Thanks to all those who joined the Mockingjay giveaway. I’m sure you’re all eager to find out who the lucky winner is, and I’ve finally (figuratively) drawn the name out of the hat!
Category: Book Reviews
Back to the Underland
Last month, I blogged about how much I loved Suzanne Collins‘ Underland Chronicles after I read the first three books right before Mockingjay was released. I must confess the series took me by surprise; way before I discovered the Hunger Games series, I’d been seeing the Underland Chronicles in the bookstores and never really thought of picking them up. Then I managed to forage two books out of the bargain bins, and when I finally decided to read them, I found them utterly engrossing!
I read straight on from books 1-3: Gregor the Overlander, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, and Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods. I had trouble finding copies of the next books in the series, Gregor and the Marks of Secret and Gregor and the Code of the Claw so I momentarily had to stop reading the series, but some wonderful friends at Scholastic (yay, thanks Ms. Joyce and Ms. Roselle!) gifted me with books 4 and 5, and as soon as the craziness of the past couple of weeks subsided, I happily dug into the remainder of the Underland Chronicles.
The weird wonders of the wanderer’s world
At the height of stress, I often choose trivia books over novels, because I’m not in the proper frame of mind to concentrate on plot, and I really can’t afford to read more than a few snippets at a time. Last week was pure madness (in my world), but one book got me through it: The Traveller’s Companion.
Whenever I could find time to just sit down and catch my breath, I’d open it and read a page or two, and it was quite a relaxing exercise, and by the end of the week, I had finished the book!
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Mini Shopaholic
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Sophie Kinsella, and as soon as I heard there was another book in the Shopaholic series coming out in early September, I started skulking around bookstores to get my copy.
Mini Shopaholic is the sixth book in Kinsella’s wildly popular Shopaholic series, following the books The Confessions of a Shopaholic (in UK it’s The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic), Shopaholic Takes Manhattan (UK Shopaholic Abroad), Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Shopaholic and Sister, and Shopaholic and Baby.
While my favorite Sophie Kinsella books are outside of the Shopaholic series (I love Undomestic Goddess, and the last one, Twenties Girl), Becky Bloomwood has grown on me as I read the novels. I was a bit outraged at her addiction to shopping in the first two books, but well, later on, I realized there’s a little Becky Bloomwood inside of me: the book shopper (hahaha!). And I really love the supporting cast in the series — the dreamy Luke Brandon, the delightful Suze and Tarkie, the oddballs Jess and Tom, Becky’s folks Jane and Graham, their next-door neighbor Janice, the wild and wacky designer Danny Kovitz, and dear old Derek Smeath!
Heroes vs. Villains
Earlier this year, I blogged about The Action Heroine’s Handbook, a handy guide for wannabe kick-ass chicks, which details instructions on a variety of useful action heroine skills, such as winning a catfight, drinking someone under the table, choking a man with your bare thighs.
Months later, I received its companion volume, The Action Hero’s Handbook, that I requested from BookMooch, followed, quite aptly, by a copy of The Villain’s Guide to Better Living.
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