise in the works for this month (patience!).

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Why We Buy

I don’t normally read business books, but I needed a U for last year’s A-Z Challenge and I couldn’t find any fiction book by a U author that interested me, so I raided my sister’s book stash. My sister, marketing manager of the supermarkets of a major retail chain, was about 21 pages into the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill when I encroached upon her reading! :D

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Style: Rachel Zoe + Carson Kressley

I’m no fashion savant, but I do like reading pretty fashion books, just to keep myself updated.

Last Christmas, I got two personal style books to give as gifts: Style A to Zoe: The Art of Fashion, Beauty, and Everything Glamour by Rachel Zoe with Rose Apodaca, and Off the Cuff: The Guy’s Guide to Looking Good by Carson Kressley. The Rachel Zoe book went to my sister, and the Carson Kressley book to a friend, but of course, before they got wrapped, I could not resist poring into them!

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Vivaldi’s Virgins

Antonio Vivaldi, also known as “the Red Priest,” is regarded as one of the most greatest Baroque composer, and is widely popular even to this day. He has over 500 concertos to his name, the most famous of which are the four violin concertos, “The Four Seasons.”

Vivaldi has always been one of my favorite classical composers, so the book Vivaldi’s Virgins by Barbara Quick caught my eye at the NBS book bazaar a couple of years ago. I finally got to read it last month, because I badly needed a Q for the A-Z Challenge.

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