Armchair BEA 2013 Giveaway Winner

Congratulations to Helen in Arizona, who will be receiving a copy of Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen! :)

Armchair BEA 2013: Keeping It Real

One of the great drawbacks to blogging is that it can start to feel like a job and you become jaded and lose interest. Today we were asked to comment on how we keep ourselves, and our audience, returning to our blog. You can find links to other blogs taking part here.

So, how do you keep your blogging fresh and interesting? I find one of the best ways to do this is to provide myself with goals and targets. I also like to engage with the community as this provides a source of feedback and encouragement that can make all the difference when you simply cannot face writing anything inspiring.

Challenges

These are an excellent way to keep the motivation flowing and can also provide you with great ideas for things to read and review. They may also provide you with a way to interact with and find new readers, which is always a wonderful way to refresh your own interest.

They come in all shapes and sizes, as you can see from the pages I have dedicated to my Challenges ’12 and Challenges ’13. Some of these are run by large organizations, like Goodreads, and are very general. Some are self-imposed stupidity, like my Challenge of Ice and Fire, which encouraged me to complete the entirety of George R.R. Martin’s series last year: it worked, but it was a relief when I reached the end! Others are a way for small(ish) groups of bloggers to celebrate certain genres that they appreciate or to encourage each other to work through that TBR pile.

They do not always keep you on track, especially when life throws you a curve ball, as mine did this year. I rather surprisingly became employed in mid-January, which has had a dramatic impact on my reviewing output, although I did hamper myself by engaging in far too many . . .

Read Alongs

I am seriously addicted to these events, and this year I found myself engaged in four at the same time for a week or two, which was a sign of my total lack of self-control! :D

I posted about these wonderfully addictive online book groups during last year’s Armchair BEA, but I cannot stress how much they keep me involved with my blog and motivated to write. I am very fortunate that I have found a group of fellow addicts who keep me supplied with titles to read and discuss, whilst making it all seem like good, clean fun. I even found a Read Along more ludicrous that my Challenge of Ice and Fire: a small group of us are slowly creeping through the monster that is Robert Jordan’s mammoth Wheel of Time series. We have just finished book 3 of 14, so we will be finished in another couple of years . . .

So far this year, I have taken part in Read Alongs for:

The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

Elvenbane by Andre Norton & Mercedes Lackey

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

Shadow of the Sun by Barbara Friend Ish

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

That looks like too many, and it was hard work, but it keeps me happy! :)

Armchair BEA 2013: Young Adult Literature

You can find links to other blogs taking part here.

I have never had a problem reading books that are primarily aimed at a younger audience, especially if they do not read as anything other than ‘normal’ fiction. I suppose the best example of this from recent years is the Harry Potter series, which was even published in an ‘adult’ version in the UK.

 

Here are some of the best YA titles that I have read in the last few months.

Please note: the descriptions are from Goodreads.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

You can read my review here.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family . . .

You can read my review here.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Catch a fallen star...

Tristan Thorn promised to bring back a fallen star. So he sets out on a journey to fulfill the request of his beloved, the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester - and stumbles into the enchanted realm that lies beyond the wall of his English country town. Rich with adventure and magic, Stardust is one of master storyteller Neil Gaiman's most beloved tales, and the inspiration for the hit movie.

The Wee Free Men & A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

Armed only with a frying pan and her common sense, Tiffany Aching, a young witch-to-be, is all that stands between the monsters of Fairyland and the warm, green Chalk country that is her home. Forced into Fairyland to seek her kidnapped brother, Tiffany allies herself with the Chalk's local Nac Mac Feegle - aka the Wee Free Men - a clan of sheep-stealing, sword-wielding, six-inch-high blue men who are as fierce as they are funny. Together they battle through an eerie and ever-shifting landscape, fighting brutal flying fairies, dream-spinning dromes, and grimhounds - black dogs with eyes of fire and teeth of razors - before ultimately confronting the Queen of the Elves, absolute ruler of a world in which reality intertwines with nightmare. And in the final showdown, Tiffany must face her cruel power alone...

The Heroine: Tiffany Aching, incipient witch and cheese maker extraordinaire. Once saved world from Queen of the Elves. Is about to discover that battling evil monarchs is child's play compared to mortal combat with a Hiver. At eleven years old, is boldest heroine ever to have confronted the Forces of Darkness while armed with a frying pan.

The Threat: A Hiver, insidious disembodied presence drawn to powerful magic. Highly dangerous, frequently lethal. Cannot be stopped with iron or fire. Its target: Tiffany Aching.

The Nac Mac Feegle: A.k.a. the Wee Free Men. Height: six inches. Color: blue. Famed for drinking, stealing, and fighting. Will attack anything larger than themselves. Members include: Rob Anybody, Daft Wullie, and Awfully Wee Billy Bigchin. Allies to Tiffany Aching.

Armchair BEA 2013: Non-Fiction

You can find links to other blogs taking part here.

“Oh, crumbs!” I thought, “I don’t read non-fiction!” So, yet again, I turned to Goodreads for some inspiration – seriously, where would I ever be without it? A quick look through the Popular Non-Fiction shelf reminded me of a few titles that I thoroughly enjoyed. They are somewhat diverse, but that is just how my reading wanders about.

Please note: all descriptions are from Goodreads.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Full of spleen, this is a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science. When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.' Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. His book is about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads.

C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too by John Diamond

Shortly before his 44th birthday, John Diamond received a call from the doctor who had removed a lump from his neck. Having been assured for the previous 2 years that this was a benign cyst, Diamond was told that it was, in fact, cancerous. Suddenly, this man who'd until this point been one of the world's greatest hypochondriacs, was genuinely faced with mortality. And what he saw scared the wits out of him. Out of necessity, he wrote about his feelings in his TIMES column and the response was staggering. Mailbag followed Diamond's story of life with, and without, a lump - the humiliations, the ridiculous bits, the funny bits, the tearful bits.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine--now with all-new, never-before-published material

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Perhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific imagination, The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England, and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly "passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street." Yet, after reading it, Darwin's friend and colleague T. H. Huxley had a different reaction: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that."

Based largely on Darwin's experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species.