Review: Fiendish

Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I loved the unique voice of this novel as well as the vivid setting that it conjured. I've enjoyed most of Brenna Yovanoff's works that I have ready, and this was no exception.

A good YA read for adults of all ages.



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Happy New Year!

I declared 2014 "The Year of Finishing Things," almost a year ago, and I wouldn't say I just knocked that goal out of the park. I'm not terrific with finishing things, but I want to be. I'm going to carry this idea over into this year and give it another go.

I'm terrible with resolutions, so I'm just going to make a list of some things I'd like to accomplish in 2015, with no expectation that I will achieve all of them. I'm a work in progress, into 2016 and beyond. I don't doubt I'll be back here 1/1/2016 reaffirming some of these goals to be carried forward into the next year, but that's okay.

The trick is to keep moving.

Goals for 2015

1. Get my average steps per day up to 10,000.  I have lots of data here, since I've been wearing a Fitbit every day for over a year.  My steps per day took a dive when I stopped working at Target (praise god, though, really.) and since I've been at my current (desk) job, Since then, my daily steps have dropped to an average of 4272. So I need to get 6k elsewhere, probably before work, and I don't think that will be that hard. I'm determined to do this one. It's my number one priority. That leads to the next goal...
2. Gym. Oh, the gym. I belong to Planet Fitness, that notorious gym. I'm one of the people who pays 10.00 a month to feel healthier without actually going to the gym. I really want to turn this around, though I know the Resolution People will be there with me, making the gym crowded for the first few months of the year. I'm going to be one of them. I confess, I'm a little curious how many other slackers like me are about to go back to the gym because of the principle of the thing.
3. Read 75 books, including clearing the backlog of to-reads I've been dusting and living in proximity to for two years or more. 
4. Blog three times at least three times a week--twelve entries a month, not including book reviews. 
5. Use Chuck Wendig's Novel Writing Plan to finish my NaNoWriMo 2014 project as well as the Improbable Romance Novel. 
6. 100 Happy Days--I started this last year, and fell off immediately. More pictures of more things that make me happy. It's a good practice, to be present and grateful and aware of when I am happy.

Review: A Lady Awakened

A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant

My rating: 3 of 5 stars




I'm not much of a romance reader these days, but the review of this one at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books caught my eye. The conceit was interesting: a widow attempting to circumvent the primogeniture laws in England by paying a notorious rake to get her pregnant in the wake of her husband's death.

It was a sweet, unredeemable little confection of a book. I think, from looking at other reviews of this book on Goodreads, the author could have offered a little more background information about why our heroine needed to conceive a son or lose her home. I've seen a lot of reviews that assume this is because of some meanness of spirit on the part of her husband, which is too bad. It might be a lack of careful reading, but I don't think so. I don't think I saw anything that more than roughly sketched out the law in question that provides the bulk of the obstacles our heroine faces.

Terrible cover. If I'm going to read anymore romances, I really need them as e-books.



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My Favorite Things of 2014*

*Actual release dates may vary.

As 2014 comes to a close--and to be honest, it's been a pretty fucked up year--I've been mulling over what I read and watched that delighted or changed me this year. I've tried to be thorough, but there are two caveats:

1. I didn't take great notes as the year went by, so I might miss some things that I loved as the year progressed.
2. I am sometimes (often, even) a little behind the zeitgeist, so some of these things may have actually been released earlier than this year.

I am going to go ahead and call the year's media consumption at an end a couple of days early, too. It's busy at work, and I'm not likely to finish anything else before the year ends.

Without any further ado, here's my (in-no-particular-order) list of my Favorite Things Consumed (Media Edition) for 2014:

