Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Of interest

On Bookshelves of Doom, I saw a link for Body Image Week on the blog My Favorite Author. The blog says, "We have invited bloggers from The Story Siren, Presenting Lenore, and In Bed With Books to participate and share their perspective and experience. And we are excited to also have authors Deborah Lytton, Sarah Darer Littman, Sara Zarr, Megan Frazer, Laurie Halse Anderson, Sydney Salter and Erin Dionne share their perspective, experience and advice. At the end of the week, we'll have a great giveaway for you to enter (by accepting & reporting on the Body Image Challenge) to win some of the books that we blog about this week!" Maybe it will inspire some discussion for us.

On a related topic, I will be reading Wintergirls, the new Laurie Halse Anderson, sometime next week and will blog about it then. I know others (Dawn? Kristin?) have it on their list, so maybe we'll all get around to it at the same time.

Also, I on Monday I finished reading Perfect Fifths, the new Megan McCafferty. Has anyone read it yet? (Julie? Jess?) We could talk about that, too.

6 comments:

Grouchy said...

I haven't read Perfect Fifths yet, but I can't wait. This weekend, I hope! How did you like it (very generally, of course)? I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about! Body Image Weeks seems very interesting, too.

Amanda said...

i always love the mccafferty books. marcus flutie forever (or whatever)! parts of it in the middle sort of dragged on (the best thing about jessica and marcus is their banter, but at a certain point i was getting exhausted by it all and wanted more action!) but i still loved it.

Dawn said...

Yes - Wintergirls just arrived for me today so I'm down for blogging. -D

kristin said...

I just got Wintergirls and will also be reading it soon, so count me in!

Also, let me know if you're suddenly in possession of a 2-br in the Boston area you want to unload.

:o)

Julie said...

Okay, so I didn't love Perfect Fifths off the bat. I missed Jessica's first person voice, although the 3rd person worked fairly well, especially since we get to hear more of Marcus Flutie. I agree, Amanda, more action, too - at some point I was like, oh, they're going to be in the airport the whole time. Huh.

So then I wondered if I didn't like the book at all, but after deciding I must have hated it, I realized it was actually pretty satisfying (mainly in how the unresolved becomes resolved). I thought there were a few too many "coincidences" (I think that was when the mother/daughter from the airport bathroom appear again by the elevator in the hotel). But I loved both of them embracing their inner nerds. Inner nerds, unite!

In the end, it felt like much more of a coda than a book in and of itself, but I did enjoy the coda.

Grouchy said...

I finally finished Perfect Fifths, and it seems that I had a similar reaction to both Amanda and Julie. I absolutely thought the book dragged on in the middle, and wished for something--anything--to happen during all of that banter. I also found it a bit hard to follow at times, but I admit I could have been reading it more closely than I actually was. And one of my favorite parts about the first four books was Jessica's voice as well, and I really missed that here. I'm not entirely sure, though, that I liked getting more of Marcus through the half of this book that was in his perspective--I think I preferred him, as a character, as the mysterious and frustrating person Jessica was trying to deal with. On the other hand, this did attempt to make him more of a complete character. I think it was the 3rd person that I didn't enjoy more than anything--I missed the intimacy from the prior narration. Anyway, I didn't love it but I didn't hate it either, and I enjoyed its wrapping-up qualities.