Armchair BEA: YA and I

YA is Armchair BEA's prompt of the day.

I almost missed YA.  Seriously, when I was in high school the first couple Harry Potter books were taking the world by storm, but I was beyond this young witches and wizards stuff by then.  I had started to trod the hallowed halls of high school (Ha!), and with those days came carte blanche to finally read whatever I wanted.  I considered myself a Reader with a capital "R," and I was ready to eschew all this "stupid kid stuff" to spend my long, hot summer days with frightfests by Stephen King and Dean Koontz.  Digging into John Grisham's legal thrillers and the freshly minted Oprah's Book Club titles was way more enticing to me than reading about high school horrors and romances among kids that reminded me of the annoying teenagers I walked the halls with every day.  I couldn't wait to be out of high school, and I certainly didn't want to spend my free time reading about it.

Luckily, my life and times on the interwebz wouldn't let me put this whole wealth of YA in the rearview.  Rather, day by day friendly Bookcrossers and then bloggers convinced me of the merit of this body of work I was so eager to leave behind.  By the time I was in college, I was already backing away from Dean Koontz's laughable metaphors (sorry Dean, but I think even you make fun of your metaphors now) and James Patterson's two page chapters (and I thought YA might talk down to me??) in favor of the very Harry Potter books I was "too good for" in high school.  I loved them so much that they may have, on occasion, actually made me late for work at my summer job slinging dishes in a nursing home dietary department (no great loss there).

Since then, I've lost myself in numerous YA books of the highest quality like...

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Did I even need to say it?)
Sparrow Road by Sheila O'Connor
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Open Wounds by Joseph Lunievicz
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

....and so very many more excellent reads. 

Truly, truly I owe Bookcrossers and bloggers a great debt of gratitude for bringing me back to what has become one of my favorite categories of books.  A category that can hardly be called a genre because it seems to cover all genres.  Now I read YA when I'm looking for a break from the occasional slog of interpreting literary/contemporary fiction because I know I can count on YA for solid reads that dabble in any of a few genres with relate-able characters that won't ask me to leave my brain at the cover to enjoy them.  Great YA authors today are writing books that ask important questions that will give young adults (and the crusty old grown-ups who read their books) food for thought all delivered with quick pacing and fantastic characters that render those books completely unputdownable. 

My bookshelves and my Kindle are both loaded down with YA, and I couldn't be happier to be young again, if only in the books that I read.  How about you?

Armchair BEA: Introductions

Good morning, all!  I thought a little bit about the week that starts today and reconsidered my verdict that I'd be too busy to participate in Armchair BEA.  I probably won't have a post for every day or anything, but I'm excited to use the time that I do have to meet some new bloggers and reconnect with some old ones, especially since I've been so lax in my blogging for quite a while up until recently.  I'd sure like to make a go of this (more serious) blogging thing again, but it gets to be awful boring if you're not hanging out with the best part of book blogging - book bloggers.  Anyway, today is for introductions, so without further ado...

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been blogging? Why did you get into blogging? Where in the world are you blogging from?

Hi, I'm Megan, and I've been blogging here at Leafing Through Life for almost seven years now.  I got into blogging because, in the fall of 2007, I'd just returned home to Pennsylvania from Boston where the best-paying steady job I could get was at a Borders bookstore (RIP).  When I got back, I had no job, and I missed spending my days in the company of books and bookish people.  I wondered if I could review every book I read just for kicks, and I saw a handful (back in the very olden days of book blogging - LOL!) of bloggers were doing just that.  So, here I still am, except now I have a decent job in healthcare that monopolizes more of my time than I'd like, but I'm still blogging it out here in Bloomsburg, PA.

2. Describe your blog in just one sentence. Then, list your social details -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. -- so we can connect more online. 

Leafing Though Life is a collection of the honest book reviews and laughable life-related ramblings of a busy thirty-something who buys many more books than she reads.

Now, for shameless social media self-promotion, here's my...

Twitter
Goodreads
LibraryThing
Instagram

I'm always look for new friends.  LT is the more comprehensive listing of my library.  I'm a late-comer to Goodreads, but I'm trying to be more social.  And I just luff Instagram, even though I forget and neglect it too often.

