Skip to main content

The Sunday Salon–The Ick Edition

It is true. I have caught a case of the Ick, just a short while after getting over a stomach thing I now have a cold thing.  And for the past few days I have felt like death warmed over.  But whether I feel 100% or not my invalid time is almost over since soon I will have to pick up my girlies and do my ever important mommy time.  Which doesn’t particularly mix with invalid time. But don't feel too bad for me because the week was filled with book shopping and I have some author events coming up I don't plan on missing.

 

The Sunday Salon.com

 

I love Scholastic book fairs.  I always have, and I hope I always will. In the  fall there is a regular priced fair that acts like a fund raiser for our school.  Now that I understand the workings of this better I can appreciate buying a few full priced books.  But it will not surprise many people that I love the buy one get one free fairs even more. This fair we got more books than we ever had before.  Unfortunately for me, I already owned a good majority of them.  I did end up getting a lot of books, but most were for the girls and not the thrilling selections that make your heart skip a beat on your way to the checkout line.  Which is why I headed over to the middle school fair to see what they had to offer.  And there, mostly in one case were a bunch of books off my wishlist just waiting for me.

 

Dark Life by Kat Falls has been on my radar for longer than I like.  I almost bought it during the fall fair but decided I just may not get it read in time for it to be worth full price.  Since then the book had intrigued me even more.  There is something I really like about the cover and how it feels different from other dystopian books I have been reading.

Surprisingly, when I got to the book fair nothing really caught my eye.  Fearless has been on my list for a while but my eyes just passed over the cover a few times and it was one of the last books that I found.  When I came home I had Mr. X read the back and he said it sounded like The Declaration, and that makes me even more excited for it.

 

In all truth the last thing I need it more young adult dystopian novels.  I found Amy Sturgis’s YA dystopian list a while back and it has been my map through the genre ever since.  Her latest iteration of the list went up late last month.  This list is particularly good for finding new authors and tracking down forth coming titles.  I have also used it to help make many book purchases over the past year and the books are piling up around me.  There is something both comforting and daunting about this. I like knowing I have a good selection of YA dystopian novels but I also know I am not reading them as fast as I would like.  As much as I love dystopian literature you can only read so many of them before you get burnt out.  No mater how vastly different they can be from each other they often boil down to the same concepts in a way that fantasy novels and science fiction novels don’t.

 

When I went to the Utah Book Blogger’s Social I was excited to hear more about Fire and Ice Photo’s first book trailer.  I hear about it originally on Twitter and I was really excited to find out more about it.  The trailer is for the third book in the Prophecy of the Sisters series by Michelle Zink.  This isn’t really a book I am clamoring to buy and read, but since we were just talking about it I figured I should probably try it out. I am very excited to hear more about the book trailer as we get closer to the book release date.

 

I am challenging myself to read Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink (book 1) before the third book releases.

 

Although there is nothing particularly appealing about the cover of The Comet’s Curse it became an impulse buy to match with another book of the same price at the book fair.  For weird book lovers and deal finders like myself,  I would rather buy more books than not match price for price on the books I do get. Because it is more about the price spent per book than the total price spent.  It sounds insane but my friend is the exact same way which makes me feel more okay about the situation.  When Mr. X looked through the books I bought he picked up The Comet’s Curse and said “This looks terrible.” It is amazing how much we identify books by cues that are on the covers and how we might pretend that we don’t but it is an extremely vital part of understanding what a book is about.

 

I like to know as little as possible about books before I buy them and I love having Mr. X around to read the back of books and see if I would like them.  He always sigh before he does, but he will tell me if I will like and occasionally he finds one that maybe he would like too.

 

One of the middle schools in our town was having a regular fair, not a buy one get one free fair, but I did find one title that I just couldn’t live without.  The Gardener by S. A. Bodeen has been interesting me since I finished The Compound.  It is interesting because I didn’t really like The Compound very much.  It was pretty well written and a definite mind bender but something about the ending negated the whole book for me.  It went under the category of too crazy to believe.  Despite that it did leave me eager to read another book by Bodeen.  It is relatively slim and that makes it a great candidate for a new read for me.  Every day it feels like there is more piled up on my plate and I often wonder why I am taking on so much.  I definitely need a new balance in my life, now it is just a matter of finding the time to sort everything out.

 

This is just a sampling of some of the books I got.  The part that is the most fun for me is running away from my current book fair with my friend for an hour and going to check on the middle school fair, which have a few more books in the age range we like.  I like all kinds of books for all kinds of age ranges, but there are honestly only so many picture books I really need. I buy new ones at every book fair, but I have so many already.  And picture books are inherently more readable, and kids clomp onto certain ones.

 

Did you buy any good books this week?

Comments