A life of books . . .
This is one of the best Jane Austen adaptations I’ve read in a long time, maybe I’m just moving toward only wanting to read YA adaptations but honestly it made me laugh and similarly to The Season I read back in November I read it pretty much in one sitting. Basically, this book did for Pride and Prejudice what Clueless (IMDb link) did for Emma.
Seriously, if you don’t believe me just go look at the number of Austen adaptations/modernizations that I’ve read here. I’ll wait.
This might be the book to have pulled me out of my reading slump! Even if it’s not, I really enjoyed it as visible by my starting it at 8:30pm and finishing it the same night at 12:45am.
I stumbled across this book catching up on blog posts when I saw A.M.B.’s post Five Variations of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice on her blog The Misfortune of Knowing. We all know I love Jane, her birthday is on my calendar – seriously, and I have an entire page dedicated to her here: Austen(esque). So of course, I immediately went to put all of them on hold at my various libraries and this one was available immediately!!
Continue reading “Book 526: The Season – Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer”
I hadn’t planned to read more than one of these, but when you’re caught up in the moment you can’t really control what comes through on your kindle (or you buy at a bookstore, get from the library, or… well you know what I mean). After finishing Hot Head, I checked to see if this was available at the library and it was, so of course I checked i tout and blazed through it.
Lickety Split, is sort of the opposite of Hot Head in that it’s set in super rural Texas and you’ve got small town life versus big city living. There are still some family hiccups in this one as there were in the first. I guess Suede writes what he knows with a big impact either way. He grew up in small town Texas (surprise, surprise) and fled for the big city at the first opportunity he could.
I’m not sure why I picked this up back in January 2014, but I did. It was either the sadness in the title or the open envelopes on the front. I had no recollection of it being short stories as I rarely read them. And yet even when I went to read this, because I wanted a quick read before vacation, I was surprised they were short stories and it says STORIES on the front!
Honestly, this book disappointed me. There were two beautiful quotes, but overall I found the stories to be lacking and somewhat stunted. Many of the stories loosely tied together and I felt it distracted from what could’ve been a wonderful collection of (somewhat depressing) coming of age stories.
“Homesick is how Karen feels, though she doesn’t miss home, more like an earlier version of herself, a person who, in her memory is hardworking, starightforward, pure.” (Common Rooms, 12)
“Lewis and I decided this last night and it was a relief. Not everything has to do with me. Even the things that have something to do with me, like this contract, don’t have much to do with me.” (Sam, 87)
I would rather have not wondered if everyone was connected (and I could be wrong).
All of this being said, I think what bothered me the most about the short stories was that really good short stories to me, leave you curious about everything before and after, but simultaneously leave you feeling fulfilled. These did not, partially because there were characters that were either the same character or one with the same name and it was like wait what, is this a continuation? And partially because they just didn’t feel complete with the exception of Common Rooms, it was by far the strongest and it was the lead of the book.
Recommendation: Pass unless you are really interested in college coming of age stories or really interested in short stories.
The End.
I think that’s about all you can say about this book. It wasn’t as disappointing as I though it would be, but it also wasn’t the ending I wanted/needed for a 13 book series investment. Perhaps, Snicket hit it on the head with the final line of the book, which doesn’t spoil anything because there was a 14th chapter.
“Under the circumstances, it is the best for which you can hope.”
I’m not convinced it was the best for which I could’ve hoped for, but I think it’s the most I was going to get. If these books would’ve been difficult to read or any more of a time commitment, I would probably be angry about the ending or even disappointed, but because they were quick reads and mostly easy to understand it didn’t feel like too much of an investment. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS, skip to the Recommendation if you don’t want spoilers.
Continue reading “Book 496: The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events #13) – Lemony Snicket”