An Abundance of John Green

One of the things I love about my book club, Flips Flipping Pages, is how it opened up new worlds of reading for me.

In the past, I was averse to reading books other people raved about, mainly because I like discovering books on my own, and with the exception of my cousin Dianne, I don’t know anyone who has the same taste in books as I do. The more a book was foisted on me, the more I resisted it, and if I was interested in a popular book, I usually chose to read it long after the hype had gone down.

Making friends with other readers made me realize a bunch of things. One, I was missing out on a whole lot of books. Two, people with entirely different tastes in books can like a same book, or even find different elements to like in one book. And three, you don’t even have to like a book to find it interesting!

Of course, this realization has had its repercussions: the inability to walk out of a book store empty-handed, the triple-layered shelves of TBR books, and transforming from a strict monobookist to a juggling polybookist, but because there are other people as pathologically addicted as I am to books, I don’t really mind.

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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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