I’ve MOVED!

Hey readers! I got my own domain, so I will no longer be posting on this blog. No worries, I will still be blogging, but from kariannalysis.com from now on! I hope you’ll head over there, favorite me, and come back often because I always have something to say!

Thanks 🙂 -Kari

Wordless Wednesday 9/9

This is a birthday cake I got at work yesterday 🙂

Check out others at WordlessWednesday.com

Bookish Meme

This is a meme that has been floating around book blogs. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and spend time on it. I got this from Jessica at Cover to Cover. Check her answers out too!

Hardback, trade paperback or mass market paperback?
I am normally a mass market paperback kind of girl. I am currently reading a library hardback that I got at a book sale at Empire Books. They always have rows and rows of library books. One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell was one of 10 I got for $30 one day. Great deal, but I like paperbacks better because they fit into my purse easier. I hate to leave without a book. You never know when you are going to need one!

Waterstones, Borders or Amazon?
Am I dumb? I’ve never heard of Waterstones lol. I am a Borders girl. That’s where I get most of my books, but I also shop on Amazon. I can normally find good condition books for great prices there. But most of my books are impulse buys. I hate to leave the bookstore empty handed 🙂

Bookmark or dog-ear?
Can’t believe this is even a question. If I’m going to spend time writing a blog about books, do you really think I dog-ear? Yeah freaking right. My dad actually got me a really cool bookmark from Key West earlier this year. It’s got a magnet on it, you put it on either side of the page you are reading and it doesn’t fall out when your book flops around your purse! That reminds me to put that on my present list next time he goes! I could use a couple more.

Alphabetize by author, alphabetize by title or random?
All of my read books are alphabetizedby author. I am very OCD and as soon as I finish a book, it goes on my finished shelf. My to be read shelf on the other hand is just random. If I put them in ABC order, I’ll feel like I should read them in that order and I like to have options.

Keep, throw away or sell?
People throw away books? That is a sin 🙂 I am a major keeper, but I’m getting better. I have a few books that I know I’ll never read again and I’m starting to use them as giveaways on my blog. Yes, I know it’s rude to only give away the ones I don’t like, but remember the saying, one man’s trash, another man’s treasure. Someone, somewhere will love the books I didn’t.

Keep dust jacket or toss it?
I normally keep, but had to throw one away over the weekend because it was at my moms and I think the cat threw up on it. I am hoping that’s what it was anyway.

Read with dust jacket or remove it?
It depends on where I’m reading and where I got the book. Library book dust jackets don’t come off. But if it’s one I bought, I will normally take it off if I’m carrying it in my purse so it’s not ruined.

Short story or novel?
I’m a novel kind of girl. I’ve only read a couple of short stories books and I liked them, but I love novels because I love getting close to characters.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
I have never read Lemony Snicket. I have heard great things though. I am a Harry girl all the way. Love the books, love the movies, love EVERYTHING about it!

Buy or Borrow?
I’m a buyer. I love to have them in my possession and know they are mine. I don’t buy expensive shoes and clothes, I spend my money on books. The one book I have borrowed in the past year, I ended up going out and buying because I loved it so much.

Buying choice: book reviews, recommendations, or browse?
I do a little bit of all of these. Most recently I’ve been reading other reviews, but I’m a big browser. Much like Jessica’s answer before mine, I like books with pretty colors. I have a HUGE list on Borders.com of books I want, but it got so big, I can’t sort through it. I found all of them by browsing the store and their website.

Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Since I like series’, I like a cliffhanger. I love knowing there’s more to come.

Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading?
Most of my reading gets done at night. I sit in my bed for an hour or two and read until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. During the fall and spring, I spend a lot of time on my porch reading and enjoying the weather. I like to read any second I get a chance though. On the weekends, it’s hard to pull me away.

Stand-alone or series?
I love me some series. I’ve read all but one Stephanie Plum book, I am loving the Poseur series, I asked for the Sookie Stackhouse series for my birthday, I got the first two in the Wicked series (not the spin off of Wizard of Oz, but I’ve read those too), and I just bought the first in The Luxe series. Need I say more?