4. What was your favorite book read last year? What’s your favorite book so far this year?

This is the hardest question, I read so many great books last year.  In adult fiction?  Brewster by Mark Slouka or Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden.  In YA?  I finally read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green last year and loved them as much as the hype would suggest.  This year? Honors go to Whistling in the Dark by Lesley Kagen. 

8. Share your favorite book or reading related quote.

Well, I really love the one that's in my blog header:

"She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in."

After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell

Have you ever felt that way?

9. If you were stranded on a deserted island, what 3 books would you bring? Why? What 3 non-book items would you bring? Why? 

Books: 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, because then I'd finally have to buckle down and read it, right? 
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, because I've been meaning to read it for sooo long.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen, because I'm not a re-reader, but I'd like to revisit this one.

On the practical side:

Food and water, for obvious reasons.  And a gigantic vat of sunblock to protect my pale Irish skin from that big desert island sun.



(P.S. Yes, I'm a "word person," but really, I can count.  I was supposed to pick 5 out of 10 questions, and I used ArmchairBEA's numbers, of course!)

Loose Leafing: The Week That Sucked and Other Low Grade Horrors

Fair warning, this isn't going to be one of those warm, fuzzy gratitude posts.  You may have guessed this from the title.  Now, it's not a eulogy for a pet or a loved one or even my car, happily.  I mean, for sure, this week sucked, but it's sucking in a "you'll laugh about this later after you get a few good nights sleep and the extensive dental work you've been avoiding for years" kind of way.  It's sucking in such a way that may even be able to get you to laugh at me now despite my more less or less continuing low grade wretchedness.  So, here's the story of the week that was.  I mean, the week that sucked.  

 You look friendly enough, but I'm onto your game, Mr. Blood Drop

I let you drain my lifeblood, and all I got was this stupid t-shirt?   Okay, so.  I got this new job, and it so happens that one of my new co-workers is a somewhat crazed lunatic about getting people to donate their blood.  Working in a hospital, opportunities to be abducted by said co-worker and coerced into forfeiting my more valuable bodily fluids are numerous and unavoidable.  It seemed like a worthy, if vaguely terrifying thing to do, so I failed to "just say no" to this particular peer pressure.  Also, I'm thirty years old and have no idea what my blood type is, so what sane person wouldn't give up a pint of it to find out that little tidbit of information?  (I'm A+ if you were wondering.  Put that under your hat in case you might want to give me a kidney some day or something.  I'm kidding.  Or am I?) 

Anyhow, as was my great fear, I suck at giving blood.  All these fine folks dashing in on their lunch break, casting off a pint of blood, downing a cookie, and then off on their merry way just as right as rain?  I am not like those people.  I'm the sad sack that makes a scene by almost getting sick and almost passing out.  Sure everybody was really nice and nobody let me bonk my head on a sharp object and my co-worker, the closet "Donate life!" recruiter girl, kept me company for the overlong time I was there basking in my lightheadedness and vague sense of humiliation, but the experience was none too pleasant.  I hope those three people that can apparently benefit from my blood are enjoying it, because I'm kind of missing it, and the free t-shirt, comfy and oversized as it may be, is no pint of blood.

So, that Tuesday night I retired to my bed exhausted from the work of regenerating my lost pint of blood when along came my next adventure...

Close encounters of the bat kind.  Because who, when busy regenerating their lost vital bodily fluids, doesn't love to wake up at 2:30 AM to find a bat (!!) flying around their bedroom?  Okay, I'm generally not among the super easily frightened, but if the prospect of having a bat bodily collide with you while it's swooping unpredictably around your bedroom in the middle of the night doesn't drive you to scream and scramble into the bathroom where you slam the door and exhale as if you've just escaped being tortured by one of the sicker serial killers to grace Criminal Minds, what will?  (Actually escaping a sick serial killer, you say?  Oh pshaw).  So, here it is 2:30 in the morning...3:30 in the morning...bat has disappeared...but to where?  Three hours of sleep, combing every inch of my bedroom in search of the bat with the amount of tension usually reserved for turning the crank on one of those infernal jack-in-the-boxes, and no bat to be found = not a great way to recover from being a sucky blood donor.