• Red Rising--it's a little Hunger Games and a little Ender's Game, but a lot more graphic and brutal than either, which is no small accomplishment. It's YA with the emphasis on A, but it's tense and tightly plotted and I couldn't put it down. Its sequel is coming in 2015, and I can't wait to read it.
• Rainbow Rowell's writing, but particularly Eleanor and Park and Attachments--These two really are outstanding novels that deftly achieve what they set out to do. They aren't high art or literature by any stretch of the imagination, but each is a beautiful jewel of contemporary fiction for its target age group. Reading Rainbow Rowell is a lot like hanging out with a girlfriend, or revisiting a crush from high school that you have no bad feelings toward in adulthood. I've been reluctant to recommend them for their "lack of depth," but in retrospect I'm applying the Ebert Rule and judging them on how well they achieve what they set out to do. That makes them awesomely good.
• Everything written by Roxane Gay but especially An Untamed State and Bad Feminist--her Twitter feed is also often funny and thought-provoking all at once. Gay has a sweet, funny voice in her essays and her Twitter feed, and An Untamed State proves she can do raw and dark as well. She's uncommonly talented, and I want to be here when I grow up.
• Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened--I don't remember when I first found Allie Brosh's web comic, but I read it religiously for most of law school, and then I fretted during the times when Brosh would go silent. Her comics on the subject of her depression are some of the most truthful, accurate, and yet still-funny I have ever read. The book adds content the site didn't have, and Brosh can count on me to buy all her future endeavors.
• Saga--I think I technically read the first of these in late 2013, but I'm squeezing it in here since I read most of it in 2014. This series of graphic novels are hard to truly describe, but it's a space opera love story about soldiers from two warring cultures who fall in love, go AWOL, and have a cross-species baby. It shouldn't work at all, and yet it totally does. I'm wait-listed at the library well in advance of every installment.
• Dusted--Podcast veterans Alastair Stephens and Lani Diane Rich (of StoryWonk) have started a re-watching of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the same time they've started an episode-by-episode analysis of them in podcast form. It combines StoryWonk's love of nerd culture and well-constructed stories with the genius of Joss Whedon. But for the other podcast entry on my list, this would be the best new podcast of 2014.
• Serial--I already loved This American Life and Sarah Koenig when they announced this new podcast they were undertaking, called Serial. I set it up to download to my podcast app--Stitcher--and eager anticipated the first episode. Since then, I've been well and truly addicted. I've blogged about it. I've pushed it on friends. I've wished my parents knew what podcasts were in enough detail that I could share it with them. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if I haven't tried it, you should. It's really that good, and once you've seen it, we can talk about it!
• Outlander (TV)--I'm still not caught up with Ronald Moore's Starz adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's wildly successful novel, but so far, I've been impressed by the production values and the amazingly engaging adaptation of what is actually a pretty uneven novel. Starz hasn't scrimped in bringing the show to the screen, and I'm loving the hell out of the first half of the first season. They'll finish the novel when they come back from hiatus, and Starz announced after the huge acclaim that greeted the first episode's airing that they had already renewed it for a second season to be based on Dragonfly in Amber.

Review: A Death-Struck Year

A Death-Struck Year by Makiia Lucier

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This read as younger than I expected, and would be totally appropriate for even late elementary school children. For me, the seams on her research showed a little, as I have read a couple of the books she used to prepare this book, and in several places I recalled the passages in the non-fiction work she was drawing on for particular plot points. That said, it was a charming novel set in Portland, OR, during the Spanish flu. It hit a lot of my sweet spots, and I did enjoy it.




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Podcast to Catch: Serial

I'm not alone in raving about this particular offering, but if for some reason you ARE a person who likes podcasts and you have not yet checked out Serial, you really need to do so right away. I'm aware that raving about an NPR-related podcast like this is squarely in the

The first spin-off from the consistently good, rightly beloved This American Life, Serial has been buffed to a high sheen by one of my favorite TAL personalities, Sarah Koenig, as well as the paragon of men, Ira Glass, and it's really wonderful. It is a discussion of a fifteen-year old murder case, and one of the strengths of the writing and the format of the story line is that it continues to raise valid questions for both the defense and the prosecution of Adnan Syed. I am up-to-date, and while I do have an opinion (a strong one!) on the case now, I do occasionally waver in my certitude as Koenig unspools what she's learned in digging deeper into the murder of Hae Min Lee.

The only downside I can think of for picking it up right away is that they are still in production, so there will be no chance to binge-watch these. In fact, the Serial site has a statement up currently in the face of what I can only assume were strenuous calls to release all the episodes at once for binge-consumption:

We’ve been getting lots of questions about why we’re only releasing one episode per week instead of the entire season all at once for those of you inclined to binge-listen. The reason is: We're still making them. As I write this, in fact, Sarah is re-writing Episode 5. 

I guess you could say we didn’t get all our work done ahead of time. We’re reporting this story as we write it. We’re still pinning down information, doing interviews, following leads. So when you listen each week, the truth is that you’re actually not all that far behind us.

 I sympathize. If all the episodes had gone up on iTunes all at once, Orange Is the New Black style, I would have made it to the end already. I love it, and I really need some people I know to watch it so I can ~talk~ about it.

Anyone seen it? What have you thought so far?

If you haven't tried it yet, you can find it here.

Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Dark and sad, but beautifully written. Like The Secret History, a lot of this is people behaving badly, but it's impossible to turn away from.

Weighty and serious, it expects attention from its reader, but it rewards a close reading.



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