Favorite Series?
Stephanie Plum by Janet Evanovich without a doubt!

Favorite children’s book? 
Pat the Bunny.  I had this when I was teeny tiny and absolutely loved it. It’s a touchy feely kind og book. I recently got another copy of it and my fiance reads it to me all the time!

Favorite YA book?
I am getting more and more into the YA books everyday. I read Zombie Blondes and really liked it, but I think the Twilight series, which first turned me to YA, is still my fave.

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
I have a few I don’t know if others have read. True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was a great one when I was in grade school. I still have it actually. I also really liked Invisible Monsters  by Chuck Palahniuk. It was crazy, but kept me reading.

Favorite books read last year?
I am going to have to hands down go with Jane Eyre. It was the book that got my blogging. I absolutely loved it. No other book I’ve read holds a candle to it.

Favorite book to re-read?
I have not re-read any books, but plan on re-reading my Harry Potter books, probably the Twilight books and definitely The Historian. Great Halloween read.

Do you ever smell books?
Not a lot, I always think of Rory Gilmore giving a tour of Yale to a Chilton student and smelling books in the library and Logan catching her (yes, I know every scene from every episode of Gilmore Girls).

Do you ever read primary source documents like letters or diaries?
I consider reading blogs primary sources. I do like reading diaries. I found a diary in my moms house. It’s old but I don’t remember how old. I think diaries are intriguing. My mom got Mikey a book by Ronald Regan. He kept a diary every day he was in office and they put it together. It’s just a small paragraph a day, but it was super cool to see he wrote about Robert C. Byrd within the first few pages of the book.

What are you reading right now?
One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell.

What are you reading next?
Either The Luxe by Anna Godbersen or Wicked: Witch and Curse by Nancy Holder. I hope Wicked comes in the mail by the time I’m done with the one I’m reading now.

Teaser Tuesday 9/8

So I know this is a little late … 9 minutes to be exact, but it’s been a long day 🙂 I mean it’s my birthday, so I had to do some shopping, right?

Lets get down to it! Happy Teaser Tuesday all! I actually just started a new book,so I’ve been
debating on how to do this all day. I’ve only read the prologue to Candace Bushnell’s One Fifth Avenue but if you know Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City writer if you don’t), I have one for all the ladies out there to get the mood set.

Pg. 5: “A blue-and-green brocade shoe with a kitten heel appeared, followed by the famous long legs, clad in narrow white jeans. Then a hand with the slim, elegant fingers of an artist; on the middle finger was a large aquamarine ring .”

I’m a huge Sex and the City fan. Let’s hope this lives up to it’s predecessor’s hype! I’ll keep you updated!

What’s your tease??

AnnAlysis: Your Mouth Drives Me Crazy

My mom found this book on the Oprah book list. She read it and told me she didn’t like it, it wasn’t what she expected. And I swear she told me she thought it was going to be a little more… dirty. Well, let me tell you – it was definitely dirty.

This is not a book that you want anyone under 18 to read. There are at least 3 parts that are descriptively sexual.

Lets get back to the beginning though. Kane is on vacation, sort of. He’s hanging out on his beach front property when he sees something, a person, that has washed up on the beach. He takes her in and puts her in the shower, gets her warmed up. Little does he know the firecracker he took off the beach.

Annie is on a mission. A very bad man took advantage of her mother and Annie is back for revenge. And she will not be leaving the island until he’s dead.  But other people keep turning up dead.

I didn’t expect all of the drama that was in this book. It was a nice surprise though. It made it easy and quick to read. It was definitely a page turner.

And I love, love, loved the characters. Annie is great. She has the mouth of a sailor and she’s one tough cookie. Kane is a man’s man. He’s tough, strong, doesn’t show emotion and doesn’t really like to talk a lot. But once you get to know him, he’s a great man.

There was one thing that caught my eye a couple of times during the book. We all know I’m a stickler for grammar and mistakes. There were 2 times in the book that a sentence needed and extra quotation mark and they were left out. That drives me crazy.