Next night, repeat, only at 1:30 AM, and this time I figure I've discovered batty's entrance and exit point.  I jam the hole temporarily with old socks.  I take to Twitter at 2 AM to congratulate myself on a battle won and use up my stock of creative hash tags.  I am the winner!

 Don't look so smug, Twitter chump.

Next night.  Nope, I'm a big loser.  Discover the bat fluttering around my window before going to bed.  Feel bad about possibly killing him when he's probably really great at eating stupid bugs.  Pin him between inside window and outside screen, and talk my dad into pulling the screen up an inch so the bat can escape and do his batty thing in nature.  He does.  I find a creative use for rolls of pennies, which are decidedly more sturdy than old socks.  I may have won the bat battle, but I've lost the bat war.  Everything that moves startles me.  Awesome.

And in the meantime...

Oh HAAAIIILL no!   That's right, big freak hail storm decimates the expansive parking lots of my workplace.  This is even scarier when your employer ran out of real office space a few departments ago and you're gawking out the window of your office trailer during a tornado warning.  Golf ball to baseball sized hail fell from the sky for a frighteningly long time making my car look like this...

 When hailstones attack....

Thankfully, it didn't look like this (which a lot of people's did):

 ...they can be really big meanies.

But that doesn't mean I'll be spending any less time on the phone dealing with insurance claims.

In the mean meantime.   I have too many teeth.  And it's starting to become really, very unpleasant. The writing on the wall says, "Megan, you are about to become likethis with your dentist," and that is a prospect that frightens me (and my bank account) to no end. 

All that, and I just last evening finally committed the "meh" book I was reading to the DNF pile, and discovered (much too late) an e-mail about a giveaway win in my spam folder, so even books have not been able to suitably lift my spirits this week.

Anyhow, that's my week from hell.  How was your week?

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood

It's time to retrieve an oldie but a goodie from the vault of books that I should have read and reviewed a long time ago but didn't.  Today's selection is The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood.  Back in high school when I was making the transition from kids' books to "grown-up" books, I was way into crime fiction.  As I got a little older, I switched over to being more of a "literary" fiction fan, but there are parts of me that remember that craving for a good crime thriller, and when an offer of The Wicked Girls came across my radar, I was excited to read a good crime story that had been "literaturized" a little.  The more literary aspects of this book definitely gave me what I came for, but, much to my surprise, the mystery itself kind of disappointed.  This review is pretty much impossible to write without a light spoiler or two (that the jacket copy spoils anyway), so tread carefully, spoiler haters. ;-)

The action of The Wicked Girls starts in the seaside town of Whitmouth where Amber Gordon works as the supervisor of the third shift cleaning crew at Funnland, a beachfront amusement park.  Amber is trying to be the kind of supportive supervisor people like, helping them out when she can and turning a blind eye to their minor infractions.  Her life is pretty no frills, but her luck; finding a home with a good boyfriend, her two sweet dogs, and steady work; never ceases to surprise her.  That is, until the night when she reports to her normal cleaning duties at Innfinityland, the hall of mirrors, and discovers the body of a strangled young girl in its passages.  All the sudden, her criminal past, carefully buried and obscured by a new name and a quiet life, comes perilously close to the surface. 

As the killings continue, and the Seaside Strangler begins to make a name for himself, the press descends upon the lower-end holiday town. With it comes Kirsty Lindsay,  mother of two, hack journalist, and the incognito other half of a "criminal" duo.  Kirsty and Amber were never meant to see each other again, but the coincidence of the Whitmouth crimes drags them into each other's orbit for the first time since the fateful day when their childhoods came to an abrupt end. As the saga of the Seaside Strangler continues, the back story of the "Wicked Girls" also slowly unspools.

I actually quite enjoyed The Wicked Girls, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.  For starters, it was set on the English seaside, which for some reason, despite having read the spoilery jacket copy and whatever the publicist sent me when pitching the book to me for review, I failed to realize.  As for me, the British slang and atmosphere set this book a little apart for me and made me like it more.  Second, I was expecting more of a nailbiter when it came to identifying the Seaside Strangler. However, for anybody who has ever caught an episode of a show like Criminal Minds in their lives, spotting the Strangler was no difficult task, and I think I'd managed it before the book was half over.  Rather than giving a lot of attention to the immediate crimes at hand, the book uses them to embrace its more literary side and delve into the psyches of the now adult perpetrators of a childhood crime. 

