Our Little Geekling

Our journey toward finding out what it means to be a parent.

BOOKS April 13, 2010

I’ll update this periodically with book recommendations. :)

—-1 December 2010:

I HAVE been reading lately, I promise!

-I recently finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which I read for the online book club I’m a part of. It was… interesting. It’s in the young adult genre, which I found interesting once I realized that it was about World War II, set in Germany, and the author was very educational about teaching readers to swear in German. But all in all, good book.

-I was re-reading the Harry Potter series, which never disappoints. I wanted to get through all seven books before the newest movie came out, but I found my time waning, so I skipped books 4 and 5 and went on to 6 and 7. I’ve read them all several times, so I didn’t feel necessarily badly about this, but I feel as if I might have missed something, anyway. Silly, I know.

-Last night I completed The Tower, the Tortoise and the Zoo by Julia Stuart. I adored this book. It was a bit strange, and very formal for a modern-day book (well, I’m assuming it was supposed to be modern-day). But I thought it was very well-written. If you have connections in any way to London or London Tower, or you just want a good book to read that doesn’t have too much in the way of sex and swearing (although there is a bit), then this is a good one to pick up.

There are more books on my to-read list. I’ll keep you posted! :)

—-11 October 2010:

-I just finished Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. Not recommended. At all. It’s safe to say I hated this book. Who knows; you may love it. But I did not.

-Before that I re-read New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd. I love love love this book. It’s long. Seriously long. 880 pages long. But wow, it’s so worth it. If you love New York, or hope to love it someday, it’s definitely worth the weeks it will take to read it.

-I also read Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. It was good. Weird, but good. Interestingly written.

—-21 August 2010:

Well, I’ve been reading a lot lately, but until a friend told me she’d been on this part of my blog, I forgot I posted it. :)

-The third installment of the Stieg Larsson series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, came out and I LOVED it. It was well worth the wait. Now I’m waiting for the American movie of the first book to come out. But a friend and I watched the Swedish version last week, and it was great, with subtitles and all. It wasn’t exactly like the book, of course, but they did a really good job of telling the complete story.

-I also finished up through the tenth book of the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. That’s all of the series to this point. I finished it out, but I felt like the last few books were rushed, which they probably were, and didn’t tell enough of the story. I still recommend them, especially if you’re a fan of the show “True Blood”, which is based on the books, but be prepared for some annoyances in the last few books.

Let’s see.

-I re-read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer before the third movie came out. The movie was good, but not as good as the books, of course.

-I read The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks, and I’m super excited to watch the movie because (don’t judge me) I think Miley Cyrus is great.

-I read Faithful Place by Tana French and would recommend ALL of her books because she’s awesome. I bought her first book because of her name, since my older sister’s name is Tana, but I loved the author’s style.

-I also read The 9th Judgment by James Patterson, which is the most recent in the Women’s Murder Club series. The only complaint I have with this series is that the author is adamant that one of the characters is “large” and “chubby” and “enormous” and a “size XXL” at a “size 16″, which drives me crazy. Wow, he should have done more research. A size 16 woman is NOT a XXL, enormous or necessarily chubby.

-A great read I finished recently is Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. It was AWESOME, although I ended up being angry through most of the book. It centers on a Middle Eastern, Muslim man and his family living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. It tells of a great number of injustices and stereotypes and made me really disappointed in the response of some of the military and law enforcement after the storm. Highly recommended. I would let you borrow it, but I only have it on the Kindle.

I can’t think of anything else I’ve read recently right now… I just re-started I’ll try to be more diligent about updating this part of the blog so that I can help you all find good reads. :)

—-12 April 2010:

-I just started the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. So far I’m loving it!

-I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who Played with Fire by the late Stieg Larsson. There’s a third coming out at the end of May for which I can hardly wait. These books are not for the faint of heart, though, as they are full of swearing, violence, abuse, etc. Reader beware.

-If you’ve got a long while, you can try this one: Under the Dome. Stephen King is, of course, a literary genius. Under the Dome was one of the best books I ever read. It’s awesome. And frightening. One of the characters in this book is the one I hated most, ever, out of all of the books I’ve ever read. Including Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter.

-Another LONG but oh-so-worth it book is New York: the Novel by Edward Rutherfurd. It’s an amazing historical novel about Manhattan. It follows a lineage from the 17th century through present day. It’s awesome.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett was very touching. It opened my eyes a lot to the treatment of African-American housekeepers in the Deep South during the 1960s, AFTER we thought things were improving. Excellent read!

Water for Elephants was incredible. I bought it because of the title, because of my love for the majestic elephant. But the story was amazing. Sara Gruen is a great writer and researcher! I haven’t read anything else by her because, well, all of her other books are about horses, and I’m not really interested in horses. But she has a book about apes coming out, and I am excited about that one.

-Another author I’ve been loving is Douglas Preston. I’ve read three books by him, and he’s awesome. So inventive and amazingly forthwith. The Codex and Blasphemy mix literature and science, and The Monster of Florence is a true story and is just incredible (and makes me think twice about wanting to go to Italy on vacation!). Highly recommended.

John Grisham has long been my favorite author. I’ve read every book he’s ever written and I think he just gets better and better all the time.

-Another favorite is James Patterson. I just recently got into his books, and they have been great. I’m all caught up on the Women’s Murder Club series, and I’m on the fourth book for the Alex Cross series. If you like mystery/thriller books and want easy reads, he’s a winner!

-Another author I’ve recently gotten into is Kathy Reichs. Her books are the inspiration for the tv series “Bones”, and her books are great! I’ve read a few of hers, and just love them. Again, easy reads and mystery/thriller books. Excellent!

-Of course, I’ve been a huge fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series – who isn’t? And even though I’m not a teenage girl I love love LOVE the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.

 

One Response to “BOOKS”

  1. Megan Smith-Doss Says:

    Hello to my long lost cousin :) Your mother directed me to your blog so that I can keep up with the family from afar! I was drawn to the “Books” section of your blog…I wish that everyone would keep a running list of the books that they are reading and a short review as you have done! We have similar taste! I am going to follow your reading list….mostly because I already have the same books in my “To Read” pile! Anyway, can’t wait to read more! Kudos to you for being so responsible and staying in touch so well! I need to take a page out of your book ;) Oh and congrats to you and Jim….I am keeping you and your little peanut in my prayers!

    love love!


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
https://ourlittlegeekling.wordpress.com/books/
ourlittlegeekling.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
62663
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZCAPVTX5OTFKQRMXMLQSNPN7RHOZVXK5
<urn:uuid:a049fadf-ca0a-405a-bf9b-d82a2e0d6dca>
2015-04-19T15:35:25Z
192.0.78.12
sha1:YFPV4WWZHDANMSRGQU3LTVORCVA7ABPO
<urn:uuid:a5515253-ed0f-461b-bf2c-9724d9893b95>
https://ourlittlegeekling.wordpress.com/books/
length
response
<urn:uuid:5c14b37a-4e8c-46eb-97f0-97768f03fb1b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf