Labor Day Weekend Read-A-Thon Update

Day two of the Labor Day Weekend Read-A-Thon, and I've put a slight dent in my TBR pile, but not as much as I'd hoped. I started feeling a bit better and a bit less sick, so I got up to catch up on some homework earlier today. While I'm glad that that's now out of the way, unfortunately it means I haven't had as much time for reading today as I thought I would.

I did manage to finish reading Smashed last night and have started Vamped. I'm about halfway through it, and will hopefully have it finished by tonight. 1.5 books down, 3.5 more to reach my goal! I highly doubt that's going to happen, but I will give it my best shot.

What books have you been reading lately?

Labor Day Weekend Read-A-Thon!

I've decided at the very last minute to participate in the Labor Day Weekend Read-A-Thon, hosted by Katie at Katie's Book Blog. It runs from I originally had other plans for the weekend, but I'm fighting a cold that started this past week as well as some sort of stomach bug that just came up today, so I'll be spending a lot of time in bed and likely a lot of time reading.

My goal for this read-a-thon is to read five books. I'd like to read:

and one other book from my TBR shelf that I haven't yet determined.

I started Smashed this morning and am about 3/4 of the way through it, so hopefully I can finish that and move onto the next book tonight. If I'm gonna be stuck in bed feeling like crap, I figure I might as well make the best of it. Bring on the books!

Bout of Books Read-a-Thon!

I just heard about the Bout of Books Read-a-Thon hosted by Amanda at On A Book Bender and decided to participate! My TBR shelf is overflowing, and this is the last free week I have before school starts up again, so I figured that it would be the perfect time to knock out some of those books. The Read-a-Thon will run from 8/22 to 8/28, and you can find more info on it here.

My goal is to make it through at least five new books and to finish the two I'm currently reading. I know, that's not very many, but since I honestly haven't been doing a ton of reading lately I'd like to pace myself rather than rushing through them. I'd like to finish the two books I'm reading now (Far From the War, Into The Wild Nerd Yonder), the books I mentioned yesterday (Fallout, Saving June), and then whichever ones strike my fancy from my TBR shelf when I've made it through all of the previously mentioned ones. Can't wait to get started on this tomorrow!

Auf Wiedersehen - In pictures!

The current Random Reading Activity Challenge asks us to post about the book we're currently reading, in pictures. I'm reading Auf Wiedersehen by Christa Holder Ocker, a book about World War II in Germany from the point of a young German girl.

This is Bahnhof Apolda, or the Apolda train station. Christa and her family leave their town in Görlitz to go to Apolda, to escape from the Russians.










An American soldier at the American headquarters there gives her a chocolate bar every day. Then one day, the Americans are gone to round up the SS.






Christa's Mutti writes letters to her old friend in America, in hopes that he can help them out in moving to America.








This is fairly short because I don't want to spoil the book, which is also very short. But it's such an authentic, gripping one. I read it all in one sitting. Review will come soon, but for now, there's a slight bit of it in pictures.

Review: The Straight Road to Kylie

Title: The Straight Road to Kylie
Author: Nico Medina
Publication date: May 22nd, 2007

Summary:

Life is fabulous for Jonathan Parish. He's seventeen, out and proud, and ready to party through senior year with his posse of best girlfriends. But the year starts off with the wrong kind of bang when Jonathan -- in an inebriated lapse of judgment -- sleeps with a friend of his...a girl friend!

When word gets around that hot-but-previously-unavailable Jonathan might be on the market, the school's It girl approaches him with a proposal: pretend to be her boyfriend, and achieve popularity like he's never known. But popularity isn't what Jonathan wants. And suddenly, going back into the closet becomes Jonathan's only way to get what he's after -- a trip to see Kylie Minogue.

Review:

The only GLBT young adult book left on my shelf that I hadn't yet read, I decided to pick this one up for this month's GLBT April Mini-Challenge. It didn't disappoint one bit! Jonathan seemed like such a great, fun guy. There was never a dull moment because there was always some kind of excitement or trouble going on. I hear lots of girls wishing they had a gay guy as a best friend, and Jonathan was perfect for that role, especially with his best girl friends in the book. I'd love to hang out with him in real life; he seemed like so much fun to be around. This book had an amazingly real feel to it, almost as if I was reading about an account of someone's life. Potential readers be warned though, there's a lot of talk about sex, lots of drinking/partying, and lots of cursing. If that kind of thing bothers you, this is definitely not a good book to pick up. But with all of the drama, hilarity, and awesome characters I got to know, this book was a very enjoyable read, especially if you're into GLBT literature.

