Tag: YA

The Prince of Mist

Finally, I have a new review to post!

Since last February, I’ve been counting the days until I could get my hands on a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zaf0n’s young adult novel The Prince of Mist. I got a copy as soon as it hit the bookstores — the first week of May, I think, and read it the very same night. I’ve been meaning to review it for some time now, but work has piled up (again) and I haven’t had the luxury of time for blogging.

Anyway, if you don’t know Carlos Ruiz Zafon, he fast became one of my favorite authors after reading The Shadow of The Wind, the bestselling novel that catapulted him into fame, and earned him the post of Spain’s most widely read contemporary author after Miguel de Cervantes — and Cervantes has had a good five centuries to build up his readership.

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Meg Cabot again

When my mom arrived from the US early this year, I finally got the two Meg Cabot books I’d mooched from the US, and I finally got around to reading them: Pants on Fire and Airhead.

I’ve been reading Meg Cabot for what seems like ages now, and she’s a steady choice for my chick lit fix, judging by the fact that one layer of my shelf is filled with her books.  I have some favorites among her books (All American Girl, Every Boy’s Got One and The Boy Next Door); some I didn’t care for (Heather Wells series, the Princess Diaries after book 5, Nicola and the Viscount, Victoria and the Rogue); some I found horrid (Ready or Not) and some I don’t want to read at all (Mediator series and the 1-800 series), but all in all her repertoire is a good mix for girls of all ages — hip and easy-breezy books perfect for vegging out on the couch on a lazy Saturday afternoon (or procrastinating on a weeknight for that matter!).

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Shamanka!

Rum-pa-pum-pa-pum-pum! Rum-pa-pum-pa-pum-pum! The drumming sound was driving me crazy. Maybe it was a combination of the heat and the fact that I’d been walking frantically for the past half hour, but the faint drumming I’d heard as soon as I stepped into the used bookstore complex was getting louder by the minute.

I rounded the corner and found a bookshop I hadn’t noticed before, small and cluttered, with a labyrinthine arrangement of tall shelves. The Hindu storekeeper beckoned with a smile, so I ventured inside. Instantly, the drumming escalated into a frenetic rhythm: Pum-ba-da-bum-ba-da-pum-ba-da-ba-da-bum! Heart pounding, I backed into a shelf, causing a stack of books to fall on the floor in front of me. On top of the pile was book covered in snakeskin, with a strange word emblazoned on the cover: Shamanka.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid

diary

I’ve been hearing so much about this book in the last year, and for some reason I forgot that my cousin Dianne gave me a copy of this book last Christmas, as it got buried in the TBR pile. Thankfully I managed to dig it out sometime before the flood so it didn’t get wet or join the rubble of books that were brought upstairs for safety against the flood which I am still in the process of reshelving.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (#143 for 2009) caught my eye when I first saw it on the bookstore shelf; the words “a novel in cartoons” jumped out at me and I just knew I had to read the book.

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Catching Fire (and the HG fever continues!)

mockingjay

I know this is way overdue, as I finished Catching Fire three weeks ago. But the book fair, the two storms (and the great flood) that hit the country, my trip to Singapore (more on that on a future post!), and rearranging the house (ugh, reshelving my books, and still resuscitating those that went under during the flood) have kept me pretty busy and this is the first weekend I’ve had to myself in a long time.

If you’ve just discovered my blog, well, I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (Scholastic Press) about a month back, and to my surprise, it slaked that craving I had for a really good read, and about time too, as I’d spent more than half of the year looking for a book to wow me.

Several days later, I got ahold of the I had newly-released sequel, Catching Fire, and finished it just before I had the thrill of watching the Hunger Games Live Action Role Play (LARP) at the Manila International Book Fair, organized by Scholastic and National Bookstore with the New Worlds Alliance.

(Spoiler free!)

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