Although it was a little, ok, a lot more sexual than I bargained for, I still liked it. But for the sexuality, I have to take a bookmark away. I know I should have expected it because of the title. As soon as Michael read the back, he was like “Are you serious?”. I guess my mom forgot to mention how dirty it was 🙂

I give Your Mouth Drives Me Crazy 3 bookmarks.

AnnAlysis: Killer Cruise

Killer Cruise was a book I randomly stumbled upon while trying to fill out my A to Z Challenge (heard that one much lately?). And, similar to my other random choices, I really liked it.

The book is about New York socialite Ashley who goes on a cruise for her 16th birthday. Something comes up at work for her parents, so she goes with her 2 best friends, her boyfriend, her half sister and her boyfriend and her frenemy (which is her mom’s best friend’s daughter and Ashley’s biggest competition).

Within the first day, the drama starts and not until they’re back in New York does it start to calm down.

Freak accidents start to happen and it all goes back to Taylor who went missing last year. Is Ashley’s new crush, smoothie-maker Logan, behind all of the scandal? Like I’m really going to tell you.

There were some parts of this book I really like. I like that they used real movies, books, shows etc. When you talk about Project Runway, I know what you’re talking about. I hate when authors use made up titles. I have no idea what the shows about!

I also thought it was cute that each time the girls went somewhere, we always knew what they were wearing. From head to toe. This made it easy for me to imagine each one, each day.

Now there were some things I didn’t like about this book. And it makes me feel old to say this 🙂

1. Why is a 15 year old allowed to go on a cruise without any supervision? Yes, her older half sister is on board with her and yes, papa knows the captain, but are they really going to babysit? Doubt it. I don’t believe this is reality. I think it shows false hope for kids. And this is a young adult book, so those are the readers it’s geared towards.

2. The first day on the ship, the first day Ashley sees Logan, she already tells him she likes him. YIKES! Forward much? I know teens are love crazy, but this made me nervous to have kids.

3. Ashley didn’t hang out with her friends very much. There were days where she’d go all day out with a boy and not even see them. I couldn’t imagine bringing along my 2 bff’s on a cruise and ditching them for almost an entire week. This is another instance I don’t think parents would want their kids reading this book. When I was 20 years old and went to Mexico, I wasn’t allowed to leave my dads side, or be alone because he was afraid I’d get kidnapped. When you’re not in America, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You can’t just be running around with a stranger in the Bahamas and not be nervous that you may or may not get snatched.

4. One sentence: 16 year old sleeping in the same bed as a boy!

Ok, now I feel like an old prude after reading this book.

I didn’t start thinking about young adult books in this light until recently when my future sister-in-law was telling me one of the things that made her not love Twilight was that Edward stayed in Bella’s room. These books are geared towards teens and young adults. That’s not something they need to be reading about. I never thought of that, but I agree. My parents would NEVER have let me do that. Yes, Twilight is not real, but if Bella and Edward do it, why can’t I?

Although I ranted a lot about this book, I liked it and had to change my mind a few times about who the bad guy was before it finally came out. I give Killer Cruise 3 bookmarks.

On My Bookshelf 9/6

I’ve been wanting to do a weekly blog about books I’ve gotten, but since this is the first time in the past month or some I’ve gotten new books. I normally get a couple of new books a week, but I bought 10 one week and 7 the next and told myself I needed to slow down for a while.

I am still being conservative about buying books. The new ones to my shelf this week are all ones I found at my moms while looking for my birth certificate.

I’ve had this book for years, but I don’t remember ever reading it. the back reads:

It seems too good to be true. The most popular boy in school has asked Jane out – and she’s never even dated before. Stan is tall and good-looking, friendly and hard working – everything Jane ever dreamed of. But is she ready for this?

Suppose her parents won’t let her go? What if she’s nervous and makes a food of herself? Maybe he’ll think she’s too young. If on;y she were prettier. If only she were ready for this …

 

 

Found another Beverly Cleary under my bed too.