Characters: 8/10
Plot: 8/10
Originality: 8/10
Writing: 7/10
Overall grade: B

Random Reading Activity Challenge

We all love reading challenges, don't we? Well KarinLibrarian is hosting a new one called the Random Reading Activity Challenge. As the name implies, it's random! At any time, she'll post an activity to do that you'll have a certain amount of time to complete. After completing the challenge and posting a link back to your blog on the Mr. Linky, one winner will be chosen from the participants for that challenge. The first prize up for grabs is YOU by Charles Benoit.

Want to participate? Then head on over to the Random Reading Activity Challenge blog!

GLBT March Mini Challenge: Review: First Love Sisters #1

Title: First Love Sisters vol. 1
Author: Mizuo Shinonome
Publication date: December 15th, 2007


Summary:

During a fateful visit to Tsunojo Girls’ School, Chika Matsusato meets the girl of her dreams--cool upperclassman Haruna Kanzaki. Even though they spent only one short day together, Chika will never forget Haruna’s kindness, and has made it her life’s goal to study hard and get accepted into Tsunojo Girls’ School so that they can be together. But will Haruna share Chika’s feelings...?


Review:
While I usually don't review manga on my blog (though I do occasionally read it), this was read for the GLBT March Mini-Challenge. I've read it previously, but reading it again for this challenge reminded me how much I enjoyed it and how sweet it was. Some of the relationships between the other characters were confusing to me; I wasn't sure who was just being friendly and who might've been more involved, as the main characters were. While reading, I was constantly smiling, being reminded of how giddy and happy a first crush/love can make you. This manga was really cute, both the drawings and storyline, and I'm eagerly awaiting volume two to see what happens! Of course it left off with sort of a cliffhanger. But the publishing of volume two and subsequent volumes has apparently been put on hold due to rights issues! This greatly disappoints me, because I'd really like to continue with the series.

Overall grade: B

Review: David Inside Out

Title: David Inside Out
Author: Lee Bantle
Publication date: May 12th, 2009

Summary:

David Dahlgren, a high-school senior, finds solace in running with the track team; he’s a fast runner, and he enjoys the camaraderie. But team events become a source of tension when he develops a crush on one of his teammates, Sean. Scared to admit his feelings, David does everything he can to suppress them: he dates a girl, keeps his distance from his best friend who has become openly gay, and snaps a rubber band on his wrist every time he has “inappropriate” urges. Before long, Sean expresses the thoughts David has been trying to hide, and everything changes for the better. Or so it seems.

Review:
I have mixed feelings about this book. To some extent I enjoyed reading about the characters in this book, but for the most part I felt it was nothing I hadn't read before. It also seemed to make things too casual for my taste (like excessive teenage drinking/sex), so I didn't have a ton of respect for the characters because of the things they were doing so freely. I could sympathize with some of their feelings at times, but at others, not so much. It's an interesting addition to my GLBT book collection, but I can think of a ton of other books on the subject that I enjoyed a lot more thoroughly. I enjoyed this book for what it was, though it didn't meet my expectations.

Characters: 6/10
Plot: 6/10
Originality: 5/10
Writing: 6/10
Overall grade: D

GLBT Mini Challenge #1

The January mini-challenge for "The Challenge That Dare Not Speak Its Name" is to write about why this challenge/issue is so important to me.

GLBT issues are something that have always been really important to me. I've always been very interested in promoting GLBT rights, not only because it's an interesting topic but also because it affects me (as well as some of my closest friends) personally. The issue of hate/harassment towards people of different sexual orientations is often shrugged off or turned away from. I can recall multiple instances where I've personally been harassed for it, and I have more memories than I can count of seeing others being harassed or bullied because of their sexual orientation. Especially in high school, people loosely use terms like "that's so gay", and call each other "fags" without taking the time to think about who they might be offending. A group of my friends in another town were denied being allowed to start a Gay Straight Alliance at their school, even after following the proper procedure to start a club, because the staff claimed they "didn't need one". I've had friends in this same town skip school because they were so afraid of how they were being treated by their peers.

I chose to participate in this challenge because I strongly support GLBT rights and believe that GLBT literature is important, especially for young adults. We are all people, we all deserve equal rights, and I think that raising awareness is an important step in achieving that.

End of the Holiday Break Reading Challenge

Last night at midnight marked the end of the Holiday Break Reading Challenge, and I'm somewhat disappointed to say that I only managed to read 4 books from my goal of 10. I had planned to do a ton of reading over the last few days, but unfortunately I got a horrible case of food poisoning starting at 10 PM on New Year's Eve and am STILL recovering. Needless to say, I've been exhausted and spent most of my time sleeping and resting. I still had a ton of fun participating in the challenge though, and hopefully I can do more damage with it next year! Thanks to Karin for hosting such a wonderful challenge.

