2008 December » Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

The end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009

Posted by Anastasia on December 31, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 312008

baby_new_year2 2008 was a pretty good year for me, as far as I can remember. I know for sure I read some great books and graphic novels. And, since I’m such a big fan of lists and factoids, here’s some totals and tops for my 2008 reading life. This is all just book-related stuff, mind; I’ve got a couple more resolutions that aren’t and so I didn’t put them down here.

Top 10 Novels Read in 2008 (in no particular order):
1. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower – C.S. Forester
2. Miles From Nowhere – Barbara Savage
3. The Gatecrasher – Madeleine Wickham
4. Skulduggery Pleasant – Derek Landy
5. Carter Beats the Devil – Glen David Gold
6. Summerland – Michael Chabon
7. Gun, With Occasional Music – Jonathan Lethem
8. The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
9. Galileo’s Daughter – Dava Sobel
10. Operation Red Jericho – Joshua Mowll

Top 5 Graphic Novels Read in 2008 (in no particular order):
1. Homunculus – Hideo Yamamoto
2. Mail – Eiji Otsuka/Housui Yamazaki
3. Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service – Eiji Otsuka/Housui Yamazaki
4. Sand Land – Akira Toriyama
5. Gokusen – Kozueko Morimoto

In 2008 I:
- read 163 books total (including graphic novels and rereads)
- started my own book blog (and kept it)
- wrote 43 reviews (only 11 of them posted here)
- won one book contest (from Wendi!)
- renewed my library card after noticing it had been expired for nearly two years
- bought approximately 250 books
- saw David Sedaris at Barnes & Noble and got my book signed!
- got a job at a campus library (and kept it)
- met some really nice book bloggers

In 2009 I resolve to:
- check more books out from the library
- kill at least half of my TBR pile
- hold a book contest
- try out for an internship at a publishing house
- finish all the book challenges I signed up for

I hope you all are having a lovely New Year’s eve, and that this next year will bring good things into your life. Oh! And if you’ve got any top 10 lists or book-related resolutions, let me know in a comment and I’ll link to them in this post. Let’s see how long we can keep them, eh?

Mailbox Monday: December 29

Posted by Anastasia on December 30, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 302008

mailbox [Mailbox Monday is hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page. Be sure to check out this week's post to post your own incoming books and see what other bloggers' got!]

The inlaws went home yesterday and in the rush to get everything done I forgot to do my MM post! But here’s what I got:

- Vampirates by Justin Somper, from Borders. You have NO IDEA how excited I am to read this. Vampires! Pirates! VAMPIRATES. I am hoping it’s actually a decent read, even though it’s COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. But the ridiculousness makes it AWESOME. Hopefully. Anyway.

- Triskellion by Will Peterson, also from Borders. It was on one of the discount shelves, and after reading the summary (which includes the phrase “archaeological adventure”) I decided to go for it.

- The Optimist’s/Pessimist’s Handbook by Niall Edworthy and Petra Cramsie, from my brother as a Christmas gift! I always considered myself with be more on the optimist side (though cynical), but according to my mother and stepfather I’m a decided pessimist. Heh.

I’ve also got a big box of books coming from Barnes & Noble sometime this week, hopefully, so that’s make for an exciting MM post.

In other blog news, I wanted to mention that:
a) I know I haven’t posted any book reviews in quite a while, but my reading does tend to slow down during holidays simply because I can’t seem to tear myself away from the computer and actually finish a book. Whoops.
b) I should start posting reviews again sometime after the 5th, as that’s when my vacation’s over. Darn.
c) I’m planning on posting something New Year’s-related in the next few days, plus a review of ebook readers on the iPod Touch. So that’s something.
d) I hope you’re all having a lovely holiday, and that you’re getting more reading done than I am.

Mailbox Monday: December 22

Posted by Anastasia on December 22, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 222008

mailbox [Mailbox Monday is host by Marcia at The Printed Page. Check out this week's MM post for more links to other bloggers' hauls, and to post your own!]

I haven’t done a MM post since the first of the month! So I’ll do everything I’ve gotten since then, not just this week.

Tuesday (2nd): Four books from Wendi! I won them from a contest she was doing last month.
Miranda’s Revenge by Ruth Wind, Dangerous to Touch by Jill Sorenson (which I’ve started reading), Killer Passion by Sheri Whitefeather, and The CEO Takes A Wife by Maxine Sullivan.

Tuesday (9th): Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders by Larry Millett, from BookMooch. I have this wish to read every book with Sherlock Holmes in it, official or not. I’ve managed about four (out of hundreds), but I want to progress more next year and that means I need books! Not that I need an excuse to buy books.

