retail therapy :-D

I've been oh-so-homesick lately, but I won't be able to make it home until after Christmas. So today, I went to Barnes & Noble and engaged in some retail therapy. Here's what I bought:

Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern - one of my favorite authors!

What difference do it make? by Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and Lynn Vincent - a sequel, of sorts, to The Same Kind of Different as Me by Hall & Moore, which was an incredibly touching book written by the unlikeliest of friendships.

Heat Wave by Richard Castle - a fictional author, haha! Fans of ABC's hit show, Castle, will recognize it, though, and fans of Nathan Fillion will appreciate the author's picture on the back of the book! I read the first eleven chapters online before ABC took all but the first ten down, and I just couldn't leave it unfinished! I bought what I believe was the last copy at the Barnes & Noble in Jonesboro, after seeing on Twitter that the books were sold out. I was quite happy to see this copy on the shelf!

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma by Trenton Lee Stewart - This is the third installment in the MBS series. I loved the first two, and heard a while back that there was a third. It came out this month!

The Best of Mystery: 63 Short Stories Chosen by the Master of Suspense by Alfred Hitchcock - Anyone who knows me knows that I positively adore Alfred Hitchcock. This compilation of stories from his Mystery Magazine was all of ten dollars and, according to the back flap, "is not recommended for late night reading. These masterful tales are guaranteed to unnerve." Sounds wonderful to me!

There's No Place Like Here

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I'm definitely a fan of Cecelia Ahern! This one wasn't her best, but it was still quite good. The tagline on the back cover was what really drew me to this book: "Sometimes it takes losing everything to truly find yourself..."
I felt like I'd identify well with the lead character, and in a sense, I did, though my losses came in quite another manner from hers. This was a sort of modern-day Wizard of Oz, with references throughout the story. Sometimes, losing everything includes losing yourself, and in finding yourself, you find your way home again. And like I said...it's not her best book, but worth the read!
I find Ahern's writing to be absolutely delightful. She manages to instill real emotions without ever feeling too heavy. I think she's a gifted writer and I will most likely pick up everything she ever publishes. In fact, I bought another one today :-D

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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This book was SO. MUCH. FUN!!! It is to be a series, and I look forward to getting my hands on the next installment.

The heroine of the novel is Flavia de Luce. She's eleven years old and has an odd fascination with chemistry, poisons in particular. She finds a dead man in the garden and decides to deduce for herself what happened.

The book is chock-full of references to other works of literature, films, and music. It really pulls you back in time (the book is set in the 1950s)and away to the English countryside.

I can't wait until Flavia's next adventure! It won't come out until next year, though, so...what next? :-)

Wuthering Heights (finally!)

I've finally finished Wuthering Heights! If you read my other blog, you know that this has been a HUGE week for me, so the fact that I also managed to finish this in the last few days is a pretty big feat. I've just had SO much going on lately that it took me a lot longer to read this than it normally would have.
This was a wonderful novel! It is very dark, but it is still a great romance. It is a tale of a love that is so intense it destroys all those it touches...pretty amazing stuff! Heathcliff, devil that he is, still manages to win the sympathy of the reader in his love and heartache for Catherine.
I find it very sad that this is Emily Brontë's only novel (or at least, the only one that survives). It is a classic, and a good read! It is beautifully haunting, and I will eventually re-read it, and hopefully at a somewhat faster pace next time. I feel like some of the intensity got lost in the length of time it took me to read it. I'd read a few chapters and then have to put it off for a while before picking it up again, and I rather think it would have been even better if I'd been able to read it in a more compact time frame. At any rate, I very highly recommend it! If you have trouble with reading accents, check out the link I put in my last post. It was a great help in interpreting Joseph's extreme Yorkshire dialect.

Next up: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, a mystery. The cover and title caught my eye, and the description sounds delightful! It is the winner of the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, and I'm just really looking forward to reading it! I imagine that it'll go a bit faster than Wuthering Heights...we shall see!

Happy reading! :-D