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 One for the Money, Janet Evanovich
My mom recently started reading this series on the recommendation of some of her friends, and when I was visiting she lent me this one to give the series a try. Not wanting to disappoint, I did so, and I could pretty easily see why this has become so popular.
Stephanie Plum is a young woman who has got herself into a tough spot. She needs money to pay her rent and bills in her apartment in Trenton, New Jersey, and soon, so when her family tells her that her cousin has a job up for grabs, she goes for it. That job is for a bounty hunter, but the inexperienced Stephanie, lured by the promise of $10,000, decides to go after the most dangerous criminal of them all. He is a man with whom she has a past, and a man she’d very much like to get revenge on.
For me, this had a very typical mystery feel to it – if it had had magic, it could have been the start to an urban fantasy series, which usually starts out with some sort of mystery at the core. It was certainly fun, albeit a bit gory at times, a book I didn’t mind reading and sped through very quickly. My favourite parts were probably Stephanie’s interaction with her oddball family; I think I can see where the series is going with the two potential love interests, too.
I am not really dying to read the second book, but I wouldn’t turn it away if my mom put it in my hands again, either. Like most series, I suspect it gets better as you go along and get more acquainted with the characters and the history of the books, but it’s down to preference; I prefer the variety of mystery that involves either fantasy or history.
 Web of Lies, Jennifer Estep
Having read and enjoyed the first in this series, I figured I might as well buy the second and keep on going. Urban fantasy is definitely becoming my stress relief reading; whenever I’m not sure what I want to read, one of them jumps out at me with the promise of ever-more-epic storylines, consistently developing characters, and usually a fair bit of romance, too. In short – all of my favourite things, and this series isn’t an exception to the rule. In fact, I found the second one improved on the first as I fell deeper into Gin’s world.
Ostensibly retired from her job as an assassin, Gin Blanco has settled into running her murdered benefactor’s restaurant, the Pork Pit. But trouble won’t leave her alone, and it walks into her restaurant in the shape of two people; Jake McAllister, who attempts to rob her, and Violet Fox, who knows that benefactor and who is in danger. Gin’s own personal lust interest, Donovan Caine, is back, but thrown into the mix is another potential partner this time, as the stakes for Gin are as high as ever.
I liked this book a lot; it was a fast and easy read and I found myself liking Gin a lot better than I did in the first book. I liked that she was a devil-may-care contented assassin before, but I think her heart is coming out a lot here, and she needs to figure out how to operate without Fletcher around at the same time. Probably the only part that I didn’t like was Donovan Caine, the cop who simply won’t let his morals go enough to be with Gin. He doesn’t even seem that interested in knowing her – there is plenty of lust between them, but for him, he’s not curious about her and simply shuts off when he realises she’s going to kill someone else. I much preferred Owen Grayson, the new guy, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes next.
 When I was young, I was a frequent re-reader. I read my favourite books on a regular basis. This isn’t to say my parents didn’t buy me new books, because they did, especially when the Scholastic book orders arrived, but certainly they couldn’t afford to at the amount of books I actually read. I read nearly every day after I’d finished my homework, and so I needed to return to my old favourites over and over again. I re-read books so often that my dad used to boast I didn’t have a single book I hadn’t read twice.
I had a number of books that I read over and over again; the Little House on the Prairie books, for instance, I regularly read over again, as I did the two books I had that Julie Andrews wrote, especially The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. One of my favourites was Princess Nevermore by Dian Curtis Regan, as was, of course, Anne of Green Gables. I adored the Dear America series and I’m confident I read the first few more than five times – history creeping up on me without me truly realising it.
But as I got older, and had a bit of my own money, I started to get more and more books. I started to have an unread pile all the time, instead of just shortly after the Scholastic book orders came in. I discovered longer, more complex books, that took me more than couple of hours to read, especially the fantasy doorstoppers with which I immediately fell in love. I still remember the vivid excitement that overtook me when Robert Jordan’s ninth Wheel of Time book graced the top of my then-single TBR pile, which I used to structure in order to give myself variety.
And now, I’ve reached a stage where I very rarely re-read anything. I have an entire bookcase of unread books staring at me every time I go downstairs. Re-reading makes me feel a bit guilty, especially if I have review copies lingering. But recently, as most of you probably know, all of the Harry Potter books became released in ebook format. Harry Potter is the one series that always calls to me for re-reading. It’s just that type of story, where settling down in the world each time makes the entire experience richer.
The other series that has been calling out recently is A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. I have, at long last, started watching Game of Thrones, and am surprisingly completely caught up. The first book is the only one of the entire series I’ve ever read twice, and I found that, correspondingly, I knew what was going to happen. Now that we’re halfway through the second season, I honestly can’t remember what’s coming next or what really happens in the rest of the series, besides some vague feelings about various characters.
