Author: Lee
WWW Wednesday: April 25, 2018
Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at Should be Reading and revived on Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three W’s!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently Reading: What’s Left of Me (Hybrid Chronicles, book 1) by Kat Zhang
I’m enjoying this one, but I feel like I shouldn’t be considering how slow it’s going so far? I mean when I think about it and break it down into what has actually been happening, I feel like I should have DNF’d this by now, but for some reason the actual reading process is going pretty easily and it doesn’t feel slow.
I’m also still technically reading Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell and the audiobook of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I can already tell I won’t finish American Gods before hoopla auto-returns it, but that’s okay, I’ll just check it out again afterwhile. I am enjoying it, even if the pacing is a bit strange to me in a way I can’t place.
Recently Finished: Once and for All by Sarah Dessen
This was my pick for one of the April reading challenges that this book club I’m in is doing. The challenge was to read a book with a pastel cover, and I wasn’t sure this counted, but I took a little poll of sorts and everyone agreed it was pastel enough to count for the challenge.
I was a little afraid I wouldn’t enjoy this book because I haven’t read anything by Sarah Dessen since high school, when I was the same age as the protagonists. I was worried I might have outgrown it or that her writing may have changed in a bad way. I wouldn’t rate this one as high as I have some of her other books, but since it’s been a while since I read them I can’t tell if that’s because I was right about aging out of her demo or if it’s just this book in particular. I’m thinking next month I might start on a little Sarah Dessen reread to answer that question.
Reading Next: Heartless by Marissa Meyer
I don’t know exactly what to expect with this one. It’s another of my April Challenge books (read a book with a one word title) and my husband actually chose it off my TBR for me.
I hope I like it? I’ve only read one other book that was an Alice in Wonderland retelling, and I don’t remember enjoying it, but obviously that may have nothing to do with the setting and more to do with the writing.
I’m probably hopeful.
Dedication Spotlight: Austenland by Shannon Hale
Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy.
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 113
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
“Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “But hatred, now. That’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It’s so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.”
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 32
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 32
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
It was as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see.
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 23
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 20
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
First Lines Fridays: April 20, 2018
First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
First Lines:
Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway.
Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!
Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher
(Suzanne Vale, book 1)
When we first meet the extraordinary young actress Suzanne Vale, she’s feeling like “something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting.” Suzanne is in the harrowing and hilarious throes of drug rehabilitation, trying to understand what happened to her life and how she managed to land in a “drug hospital.”
Just as Fisher’s first film role — the precocious teenager in Shampoo — echoed her own Beverly Hills upbringing, her first book is set within the world she knows better than anyone else: Hollywood. More of a fiction montage than a novel in the conventional sense, this stunning literary debut chronicles Suzanne’s vivid, excruciatingly funny experiences-from the clinic to her coming to terms with life in the outside world. Conversations with her psychiatrist- “What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me and I haven’t had enough therapy to be comfortable with having found him?”; a high-concept, eighties-style affair- “The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure. My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody and then I notice when they’re not there?”
Sparked by Suzanne’s — and Carrie Fisher’s — deliciously wry sense of the absurd, Postcards from the Edge is more than a book about stardom and drugs. It is a revealing look at the dangers-and delights-of all our addictions, from money and success to sex and insecurity.
I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander, page 13
Version:
ebook, 345 pages
Published September 1st 2006 by Little, Brown and Company
Darkestwings Reads