As a character study, The Wicked Girls soars.  It asks difficult questions about what constitutes a murder, whether a killer can ever outrun the effects of their crime, and how well another person and their motives can ever truly be known.  More suspenseful than the Strangler mystery by far is the collection of flashbacks that recalls the details of the first and last day the Wicked Girls spent together and the crime, if you can call it that, that derails their futures.  Marwood does a stellar job with her two main characters.  They are are never quite positioned as wholly loveable women, but Marwood easily draws your sympathy toward them as she lays out the paths that each took to live a good life in the wake of crime and punishment, whether it was by being a devoted wife and mother or by always offering a helping hand to a friend or a co-worker in need.  When it becomes clear that what's past is never truly past, Marwood evokes a sad situation and asks her readers to consider what really makes a person wicked and whether someone with blood on their hands can ever find redemption.    

(Review copy received from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

Top Ten Tuesday: Books About Friendship

I actually had a lot of fun assembling my list for this week's Top Ten Tuesday because the topic is "Books About Friendship."  While I was perusing potential candidates for this list, I found a lot of great books that are so very different from each other, but all of which hinge on one type of friendship or another.  It's amazing to think about all the sorts of friendships that exist, and I think my list this week has a pretty interesting cross-section of them, and I'd be lying if I said that I designed it that way. 

1. Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett - Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, and I always surprise myself when I think about her work and come up with this memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy as one of my very favorites.  I think this book appeals to me so much because Patchett is the steady, dependable friend in the relationship, and that's me in most of my relationships.  It's obvious she loved her friend, but she doesn't skirt around the more difficult aspects of their time together.

2. Brewster by Mark Slouka - Possibly the most powerful portrait of a friendship I've ever read.  It's a great coming of age story, too.  The two main characters in Brewster step up to be each other's family when real family fails them.  It's a powerful picture of what it is to read between the lines to figure out what a friend really needs and stopping at nothing to protect them.

3. Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden - This is one of those day in the life sort of books, and Madden's narrator spends a midsummer day staying at a friend's house in her friend's absence and ruminating about the impacts her two best friends have had on her life and each other's.  And it's a much, much more interesting read than I just made it sound like...

4. Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going - Troy, the fat kid in question, is contemplating suicide when he makes friends with a budding rock star who's got some problems of his own.   Curt's a little bit larger than life, and drumming for Curt's band gives Troy a reason to be, but, turns out, Troy's not the only one who needs a little help.  Fat Kid Rules the World is a great story about two unlikely friends who turn out to be made for each other.

5. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger - Told completely in letters, Last Days of Summer is a mostly hilarious and briefly heartbreaking story of a mouthy kid who starts writing letters to the hot-headed up-and-coming star of the New York Giants.  What starts as mail harassment soon turns into a memorable friendship.  I love this book.  Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again. 

6. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty - The main character in this one is missing her flaky friend who fled normal life to join the circus.  This is the sort of friendship where you understand why your friend is doing the crazy things they're doing, but you're also kind of bummed that they're always leaving you in the lurch.

7. Gossip by Beth Gutcheon - This book hinges on a narrator whose two best friends became each other's sworn enemies over some long past trivial slight.  The ripples of their mutual loathing are far-reaching, and it's an interesting look into the delicate balancing act that ensues when the people you love best in the world don't even like each other.

8. The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton - Then there are the "group of friends" books. I kind of expected this story about a group of women who bond when they form a writing group during the 1960s to be kind of fluffy.  Instead, it's a an intriguing story about women "coming of age" all over again, in a decade when the world is opening up for them in ways never before experienced.

9. Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister - Another great book with a group of friends.  One friend is facing a fight with cancer and inspires her group of friends to dare each other to do one fearless thing that will open up their lives to new possibilities.  What's great is following each friend through her assigned task, which may at first seem pretty innocuous, but turns out revealing each character's struggles and also the depth of their relationships with each other.

10. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson - Bridge to Terabithia is practically a classic.  You pretty much haven't lived until you've explored Jess and Leslie's imaginary kingdom and cried bucketloads of tears over a kid losing a best friend.

Turns out I really love lots of books that explore friendships.  What's your favorite?