Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

I took this from one of the blogs on my feed reader, The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Ranting.

1. Hardback, trade paperback or mass market paperback?
It depends on the book. Some books I want in hardback because I know that they are special. My favorite books I like to have in hardback. And sometimes I find good books at the hardback bargain table for super cheap and buy them. For most books, though, I want trade or mass market paperbacks. Since I like to keep a book in my purse, most books I will simply buy in the smaller size mass market paperback.

2. Barnes & Noble or Borders?
I generally shop more at Barnes and Noble since there are quite a few of them close to me and only one Borders in the area that I can get to. Granted, Borders has some excellent coffee and better books on sale… I wish I lived closer to a Borders. If I did, I would shop more at their location.

3. Bookmark or dog-ear?
I always use a bookmark. You can’t force me to dog-ear a page! If I have nothing around to mark a page, I will memorize the number. Or, if I have my purse rip out a piece of paper or find something to slip in there to save the spot. But never will I dog-ear.

4. Amazon or brick and mortar?
I love to shop at Amazon because they have great prices. If I buy in bulk, the way I like to, I get free shipping. But, nothing can replace a brick and mortar book store. When I go to them, it’s mainly to browse books and find new ones to check out at Amazon or Ebay. I rarely every buy from a brick and mortar store unless they have something on a really good and unbeatable sale.

5. Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
Well… I try to keep my books organized by Author. But, I get so many new books that I have run out of space and can’t catalog anymore. So, now the new ones just sit in tidy piles with no organization whatsoever. My bookshelves are not very updated at all.

6. Keep, throw away, or sell?
Keep! I would never throw a book away, even if it was one I did not like. If I read a book and didn’t want to keep it, I would either give it to a friend, donate it to a used book store or thrift store, or hold a giveaway and give it to someone on this vast World Wide Web.

7. Keep dust jacket or toss it?
Keep. Always. Often times the dust jacket has a very lovely design. And, if anything, it will protect the edges of the book from being knocked against, scuffed, or frayed.

8. Read with dust jacket or remove it?
I remove it when I read because I read a lot lying down and I get tired of it flopping loose and around.

9. Short story or novel?
Novel.

10. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Harry Potter! I have read every Harry Potter book, but I have never read a Lemony Snicket book.

11. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
I TRY to make it to the end of chapters. When I feel myself start to get tired, I hang in there as best as I can until the end of the chapter is reached. But sometimes I am too tired or the chapter is too long. Sometime I just don’t have the stamina to hang in there and keep reading. So, I do end up falling asleep a lot when I am tired but don’t finish a chapter.

12. “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?
Definitely “It was a dark and stormy night.”

13. Buy or borrow?
I would rather buy. If I burrow, it is from a library. Even then, if I read a book that I really like, I will go out and buy it as soon as I can get a good deal on it. I don’t really have any book friends who borrow from.

14. New or used?
New is always great, but I will buy used books from eBay if I am trying to save some money. I will eventually get the books ‘new,’ but I like to have a cheap used copy to read in the meantime. I’ll usually pass on the used copies to used book stores or send them in the mail to friends.

15. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse?
By browsing or by book reviews, usually. I don’t tend to stake much on book reviews, though I do read and enjoy them. I like learning other people’s opinions about books, though I don’t necessarily knock a book off my list for having a bad review, or put a book on my list because one person said it was great. It might put it down on paper to check it out myself in the bookstore. But, I have to browse a book myself before I’ll buy it.

16. Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
It depends on the book. Some books that end with an unresolved ending or in a cliffhanger are just exciting. It gives you a sense of continuity, like the book is stretching on even though you don’t get to take part in it. But, in the wrong book, it can be annoying or badly done. You’ll just end up feeling dissatisfied with the book because you’re left without the resolution that you crave. The same goes for tidy endings. They have to be done right. Even the tidiest ending, if done poorly, can make a person feel as if things are unresolved.

17. Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
Nighttime. I work in the morning and afternoon, so I am not around to do much reading then. Maybe I can squeeze some in on my lunch break.

18. Stand-alone or series?
Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. I have just as many stand alone books as I do series books, though I do confess that I love a good series because I can ‘keep’ the characters and enjoy them more. Some characters are just too good to read only one book with. And some books you are disappointed only have one or two to read.

19. Favorite series?
Without a doubt, The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.

20. Favorite children’s book?
Where the Sidewalk Ends… is that even a children’s book anymore? It was always kind of disturbing.

21. Favorite YA book?
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

22. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
Submission (Deviations, Book 1) by Chris Owen & Jodi Payne

23. Favorite books read last year?
In 2008: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Dead Until Dark (Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 1) by Charlaine Harris, and Submission (Deviations, Book 1) by Chris Owen & Jodi Payne.

24. Favorite books of all time?
Blood and Gold: Or the Story of Marius by Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice, A Spell of Chameleon by Piers Anthony, and Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris.

25. What are you reading right now?
I am reading Follow Me by Joanna Scott and Hotter Than Hell edited by Kim Harrison.

26. What are you reading next?
I don’t know! I have some books that have tours/interviews coming up, so I think I am going to knock those out one by one.

27. Favorite book to recommend to an eleven-year-old?
Hm… I don’t recommend books to eleven year olds.

28. Favorite book to reread?
Blood and Gold: Or the Story of Marius by Anne Rice.

29. Do you ever smell books?
I do.

30. Do you ever read Primary source documents, like diaries or letters?
I have my degree in history, so of course I read primary source documents. I absolutely LOVE them! I love being able to gather a whole bunch and pull out of them a story or picture of the past. It’s fun to do because it’s… a discovery.

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TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
Please avoid spoilers!

Since Sally was not the type to register her disappointment directly, her account of this period would tend to be terse and to begin with a bland suffice to say . . . Suffice to say, the law clearly stated that a competent father had the right to be involved in the child’s upbringing.

- Follow Me (Joanna Scott), pg. 265

Here are the latest book giveaways I have come across in my travels through the world wide web. Whenever I see a book up for giveaway that I think sounds like a good read, I will post a link to the giveaway so that all of you, my readers, can go to the website and snag a chance to win for yourself. Below you will find cover images (clickable to their Amazon.com page), the name of the author, the name of the book, the link to the giveaway, and the date the contest ends. If you need any help or have any questions, feel free to comment.

If you are hosting a book giveaway and would like me to list it here, leave me a comment with the contest URL or send me an email at morbidromantic@gmail.com.

Win Allison Brennan’s Sudden Death at Lori’s Reading Corner
Contest ends May 1st

Win C.W. Gortner’s The Last Queen at Passages to the Past
Contest ends May 4th

Win Richard E. Roach’s Scattered Leaves at Peeking Between the Pages
Contest ends May 8th

Win LA Meyer’s Bloody Jack at Today’s Adventure
Contest ends May 8th

Coming towards the end of April, we’re a third of the way through the way through the year. What’s the favourite book you’ve read so far in 2009? What about your least favourite?

It’s so hard for me to pick my favorite. I have been very fortunate this year to have read many, many great books. I am sitting here staring at books I have read in 2009, and I simply can’t choose one that is my ultimate favorite. Each stand on their own.

But, I will try!

So, my two favorite of this year are Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie and Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris.

As you can see, both about Rome.

The worst? Yeah, that one is obvious. Definitely Refined in the Furnace of Affliction by John McCulloch. It was an awful book, and even more awful because the author got totally butt-hurt about my negative review.

