Little Thoughts About Books and Stuff

I have three books left in the Color Coded Reading Challenge - brown, yellow, and black.  I've been struggling with picking which books to read.  I finally picked some books! For Brown For Yellow For Black

The Grass Is Singing: A Novel by Doris Lessing My rating: 3 of 5 stars What a depressing novel.  I'm a little confused by the ending, did she have a relationship with him or didn't she?  Lessing never writes that she does, but I guess that's part of this story.  As I read the novel, I kept wishing the characters were different.  I wanted Dick and Mary to at least attempt to work out their differences and try at their marriage. As depressed as I was reading this book, I have to say it's been my favorite so far in this class.  I really liked Lessing's writing style and I thought the story was formatted great!  You know from the first few lines that Mary is dead, the story is how she winds up that way.  The story is about identity and the struggles that we all face in finding who we are and where we belong.  Sadly Mary never found where she belongs. View all my reviews

Season 8, Vol 1-4  The only two books I purchased besides the Buffy Graphic Novels. Two free paper backs Timonthy Zahn was there signing his book and I'm never one to pass up a free signed copy of a book. The five ARCs I was able to get my hands on at different booths. "special" ARCs.  I got Blood Gospel when I purchased the Douche  Journals and Obsidian Mirror was handed out only to librarians. 

I'm currently reading two books for school: For the last two weeks our book for discussions/reaction paper is The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. It's a good book, but it's depressing. Midnight's Children by Salaman Rushdie is a book we'll be discussing later in class but it is the book I picked for my final project so I need to read it now. I'm moving a lot slower than I would like to be, but it's a difficult read and I want to get as much out of it as I can! My current audio book is: So far I'm really liking Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. It really is a book that I think I wouldn't have been able to get through if I was reading the print book, but listening to the audio book on my commute to and from work I have time to listen and process the information. Being an Introvert I'm really interested in a lot of the information that basically explains why I am the way I am. ...

The Maverick (Long, Tall Texans) by Diana Palmer My rating: 1 of 5 stars I was kind of excited about this book, I've been waiting for Harley to have his own story and even though I didn't finish reading this series during the summer I was going to keep reading to fill in the gaps since I had read Jon's book and had holes to fill in. However this book was the biggest let down.  I didn't like the characters, the dialogue or the story.   There have been a few books that I've waited for with bated breath. Books that are finally telling the story of the character who has been in each previous books, or a romance that has been building up for a number of books.   Acheron  by Sherrilyn Kenyon was one and I wasn't let down by this book, nor was I let down by  Kiss of Snow  by Nalini Singh.  They were just what I was expecting, the epic stories they had been built up to be. I wasn't expecting Harley's story to be epic, but I was expecting to at lea...

In order to catch up with the current weeks in the semester I'm combining weeks 2 & 3 into one post. The Stranger by Albert Camus My rating: 2 of 5 stars It was okay, I don't think I would have picked this up on my own. I've always thought that Camus was a bit heavy and I tend to avoid heavy reading unless it's assigned to me. That being said I thought it was a deep book, and it really made me step back and take a look at how I react to and interact with the world around me. View all my reviews Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe My rating: 3 of 5 stars I liked this book. I was starting to think that I wouldn't like anything we were reading this semester. I was surprised that this would be the book that I liked, since I don't have a favorable opinion of Chinua Achebe. (Long explanation involving earlier Literature classes.) There were things that frustrated me about this book, but it got bumped up to "like" because I can see myself rec...

This semester I'm taking Graduate Seminar in Global Literature.  We have a great line up of books and I wanted to share some mini-reviews here.  Here is the list of books I'll be reading: Week 1 - The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann Week 2 - The Stranger by Albert Camus Week 3 - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Weeks 4 & 5 - The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing Week 6 - Wide Sargasso Sea Weeks 7 & 8 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Weeks 9 & 10 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie I chose Midnight's Children as the book I'm going to focus on for my final project/report.  I'll be finishing that up sooner rather than later. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka My rating: 2 of 5 stars It was okay, I don't understand what all the fuss is about with this book.  I thought it was disturbing. View all my reviews Death in Venice by Thomas Mann My rating: 2 of 5 stars It ...