Month: February 2010

22 Feb 2010

sometimes i feel like a toad

Frog ran up the path

to Toad’s house.

~

He knocked on the front door.

“Toad, Toad,” shouted Frog,”

“wake up. It is spring!”

~

‘Blah,’ said a voice

from inside the house.”

~

from Arnold Lobel‘s Frog and Toad are Friends

~

Blah, I say.

Blah!

18 Feb 2010

doldrums

I’m in kind of a reading slump. After a semester of intense required reading of YA books of all sorts, and then a little winter break “Catch up with every cool book I missed out on while I was reading required books” and then a little bit of HOLYCRAPLOOKATTHESEAWESOMEARC madness, I’m in a weird reading place.

I indulged a craving for adult nonfic

Which left me

1) Intrigued

2) Comforted

3) Horrified

and

4) Planning on eating My Last Hamburger For The Foreseeable Future this weekend.

~

But not particularly satisfied.

I have a shelf full of perfectly pleasing YAs, some that I’d been anticipating the chance to read.

But nothing’s really pulling me in.

So I don’t know.

I’m feeling an urge to revisit my favorites. I want to read Sarah Dessen after Sarah Dessen, meet up with Jessica Darling. But maybe I just want something more expansive.

A book I can get lost in.

Books that feature descriptions of animal slaughter don’t really have that quality.

Strangely enough.

16 Feb 2010

absentee

In seven days I must turn in 50 single-paged papers on single picturebooks.

I really liked this song when I was six years old. I used to sing it a lot

Little did I know, it would become my existence.
Like, literally. My existence.

14 down. 36 to go!

So yeah, if I have time to blog, then yell at me and tell me to get back to work please.

03 Feb 2010

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Popular Girl dies.

Then Popular Girl wakes up, in her bed, not dead, living her last day again.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

This book is definitely gripping. I won’t say it’s the best book of the year – the characters are hard to like, the story of “Popular Girl Seeing The Unintentional Damage Her Life Causes” a little too typical – but good gosh I couldn’t put it down. Lauren Oliver does a most excellent job in playing with the reader’s emotions and expectations. There is one level of the book – Samantha, stuck in a perpetual Groundhog’s Day cycle, struggling to solve the mystery of how to live this particular day in her life – and then there is another, the more interesting, theoretical level. Why is this happening to her? What will be the optimal outcome of this story? If she “wins,” does she get to live? What does it mean if she doesn’t?

And of course, there’s the visceral pleasure of ripping through the pages… the rapture of having to choose sleep over reading because you just can’t keep your eyes open.

Check this one out in March. Or you can borrow my copy.

01 Feb 2010

the joy

Still grumpy.

But will you LOOK at this!

She is just so cute.