It should be the happiest moment of Jean’s life – instead of the most embarrassing. Why couldn’t she have been ready when the best-looking, most popular boy in school asked her to dance? Instead, she’s stepping all over his feet and completely tongue-tied. Her head is filled with wishes that she knew how to dance, knew what to say, wore the right clothes, and didn’t wear glasses. She’d also like to be two years older and three inches taller. Jean will probably never forget this day… or all that happens in the days that follow!

Seems very similar to the book above. I’ll have to compare them when I read them!

 

When confronted by raging fires or deadly accidents, volunteer fireman Taylor McAden feels compelled to take terrifying risks – risks no one else in the department would ever take – to save lives. But there is one leap of faith Taylor can’t bring himself to make: He can’t fall in love. For all his adult years, Taylor has sought out women who need to be rescued, women e leaves as soon as their crisis is over, as soon as the relationship starts to become truly intimate.

Then, one day, a raging, record-breaking storm hits his small Southern town. Denise Holton, a young single mother, is driving through it when her car skids off the road. With her is her four-year-old son, Kyle, a boy with severe learning disabilities and for whom she has sacrificed everything. Unconscious and bleeding, she – but not Kyle – will be found by Taylor McAden. And when she wakes, the chilling truth becomes clear to the both of them; Kyle is gone.

During the search for Kyle, the connection, the lifeline, between Taylor and Denise takes root. Taylor doesn’t know that this rescue will be different from all the others, demanding are more than raw physical courage. That it will lead him to the possibility of his own rescue form a life lived without love. That it will require him to open doors to his past that were slammed shut by pain. That it will dare him to live life to the fullest by daring to love.

That was a really long preview. I’ve had this one for a few years. I actually think it’s my dads. I’ve liked all of Nicholas Sparks’ other books, so I’m sure when I finally get to this one, I’ll like it too!

What’s new to you this week?

A to Z Challenge Update

As September begins, I only have 4 books left in my A to Z Challenge and I already have them lined up. Here’s what you can expect in the next month or so.

I: Interview with the Vampire (No secret, I love vampires. I’ve heard great things about this. October read for sure)

K: Killer Cruise (I’m reading now)

W: Wicked: Witch and Curse (I just ordered off Amazon to take Wuthering Heights spot…yay!)

 

Y: Your Mouth Drives me Crazy (This was an Oprah Book Club book my mom read, not as steamy as she expected lol)

If you’ve read any of these, without giving away spoilers, let me know what you think 🙂

Abandoned Book Shelf

I have added my first book to the “Abandoned Book Shelf”. Gasp, I know. And as I told my fiance that I had stopped reading Wuthering Heights because I was having a hard time getting into it, he said “Isn’t that one of the most popular books ever written?”. Yes, yes it is.

I’d waited 9 months since I read Jane Eyre and finally decided that I would give Emily Bronte a chance. I’ve been reading a lot of fluff, fun books lately and thought I’d try to harden it up. DIDN’T WORK!

 I couldn’t tell you how many time I had to go back and read 2-3 pages because I forgot what I’d just read. My mind kept going elsewhere and it just wasn’t sticking. I read the first 50 pages and wasn’t interested.

I would probably have to say that there’s too many other things on my mind right now to have to think hard about something I read. I AM getting married in a month and 11 days. Maybe I need to keep it light until then 🙂

So, you may be wondering what I’ve taken up instead. Good question. I am now reading Killer Cruise. It’s about a group of high schoolers who go on a cruise and they find out some drama happened the year before. Goal of the cruise, make it a week, ALIVE! Yay for meaningless Young Adult books. I am back in my happy place now.

I will try to read Wuthering Heights at another time. I’m just not sure when.

Oh, by the way, Wuthering Heights was my W Title Book for my A to Z Challenge. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

My Very First Award!

Super thanks to Alita.Reads for giving me my first blog award. Too cool!

Here’s the description of this award:

“The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken– excellence, grace, and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least 5 other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all.”

It didn’t take me long to figure out who I would pass this onto:

Read Into This

Wite Meg!

Cover to Cover

I enjoy all of these blogs and click on them multiple times a day to make sure I don’t miss anything 🙂 Check them out!