The Cricket in Times Square

I’ve been seeing The Cricket in Times Square ever since the librarians let me sneak into in the “big library” when I was in first grade (the primary levels in our school used to have a separate kiddie library), but somehow I never got to read it, not until I found the audio book at the bargain bookstore.

I can’t listen to an audiobook without having read the book first, because my attention tends to drift away after a while, and I end up tuning out the sound. I wanted to listen to the Cricket audiobook because the box said it was narrated by Tony Shalhoub, so I dug out the wornncopy of the book I had lying around in Planet TBR and decided it was finally time to give it a shot.

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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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Love in the Time of Taffeta

As you guys may have read last month, my book club, Flips Flipping Pages, kicked off the Christmas festivities with our very own [bloody] prom, a totally fabulous prom night that made up for all the bad prom nights we had, or, for some people, the ones they missed going to.

Around that time, I wanted to read something prom-themed, so I picked up a copy of Love in the Time of Taffeta by Eugenie Olson, which the cover promised to be “a moving story of prom, bad behavior, and sequins.”

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The Scared Stiff

Taking a chance on books really pays off sometimes. I usually trawl through bargain bins for the occasional gem of a find, but failing that, I often end up buying a bunch of bargain books to put up in my bookmooch inventory. Sometimes though, when I look through the pile I’ve bought, I find one or two books that catch my interest, and I end up keeping them for myself. And sometimes, these obscure books I’ve never even seen or heard of before turn out to be good reads.

Tonight’s book is one of them. I got this book over a year ago (for P10!) and meant to list in on my bookmooch inventory, I happened to skim through the first few pages and changed my mind.

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