As if I was Never Gone

This post will (mostly) be as if I was never gone...

Which means that I will spare you the essay-length description of what has been going on with everything me in the last what? six weeks? I lost count.

Let's just say since then I've done some performing, as in my last Nutcracker, and finished yet another grueling semester at school.

And now it is time to start yet another!

And also time to start blogging again. Yaaayyyy!

SO.

I have picked three topics to blog on and will present them in three individual parts. Like my organization? Thank you.

First part will be easy and fun because it is another round of The Latest Three.

Second part will be me shifting into a new gear with a more lengthy post on my experience in my first writing class.

Third part will be the epic climax with two--count them TWO--fairly large announcements, and I think it fair to state that using the word "fairly" is an understatement, but until then you'll have to wallow in your nerve-wracking, nail-biting anticipation. XOXO

 

So, without further ado, Da Polka Bot presents...

The Latest Three

 

 

The Diviners, Libba Bray

What was cool about this book was that I found I would recommend it to people who liked Libba Bray's first series, The Gemma Doyle Trilogy. It just felt to me like Bray was getting back to her thrill-seeking, boy-crushing, creeptastic* roots. I LOVED this book! There's a butt-load of characters, but the story mostly follows Evie O-Neil in 1920's Manhattan and oh yeah there's a devilish ghost plot and a bunch of youngin's who have special powers and all their fascinating stories are intertwined and I love the fact that this book is SO HUGE and it is unbelievably cool and I basically have a literary crush on Libba** Bray. Oh and all her other books are legit too. Check 'em out.

The Fault in our Stars, John Green

 So I have basically spent my last year in shame because of the fact that I am a very bookish person, especially a YA bookish person, who had not even touched a page of John Green's books. I am proud to say that illness has officially been cured. So many people gave me the WHAAAAAT? face when they knew how much I love to read this genre and learned I hadn't read any of his stuff. Well I can see what all the fuss is about. This book, first off, is a cancer book. Now you see, my mom had cancer so therefore I don't really read cancer books. There's a stigma to them for me, but I was thinking about it and it has been a long while and my mom is perfectly healthy now and if so many people were shunning me for not reading it then I should probably do just that. Well, needless to say, I read it in two days. There's not really much else I can say except to repeat those oh so familiar words: Read It.

War for the Oaks, Emma Bull

 I took an Intro to Short Fiction and the Novel class (aka: Book Club Class) and we read lots of books but I only actually read one book in total from front to back (long story, don't ask) and that was this book, War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. I'd give this book perhaps three stars out of five, not that I'm a huge rating fan because I'm so bad at comparing books, but this book mostly just "had its moments." Know what I mean? What I did really appreciate was the fact that I had a college professor who actually assigned some legit genre fiction and did so not in order to point out why it was not actual fiction. In fact, we gave as much time to this book as to all the others like Jane Eyre (my FAVORITE!) and Beloved, which I also really liked, and Light in August by William Faulkner, which is a whole other blog post. But I digress. This book is one of the original urban fantasies as it was written in the 80's. There's some really solid prose in here, a commendable romance, nice humor, sexy fairies, and--my favorite--as much presence of magic within the mundane world as in the fantasy world, through music, which really made this book stand out for me. It's not YA, but if you're thinking of trying some light reading that's a little more grunge, adult humor then give it a try.

Here's to loooong breaks!
Here's to a new year!
Here's to time to read so Kateri can make a blog post about it: good for so many reasons!!!

*Got a new computer for Christmas. Definitely just added the word creeptastic to my dictionary.
**In light of that, my spellcheck just said Libba was not a word and my only options were Libra, Libya, and Libber...Libber?...with a capital L? Really?