Friday Book News: 7 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break (4/1/11)
Happy April Fools’ everyone! And it feels like the universe is playing a bit of an April Fools’ joke over here–it’s been snowing on and off since last night, and there are driving warnings about the snowy conditions in effect until 2pm. Back home in Sydney, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle too–John Le Carré has tried to withdraw his name from the list of finalists for the Man Booker International Prize. The emphasis here is on “tried,” because the...
Read MoreCover Notes: Black Hole Sun, by David Macinnis Gill
Cover Notes is a new series I’ll be running every Monday. Rather than focusing on covers of books I’ve read, I’ll be writing about books I’ve never read and recording my first impressions of their covers. Each book will also have an Embarrassment Factor of between zero & five, with zero meaning “a totally awesome cover I want to write fan mail about” and five meaning “I’m ashamed to be seen with this in public.” This week, I was actually on my way to the young reader...
Read MoreReading MG: Modernizing Mythology in Carolyn Hennessy’s Pandora Series (minor spoilers)
Carolyn Hennesy’s Pandora series is like Kim Possible–in Ancient Greece. It’s fun. It’s a little flirty. It’s original. It’s kind of educational. It’s also not exactly accurate… Mythology is one of my passions. In high school, I devoured everything that could possibly have had “gods” splashed across the cover. And I still love it, though I’m especially partial to The Greek Stuff: I read both Bulfinch’s and Edith Hamilton to...
Read MoreFriday Book News: 6 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break (3/25/11)
Good morning, book people! It snowed for about ten minutes yesterday–fat flakes drifting on a rather bitter breeze. I think this is a hint I should spend more time in bed catching up on my reading… Yesterday, Kindle success Amanda Hocking struck a deal with St. Martin’s for her next series, Watersong. And Here’s Hocking’s blog post on the deal–she makes a lot of great points about why self-publishing isn’t for everybody. Remember Chitty Chitty Bang...
Read MoreWill Grayson, Will Grayson: The Good Side
Will Grayson, Will Grayson gets so many things right it’s almost painful to read. There are so many things to love about this book. Written by YA power duo David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) and John Green (Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines), it’s ridiculous and absurd and somehow wonderful, like a Benny Hill/Monty Python/It’s a Wonderful Life mashup suffering from ‘roid rage. It is almost everything I wish I could be...
Read MoreBeautiful Creatures: A Real Review (minor spoliers)
Read my earlier, list-style review of Beautiful Creatures. Reading Beautiful Creatures is like spending an afternoon strolling through a lemon grove, digging up a cemetery, and hanging around a Southern gothic mansion. It’s vibrant and thoughtful storytelling, with real depth of character, the sort of YA novel I wish I’d read as a teen. Ethan is haunted by dreams of a girl he’s never met, a girl who’s falling, whom he can’t save; Lena is a girl who’s...
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