Library Loot: April 4-10

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! 

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Library Loot was the first internet meme that I participated in two years ago when I first started this blog and I'm very happy to resume the tradition now that I'm blogging again. Unlike a lot of book bloggers, In My Mailbox isn't a meme that applies to me very often, I don't get to buy books more than a few times a year and I don't get ARCs mailed to me from publishers (although I did just start getting some online from NetGalley). But I'm very lucky to have one of the best library systems in the nation at my disposal. There are 37 library systems across 10 counties in our library consortium, so it's very rare that a book that I want isn't available somewhere in the system. I reserve the books that I find out about on Goodreads, Twitter and from bloggers, and they just show up, it's like getting free gifts every week. When I saw this comic on Marg's blog I had to copy it too, I'm sure everyone is: 

OK, on to the loot! I only got 4 books this week, which is good because my shelf is still overflowing with new releases, several from an author I fell in love with recently (Sarah Zettel), a few mysteries and miscellaneous other books. Today I got:

A highly anticipated third (last) book in a series. The kid in this book is so hard to resist, the author really makes your heart break for the kid. Will he have a happy ending, despite all of the agony he's going through? I'll find out soon.

The newest book by Christoper Moore, bound to be entertaining. And bound to have a long list of people who've reserved it, so I have to get it back on time, no renewing it possible.

Another new release and third book in a series. I like but don't love this one. It's a mix of romance and urban fantasy and the mix doesn't always work well for me. I like the UF better than the romance. But it's fun.

I found out about this one from @BookaliciousPam. She wrote a column in her new blog bookalicious.org about an article in the the New York Times about Arizona removing books from the high school curriculum because they can be seen as anti-white. The article mentioned that Matt de la Peña gave up his speaking fee to buy 240 copies of his novel Mexican Whiteboy for the students of a school he visited. That made Pam really want to read his book and encourage others to do so as well, so she sponsored a reading-along on the blog. If you have a moment, please read Pam's blog and the NYT article, and consider reading the book with us as well.

So that's my haul for the week. As usual, it's an embarrassment of riches. I just love having the terribly difficult problem of deciding which terrific book to read first, don't you?

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Review: Nice Girls Don’t Sign a Lease Without a Wedding Ring (Jane Jameson, #3.5) by Molly Harper

Nice Girls Don’t Sign a Lease Without a Wedding Ring by Molly Harper

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quick little online story available for free for free from the author online. Definitely fun for fans of the series, it would probably also be a good intro to the author's style and the characters for people who haven't tried the books yet. But of course I'd always recommend going back to the beginning and trying the first book, if you haven't read any of them yet. I love Jane's voice in this series, she's definitely one that a lot of women will really love, as the small town (former) librarian who's super witty but not too snarky. The story is very short, so I wouldn't worry about even bothering to download it to your kindle or nook or whatever. I read it easily on my browser on my phone. And if you don't get a chance to catch it, don't worry, it's fun, but the events are summarized in the early chapters of the fourth book. You won't miss anything but a few chuckles.

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Review: The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor

The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise if this book is fun: what if Bella from Twilight wasn't really a shy, awkward kid, but was actually a manipulative, psychotic murderer and all of her shy, bumbling ways were planned behaviors to mask her real intentions? The book very closely mirrors Twilight, very much like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and that style of parody. If you like that kind of thing you'll likely get a chuckle out of this. I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so a lot. I thought that it wouldn't be as funny if I hadn't (a) read Twilight, (b) liked it, and (c) had a sense of humor about it. Diehard fans definitely won't appreciate it because it's obviously making fun of the book, although really it doesn't ridicule it that much at all, just presents a different angle and pokes gentle fun at it. But you know diehard fans won't be happy with any poking fun at their beloved characters or books. And people who hate the whole idea of Twilight will probably be annoyed by the it because it really closely matches the book. Too much, as it turns out.

By the middle of the book it got boring, it was just too close to Twilight. It wasn't quirky enough, there wasn't enough action or snark, and  there definitely was not enough Lake Woebegotten. It was just too much a scene-for-scene retelling of Twilight with a few semi-snarky comments from Bonnie and changing of the pertinent names and such to make it a parody. So they didn't play baseball, they played hockey, that is hardly interesting. 

As a fan of The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten, what would have really spiced it up was more interaction with the characters from the town. There were a few scenes throughout the book dealing with people from town, clearly leading up to something, but they really weren't utilized extensively until the end. It was also confusing as to whether this was a prequel or what. It turns out that it's really an alternate history, kind of like James Lovegrove with his Greek, Egyptian, Norse and now Astec versions of Earth. There are several people who die in both Woebegotten books, people who have different jobs, and a lot of fun parallels as well, so there are things that will satisfy fans of Zombies. But not as much as I'd hoped for, and not as much as the book needed to make it more interesting and original. By page 200 things finally picked up again, but it was quite a dry spell in between.

Overall, Zombies was just wittier. It kept me constantly amused. Maybe because I hadn't read the book it was based on? Was Zombies as faithful to the book it was based on as this one was? I have no way to compare at this point. This book just wasn't as biting and clever as I wanted it to be, but it's a fun idea pretty-well executed.

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