Liberation by Joanna Scott
The morning after her 70th birthday party, attended by her dutiful husband and children, Adriana Rundel takes a commuter train from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan, and becomes lost in memories of her WWII girlhood [...] in hiding on the Italian isle of Elba. Stealing glances from her hideout in the cupboard, she finds her first love, a young AWOL Senegalese soldier named Amdu Diop, who takes refuge in her family’s home during the Allied push toward liberation. He is 17; she is 10. Theirs is an innocent infatuation rather than an intense affair, but that seems to be precisely what Scott (The Manikin) is after: “The truth was she liked Amdu because he was perfectly alive…. She just felt it, the way she felt the warmth of the sun.” Their attachment is lovely, but doesn’t provide much dramatic lift. And the heart attack Adriana suffers on the train ride into the city, which intermingles her childhood panic with her later-life mortal fear, is less a plot device than a means for integrating the vivid past with the dull present. Still, Scott accomplishes large shifts in time and perspective with grace, and delivers an affecting, unsentimental portrait of a survivor taking stock of her life and loves.

Jantsen’s Gift by Pam Cope
For Cope, life in her small Missouri town seemed perfect; she ran a hair salon, enjoyed a happy family life and lived in a beautiful home. Yet, she explains, I have to say, I put on a hell of a performance. For a long time, I even had myself convinced of how good and right everything was in my life. Her ideal was shattered in 1999 when Jantsen, her 15-year-old son, died suddenly from a heart ailment; this moving memoir recounts Cope’s transformation and growth after her world collapsed. Her metamorphosis began after she accepted an invitation from a friend to visit Vietnam. Though Cope was wrapped in personal grief following the death of her son, the trip illuminated for her the superficial environment she inhabited. After visiting a local orphanage, Cope found for the first time in her life a sense of wholeness and purpose. Soon she stepped outside her own circumscribed world and began creating better lives for the abused, neglected and at-risk children she encountered, first in Vietnam then in Cambodia and Ghana. This is a wonderful story of a woman whose personal tragedy gave birth to a gift and how she fulfilled that legacy to make the world a better place.

I have decided that I no longer want to post generic, “my week in book” posts for my Sunday Salon. Instead, I am choosing to switch focus a bit and start posting about more meaningful things. I want to write more in-depth, meaningful posts about what reading means to me and why it is my ultimate source of pleasure and leisure.

My love for books began early. My mother was an avid reader and had always been as long as I could remember. When I think about being a child, I imagine my mother with her same bun reading a book. She worked two jobs when I was around seven years old, so I barely got to spend time with her. One night as my sister and I were in bed watching some thriller movie on television, my mother came home from work and poked her head into the room. When seeing that we were awake, she asked, “Do you guys want to read?”

Well, we relished any chance to spend time with our mother, so we agreed. The book that she pulled out was called A Spell For Chameleon by Piers Anthony, which is the first book in his Xanth series. It is an adult fantasy novel, but my mother decided to read it to us, aged seven and eight, just the same. I now know as an adult that she skipped over a great many parts, but my sister and I were so young that we never noticed the strange paths of plot. Instead, we just listened to our mother read, now and then being allowed to read a passage or two out loud on our own. Often times, reading was just a prelude to get together, eat snacks, and talk. My mother was always more than happy to set the book down and just talk to us about our day or girly issues, or anything at all.

We did this for years. We got to book 9 in the series, Golem in the Gears. I’m not sure what happened around this time. Well, I do. Live just got too chaotic and complicated, so we stopped reading together.  However, a few years later, I rediscovered the books and began to read them.  I fell in love with them all over again. Being that I was older, on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I got a lot more out of them. I still have the copies my mother read to me. Yes, all the original ones with their wear and tear. The series if very dear to me. I read the books now and each time appreciate them all the more for their humor and creativity, yet perhaps more so because they are linked in with some of my happy times.  Regardless, I was by then a passionate reader who had hundreds of books.  All I would get for Christmas and birthdays were stacks of books.  My mother would buy me TONS of them even though we hardly had that much money to spend.  She’d save, put a batch on layaway, and eventually be able to buy them.  If I wanted to read, my mother was going to make sure that happened.

What my mother did was foster in me a love of books. What she showed me was the pleasure of it, how a book can become real, how a book can be just the right thing to help you settle in to relax after a long day.