Tuesday, January 19, 2016

A few more notches on the bedstand...

Overall, I'm feeling a little behind in my reading.  First, I read The Sister.  My normal "MO" for reading is that I read a book at lunch for a couple of days, get pretty well hooked, and end up staying up way too late one night to finish it.  Unfortunately last week was full of errands that needed to be run in the evenings, so I wasn't able to finish it in the evening.  I was feeling very frustrated by the time Saturday rolled around and I was able to finish the book and then, well, it ended.  And I was left feeling like WTH?

I'm not sure what even caught my eye about the book.  When I first read the blurb, for some reason I thought it was going to be a funny book.  "Humorous book" is one of the categories, so I was okay with that.  Then about 50 pages in I could tell it wasn't a funny book and thought maybe mystery, but then it wasn't really a mystery.  It was kind of a horror story, but (as one goodreads reviewer said "The only thing it lacks is a sense of horror....") it really wasn't that either.  By the end I was like "Did I just waste a week of my life on this?"  Luckily there's a "book by/about someone you don't like" and I definitely didn't like the main character of this book by the end, so I guess we'll pop it there and have done.

Because I could tell generally where that book was heading, I decided to go for a book I knew I'd likely enjoy for my next book.  When I was a kid, one of our teachers was a fairly conservative Christian and we were forbidden from reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.  I've always wanted to read it, though, and this seemed a good opportunity to jump in.  I was not as enamored of it as I had hoped, but it was a relief after The Sister.

I got suckered in by a colorful cover and thought maybe I'd enjoy The Cherry Cola Book Club, but overall it was a really disappointing read for my "book with a fruit in the title" category.  This is the kind of book that you feel like publishing companies publish just because they need to meet a quota this month, and hey everyone loves a good "they're going to close the library--we need to save it" drama, right?  Yeah, do yourselves a favor and pass.

Finally, I greatly enjoyed reading Bloodsucking Fiends to complete my "humorous book" category.  It really was a humorous book, by the same author who wrote "Lamb," which is an old favorite of mine. This was a fun book about a woman who was turned into a vampire (mostly to amuse the vampire she turned into) and her struggles to figure out how to survive.  Campy and entertaining, with a solid plot and good characters.  I need to read more of Christopher Moore's books when I have time.

Next up is my behemoth "book over 600 pages" category, which I'm guessing will take me awhile (and disturb the cats as a 600 page hardcover takes up too much lap space for them to be comfortable sitting on me), and I'm working my way through a "book written by a celebrity."  We'll see which I finish first!

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