Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz.
This was pretty terrible. All the heart transplant stuff made me squirmy. Every chapter started with a long paragraph setting the scene with approximately 5,000 adjectives. This is the way I would write when I was ten years old, thinking wordy descriptions filled with big words meant good writing.
It wasn’t quite as horrible when it was just about the action.
I think this isn’t one of Koontz’s best, but I don’t really want to try another.
Only two of the proposed three books have been published, but so far I give this series the Annie stamp of approval. If you’re looking for a book to become addicted to, pick up the first one. The second book was almost as good as the first and got me through a red-eye flight. I gave the first book five stars and the second an almost perfect 4.5 stars.
Survival stories really capture my interest and this is one fast moving story. These are, like many of my recent favorites, billed as young adult books.
The second book just came out so it might be a bit of a wait for the third. I for one will be counting down the days.
In case nobody is tracking these sorts of things, it has been awhile since I’ve finished reading a book. Today I just reached the end of The Book Thief.
It was magnificent. I am relieved as I was sad to think that it would be awhile before I got to read something as fantastic as the Twilight Saga.
This book is entirely different from those books, except for the fact that all are supposedly for young adults. This one took awhile to read, but not because it was ever a chore to slog through. The writing here is just something to really enjoy. The only way I can think to describe it is to say that it feels handcrafted.
Certainly the story is amazing and moving and even original what with Death doing the narrating, but it is definitely the author’s skill with words that pushes this one into top-notch territory.
I have finally finished this vampire series. As a whole, it was a great set of books. Even though I rated most of the books as fours, with one even less than that, I give the series as a whole a 4.5. The story gave me something to ponder for quite awhile and each book had me looking forward to picking it back up again when I wasn’t reading. Lately I have been finding fewer and fewer books so compelling, so I think these are quite an accomplishment.
Certainly there are flaws. The writing can be just slightly cringeworthy at times and I felt that, even as the longest book of the series, Breaking Dawn was a bit rushed. It seemed that the development of relationships between characters was sacrificed in order to move the story along. I don’t want to give anything away here so I don’t think I want to explain any further.
The entertainment value of these books outweighs any negatives in my opinion. I haven’t looked forward to reading so much in quite awhile. And I love to read.
The vampire book. The teen vampire book. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. I read it. I liked it. I will read the sequel.
Sure, the writing isn’t something to savor, but it’d just be a waste anyways, considering how fast I whizzed through the pages. This is most definitely a page-turner.
The final book in this series just came out last month and the hype surrounding its release is actually what tipped me off to this phenomenon.
If you like vampires or enjoy a little teen drama, definitely give this one a go.
I feel the need to add a note to the beginning of my review regarding how I consumed this book. It was an audiobook that I downloaded for my trip to the west a couple weeks ago. I have a hard time out and out declaring that I read this book. The audio version was read by the author and was unabridged. Did I really read it, though?
Either way, it was really enjoyable. Much of my airplane time flew by (ha!) while listening to this one and I did indeed laugh out loud a few times. The story is about Dan Kennedy’s time working for a record label, but a lot of the humor is the kind of stuff any office worker can relate to. There are a enough insights into the music industry sprinkled in to make it feel like I picked up some insider’s knowledge.
I wish that more of Daoud Hari would have come through in this memoir. The parts of the book that really highlighted his great personality and really got to the heart of his story were the most enjoyable, but those parts did not make up the majority of the book.
His story is amazing and the situation in Darfur deserves much attention. This book didn’t do justice to either.
This is another book I got from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. I wrote this review for the site.
This single mom break-up story has great potential due to some unique elements. Exotic dancing to pay the bills and homeschooling a misunderstood son while working towards a writing career makes for an intriguing mix. Unfortunately, a few flaws made the book less enjoyable than I had hoped.
It is a compelling story and I had no trouble turning page after page, but the cluttered somewhat clunky writing started getting in the way of my reading enjoyment. Her son is charming and that mother-son relationship is a great piece of the story. There are some great scenes and I was certainly never bored, but I felt like the rest needed a little something.
As with any break-up, it’s easy for an outsider to pass quick judgment on the situation and I found myself in that very position, frustrated that she wasn’t just getting over it already and moving on. One contributing factor was that I just never felt like I got a sense of the weight of the relationship and so found it hard to really feel the heartbreak. And I think that’s essential in this type of tale.
I scored this book from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. This is the review I wrote for the site.
I read an encouraging review for Sick girl and so checked it out of the library. It was going along fine. I knew it wasn’t going to be an absolute favorite, but found it worth a continuing effort. Then, as I was reading last night, the author started detailing heart biopsies.
In the past few years a new limitation has slowly snuck up on me. I get a little woozy when confronted with these sorts of medical details.
So I couldn’t go on. I tried again in the daylight, thinking that darkness was an issue, but to no avail. The book is going back to the library.
This book may have benefited from my long drought. It was good enough to keep me turning the pages and so ends up seeming comparatively awesome in my mind. But I think it is stand alone awesome as well.
A.J. Jacobs attempts to live a year following every rule he’s mined out of the Bible. No matter how nonsensical a rule seems, he abides by its literal meaning as best he can. There’s a lot of humor and great encounters with various characters along the way as well as a bit of thought provoking religious analysis.
It has become very difficult for me to find books I enjoy these days (that aren’t graphic novels) so I’ve been quite pleased to read this one.