ARC, Books

Book 234: The Bookstore – Deborah Meyler

As with many galleys I end up with, I thought this book was a different book. However, I am glad to have read this one and for a debut novel it was really well written and I mostly enjoyed it. I received a copy from the publisher via NetGalley and received no compensation in return for my honest opinion of the book.

The Bookstore starts and ends with great potential, but never quite lives up to it. I thoroughly enjoyed the characters and the setting of the book, but there was just something missing from it. I’m not sure if it was the writing style, lack of a finite conclusion (even though I did like how it ended) or something else completely, but the entire time I was reading I couldn’t help feeling as if something were missing.

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Books

Book 230: The Serpent’s Shadow (The Kane Chronicles #3) – Rick Riordan

My thoughts still stand from the first two novels. This series is not as great as the other two of Riordan’s series, the publisher really should have invested in a better copy editor and I’m still not convinced about the ‘transcription’ part of the story (it brought the author into the story in a way that Percy Jackson didn’t). Aside from that, this was a great ending to a mediocre trilogy.

The Serpent’s Shadow picks up right where The Throne of Fire ends. Looking back on my reviews of it and The Red Pyramid, I’m not sure what holes in the plot I referred to were but it didn’t feel like there was anything missing from this third book from the second. A lot of the characters that I remembered and enjoyed from the first two books made appearances in this novel and there were even a few introductions of new characters, although fleeting. Riordan seemed to have mastered the Sadie/Carter duality in this novel so that was great and I enjoyed their love interests although the parallel of the two was a bit weird and could be misconstrued as lazy.

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2013 Challenges, Books, The Classics Club

Book 197: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories – Truman Capote

Yay for another book that counts for multiple challenges (Mount TBR, Back to the Classics and The Classics Club)! (It’s a doozy, sorry for the length!)

Ever since I read In Cold Blood and Other Voices, Other Rooms, I’ve wanted to read more Capote, but I haven’t. Throw in the fact that Breakfast at Tiffany’s has such an iconic place in popular culture, I had to read it at some point. Now I just need to see the film.

I didn’t realize this when I bought this copy, but it contained the novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and three short stories: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory. So for my response I’ve just written a paragraph about each under a subtitle and you can see the opening/closing lines of each at the end of the post and my recommendation is for this collection as a whole.

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2013 Challenges, Books

Book 195: Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World – Sharon Waxma

Sorry for the long post in advance, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a book about museums and antiquities and I forgot how much I love them and how much they make me think!

This book has been on my to-be-read shelf since July of 2011 and I can’t believe I waited this long to read it! I will never forget my first Anthropology class in undergrad and the professor going off on a tangent about the looting of the museums after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It pretty much guaranteed I would be an Anthropology major. (I later switched to cultural anthropology and focused on gender in the media, but still the people were awesome!) The intrigue, the drama, the affairs and the crimes, it could be a spy novel if it were fiction and not fact! This book will count as a bonus book for my 2013 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

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Book Group, Books

Book 191: Cujo – Stephen King

One of my friends put it best, ‘So apparently Cujo is just a bad lifetime movie with a rabid dog’ and although he was referring to the movie, it pretty much sums up the book as well. I just was not impressed and couldn’t get into the novel. The major plus side was that it felt like a short novel.

If you haven’t figured it out yet I didn’t enjoy this book. I am glad I can now say I’ve read a Stephen King novel but overall it was lack-luster and disappointing. I didn’t choose to read this novel on my own, it was the selection for our April Books into Movies library book group. So my disparaging review is totally legit. I did have major issues with the formatting of this book. I read this book through Overdrive from my local library and somewhere during the conversion process a lot of mistakes were processed. It was really distracting and felt more like a galley than an actual published book.

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