Tuesday (16): The Princetta by Anne-Laure Bondoux, Creepers by Keith Gray, A Ghost in the Closet by Mabel Maney, all from BookMooch. I saw Princetta at Borders and wanted to buy it, but thought that maybe it’d be on BookMooch. And it was! I saw a review of Creepers at Chicklish and wanted to read it, and was very happy to find it was on BM as well. And I’m not sure where I learned about Ghost In the Closet, but it looks fab. (It came all the way from England, too!)

Sunday (21): Yesterday I picked up a box of books I had ordered from BookCloseouts during the Black Friday sales. I’m so excited! There’s quite a lot, so I’ve put the list under the jump:
Continue reading »

Review: Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham (2000)

Posted by Anastasia on December 21, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 212008

Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham
Publication: St. Martin’s Griffin (2006), Paperback, 304 pages / ISBN 0312349998
Genre: Romance, Fiction
Rating: 3.5/5
Find @ Amazon, swap sites

I’m done with my finals and on winter break, which means I have time for reviews again. Hurrah! First I’ve got to get through the backlog of books I need to review, which starts with this one.

Cocktails for Three is about three friends who have terrible secrets. There’s Roxanne, who’s having an affair with a married man, Maggie, who’s pregnant but not sure she wants to be, and Candice, who holds onto enormous guilt re:her con-artist father’s antics. At the first of each month they meet at a swank bar for drinks, and it’s during one of those meetings that they encounter someone who will throw their world out of wack and force them to give up their secrets.

I really liked Wickham’s The Gatecrasher, and so I was hoping Cocktails for Three would be just as good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The writing itself was very good, and the characters were very engaging (even if they annoyed be because of their stupidity), but the plot was lacking. Normally I think Wickham can handle having multiple character viewpoints (as in The Gatecrasher), but here it just never seemed to entirely work. I also really disliked the ending; it just didn’t work! It was entirely too gooey and just…nearly cliched. The whole “your friends are the most important thing in the world EVER OMG” seems both dated and cliched, and I could have done without it.

I do want to say again that I think Wickham is a wonderful writer– even if I hated the characters at times, she still kept me reading and pulled me along with their many emotional rollercoasters– and I will keep on reading her books. This one was just unfortunately a dud.

Small hiatus

Posted by Anastasia on December 8, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 082008

Just a quick note that in an effort to actually get my last few papers done and pass my finals, I’m going off the radar for at least a week and a half. No memes, no reviews, no nothing. *sob*

See you all on the 18th!

Review: Peeps by Scott Westerfeld (2005)

Posted by Anastasia on December 4, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 042008

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
Publication: Allyn & Bacon (2008), Paperback, 336 pages / ISBN 1595140832
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Teen
Rating: 3/5
Find @ Amazon, swap sites

I previously read Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy and liked it enough to try out some of his other books. Peeps is about a guy named Cal who’s been infected with a parasite: vampirism. Unfortunately, he’s also infected some of his girlfriends, and he must now hunt them down and bring them back to the Night Watch– a secret organization dedicated to keeping the lid on this nasty Peep problem– for rehabilitation. But there’s something else going in New York besides vampires. There’s something living deep underground, beneath the subway and the sewers, and it’s waking up.

I thought Peeps had an interesting premise, but it wasn’t put together as well as the Uglies series was. There were some plot points that popped out of nowhere and seemed to go nowhere, or at least weren’t gone into any deeper than a few pages. Some of them, like the thing underground, I expect are further expanded in the sequel, but it would have been nicer if there was more explanation in this book. I think that Peeps could have actually used a few more chapters, which would have given it a bit more room to grow. The characters aren’t as vibrant or likable as they could have been; even Cal suffered a bit from (my) lack of empathic connection to him. (I also just didn’t really like him.) The writing itself wasn’t so bad, however, and I liked the connection between chapters about (non-vampire) parasites and the actual plot.

If you like books with a different take on vampires than the norm, I’d recommend checking Peeps out. It’s not spectacular, but it’s not bad either. I certainly plan on reading more of Westerfeld’s books.

Much better than a folded page corner

Posted by Anastasia on December 1, 2008 No Responses »

Dec 012008

Image borrowed from Wikipedia.org

Just wanted to very quickly point out my new widget to the left, the one title “Bookmarked.” I’ve joined Delicious, and plan on using it for keeping track of various bookish things: news, reviews, lists, whatever (alright, and non-bookish things as well). I think I’ve managed to set up daily lists of what I’ve bookmarked for that day, but I’m not sure if it’s worked or not. I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow. At any rate, the widget should keep track of the three newest bookmarks I’ve, er, bookmarked. It also only keeps track of the links that are directly related to books, if you’d rather not see the non-book links.

If you’d like to add me to you Delicious network, click this link (or do it from my Delicious page, I suppose?). If you’ve got an account of your own I’d be happy to add you to my network as well!