That, combined with actually re-reading Harry Potter now, makes me long to re-read everything else that I know I loved, so much so that I’ve actually designated a new bookcase (my fourth here in the UK) the shelves where the books I want to re-read the most will sit.
But even so, I think the piles of unread books will call to me more than the ones I’d like to read over again will; I simply hope that now and again I will made an exception, and allow myself to delve into another world.
How do you feel about re-reading? Do you do it often, wish you did it more, or think that there are too many books left in the world for you to read those you’d already experienced over again?
I am so glad to see the back end of April! It was one crazy month, with no less than 3 business trips and a visit to the US to see my parents. Amazingly, my plans for May don’t involve leaving York, and I am thrilled about that for once! I have the rest of the year to take more time off and travel, so I’m grateful for a few weeks and weekends just at home.
This travel meant that I actually did a lot of reading, but little to no reviewing. I managed to read 16 books in April, including rereading 4 Harry Potter books. I have a lot to catch up on, but we’ve got a 3 day weekend ahead, and I am very much looking forward to having an extra day to relax and get everything in order. So these reviews will be appearing in May.
Fiction
- Girl Reading, Katie Ward
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
- The King’s Agent, Donna Russo Morin
- When She Woke, Hilary Jordan
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- One for the Money, Janet Evanovich
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
- A Night Like This, Julia Quinn
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
- Chime, Franny Billingsley
- Discount Armageddon, Seanan McGuire
- I, Iago, Nicole Galland
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
- Web of Lies, Jennifer Estep
Non-fiction
Favourites of the Month
  
I would whole-heartedly recommend all three of these books, and I simply can’t wait to tell you about Chime.
Ahead for May
As I mentioned, May is going to be a blissfully quiet month! I intend to finish my Harry Potter reread and move on to A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ve started watching A Game of Thrones (I am now fully caught up) and I’ve really been longing to read the series again. I hardly remember what’s happened now that we’ve moved on to the events of the second book, and I want to catch up. I’ve not had a chance to post about the Harry Potter reread, but I do plan to.
I’ve also given myself a temporary ban on buying books in May. I’m up to 522 unread books and that number needs to go down, and the money that I would normally use towards buying books can be channeled temporarily into other causes, like a potential trip with a couple of my college friends this summer.
Hopefully this means that my total unread count will go down. I have plenty of books I feel like I can’t wait to read, so I certainly won’t get bored. From last month, I still haven’t read Blackout by Connie Willis or The Girl King by Meg Clothier, both of which were on my list, and I’m also planning to read Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy next.
Mainly, I’m looking forward to nicer weather, free time, and a little bit of relaxation without all that travelling!
What’s ahead for you this May?
 Roald Dahl wrote some of my favorite childhood books. I’ll never forget James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, or any of the other amazing books that he wrote for children, and I fully intend to share them with my own children someday. But a couple of the ones I found most interesting were the memoirs he wrote about himself, Boy and Going Solo. I was naturally very eager to learn more about his life, and Sturrock’s biography was a brilliant choice for doing exactly that.
Charting Roald’s life, from his immediate ancestry to his death, Sturrock does an amazing job communicating what sort of man Dahl was. He doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult aspects of his life, or the way that he manipulated his own past when it suited him – mainly, it becomes clear that Dahl was a storyteller in all respects, and if he thought he could make his life more interesting by telling tales about it, he was happy to do so. While I wasn’t thrilled to discover that both Boy and Going Solo had a large degree of fictionalization, I was still eager to discover the actual, documented truth, and indeed there is a considerable amount of that here thanks to archives, research, and interviews consulted and conducted by Sturrock. Sturrock had also met Dahl before his passing, and so shares personal knowledge of him with us.
There is so much here that I’d never really guessed at it; I knew he’d written darker stories for adults, but I had never really known about his many love affairs, the true misery of his childhood, the losses he suffered in his own life both as a child and an adult, nor his crotchety and sometimes difficult personality. Sturrock liberally quotes from the author’s letters and documents, and I felt like I was genuinely getting to know him and connect him with the author I knew. His writing style is distinctive, and the picture Sturrock tells is cohesive. It’s in no way idealized; it makes him into a fully rounded person, which I think is the best possible result of a biography such as this one. Sturrock is equally praising of the author’s merits, especially his unflagging commitment to children’s literature and charitable work, as he is critical of other aspects of his life.
Naturally, I also found the circumstances around Dahl’s life to be fascinating. An attendee at a British boarding school, a pilot during World War II, and then an up-and-coming writer with a Hollywood star as his wife, Dahl lived through a considerable amount of exciting twentieth century history. I enjoyed Sturrock’s distillation of the facts and the way he built the background around Dahl’s life; it helped ground me and made the rest of the book wonderful reading.
A detailed and intensely appealing biography about one of the world’s best known children’s writers, Storyteller is worthy of a place in the library of any Roald Dahl fan.
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