Holiday Break Reading Challenge, Activity #8

Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope that you all had a wonderful day with lots of yummy food and family and presents. Unfortunately I'm failing (a lot) with this reading challenge; I've only managed to finish one book so far, and I'll likely be busy doing other things this upcoming week (like playing with my awesome new camera!) But I'll try my hardest to at least meet my goal halfway before break is over.

I did participate in activity #8 over at the Holiday Break Reading Challenge blog, though I didn't do very well with that either. I scored 5 out of 15. It looks like I need to brush up on my Christmas literature! Go take the quiz yourself; I'm sure you'll do better than I did.

Don't forget to check back tomorrow for the winner of the CSN bookcase giveaway! You can enter up until Midnight tonight, Pacific time, if you haven't already.

Holiday Break Reading Challenge, Activity #3

For Activity #3 of the Holiday Break Reading Challenge, I needed to choose 3-4 books from my bookshelf and create a sentence. My sentence?
Strange Angels Teach Me What Happens Here.

Holiday Break Reading Challenge!

I love participating in challenges, and have desperately been looking for something fun to do over break, so I'm happy I found this lovely challenge. I'm starting a day late because I just found out about it, but oh well. Between today and January 3rd, I hope to read (at least) ten books. I don't have any specific books chosen yet; lately I've just been grabbing whatever looks good at the moment off of the shelf. After the first of the year I'll definitely get some books for the GLBT challenge in there. Right now I'm reading Waiting For You by Susane Colasanti. Click on the picture and sign up for the challenge, if you haven't already!

GLBT Challenge

I saw this challenge and decided to use it as an effort to try and be more active on this blog again. GLBT is one of my absolute favorite genres to read (especially YA GLBT) and I have a whole shelf of my bookshelf with only GLBT-related books. So I thought this would be the perfect challenge.

Rules/Guidelines:

The basic idea of this challenge is to read books about GLBT topics and/or by GLBT authors.

The challenge runs year-round, and there will be three levels of participation:

• Lambda Level: Read 4 books.
• Pink Triangle Level: Read 8 books.
• Rainbow Level: Read 12 or more books.

You don't need to choose your books right away, and they can change at any time. Overlaps with other challenges are fine.


You can read more about it here. I'm so excited to get started on this. I already have a couple of books in mind that I haven't read yet that would be perfect for this, and am also planning to re-read a few of my favorites. I'll aim for the Pink Triangle Level first and see how things go from there.

Books I've Read For The Challenge So Far:
1. David Inside Out (1/20/10)

Finished with the 48 Hour Book Challenge

So my 48 hour time frame is officially over. I stupidly started it at a bad time though, because I didn't actually start reading until about 5 hours after I posted the start of it. Oh well, I'll know better next time! I managed to read for 15 hours (1.5 of which were spent writing reviews and networking), which is better than I thought I'd do. I was aiming for 20, but I'm proud of what I did manage to accomplish. 20 will be my goal for next year! :) I finished 3 complete books, and am 3/4 of the way done with another. That adds up to be 1,256 pages.

Since my decision to participate in this was completely on impulse, meaning that I had no time to plan strategically or clear my weekend for it, I'd say I didn't do too bad. I had a lot of fun participating, and managed to lessen my TBR pile by a few books. Not bad at all! Congratulations to everyone else who's finished so far, and good luck to those of you who haven't reached the finish yet. I will definitely participate in this again, as long as I remember about it.

48 Hour Book Challenge Update

Here are my stats for the 48 Hour Book Challenge so far. I haven't been doing the greatest with this, as I've had other things come up throughout the day that I needed to tend to. I'm planning on reading the rest of the night, though (maybe through the night!) and for most of tomorrow until I have to stop because the 48 hour window will be up.

So far, I've:
-read for 6 hours, 35 minutes
-finished 1 book (How To Buy a Love of Reading) and written a review for it (posted earlier)
-and am halfway through another book (Identical)

I've had a lot of distractions and just generally not felt well, so this slows my pace a bit. My goal is to read for upwards of 20 hours though, so we'll see how that goes! Good luck to everyone else participating, I'm sure you're doing much better than I am :P

48 Hour Book Challenge!

I just found out about the 48 Hour Book Challenge and have spontaneously decided to join in. I can't promise that anything spectacular will happen, as I'm not sure what else will be taking up my time this weekend. I do know that with school having ended today though, that I definitely need to start reading some more. I think this is a great way to start that! So I'll see what kind of damage I can manage to do in the next 48 hours.

I have officially started as of 3:45 PM on Friday. :)

This will be my first time participating in anything like this, but woohoo, I'm excited!